"Listen, I want to be clear that I'm not that person any- more," Paul told a counselor at a rehab facility in Utah, twenty years later. "I'm just trying to be honest about who I was back then."

"I'm from Bangladesh, you racist moron," the cabdriver said, and left Paul there on the sidewalk, where he knelt carefully and threw up. Afterward he stumbled back to the dorm building, marveling at the scale of the disaster. Against all odds he had clawed his way up into an excellent university, and here it was only December of his first year and it was already over. He was already failing, one semester in. "You must gird yourself against disappointment," a therapist had told him once, but he couldn't gird himself against anything, that had always been the problem.

Fast-forward two weeks, past the nonevent of the winter holidays—his mother's therapist had advised distance from her son, taking time for herself, and giving Paul a chance to be an adult, etc., so she'd gone to Winnipeg to be with her sister for Christmas and hadn't invited Paul; he spent Christmas Day alone in his room and called his dad for an awkward conversation in which he lied about everything, just like old times—and all the way to December 28, the nadir of that dead week between Christmas and New Year's, when he dressed up and walked back down to System Soundbar on another Tuesday night, hair slicked back, wearing a button-down shirt that he'd purchased specially. He was wearing the jeans he'd been wearing last time he was here and didn't remember till he got to the club that the little packet of blue pills was still in a front pocket.

Excerpted from The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. Copyright © 2020 by Emily St. John Mandel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.