Page 11 of Exit Party

“Can you try?”

“I would, but I don’t think I understand it myself.” Nico was quiet, gazing out at the meadow again. “I hope you find the person you wanted to find,” she said.

“Thanks,” Ari said. “You too. I hope you find Ibari.”

Nico’s pleasant expression didn’t waver, but Ari felt her sadness. “I won’t find Ibari,” she said. “She’s . . .” Nico shook her head.

“She’s what?” Ari asked softly.

“She’s . . . elsewhere,” Nico said. “In a very fundamental way. I’m going to go now.”

Ari stepped back. It seemed to her that Nico wasn’t talking about death but something quite different. Nico closed her window and was gone seconds later, pulling out of the lot. Ari watched her taillights recede before she turned back to the meadow. Was meadow the word for it? She knew the tall grass hid all manner of foulness, discarded beer bottles and random trash. If a person were going to hide a body—which she realized was a morbid line of thinking, but that’s what comes from forced association with murderers—the middle of the meadow wouldn’t be the worst choice. It was a forgotten, neglected place, just an acre or two between a parking lot and an expressway. It wasn’t clear who owned it. And yet it was beautiful sometimes. The wind had picked up, and the grass rippled in the fading light.

There was a burst of gunfire. Ari dropped into the grass at the edge of the meadow and lay flat, listening. It was on the other side of the mall, she thought. Sure enough, two pickup trucks came screeching around the side of the building, full-speed toward the expressway, flying the black-and-yellow flag of one of the Pittsburgh militias. Why had they ventured so far into Ohio? Ari rolled over and lay on her back, looking up at the sky. Small clouds passed slowly against the darkening blue. Another vehicle—no, another two or three vehicles, marked with the Cincinnati United insignia, were chasing the Pittsburgh trucks. She watched the clouds and listened to the gunfight moving away from her.

She had dinner the following evening with her boss. Eduardo Harris had an uncanny talent for invisibility. It took a moment to spot him when she came into the diner. Her gaze slid over him twice before she saw him, sitting against the far wall, reading something on his phone.

“Interesting,” he said, when she told him about her day. She sometimes thought they were friends, but it’s hard to be certain when you’re working for someone. If they were friends, then she had exactly one friend in the world. “You think Gloria has a twin?”

“Maybe. But that’s like a bad B movie, right?”

“I like B movies,” Eduardo said, but he smiled in a way that conceded the point.

Ari went quiet, concentrating on her chicken wings. “It’s the thing with the name,” she said.

“Ibari,” Eduardo said. “Unusual name in this country. I don’t know that I’ve heard it.”

“I know. It’s . . .” But she was afraid of being called crazy, so she didn’t finish the thought.

“We’re talking about a kind of doubling, aren’t we?” Eduardo said. This was something she liked about him, his willingness to put things into words when sometimes she wasn’t. “There’s you, and also apparently someone who looks exactly like you, with the same name. There’s my cousin’s wife, Nico, and also this Gloria person, who looks like her.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if there’s a word for what we’re talking about.”

“There is,” he said, and they were silent, because it was a word that Ari wasn’t ready to say. “You know, Ari, if it were me, I’d probably start running down leads, just to satisfy my own curiosity.”

“Do you have any work for me this week?” She’d done nothing for him in the two weeks before photographing Nico.

“My operation’s shrinking,” he said. “A lot of my people defected to the new militia.”

“The Pittsburgh group?”

He nodded.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“To you? To the region? I don’t know the answer either way.” Eduardo sighed. “I thought Nico might be meeting with them,” he said. “That’s why I had you watch her. But sounds like she’s just eating sandwiches.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” He signalled for the bill. “It’s an exhausting moment to be alive, don’t you think?”

If Nico knew who Gloria was, did Gloria know Nico? That night after dinner Ari let herself into her motel room and switched on the bedside lamp, which cast the room in her favourite kind of light. Apartment rent was cheap here, but she preferred the scale and anonymity of motel rooms. She didn’t like signing leases. She would never have enough money to buy a home. Her belongings fit in the trunk of her car, and she went to some effort to keep it that way.

Her most treasured possession was a record player, which she loved for reasons that extended back into childhood. She had placed it on the room’s small table, and now she carefully selected a record from her crate—Bach’s cello suites, played by Yo-Yo Ma—and settled down with her laptop and a beer. First the soft crackle of static, which she loved, and then the first notes, for which she momentarily closed her eyes. Then she opened her laptop and began looking for Gloria, but quickly came up against an impediment: she absolutely could not remember Gloria’s last name. She’d known it, once, but there had been too many people and too many names since, and the information had been crowded out. After a while the wifi stopped working. She fell asleep a few hours later, lying on top of her bed with an arm draped over her forehead, trying and trying and trying to remember.

Ari woke from a confused dream of prison at three in the morning, sweaty and disoriented. She’d left the record spinning on the player. She lay for a while listening to the crackling static, resting in the sound. She’d always liked these early in-between hours. Ari let her thoughts drift, hoping that Gloria’s last name might come to her, but there was nothing. Who remembers their roommate’s surname, years later? They’d lived together for four months, give or take, before Gloria went to Europe and Ari began her northeasterly drift across a fracturing continent, to come to rest in this territory of big box stores and strip malls and ever-shifting governance. Four months that nonetheless loomed large in memory, because those were the first months out of prison, and in those months the non-prison world held a wonder and sheen that was gone now, however much she might have wished to hold on to it. She filled the kettle in the white glare of the bathroom and began the ritual of instant coffee. She stood gazing at the kettle’s blue light, hoping something would come to her, and then something did: Kareem’s last name had been Fayed. She’d seen it on the MISSING posters. But data was throttled on her phone because she hadn’t paid her bill on time, and the motel wifi was still down.

Ari dressed in her usual uniform—jeans, white button-down shirt, black sneakers, lipstick—and this morning she added a jacket. The motel parking lot glittered with frost when she left the room around seven in the morning.