Page 16 of Exit Party

“The father was Kareem,” Ari said, “but like I said, he disappeared at the party.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Nico said, and left Ari there in the parking lot.

In the far distance, the digging man was leaving too, a small figure receding toward a car parked on the shoulder of the expressway, carrying his shovel over his shoulder. Ari was alone in the scene, in the end-of-day light. There were things she knew, although it was difficult to say whether they were obvious things that anyone might have known just then. She knew Nico had lost a child, or children. She knew the man in the distance had been digging a grave.

Ari was back in Felix’s motel room that night, and the night after that. She realized that the customers wanted to talk, and that was the key that unlocked the business. They began offering the customers a drink, a cigarette, bowls of chips. The customers relaxed a little, spent more money. The motel room became a lounge. There were long nights with the militias, the air dense with cigarette smoke. She learned their language and their fears. Protect the homeland, they said, and they understood the homeland to be Ohio, or at least most of Ohio, sectors having been lost to the Pittsburgh militias and to two cities that wanted to become city-states. Some of them felt this was just as well. Cultural differences was another line she heard often in the haze, delivered in a sarcastic tone but meant sincerely. Ghost strikes, they said, which was shorthand for the way they operated. They rose up in insurgency and then melted back into the crowd before the remnants of the US military arrived.

There was a morning when Ari woke with a sense of imminent departure. She lay in the bed for a long time before she got up, trying to understand why she was leaving, but came to no conclusions. She was alert through the day for signs and portents, but felt only a series of certainties: this is the last shower I’ll take in this bathroom, this is the last time I’ll pull these jeans from this drawer, this is the last time I’ll brush my hair with this hairbrush. She couldn’t account for it, but had suffered these certainties often enough in her life to accept them as facts.

In the late afternoon she drove down the expressway a few miles, toward the store where Nico worked. There were fewer cars on the road than there had been. Gas was so expensive now that motorists often drove to within a mile or two of their destination and then walked. Everyone had locks on their gas caps. The demand for bicycles far outpaced the supply.

Ari had some time, so she parked a mile from the mall and walked from there, in a route that brought her eventually to the far side of the derelict meadow between expressway and mall parking lot. She could see Nico’s car parked up there in the distance. She was tempted to cut across the meadow, but she didn’t want to know what was hidden in that grass, so she walked all the way around and by the time she reached the parking lot Nico was already in her car, eating her dinner sandwich. Ari waved as she walked in front of the windshield—Nico stared at her, frozen, sandwich in mouth. Ari was very tired, less from the walk than from the certainty that her life was about to change again. She wished she could rest. She sat on a cement block with her back to the parking lot, and waited until Nico came to sit beside her.

“There’s something I remembered from the party,” Ari said. “I wanted to tell you, in case I don’t see you again.”

“Are you leaving?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. There was a woman at the party,” Ari said. “She seemed confused, and then I saw her on the street later, and she asked what city she was in.”

Nico frowned. “Do you remember her name?”

“Sarah. No, something like Sarah. I feel like I’m getting her name wrong. The reason I thought of this is, she called me Ibari too.”

“Saraya,” Nico said flatly. “She came through too, but she didn’t really make it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I last saw her in a psych ward in LA,” Nico said. “She wasn’t able to adjust.”

“Nico,” Ari said, “was the party also some kind of door?”

“It’s complicated,” Nico said. “I don’t understand it, so I can’t even try to explain.” A long silence passed while Ari tried to think of how to get Nico to tell her more, because whatever had happened at that party was beginning to seem like the strangest thing Ari had encountered in her entire life. She gave up after a while, and opted for a different line of questioning:

“Why did you come to Ohio?”

“I met my husband in LA,” Nico said. “He wanted to move back to the Midwest, and Ohio was cheap and not that dangerous.”

“Can I ask you something about Ibari?” This other me. It seemed a fair transaction, for what she’d just told Nico.

“What about her?”

“Is she from New York?”

“Yes.”

“Did she ever know when things were going to happen?”

“Sometimes,” Nico said. “Just little things.”

“Like what?”

“Like we’d be going out, and she’d say, ‘I feel like I’m going to need a pair of scissors later,’ and I’d dissuade her from putting scissors in her handbag, because that’s insane, but then later in the day there’d somehow be some kind of unforeseen circumstance where we actually did need scissors.”

“She was like that her whole life?” Ari was distracted by trying to imagine what a scissors emergency might look like.

“I think so. As long as I knew her.”

“Where did you meet her?”