Page 17 of Exit Party

“Why do you want to know?” Nico asked.

“Can you blame me for being curious? She’s another me, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Nico said, and it seemed to Ari that she was making a considerable effort to hide her despair. “I don’t know how much like you she actually is. I don’t know how similar I am to Gloria.”

“I don’t know either,” Ari said. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen Gloria, and I don’t know you well enough to say.”

A breeze rippled across the long grass in the quiet.

“We met at university,” Nico said. “She was doing a master’s degree and I was in undergrad, and we were always studying in the library at the same time, then one day we got lunch together and became friends.”

“I didn’t go to college.”

“You didn’t?” Nico seemed genuinely startled.

“I had some business opportunities,” Ari said, but she couldn’t meet Nico’s eyes, because actually what she’d had was corruption. She’d discovered in the tenth grade that she could make a lot of money buying and selling luxury goods with stolen credit card numbers, after which it was difficult to seriously entertain the idea of either a straight job or college.

“Ibari held two master’s degrees,” Nico said.

“Then I guess we aren’t much alike.” Ari had a sense of another, unimaginable life passing by in the near distance, like a ship with no lights.

“I don’t know.” Nico was looking at Ari, and there was such sadness in her. “You might be more like her than you think. The last time I saw her, she’d just been promoted to detective.”

“She was police?”

“Something like that.”

Nico fell silent, lost somewhere distant.

“Who was Ibari to you?” Ari asked.

“She was someone I trusted,” Nico said. “She was my closest friend.”

Was Nico her friend? Friendship was a puzzle to Ari and always had been. That night a group of buyers came to the motel room with a girl Ari had never seen before. The girl was about nineteen, quiet and polite, dressed all in black with a feather in her hair. They were all regular customers, except for the girl. “She’s cool,” the others said, offhandedly, but their tone was too casual, the girl too watchful, and Ari felt death moving through the room. The girl and Ari spent hours engaged in a kind of dance: Ari offered the girl drinks, and the girl sipped just enough to make it look like she was drinking but not enough to get drunk. The last customers left at four in the morning, all of them drunk except the girl, who was only pretending. Felix was yawning as he closed the door. “Why are you brewing more coffee?” he asked.

“Because we’re not sleeping tonight,” Ari said, and they were gone in under forty minutes, in Felix’s van, the vehicle packed to the ceiling with guns and ammunition.

“But how did you know she was casing the room?” Felix asked, for what must have been the fifth time. They were on the expressway by then, his face lit by passing lights.

“I just know things sometimes, Felix.”

He seemed to accept this. It was a time in which almost anything seemed possible. The van had false plates because no one was checking plates by then. Ari wore big glasses and they both wore wigs. They joined a flow of displaced people moving south and west.

3

Traffic was slow until after the first checkpoint. It was a more elaborate checkpoint than Ari had seen in a while. Young men and women with bandannas over their faces and mismatched guns peered into the car and shone lights in Ari’s and Felix’s faces for an agonizingly long time before they were allowed to drive away. It wasn’t clear who the people at the checkpoint were looking for, but they waved half the cars into a Target parking lot where makeshift cages had been set up in the darkness. Ari breathed very slowly as she drove past. She preferred driving cars to vans, and the armaments behind Ari’s and Felix’s seats were not particularly well disguised. In the parking lot there were more militia fighters than Ari had ever seen in one place, shadows moving between the cars. Her window was open, and there was a trace of chemical smoke in the cold air.

“That’s going to explode any moment,” Felix said, talking about the parking lot.

“Don’t look,” Ari said. “It doesn’t concern us.”

“You think it was random? The cars they pulled?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” The checkpoint felt like a border, but it wasn’t a border that existed on any map, just some new demarcation between shifting territories. Ari drove at a medium speed. Hands at ten and two, nothing to see here, trying to be invisible. Just another displaced couple travelling with our worldly belongings, she thought, calm because we’ve done nothing wrong, absolutely not carrying a small fortune’s worth of weaponry, and she hoped the thought reflected on her face, in her demeanour, in the speed at which she drove. They were headed for a northern district of Phoenix, where Felix had a friend.

They took turns driving through days and nights of checkpoints and expressways, overlapping with the migration patterns of the people around them. Sometimes everyone seemed to be driving in the opposite direction, suitcases and mattresses and bins strapped to the tops of cars, then they’d pass through an eerily empty area where the only people they saw were hitchhikers in a line down both sides of the expressway, everyone trying to get out, and then after some interminable stretch everyone was travelling with them, so they were absorbed into a convoy that seemed miles long. Ari liked the anonymity of driving in a crowd. Somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma the skeletal trees of the Midwest disappeared and the land became perfectly flat. They pulled over at a former rest stop where someone had rigged a makeshift shower, where they paid $10 each for five minutes of lukewarm water. Afterward, Ari felt shockingly clean. She found Felix talking with another driver.

“He says to avoid Tulsa,” Felix said, when they were back in the van. “Apparently it’s a death trap.”