Page 31 of Exit Party

We approached the villas slowly, but there was no movement in the landscape, besides the rippling of grass in the wind. A black rabbit came into view on an overgrown pathway leading up to the first villa, then disappeared.

“They’re abandoned,” Felix said, stating the obvious. All the windows were smashed. I climbed halfway up the steps of the first villa. When I turned back, I saw the blackened ruins in the near distance. From this place there would have been a clear view of the shantytown. (Clear view of the fire, clear sounds of the screaming.) I knew the fire was a crime scene because it was obviously a crime scene, it really was that simple. We walked around to the front of the villa. The sea glittered below. There were stairs here, almost hidden behind overgrown bushes, and I led us down to a lower cliff. Someone had built a stone platform with a diving board extended over the edge.

“Tell me something, Ari,” Felix said. “Have you ever jumped off a cliff into the ocean?”

I smiled. “No,” I said.

“All lives have gaps in them,” Felix said.

The sun was too hot. I kicked off my shoes and took the diving board at a run, before I could think about it, and the terror and exhilaration of being airborne was like nothing I’d felt in years, maybe not in my entire life, flight and then submersion, annihilation, the water cooling my skin. I was laughing as I surfaced and Felix was high above me, a small still figure on the distant diving board. I swam out of the way and watched as he raised his arms as if in ceremony, took a step forward, and launched. His dive was a thing of beauty. I saw the years of ballet training in his form. He broke the surface like a seabird and emerged beside me in a cloud of white bubbles, caught me in his arms, and for just a second I felt something almost akin to surrender. I was weightless.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you too,” I said into his ear, very softly. It wasn’t a lie but also it wasn’t enough, I understood that even as I was saying the words. The moment passed; we swam to shore and climbed up on the rocks, walked back by a different route through the sun-blasted landscape, and I didn’t notice until the hotel lobby that I’d skinned my knee in the manoeuvre and had blood on my leg. I didn’t care. That night I wore a longer-than-usual cocktail dress and we danced to a jazz quartet on the terrace, languidly because the music was slow. Try to think of the dive, I told myself, try to think of the dive and not the ruins of the shantytown near the diving cliff. Try to rest in the music.

I was thinking of the spring of 2031, Los Angeles, that moment just after the formation of the Republic of California, when the foreign soldiers were gone from the streets and the curfews had been newly lifted and war seemed temporarily at bay. I’d returned to instability shortly afterward, in that zigzagging drift through Ohio and Phoenix, but what I’d learned in the disorder was to recognize good moments. The party at Kareem’s place was a good moment. This was a good moment, here on this terrace at this Peloponnesian hotel. Try to think of the dive, not the diver. Looking at Felix’s face made me sad, because I loved him but also I felt that the ending was very close. We would go back to Paris in a week or two, I decided, and then I’d break things off with him. He was too much of a burden and I was afraid he was going to get me killed, so he’d have to face this harrowing world alone.

We returned to the diving cliff almost every day for the four days that followed. On that fourth night I woke at three a.m., and knew immediately that I was alone in the room. I rose and dressed quickly, made my way down to the hotel lobby and along a candlelit stone corridor to the bar. Felix was there, drinking with two other men. One was a bulky individual in his sixties, his shaved head gleaming in the dim light; the other was much younger, perhaps in his thirties, dressed all in black with a military haircut.

“So then we just peel out,” Felix was saying. “My wife, Ari, god bless her, she’d procured us fake passports. So we just drove like hell to the Houston airport, and—”

“Felix,” I said quietly, since apparently we were using real names.

“Oh hi, babe,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

The bald man shifted over one stool, and I sat between him and Felix.

“Ma’am,” the bartender said.

“A Coke, if you have one.”

“I have an excellent local equivalent.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“Bill Soriano,” the bald man said. I shook his hand. His sleeve rode up a little, and I saw the AB+ tattoo on his wrist. Only one kind of man requires a blood-type tattoo. The thought made me tired.

“American?” I asked.

“Canadian.”

“Chris Jasper,” said the younger man. His accent was Australian. Both men were dangerous but Jasper was dangerous in a specific way, it seemed to me. Something in his gaze. This was a man who liked to hurt women. The bartender set a glass of some fizzy brown liquid before me. The taste was a rough approximation of Coke, with a bitter aftertaste that could be negated only by continuing to drink it.

“How is it?” Soriano asked.

“Small miracle we can get soda of any kind, I suppose.” I felt a familiar vertigo in the contrast between this life—Felix and I had enough money to stay for some time in this beautiful hotel—and all of the lives I’d lived since prison. My life as a dishwasher in Los Angeles, my life working for a militia in Ohio, the months I spent selling weapons on the outskirts of Phoenix.

“I’m grateful for soda, but more grateful for scotch,” Soriano said. “Actually, I’m grateful for everything. Forgive me, I’ve had one too many drinks. Ignore me.”

“I’m grateful too,” Felix said. He smiled drunkenly at me. “I’m grateful to you,” he said to me. “I was just telling them how you got us out of Texas.”

“Is that wise?” I asked, as lightly as possible. “Telling our story to strangers at a bar?”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Jasper said warmly. He was in a good mood. “You’ve married a careless man, darling.”

“Are you careless?” I asked Felix, in a tone intended to be mistaken for flirting. I sensed a shift in Soriano’s attention. He was watching me closely, less drunk than he’d seemed a moment earlier. “Let’s get you to bed,” I said softly, to Felix, “before you tell these gentlemen our entire life story.” He was too drunk to protest in any serious way. It wasn’t difficult to draw him off his bar stool and toward the elevator. In the elevator he kissed me, but in a slack-mouthed drunken way that made me flinch.