Page 48 of Exit Party

“I know,” I said. “But it was my father’s. It was the only thing I had of his. I’d like to see it again.”

Nico gave me a sidelong glance. I’d like to see him was the thing I didn’t say.

4

I didn’t return to Paris till I was seventeen. Nico drove me back the day after graduation, in a rickety little car she’d just purchased. She was a wild driver, because she’d purchased the driver’s licence too. “I’m not sitting through classes,” she said, when I asked her about it. “I’ve known some idiots who could drive.” In the place she came from, cars were apparently quite different. She insisted that the basic steering principles were the same, but I had my doubts as she braked and veered on the Paris-bound expressway. My plan was to live with Nico for a few months and find a job while I decided what to do next. What had Gloria been doing, while I was away at school? I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years by then, but Nico checked in on her occasionally.

“She just works,” Nico said. “She’s always on that computer, talking to her office in LA. You know work’s always been her coping mechanism.” A solar truck passed so close that the car shook, the driver leaning on his air horn.

“Coping with what?” I said. “Life in general?”

“You know what happened to her,” Nico said.

I knew what had happened to her, but only because Nico had told me. I knew that one night in Los Angeles, before I was born, Gloria went to a party at a house in Highland Park. I knew that someone at that party blew himself up with a bomb vest, someone aligned with a terrorist campaign by United States loyalists trying to destabilize the emerging Republic of California, and that she walked over bodies—pieces of bodies—to get out. I knew the gash on her forehead had required ten stitches to close. I knew the bomb was the reason she was the way she was, why she flinched at loud noises, why she avoided leaving the apartment, why she was such a goddamned ghost in this world, but the unkind thought that flitted through me was Get over it. How long after a terrible event do you get to be a ghost? I knew the question made me a bad person.

“That was a long time ago,” I said, testing the waters.

“You can’t predict how you’ll be affected by the things that happen to you.” Nico was attempting to switch lanes. I closed my eyes and clutched the edge of my seat. She made two failed attempts—horns blaring, a screech of tires to our right—and then managed, and a beat later the Paris dome came into view. My heart was too fast but I felt exhilarated, in a near-death-experience way.

“I’m not sure how we all ended up living in a pile of soap bubbles,” I said. The dome—really domes, plural, but no one called it that—looked dim and greasy on the horizon, considerably less iridescent than the architectural renderings had led me to expect.

“It’s the only domed city outside of Asia,” she said. “We should all be grateful.” We were passing through an area that had been blasted by wildfires a year or two earlier, blackened ruins collapsing in the near distance.

“There are domes going up over Toronto and Sydney,” I said.

“Really? Well, good for them. My information’s outdated.” She was frowning at the road. “I’m not a particularly good driver,” she said, “but some days I think almost everyone else is worse.”

“Does Gloria ever talk about it?” I asked.

“The bomb?”

“The bomb.”

“Never,” Nico said. “I had to pry it out of her. I gather she has a habit of telling people she was at an entirely different party that night. Hold on, I need to switch lanes again.” I closed my eyes. “You can stay with me for as long as you’d like,” she said, while my eyes were still closed. “I’ll help you find your own apartment when you’re ready.”

Nico’s apartment wasn’t far from the dome. She lived a kilometre or two from that inhuman wall of composite glass for which a thousand centuries-old buildings had been razed, this glass that broke the city into an inside and an outside and rose too high into the air. The anti-dome protests had kept her awake for a year, but now the dome was a reality. I didn’t like the way it looked outside my window, that greyish semitransparent wall where once a building had stood, other buildings faded out like ghosts on the other side. In the quiet of my tiny bedroom in Nico’s apartment, I read through my notes on Ari Soriano and Eddie Kalisa. I was formulating a plan.

Of the two, Eddie seemed to me to be the more approachable figure. I went to some effort to secure a seat next to Eddie’s at the opera. Usually, but not always, Ari was there for the first half. I was careful not to look at her or otherwise draw attention to myself. I sat on Eddie’s other side. If Ari came, she left at intermission. I suffered through three productions, being careful to look engaged and moved and not bored out of my mind, with the whole ordeal leading up to the moment where I nodded casually to Eddie and wished her a good evening at the end, until after the third opera I finally judged the moment right to drop some pre-rehearsed opinion about the second act of Caravage, which made Eddie’s face light up. I sat through two more operas and two more similar exchanges before she asked if I might like to join her for a quick drink.

Eddie was born in Rwanda but grew up in Marseilles, she told me. The city was run by a cartel at the time, but could have been worse. She started playing piano at seven but didn’t excel until her late teens.

“What changed?” I asked. We were at one of the sidewalk tables of a forgettable café in the 15th arrondissement. It was a beautiful night in early April.

“Well, Sebastian, my mother died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It happens. Parents don’t stick around forever. You’re young, aren’t you?” She leaned forward to pick up a dropped napkin. I liked her cologne. She carried a fragrance of cedar and cigar smoke.

“Twenty-one,” I lied.

“Parents still alive?”

“That’s a surprisingly complicated question.”

“Well,” she said, “we live in complicated times.”

The thing I didn’t say aloud was You have no idea.