Page 49 of Exit Party

“Tell me about yours first,” I said, “then I’ll tell you about mine.”

“Deal.” She took a slow sip of wine. “I was in high school when my mother got sick, and she was gone a month later. On her deathbed, she said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Edeline, take your foot off the brake.’”

“She was talking about piano?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I started working harder, and started winning competitions.” It was a complicated life after that. She married a woman who died in a car accident, she told me, then married another woman. They’d had a child together, a daughter, Esme, after which an extraordinary percentage of Eddie’s income went to childcare. Her second wife left her for someone else. Eddie rose in prominence until the chaos of the 2030s put an end to her touring career. She first saw Ari on an armoured night train in the south of France sometime in that era. Eddie was on her way home from one of her last concerts. Ari was travelling with her second husband.

“What was your first impression of Ari?”

“She was pretty,” Eddie said, “and tired, but we were all tired in those years. Societal breakdown is exhausting.”

The reason she remembered her was that at a certain point in the evening, Ari and her husband disappeared. They didn’t emerge from the train in Paris, which made no sense, because Paris was the only stop. Eddie remembered that the train had stopped for just a moment at some point in the night, “but there was nothing around,” she said, “just pine forest. It was sinister, actually.” She thought for a long time that they might have been killed on the train, the two of them, their bodies shoved out into the dark. Later, when they met again at a dinner party, Ari told Eddie the story, a confused tale about travelling on foot and then by car and then by boat and then another car to Paris, where she lived with Soriano for a year or two, until the explosion that killed Soriano and ruined her leg.

“But here I’ve been talking endlessly about me and my wife,” Eddie said, “and I know almost nothing about you.”

“Well. I’m twenty-one, as I said.” Eighteen, but repeat a lie often enough and it starts to feel true. “Born and raised in Paris.” (Technically Vincennes, but close enough.)

“You’ve lived here all your life?”

“I spent a few years away at a boarding school in Normandy. Otherwise yes. I’m studying art history. I love opera and paintings.” I shrugged. “It’s hard to sum up your life, isn’t it?”

“That’s why I stopped doing interviews,” Eddie said. “I was always trying to sum up my life, and it always sounded like a series of cocktail party anecdotes. Or like a tabloid story, depending on the era. Are your parents here, in Paris?”

“My father disappeared before I was born,” I said. “That was back in California. I was raised by my mother and a . . . well, she was a sort of guardian, I suppose. She came to me when I was seven.”

“I see,” Eddie said. “Was she a good guardian?”

“Mostly.” She was a haunted guardian, Eddie, if we can be honest here. She left two children behind in another world, and if that sounds insane, well, you’d be surprised at what you can get used to in this life. “No, you know what? I don’t want to sell her short. She saved me, a little.”

“Oh,” Eddie said, startled. She was looking at me differently, interested in a way she hadn’t been before.

“She was the only adult in my life who cared about me,” I said. “Before she came, it was just me and my mother, and my mother didn’t make an effort.” I’d made the moment fantastically awkward. Eddie nodded in a tactful way. It was a cool evening, perhaps the way April had been in Paris in the past, and I wasn’t sweating for once.

“It must be ten degrees cooler inside the dome than out,” I said.

“Ah,” Eddie said, clearly grateful for the change of topic. When all else fails, discuss the weather. “I believe the weather inside the dome is modelled on a previous version of Paris.”

This was obvious now that she said it, but I’d never thought it through. “Which version?” I asked.

“Sometime in the nineties, I believe? I can’t remember the exact year. But where there’s a deadly heat wave outside the dome, it’s still the summer of 1997 inside it. Maybe ’96? I can’t remember.”

“Do you like the dome?” I asked. In those days the dome was still so new that no one took it for granted, which made it a reliably interesting topic of conversation, but I could already feel the moment slipping away. Soon, very soon, we’d be in a time when the dome would be so much a part of everyday life that no one would notice it anymore.

Eddie sipped her wine. “I believe in the dome,” she said. “It’ll save us in the next heat wave or killer storm. But the problem is, it only keeps out the weather.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was in a flood once,” she said. “A very long time ago, in Valencia. I was being driven to a concert, so I was wearing this ridiculous suit, and it had been raining. I remember realizing that the driver was nervous, then looking out and seeing a sheen of water over the road. Then a moment later the water was halfway up the door. Have you ever seen floodwater?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about. It’s not like bathwater, you know? It’s muddy and dark. I climbed out the window onto the roof, even though the driver shouted at me. He didn’t want me to get that water on the upholstery. Then very quickly the water reached the roof, and I had to jump into it, because another car came washing toward us and shifted on top of the car I’d just been travelling in. I swam to safety. It was all very quick.”

“So what happened?”

“A lot of people died,” she said, “including the driver. I wake up here, in my beautiful apartment, and sometimes before I’m fully awake I hear the noises of the flood, the cars clanking together, the driver screaming.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds horrible.”