Page 55 of Exit Party

“I’m sorry,” she said again, on autopilot now.

“It’s like you just don’t get it,” he said, in tones of wonderment.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Marlowe was very far away. She was floating. She was looking out at the lights of the city and she was somewhere out there in the brightness. A fugitive thought: What if I wasn’t in this car anymore?

“Ten years of marriage, and you just don’t quite get it. You don’t really get that this is a partnership, do you?”

“I’m sorry.” What if there were no more car rides like this one, ever?

“The thing is, it’s just . . . we’re together, Marlowe. When you do something like this, when you humiliate me publicly, it’s just very difficult for me to understand where you’re coming from.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“I don’t think you understand how people see you,” he said.

“I guess not,” she said, very quietly.

“There’s something very wrong with you,” he said, “I think that much is clear.”

“Please,” Marlowe said, “I’m really, really sorry.” What if I were to open the door of the car, and jump out?

This was the thought that shocked her back to herself. The latch was so close to her hand. She would only have to shift her hand a little to open the door and fly out into the night—they were on a high overpass over a low-lying residential neighbourhood—and then she would never be in a car with him again. But that wasn’t right. She didn’t want to fly out into the night and break on the pavement, because what she wanted, she realized in a distant way, was to be alive. What she wanted desperately just then was to talk to her father. He’d always said to call when she was in trouble, and she was in trouble, she realized, she was in so much trouble. How had she not seen it before? She looked at Hugo. He was wounded, incredulous.

“Marlowe,” he said, “do you understand how much I do for you?”

In the normal course of events she would apologize again, and again, and again—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’ll do better, I’ll do better—because there was always something she’d said or done wrong. On a hundred other nights she’d fallen over herself apologizing on the car ride home, then wept and begged forgiveness for days. But tonight, the thought of death had jolted her. Ten years of apologies, she found herself thinking, and what, actually, was she apologizing for?

“Marlowe, I asked you a question, and I’m going to ask you to extend me the basic courtesy of a response. I asked if you understand how much I do for you.”

She looked at him, and instead of apologizing again she spoke the words that began the last fight, the fight that ended with her filing for divorce five days later: “Actually,” she said, “you don’t do anything for me at all.”

2

A year and a half later, elsewhere in the city, a detective stood by her office window, waiting for Marlowe’s lecture to begin. Detective Ibari Waker was seventy-nine now, and at some point in the previous decade had slipped into the habit of dressing entirely in black. She held a high rank in the Internal Security Service, which had no central office.

There were bureaus scattered everywhere in Los Angeles, as in all of the other cities of the United State. Other countries had crumbled in the past few decades. The State would not, because the difference between mayhem and order is control. The State was a fortress and Service was the wall. It was difficult to get in or out. Immigration had been largely frozen for some time, with narrow exceptions for investors. Leaving required an exit visa, and exit visas were reserved for citizens with no history of pro-democracy activities or other subversion. Ibari had devoted her life to Service. She had some regrets.

From her office she could see the beach, just barely, a sliver of pale sand between the glass towers of the Harbor City neighbourhood. She was watching the movement of a kite between towers, a speck of red against a brilliant blue sky. This view had been hers for a long time now, decades, but she was close to retirement. She glanced at her watch, then sat at her desk, entered a code into a console, and put on her VR headset. The code was her key into a virtual auditorium. Holospace rooms felt like real rooms now, for the most part. Only a faint shimmer in her peripheral vision gave it away. Ibari’s virtual seat was halfway back in the auditorium, her favourite vantage point for lectures. She’d missed the introduction. On the stage, a holographic projection of Marlowe Li stood behind a podium.

3

Picture Marlowe behind the podium, thirty-four years old now, awake against all odds after twenty hours without sleep. Still in trouble, but in a different way. She concentrated on breathing and clutched the podium with both hands. The audience was a dark void but she sensed their presence, all these souls gathered from so far away. Can you hold the room? An old question from the beginning of her academic career, and there was victory in the answer: I can hold the room. Internal call-and-response, trying to steady herself. Panic is an ocean. She gazed out into the auditorium and imagined a ship sailing toward her through the dark.

“I think we should begin,” she said, in a faux-conversational tone that she’d been perfecting for some years now, “with some fundamental definitions. What is transport?” She paused, as if anyone were going to answer that, then answered herself: “It’s the movement of matter through time and space. Incidentally, that’s also life.”

Was that line pretentious? She worried it was pretentious. There was a murmur of appreciation from the audience, which was reassuring. But now a text message appeared on the periphery of her vision. Her brother, Samir:

Marlowe call me it’s urgent

Marlowe took a deep breath.

“What we have to consider, whether we’re talking about goods or people, is the impact of those variables—” But, and if she hadn’t been so tired she would have remembered to switch off messaging, another text from Samir had appeared:

Dad is drying

“The impact of those variables,” Marlowe said, “time and space, on—”

*dying