Page 63 of Exit Party

“Don’t call me that,” he said. “Please.”

“As you wish,” Ibari said.

“Do you have plans?” he asked. “Where will you go?” He was trying and failing to conceal envy. He was only in his midforties, but Ibari sensed that he wished he could retire too. You go into Service because you think then you’ll be safe or at least have an interesting job, but it’s a shadowy life.

“Ohio,” Ibari said. “I inherited a property there.”

“Well,” Haruki said. “You’ve been an extraordinary asset to the organization. Would you like to make this official?”

“Yes, I would. I’m ready to be done.”

Haruki held out his hand.

“I’m invoking the right of incineration,” Ibari said.

“As you wish,” Haruki said. “You’ve been here long enough to earn it.” In the way he rose from his desk, she saw that his back hurt. He moved slowly to a steel panel on the wall and entered a series of numbers into a console, and the panel slid back to reveal a small dark opening. When Ibari came to stand by the opening, she felt the heat shimmering up from fathoms of darkness. She dropped in her phone—it clanked twice against steel walls on its way down to the furnace—and then her watch. In the absence of her Service devices, she felt almost deliriously light.

“There’s a guard outside,” Haruki said. “He’ll escort you down to the street.”

“My coat’s in my office.”

“The guard has your coat.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well.” A certain awkwardness had descended on the scene. For a moment neither of them knew what to say.

“Thank you for your service,” Haruki said finally.

9

“I can’t go home,” Samir said. He was sitting with Marlowe on the porch in the first light of morning, watching the coroner’s van pull away from the curb. All of the Premium Home Care people had gone.

“Why not?” Marlowe had a dazed, faraway look about her.

“I saw something last night,” Samir said. “I mean met someone. I can’t . . . there just isn’t a way that I can return to my normal life.”

“I think I saw something too,” Marlowe said.

“Tell me.”

“How can I be sure that I saw it?” Marlowe turned to him, and he saw the panic in her eyes. She was certain of absolutely nothing.

“Why don’t you tell me what you saw,” Samir said, “and then I’ll tell you what I saw, and then we can decide if we’re both crazy.”

10

Marlowe had gone to bed with no expectation that she’d get much sleep. She fell asleep immediately, as always, but then she was awake in the darkness and her thoughts were in motion. She knew before she looked that it was two thirty in the morning. She’d been dreaming. She’d been running through a darkened garden at midnight. It was her father’s garden, but wild and strange. The lights of the towers shone down on a jungle, leaves in her face and grass that whipped around her knees, animals stalking in the dark. There were three birdbaths instead of one, standing in a row, and spiderwebs between them. She was being pursued, and then something pulled her out of sleep.

Marlowe lay in bed for a moment, a little breathless, thinking of her father. She thought, He’s gone. She rose and moved down the hallway. The door to her father’s room was ajar. She pushed it open, and blinked at an impossible vision: her father was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face clearly illuminated by the nightlight.

“Dad,” she said.

He had changed miraculously. He looked healthy, although there was a bruise on his forehead, and was at least thirty pounds heavier than the last time she’d seen him. But something was wrong. He was staring at her with a look of alarm, and then he’d jumped to his feet and was moving quickly to the open window. He was gone almost instantly, climbing over the sill and dropping to the grass on the other side. She followed him, stunned, and watched him run away across the garden and out through the gate. Never in her life had she been more confused, and something was terribly, nightmarishly wrong: as she stood there, with her back to the bed, she gradually became aware that someone was in the bed behind her. She turned around quickly, to get it over with, and her father—the too-thin, too-frail version, the version that was going to die soon—was lying very still with his eyes closed.

She would have been frightened, but he was so diminished. She switched on the bedside light and sat beside him, and it was extremely possible to convince herself that she hadn’t just seen what she’d seen, that some other instance of her father hadn’t just arisen from the bed, climbed out the window, and run away, because after all none of that made sense. She’d had years of training in not believing herself. (“You’re not the most reliable narrator,” her husband said, in some recess of memory, and lifted her off her feet.)

“Dad,” she whispered. He stirred, just slightly, and she saw movements behind his eyelids. He was dreaming. “Dad, can you hear me?”

Marlowe sat by the bed, waiting, but he didn’t wake. Still, his eyes kept moving. She couldn’t reach him anymore in the waking world, but it was nice to think that she was part of his dream.