Page 64 of Exit Party

“It’s been a bad time,” she told him. “Something was done to me. I wish I’d told you sooner. I didn’t understand how much trouble I was in. I know you would’ve wanted to help.”

He said nothing, of course, but his dream continued. There wasn’t really more that Marlowe wanted to say, when she thought about it. She wanted him to be alive in the world, but words seemed extraneous now. It seemed to her that what mattered was presence, just being here with him at the end. She took his hand, cool and dry and too thin, but holding it was awkward—she hadn’t held his hand since she was, what, nine?—so she placed his hand gently under the covers, leaned back in the chair, and closed her eyes.

She slipped back into her dream of running through the garden, but it wasn’t frightening anymore. There was true exhilaration in running through the dark. She was sleeping in the chair when it happened, and she knew what she was going to see before she opened her eyes. In that last moment before Marlowe looked at Kareem, before she saw that he was no longer breathing, she had a sense of departure, of her father having slipped away. Death is transport.

2. TRUE DILIGENCE

1

True diligence is following the improbable path. I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was eight or nine years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after.

For a long time I wrote True Diligence in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at nine I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn’t secretly wish to be a spy?

We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear—when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in—but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

We played Ghosts and Agents all the time, my friends and I, but eventually they drifted off into other interests and I still wanted to be a spy, so after high school I applied successfully to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented and moved through school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about eighty kilometres north of LA. My parents came to visit me there in my first year.

“This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, when she stepped off the train. The town made a good first impression. The central station was beautiful, one of those Southern California structures with no serious boundary between indoors and out, a tiled platform that turned into a waiting area with benches, then archways opening out to the street.

My parents had been on the train since Ohio, and they looked worn and dazed, blinking in the relentless sunlight. I was only in my midtwenties at that point, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of aging parents, and their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were confused. I didn’t like it.

“Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said.

“Do we need a taxi?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t mind walking a bit, stretching my legs.”

“My house is close,” I said. “We can easily walk there if you’d like.”

“Downtown residency permit?” my father asked, and whistled softly.

“What can I say,” I said. “I’ve been well-behaved.”

I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.

This will seem a bit obvious—there’s your actual job, which is Service, and then there’s your cover, which is what you tell everyone you do—but for a long period of my life, at the beginning of my career, there was truth in both versions.

At the Service Academy I’d been trained in espionage and investigation, obviously, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, etc., but also I’d earned a master’s in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life was concerned, I was an up-and-coming academic with a tenure-track job at the local college. My parents didn’t know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service.

Here was the branching, as I thought of it, the point where one reality split off into another: it was actually true that I was a junior professor in an urban planning department. I’d applied for and earned that position, or so I told myself—if strings were pulled behind the scenes, that was well above my pay grade—and I took that job seriously. With that being the case, was it really just cover? It was a real job, a real life. When I introduced myself as a college instructor in urban planning, it wasn’t a lie. There was an expansiveness about it. It was like getting to live two lives at once.

But in every version of reality I had an absolutely clean record, no subversion or other crimes of any kind, which had qualified me for a permit to live in an attractive neighbourhood close to downtown. My parents and I walked out of the train station and up the hill together, and as an exercise in gratitude I tried to see Central Avenue through their eyes: the double row of palm trees, the century-old restored movie theatre, the candy-coloured awnings above the shops, an overall impression of having been unmoored from time and history sometime around 1965.

“I feel like I’m in a time capsule,” my mother said, and then quickly, “In a good way, I mean. It’s nice here.”

“It is nice,” I said. I really did like it here, for the most part. In Fillmore, as in most backwaters without a significant history of subversion, the State operated with a fairly light touch: identity cards, neighbourhood permits, and facial recognition technology, like everywhere, but none of the random interrogations and drone surveillance that one might expect in larger cities.

My father took a nap on my couch while my mother and I went for a walk. We took a circuitous route that led us back through downtown. As we turned back onto Central Avenue, my attention was diverted by a scene playing out farther up the block and across the street. A black van had pulled up in front of the florist’s. The shop had been open an hour earlier, but now a crew had gone to work on it: the sign had been painted over, and two men were carting armloads of flowers into the van. The owners—a couple in their sixties whom I’d been surveilling for some time—were standing nearby, seemingly in shock. A second van pulled up, and the couple were led inside. They didn’t resist.

In a moment, the two vans were gone, and with them all trace of the business and the business’s owners. The shop was locked and blank now, no merchandise, no signs, the erasure complete. I knew, because I’d reported on this couple to my supervising officer, that they’d criticized the State on social media. They might be sent to prison, or to a black site, but I thought it more likely that they’d be sent to a work camp servicing the massive agricultural operations in the valley, a decade or so of picking strawberries or kale in the sun and sleeping in locked dormitories. People were rarely able to return to their previous life after that. I didn’t expect to see them again.

“This weather’s perfect,” my mother said.

Dinner that night was at a metal table I’d purchased for my backyard grove, as I thought of it: two ancient orange trees and a lemon tree that together formed a canopy. This was my favourite place in the world, and the main reason why I’d bought the house.

“Ibari,” my mother said, “I brought something for you from home.”

Home, for them, was Ohio, where they’d moved from New York when I’d left for the academy. I’d never lived there, and hearing the place called home was obscurely irritating. My mother had brought an ancient canvas tote bag to the table—could this possibly be the same one she’d used for grocery shopping in my childhood in New York?—and from it she pulled a battered old notebook, on which TRUE DILIGENCE and associated curlicues took up the entire front cover.

“Good lord,” I said. “Where did you find that?”