Page 84 of Exit Party

“Fayed,” I said.

“I hate that you call me that.”

“I don’t care at all. Do you have any new theories? About what happened?”

He put down his phone, flipped it screen-down on the table, and sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. Not so much a theory. More a half-baked idea.”

“Tell me.”

“I came across this paper recently,” he said. “Published years ago in a physics journal. Do you have a pen?”

I gave him a pen, and he reached for a cocktail napkin. “This guy proposed a three-dimensional model of time,” he said. “It has to do with Planck-scale quantum phenomena, cosmological evolution, and—”

“Do me a favour,” I said. “Pretend I’m drunk and also not a fucking physicist.”

“Okay, sorry. Look.” He drew a straight line on the napkin, with some effort. “The first dimension, here, that’s time as we experience it. We’re moving along this line here. Let’s say this line is today.”

“By ‘today,’ you mean . . .”

“The day you just had,” he said. “You woke up in your bed, you went to work, you came to this bar.”

“Okay.”

“But there’s a second dimension, crossing with the first.” He drew a second line, at a slight angle, so that it crossed the first line at the midpoint. “That line was supposed to be straighter,” he said.

“It would’ve been straight two drinks ago.”

“Anyway. The point is, you’re travelling along the first axis, and then you get to this intersection. If you were to step off the first line, onto the second, you might be in a slightly different version of today.”

“Or a slightly different version of the world?”

“Maybe? That’s the first thing I thought when I read it.” He peered into his glass, then gestured to the bartender.

“Is there a third dimension?”

He leaned back on the bench, gazing at me in a blurry, drunken way, and his right hand moved involuntarily to his left. He’d taken off his wedding ring, I saw now, but he was touching a phantom ring. “The third dimension involves moving between the first two,” he said.

“So the third dimension’s the cocktail napkin?”

Fayed wasn’t really listening to me. He was staring at the napkin. “Maybe there was something wrong in one of our equations.” He leaned forward again, touched the point of the pen to the first line. “We always started here,” he said, “and sometimes ended here too, but maybe sometimes our end point was on the second axis.”

“This has to be my last drink,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Fayed said. “Absolutely.” We were out on the street now. The sequence of events between paying for the drinks and leaving the bar was unclear. Why was I outside with a bar glass?

“Did I just steal this glass?” I asked. “I think I just stole this glass.”

“Stay at my place. It’s right there.”

“I didn’t realize how close we were,” I said. We were somehow already walking toward his and Nico’s place, toward the gate that opened with a code into her garden.

“I sometimes wonder if they’d be better off with the State,” Fayed said. We were walking through the overgrown garden, past a birdbath that shone pale in the darkness. Towers rose on either side of the garden and behind the house.

“In an orphanage? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t parent anymore,” Fayed said. “I can’t do it.”

“Okay, but they’re your kids.”