Page 14 of Exit Party

“You’re kind.”

“Not really,” Ari said truthfully. “I’ve never been an especially kind person.”

“In any event, at a certain point in the evening, I couldn’t find Kareem anymore.”

“And no one ever saw him again,” Ari said. She had a vague memory of having followed Kareem into a kitchen and then seeing that he wasn’t there, but the details were hazy now. Too much had happened since.

“Right. No one ever saw him again.”

“What happened to the other Saraya?”

“Who?”

“The other Saraya. The one who came out on the terrace and called me Ibari.”

“I don’t know. She wandered out of the party and into the city, and I have no idea how that story ends. I’m going to say one more thing about that party, my new friend Ari, and then I’m going to end this call and go scream into a pillow or run circles around the reservoir or something, because thinking about this gives me panic attacks.”

“Okay.” Ari spoke very softly. She was conscious of trying to soothe him over the phone line. She was staring at the bulletin board in front of her face, which featured a number of phone numbers with initials and code names, but she saw nothing. In memory she was back at the party, moving oblivious through crowded rooms: drinking beer, fucking James, dancing, watching Gloria steal a painting, skirting the edges of some incomprehensible mystery that she’d entirely failed to notice at the time.

“I think there’s another place,” James said. “Like maybe a different version of reality, with different versions of us in it.”

“Okay.”

“I told you you’d think I was crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Ari said.

“Why not?”

“My entire life,” Ari said, “I’ve known things that were about to happen.”

“Like premonitions?”

“Like premonitions. So yeah, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think there are things in the universe that can’t be explained.”

“Thank you.” His voice was almost a whisper. “The thing about that party, Ari, is I don’t think the party was just a party. I think the party was also a door. I think it swung one way, and another Gloria and another Saraya entered, and then it swung the other way, and Kareem was gone.”

“James,” Ari said, but the line went dead.

She hung up and sat for a moment in the quiet office, but no one else was there and she felt like a trespasser. Did Eduardo even realize she still had the key? He’d had no work for her in a while. Ari needed groceries, which in those days was an all-day errand. She let thoughts of the party carry her through the tedium of the day. It was hard to find the things she wanted now, given the supply chain disruptions. But the size of the stores hadn’t changed yet, so there were always acres of empty aisles, and then enormous quantities of, say, oranges, because a shipment had broken through the Florida blockade, or in another store there would be no oranges but a small mountain of off-brand breakfast cereal boxes. After several hours she’d managed to gather everything except milk and eggs. In the late afternoon she found oat milk in a gas station convenience store.

“You ever get real milk anymore?” she asked the clerk.

He shrugged. “Milk trucks keep getting robbed at the border.”

She wasn’t sure which border he meant. From which direction had milk arrived, in the more tranquil past? You don’t notice the supply chain till it collapses. “Right,” she said. “You know where I can find eggs?”

“There’s a new chicken guy behind the Exxon,” he said. “’Bout a mile north.”

The chicken guy turned out to be a chicken family, a couple and two dead-eyed teenage boys who’d built a coop behind the gas station and set up a roadside stand that one of the boys guarded with an AR-15. She bought six eggs for a sum of money that immediately made her sick with remorse.

Back at the hotel she took a hot shower, in search of clarity, but none came. When she stepped out of the shower, a silvery house centipede rippled over the wall. She shuddered. Perhaps she should return to the inexplicably named Motel Petersburg, a mile down the expressway. But she liked this place, and it wasn’t like the Petersburg was less likely to have bugs. Thinking about bugs was easier than thinking about the unsettling madness of James’s story, thoughts of a party that functioned like a swing door between worlds. She towelled off and dressed.

The sun was setting, a rosy light coming in through the curtains. She put on her jacket and stepped out into the winter air. The parking lot was quiet, but there was an unmarked black SUV parked nearby. Which militia? Impossible to say. There was a new unease settling over the landscape. She sat for a while, breathing the cold air, until the door next to hers opened and three men came out with black duffel bags. She was careful not to look at them or their vehicle as they left.

“Evening, Ari.” Felix had stepped out behind them, to see them off.

“Hi, Felix.” They’d chatted occasionally, in the year she’d been here.