Page 30 of Exit Party

We landed at Charles de Gaulle at 6:20 in the morning, grimy and exhausted after a night spent unblinking in a class of service where the seats didn’t recline, where we had to pay for plastic cups of water and no suitcases were allowed, a night in which I’d stared into the cold darkness of the cabin and thought of hails of bullets, bombs wired to car engines, being pushed from a tall building, Cali’s unblinking eyes in the second photo. Whenever I looked at Felix, his eyes were open too, fixed on nothing. We held hands as we left the plane—his was damp and hot—and moved like ghosts toward passport control. By then I was too tired to be afraid. We were still dressed in the clothes of the previous day—previous country, previous life—and Felix wore a blank, shell-shocked expression, although in fairness I probably looked no better. We’ve done all we could, I told myself, but I knew this wasn’t true. I knew I could have gone further, because it is always possible to go further. There’s always one more precaution you could have taken.

“Our passports are perfect,” I murmured to Felix, as much for myself as for him, and he nodded in a way that made me think he hadn’t heard me. His attention was focused on the border agents, a line of blue-uniformed men and women encased behind glass at the front of the line. But he seemed stunned, and I was afraid of how he might react if we were questioned. I was trying to be patient but it was wearing on me a little, this feeling of being entirely in charge of our fates. I wanted him to snap out of it. The line was moving very slowly.

There was one person ahead of us, then no one, then we were moving toward a window where a blank-faced young man examined our passports without interest. We were Adrienne and Jeremy Spanner of Philadelphia, citizens of the Atlantic Republic, with a few years to go before our passports expired and a modest history of travel to nonthreatening locales. The agent paused over my passport, stamp poised in the air, and for just a moment my heart seized up, but then he glanced to his left and I realized it wasn’t my passport that had pulled his attention, it was a scene playing out at the neighbouring window, where a young woman was speaking softly, urgently, to a border agent who kept shaking his head—Desolée, madame, mais vous n’avez pas les papiers—and now police officers had materialized at the young woman’s elbows and they were leading her away, the woman crying silently now, while in the meantime our passports were returned to us under the bulletproof glass.

A short time later we stood swaying with exhaustion in a taxi line outside the airport, in the first sunlight of our first morning in France, first morning of a new life. I felt delirious. The sky was very blue. We took a taxi to Place St. Michel, chosen at random from a memory of a long-ago novel set in Paris. It felt important to avoid patterns of any kind, because patterns can be predicted. Patterns are death. It seemed unlikely that whatever malign interests had pursued us back in Texas would follow us over the Atlantic, but we could be certain of nothing. At Place St. Michel we sat on a bench for a long time in silence, staring at people, exhausted. The security presence was significant, but all of the agents I saw seemed to be agents of the state—no obvious militias—which was reassuring. I liked the idea of being in a stable country.

“Ari,” Felix said, “why Paris?” Which was a reasonable question on the face of it, but he was asking for a fourth or fifth time.

“I chose it at random,” I explained, again. “I think you’re in shock.”

“I like Italy,” Felix said, also for the fourth or fifth time.

“Well, me too, but we’ve been there, both of us. So a person who knows that about us might look for us there.” It was like being stuck in a conversational time loop. I felt that I was being very patient. The sunlight was too bright, and Felix was blinking in an idiotic way that made it hard to look at him. “Let’s find a hotel,” I said. What I meant was Let’s build a new life, since we can’t go back to the old one. But he wasn’t the right person for a new life, that was the next thought, and I felt such sadness at this. I really did like him.

Still, I did what I thought I was supposed to do: I rose from the bench, and took his hand. I walked with him—led him—down streets that I chose at random.

“Do you think anyone’s following us?” he asked after a while. We’d gone away from the city centre, into a quieter district where the buildings were shabbier. I didn’t answer his question, because I’d already answered it several times and my patience wasn’t actually infinite.

“Here,” I said. We’d reached a narrow blue hotel, wedged in between other four-storey buildings. It looked modest but possibly not infested with cockroaches, which was the level of hotel I’d been searching for.

“Why here?” he asked, and I looked at him for a long moment. I was beginning to think he might not be as intelligent as I’d thought.

“I picked it at random,” I said.

“Just now?”

“Just now.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

We used a second set of fake passports to check in. I’d procured these from a different vendor, under different names—now we were Monica and Halston da Silva of Salt Lake City, Kingdom of Deseret—but still, that first week we kept the curtains drawn and ventured out only in the early mornings. Our days in the room were long and strange. I kept a lookout, but I detected no menace in the patterns of the neighbourhood. As far as I could tell, the bread delivery truck was just a bread delivery truck; the woman who walked her sleek black dog at precisely seven every morning was just out walking her dog; the deliverymen who gathered at the corner were only going about their day-to-day lives: smoking cigarettes, eating meals standing up in a circle, sometimes glancing at their phones and then setting off on their bikes or scooters, returning some time later to smoke and drink a little and argue in four or five languages into the night, a society of men and a few women who made their living delivering goods to people with slightly more money than they had. The delivery people dispersed by five in the morning, but it wasn’t like deliveries ever stopped, so I assumed there was a morning outpost elsewhere, a place where another congregation smoked and ate breakfast sandwiches and argued between jobs.

In the afternoons, the protests began. There were plans to build a dome over Paris, using a glass-based composite that had been successfully deployed over several Asian cities. Once complete, the city would be protected against extremes of weather, and could be sealed off in the event of a pandemic or a dirty bomb. There were protests both for and against: the cost of the dome would be borne by the taxpayers of all of France, but only the elite centre of Paris would be protected, and construction would require the demolition of nearly a thousand buildings. The sounds of shouts and drums and chanting ricocheted off walls and echoed in the streets. As best as I could decipher from the French news, a particularly militant protest group was sabotaging construction equipment.

“What’s your plan?” Felix asked, on day eight. Away from his home continent, he’d slipped into a passive state. Sometimes I caught him staring into space and I knew he was thinking of Cali and Drew. Not everyone can weather the shocks of this world. He spent his days reading the news on a burner tablet. It was late afternoon, and the shouts and chants of protesters had combined into a background din in which I could seldom discern individual voices. I felt a now-familiar irritation—Why don’t you tell me what the plan is, why is everything up to me?—but on the other hand, it was a fair question.

“How much money do we have?” I asked. In the we, I laid claim to half the business, and I saw him absorb this. Whatever else I was now, I was certain that I was no longer his employee.

“A lot,” he said. “We have a lot of money. The business was lucrative.”

“It’s too loud here,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere quiet.”

We went to Greece, through Athens and then to a hotel on a cliff in the Peloponnese, a white palace that glinted aggressively in sunlight. It was hard to look at it directly, which was what I liked about it. The hotel marked the upper extremity of a village that terraced all the way down to the sea, the hotel at the crest of a wave of rooftops. On the first day Felix and I walked down into the village to buy clothes—I found some passable cocktail dresses and Felix found a suit in a consignment shop—and then in the late afternoon we went for a walk. Behind the hotel we found a staff quarters—a dilapidated two-storey apartment building, imperfectly hidden behind a row of cypress trees—and behind that was a disused service road, gravel, with a heavy chain across it. On the other side of the chain there was garbage that no one had bothered to remove, and this lent the chained-off road an air of decrepitude and criminality that called to me. It must have called to Felix too. We were Americans, which is another way of saying that chaos felt like home. There was no discussion. We looked at each other, looked at the road, stepped over the chain, and kept walking.

The road wound down a hillside, into a landscape of scrubby dry trees and tinderbox grasses. There was a great deal of trash strewn about, and as we walked further, the trash began to take on an unsettling coherence. A long time ago, a quantity of flowers had been placed here, some kind of memorial. There were just desiccated husks of bouquets now, a few still encircled by dirty cellophane and ribbons. Just ahead, we came upon the scene of a long-ago fire. There had been structures here once, tiny plywood buildings crammed haphazardly together, but they’d burned. There was tangled wiring, charred wood, and sharp angles of scorched metal. Bright pink flowers grew from the blackened earth. I felt myself resisting identification of what I was looking at—just angles, just lines, just ashes, nothing to see here—but what I was thinking of was the tent city behind the Denny’s back in Texas, the musicians and dancers, the girl emerging from the night with the note that sent us flying over the Atlantic. RUN.

“This was a settlement,” Felix said softly. “I wonder what happened to the people here.”

“They fled when they lost their homes or they died in the fire,” I said.

“I don’t know why you’d think that.” He was wearing his dream face, as I’d come to think of it, the face I’d first seen in the Houston airport. It was an unfocused expression in which I saw something furtive, a desperate wish to not understand what was in front of him. I think you’re overreacting, he’d said at the airport, even after the photos of his murdered friends had come in on his phone, no one even knows who killed Drew and Cali, I mean it was probably just some random thing that had nothing to do with us, and that note probably wasn’t even for us, while at the same time he’d let me dispose of his phone and had done absolutely nothing to stop me from saving us both, from spiriting us off that continent. He’d had to work so hard to not understand the danger we were in, just as he was working hard now to not understand what had happened here. He was a man in a self-imposed trance, but I saw the strain under the haze.

“There were all those old bouquets on the road, though,” I said. My gaze had settled on a particular form in the ruins, something that wasn’t quite a stick. Was that a human femur at the base of a leaning blackened wall? The shape was ambiguous.

“I didn’t see flowers, I just saw garbage,” Felix said, and what I would have expected to feel in that moment was fury—This man will never grow up—but I was surprised by tenderness. He would never grow up, he was stuck in some fundamental way, and he had no one else in the world but me. There was a terrible vulnerability in it.

“Let’s keep walking,” I said, and his gratitude was so visible and obvious that I stopped to kiss him. His lips were very warm. We held hands as we left the scene of the crime, and had gone some distance further—past more remnants of bouquets—before it occurred to me to wonder how I knew it was a crime scene and not, say, an accidental cooking fire in an overcrowded shantytown. The road was leading us back uphill, toward a line of four villas dark against the sky.