Page 36 of Exit Party

“I’ll stay awake for a while,” I said, and took a seat by the window. The glass was tinted in a way that rendered the sky and the sea unnaturally dim. I was bone-tired.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: You get more than one life. The transition between lives is sudden or slow. Sometimes it’s a night flight to Paris, sometimes it’s waking to the news that your country is ending, sometimes it’s soldiers flooding the streets. Sometimes it’s the FBI crashing through your Santa Monica rental house in a wave of black uniforms, pressing your face into the carpet while they snap cold metal on your wrists, you have the right to remain silent. Sometimes it’s a prison sentence, sometimes it’s a boat. I gazed out at the seascape, at the choppy waves of the Atlantic under a dove-grey sky. Sleep was very close again. The sound and vibration of the engine were all around me. In a half-awake, half-dreaming state I saw a translucent periscope rise above the waves and fade out, some ghost submarine from long-ago memories of war movies.

“Wake up,” Soriano said gently. Some time had passed. I’d been back in the motel room in Ohio, observing Felix’s grace as he carried an AR-15 across the room and placed it with reverence in the arms of the girl with the feather in her hair, the girl dressed in black who was pretending to be drunk.

The boat was pulling into an industrial port in a landscape of warehouses, an unobtrusive rusted-steel pier that looked comically small beside the massive cranes. (Involuntary memories of a parking lot by the Port of Houston, listening to distant gunfire with Felix in the gathering twilight, a white bird flying overhead.) “We’ll stay inside till the car pulls up,” Soriano said. I followed his gaze and saw the car approaching, a grey sedan cruising slowly down the line of container stacks.

“How do you know it’s the right car?”

“I think you should marry me,” he said.

“What?”

“We think exactly alike. Watch.”

The car stopped by the pier, and the driver—a dockworker, or a man dressed as one—got out, left the driver’s door open, opened the back passenger door, and walked away. Then, as I watched, a woman emerged from some other part of our ship, walked briskly down to the car, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“That’s Pilar,” he said. “I trust her.”

“She’s been working for you for a while?” I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but assumed she was watching us. The windows of the car reflected the sky.

“Yeah,” he said, “and also she’s my cousin.”

“Same as before, then?” I wished I’d slept longer. I wasn’t well. I could feel the beginnings of a fever, dull heat behind my eyes.

“Yes. No matter what happens, walk straight to the car. What will you do if I’m shot on the pier and fall dead beside you?”

“I’ll walk to the car.”

The outside air carried oil and saltwater brine, indistinguishable from the Port of Houston. I wished I could stay outside for longer, but in a moment I was inside the car and Soriano was closing the door behind us. The door cut off sound in a way that made me understand that the windows were bulletproof. It was like being encased in a hermetically sealed pod. I had to fight off claustrophobia as we set off. Pilar’s gaze flickered to mine in the mirror. She was younger than me by at least a decade.

“Soriano,” I said, “what exactly is your business?”

“I have several,” he said. “My main business is, I transport people. It isn’t human trafficking. I’m talking about willing individuals who desire to start over in an entirely different place, with a different name and different identity papers.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“Very,” he said. “I’m good at my job, and I charge accordingly.”

“I did that without you,” I said. “The name, the place, and the identity papers.”

“Yes, but you weren’t in the Mafia,” Soriano said. “I’m using the Mafia as an example. There are countless people who’ve sworn fealty to organized crime, and the only way out of that is death, usually.”

“Death or you?”

“Death or me,” he said. We were leaving the port, through a steel gate that closed behind us, then out into a larger territory of warehouses and parking lots, huge trucks passing. “We’re a good match for several reasons,” he said, “and one of them is that you understand how to operate in this environment. Felix’s story about your flight from Texas made that clear.”

“Why do you travel like this? Is someone specifically after you?”

“Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve learned to be careful.”

“I can operate in this environment, but I dislike it,” I said. “Don’t you wish life were easier?”

“Of course. Doesn’t everyone?” He looked at me. “We don’t get to choose the world we’re born into. But you either learn to navigate that world, or you don’t.”

I nodded. I was very tired. Pilar merged onto an expressway, and we lapsed into silence. Time collapsed and I was six years old again, drifting toward sleep in my mother’s arms in the back of a yellow taxi, steel girders of the Williamsburg Bridge sliding past overhead, suspended between and above the lit-up shores of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I had a sense of blurred borders, of having travelled in so many cars between so many places that I was somehow in all of the cars at once. I drifted in and out of sleep through the grey hours between the ocean and Paris.

“Not much longer,” Pilar said. It was the first time she’d spoken, and I was startled by an American accent. Who were these people, actually? I closed my eyes for a moment, trying not to sink too far into exhaustion. Thinking, How did I land in this life. Or How did I land in yet another life, how often do I get to blow my life up and start over, how many completely separate lives am I going to get to live before I run out of chances. We were passing through a neighbourhood of narrow streets, somewhere near the city centre. The car came to a halt in front of an elegant apartment building.