Page 37 of Exit Party

“Welcome home,” Soriano said, and looked confused when I laughed.

I married Soriano quickly. He needed a wife for social events. I could have built a new life on my own, in a new city, but the thought was exhausting. I would attach myself to Soriano’s life for a while, I thought, and see what came next. It was a life of dinner parties, for the most part. At some point in the evening, the party would divide: a selection of guests—mostly men—would withdraw into another room to talk business, while the rest of us—mostly women—talked about everything except what our spouses were up to. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am not a monster. I don’t think I’m a monster. I held considerable doubts. But the world changes and you have to change with it, and it was that understanding that propelled me from one life into the next without dying.

Our street was on a popular route for anti-dome demonstrations, and I woke some mornings to the howls of protesters and the metallic clash of pots and pans in the street below. I liked watching the surging crowds from Soriano’s bedroom window.

“It’s adorable that they think they have problems,” I said to Soriano, and this struck me at the time as a reasonable stance for an American to take, but also it was true that I was floating through a city that I didn’t understand. On our last night together, we went to a dinner in the 5th arrondissement, not far from the river. I’d slept poorly the night before, and had drunk too much espresso to compensate. When we left at eleven, I felt almost manically awake. Pilar was waiting with the car, but I hesitated on the steps.

“What is it?” Soriano asked.

“Could we walk a little? I’m overcaffeinated.”

“Of course,” he said. He leaned into the car window and said something to Pilar, who drove away. A small crowd had gathered by the curb, people in extremely expensive clothing waiting for their cars, and there was something mildly subversive in walking away on foot.

“I feel like we’re getting away with something,” I said.

He laughed, and I took his arm. “Living in this city feels like getting away with something,” he said. “Let’s walk along the river a little ways.” The Paris dome wasn’t going to be a dome, exactly, so much as a series of giant soap bubbles. One of the support beams was quite nearby, just on the other side of the river, a massive square tower rising improbably into the night air.

“Are you worried about the protests?”

“A little,” he said. “But I’m more worried about the dome.”

This was interesting to me. He’d been working long hours while I studied French and wandered the city, and we hadn’t spoken much about it.

“Why?”

“If you’re talking about a structure,” he said, “then operationally speaking, being protected by a structure can easily turn into being trapped by it.”

“I suppose you have a point.”

“The dome will protect us against the heat and the storms,” he said, “but what if something happens inside the dome?”

We’d reached the river. We descended a walkway down to the bank, and walked in silence for a few minutes. I was admiring the beauty of the river at night, lights sliding over the surface. All my life I’ve loved dark water.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“New York,” I said, and registered his mild surprise. I never talked about the past. “I lived by the river as a kid.”

“In Manhattan?”

“Brooklyn. Near the Williamsburg Bridge.” When I was twelve—after my mother was deported, after my father followed her back to Ecuador, after there were no more parents—I used to slip out of my aunt and uncle’s apartment at night and go down to the water. Why? To stare at it. There were places on that industrial waterfront where I never saw another living soul, and I liked inhabiting a secret night world that was only mine.

“Something’s wrong,” he said softly.

I snapped back to the present, and I saw it too. A small dark ship was moving down the river. A passing shadow, no lights. I glanced over my shoulder. Two dark figures had materialized at the top of the walkway we’d taken. There was something in the way they stood, side by side, watching the boat. They were dressed in black, dark masks over their faces. Something glinted in the streetlight and I was certain they were armed.

“We have to go forward,” I said, and we increased our pace. Just ahead, the river path diverged. To the left, rough cobblestones continued along the water. To the right there was a pedestrian tunnel, lit with blue lights. I took Soriano’s hand and led him into the tunnel, still at a strolling pace. If we ran, I feared the spell could break and the night dissolve into gunfire.

“Why the tunnel?” he asked. Not afraid, just curious. Soriano had nerves of steel.

“Because surely those people are connected to the boat,” I said, “so I want to get us away from the water. Can you run?”

“Of course,” he said, and we broke into a light jog, footfalls as quiet as possible. I’d been here before in daylight and it had been reasonably well populated, but at this hour we were almost alone. A cyclist passed going the other way—he glanced at us curiously—and then we were alone entirely, moving rapidly between graffitied walls. The walls were lit at intervals by streaks of ultraviolet light: political slogans—Le dôme = la mort—but mostly names, stylized roses, stars, human figures, animals. We passed a one-eyed fox, a blue rabbit. The sound behind us was almost certainly gunfire. The cyclist who’d passed us a moment ago came back the other way, whirring past us in a blur, pedalling frantically. This far into the tunnel, the air was stale. There were fans overhead but they were stilled. We had to get back to air, that was what I was thinking. I sped up, so Soriano did too, the two of us moving at a dead run now.

There was some kind of cacophony ahead, shouting and sirens. We were running toward danger. Soriano stopped.

“We have to keep going,” I said.

“I think it’s worse ahead of us,” he said. “Whatever’s going on. You hear all that?”