Page 50 of Exit Party

“It was a long time ago. I do like the dome, that’s the short answer to your question. What happened to your father?” Eddie asked.

“It’s a mystery,” I said. “He went to a party with my mother, when she was pregnant with me, and then at some point in the evening he was gone and she never saw him again.”

“Was this during the collapse years?”

“Yes.”

Eddie nodded, as though that explained everything. “Still,” she said, after a moment. “What an awful thing.”

“Is your wife a musician as well?” I asked, with a nod to Eddie’s wedding ring.

“Ah,” she said. “No. She appreciates music, but she’s not a musician.” I liked the way Eddie’s face brightened when she talked about Ari. At eighteen I was always on the lookout for evidence that true love might exist in the world, although I would literally have died before admitting that to anyone. “She travels. She collects art and friendships.”

“She sounds like an interesting person. What kind of art does she collect?”

“Abstract stuff from the late 2030s,” she said, “also works from New York City in the mid-twentieth century.”

“So Cecile Gray Bazelon, Richard Pousette-Dart, all those characters?” I’d done my research.

She smiled. “Possibly? Those names ring a bell. She walks me through the apartment, she names names, she points out details, but I’m afraid it’s in one ear and out the other. I just get lost in all the images.”

“What an extraordinary thing,” I said, “getting to live with those works. I’ve never even seen most of them.” I was fishing desperately. I was trying to sound much older than I was.

“It really is extraordinary,” she said. “I’m a lucky woman.” The conversation moved on. No dinner party invitation presented itself.

5

Eddie wasn’t at the opera the next week, or the week after, and then I read her obituary: the noted pianist Eddie Kalisa had died unexpectedly in a Paris hospital, following complications from surgery. She was survived by her wife, Ari Soriano of Paris, and her grown daughter, Esme Léon-Kalisa of Lisbon. I would need another angle of approach.

6

In that first year after high school I was working at a grocery store in the 2nd arrondissement, and living in a tiny apartment in Nico’s neighbourhood. My apartment was a single room with a tiny closet for a toilet carved out of the corner. There was a bathtub next to the kitchen sink. I could open my fridge from my bed. I’d rented it sight unseen and never regretted it—restocking grocery shelves didn’t pay well, and after all those years in dormitories I was desperate to not have roommates—but when I tried to think ahead, to consider living in this space in a year, five years, ten, the walls closed in and I felt very tired.

“But what a gift to have your own apartment,” the girl I was dating said. Her name was Marie-Ève. We’d met at the grocery store, where we worked overlapping shifts, and she lived out in the Vincennes forest, in a former equestrian centre that had been taken over years earlier by climate refugees. It wasn’t terrible, she said, but it was crowded, and the apartment she shared with another woman had previously been an administrative office.

“I know,” I said. “It’s incredibly fortunate.” We were lying together after sex, and she’d gotten chilled so I’d wrapped her up in the blanket. I loved the weight of her head on my chest at these moments, her soft hair. I was running flashbacks in my head from the preceding half-hour, and Marie-Ève was blinking shortsightedly at my kitchenette. Her glasses were on the side table.

“I don’t even want to know how you managed to get this place,” she said. “You must have some serious connections.”

Did I have serious connections? I had Nico. She was the one who’d gotten me this place, but until that moment, lying there with Marie-Ève, I hadn’t entirely thought through what that meant. Nico worked in a retail job, but there was no possibility, now that I thought about it, that this work lined up financially with the size of her apartment a few blocks away, let alone her travels around Europe to speak with other scientists about parallel universes.

“It’s not like we’re inside the dome, though,” I said.

“Still.” There was a heaviness in Marie-Ève’s voice that meant she was falling asleep.

My apartment was south of the dome, on a street that had been abandoned by the municipal government. A local gang had negotiated control of the block, but the cost of that control was an absolute absence of municipal services. Garbage had to be hauled to a designated corner, where hypothetically some gang-affiliated service was supposed to pick it up on Tuesdays, except they seemed to miss the pickup three Tuesdays out of four. My street was so dirty that the sidewalk appeared several shades darker than the rest of the neighbourhood.

There were a few old people on the block who went out with brooms sometimes and tried to restore order to the sidewalks, but it’s difficult for individuals to fill the void left by absent systems, and an air of abandonment remained. The men who ran the neighbourhood were a constant presence. They were sitting on stoops, they were pulling up in their cars at all hours, they were carrying boxes of who-knows-what in and out of buildings. They were elaborately polite in a manner that chilled me.

My school friend Obie was among them. I stumbled across him almost literally one night, on my way home from a bar where I’d been drinking with Cole and the girl he was dating. We’d lost track of Obie immediately after graduation, and now that I saw him, I understood why. Obie was on a corner with two older men whom I recognized as local gangsters, the three of them speaking quietly, confidentially.

“Obie!” I said, too loud, too bright.

He responded with a nod, unsmiling. I thought I detected a warning in the way he looked at me. He’d moved past me somehow, and seemed much older than I felt. He’d slipped into his father’s underworld. The other two men stared flatly at me.

“We went to school together,” he said finally, to one of them, who nodded too. I didn’t like their gaze on me, the three of them. I found myself thinking stupidly of a long-ago TV show, some drama about people who could see ghosts, and the thing that was announced in a portentous tone at least once per episode was that if you can see ghosts, the ghosts can see you back. I’d seen these men, because Obie was among them, and now they could see me. I’d drawn their attention.

“Well, good night,” I said awkwardly, “good to see you again,” and went up to my apartment feeling like an idiot. But the weeks slid past without incident after that, and I tried not to think about it. I didn’t mind living there. The neighbourhood wasn’t noticeably more dangerous than anywhere else in the area, I was close to Nico, and so long as my hours didn’t get cut at the grocery store, I could make my rent. I didn’t have to think about how Nico had gotten me the apartment.