Page 75 of Exit Party

I grabbed a painting off the wall. I don’t know why, it was just in my line of vision.

What was the painting?

Does it matter?

Candidly, we don’t know what matters and what doesn’t at this point. Please continue.

Okay, it wasn’t just any painting. It was this painting called Swan Dive. It had belonged to my uncle, and he’d given it to me when I graduated college. It had been painted by a friend of his, or so the story went, and my uncle had taken it from a studio after the friend died of a heroin overdose. Dark story, but it’s a beautiful painting. Nico loved it, so I gave it to her as an anniversary gift, and she hung it in the lab. Anyway, I put it on the A platform. We ran the sequence again, and the painting appeared on platform B, absolutely fucking instantaneously, like some kind of sick joke. It worked perfectly. Len said, “Let’s try something living.”

We didn’t have any mice on hand. So I went outside, and I remember everything was wrong. Like nothing had changed in the world, but the neighbourhood felt sinister to me all of a sudden. All I could think about was my missing wife. I’d seen lizards out on the steps earlier, and a couple of them were still there. I captured two of them, and brought them back to the room, squirming around in my hands. I put them in an empty yogurt container, placed the container on an A platform. Len and I couldn’t look at each other. It felt . . . it feels like a nightmare. I kept thinking that maybe the two missing women would just reappear on the B platforms, like there’d just been some kind of inexplicable delay, and I kept staring and staring at the empty air. We tried with the lizards, and it worked perfectly.

Then Len said, “We could still salvage the experiment.”

What did he mean by that?

He meant that I could still go. He was never going to go. He’d been very clear about that, that was actually the condition of his involvement in the project. A long time had passed by now. Well over an hour.

I had this illogical feeling like if I waited any longer, the trail would grow cold and it would be harder to reach my wife. Like I was tracking her through a dark forest. I was desperate to see her again. I wanted to go after her. I wasn’t thinking rationally.

So you got back up on the platform.

Yeah. I did.

What were you thinking about?

You know what I was thinking? I was thinking that I maybe hadn’t been the best husband, and that going after my wife was the absolute least I could do.

In what ways were you a bad husband?

That’s not the word I used.

Explain what you meant.

Why? Is this punishment, or interrogation?

Let the record show that the subject is resisting interrogation.

Jesus, Ibari, I’m not resisting interrogation. Okay. Nico and I, we had very similar careers. We made about the same amount of money, working the same number of hours, doing similar projects. We’d met in the same department. But when we had kids, she did all the parenting. That’s just the way it played out.

Why is that?

She was better at it than me. Also, if we can be candid here, the work I was doing was more important. I didn’t think that putting the kids to bed was necessarily the best use of my time.

Let’s return to the experiment. So you got up on the platform.

Yeah. I got up on the platform. I watched Len’s face as he ran the sequence. He was sweating. He said, “I’m going to count you down from three,” and I said, “Just push the fucking button.” He stared at me, and then I was standing on the B platform, across the room, and he was staring at the empty A platform where I’d just been. I thought, Okay, it worked. It worked. There’s hope. But then he looked at me, and his face went slack, just this shocked expression. I wasn’t alone on the B platform. There was someone crowded next to me.

The other you.

The other me.

5

After the interview was done I went to the employee lounge, which looked a lot like the teachers’ lounge at the college in Fillmore, with scuffed wood floors and mismatched chairs. There was something here that I couldn’t quite grasp when I considered the furnishings, some logic to the room that evaded understanding. I felt drained and shaken. There were other people here, a few, working quietly, and that was the sole reason why I didn’t sit with my head in my hands. What I wanted was to go home and weep, because the inexplicability and mystery of the accident at UCLA felt like horror to me, and whatever had happened to Nico, it was difficult to believe that she was ever coming back.

Service protocol in difficult or complicated cases is to interview the same subject several times, retreading the same ground with different interrogators. After speaking with Nico’s husband, I very much didn’t want to speak with his double. But at least the double had been interviewed already, so I spent some time reading three previous transcripts, stalling in the guise of preparation. This other Kareem Fayed, the man from elsewhere, relayed a very strange story that had remained perfectly consistent from one interview to the next.

He talked about a version of the world where the State didn’t exist. He had a story about civil war, about terrorism and bombings, a coup d’état that brought down the United States, the country fragmenting into multiple small nations and city-states with ever-shifting borders and countless combatants, militias battling for control across the former nation.