Page 77 of Exit Party

“No. We weren’t . . . I wasn’t friends with her. I just met her at the party. We had one conversation. She was Gloria’s roommate. Gloria had told me about her, but the party was the first time we met.”

“Tell me about the party,” I said.

“The one thing I wanted to do at the party was to talk to Gloria,” he said. “I texted her that day, but we just . . . I didn’t. I was going to, and then it didn’t happen.”

“What were you going to talk to her about?”

“She was pregnant.” His eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m very tired. I was just, I was so excited to be a father.”

“I’m sorry. That must make it very difficult to be here.”

“I’d been reading everything I could about it,” he said, “since she told me. Parenting blogs, books, everything. We were going to talk at the party, but . . .” He looked at the floor.

“Tell me why you decided to throw the party,” I said.

He swallowed hard, and nodded. “Well, there’d been a war. I don’t know if it happened here. The war that broke the country apart.”

“That broke the country apart?” It was a fascinating idea. The State was indivisible.

“Well, no country lasts forever,” he said. “That’s what we told ourselves, anyway, when we were trying to come to grips with the whole thing. Anyway, the party was to celebrate the end of the Los Angeles curfew.”

My watch buzzed again, and I glanced down to see the single word in red: RECUSE. My boss was observing the interview.

“Excuse me,” I said, and left him alone in the room. As I stepped out into the hall, where Alberto was waiting, I remembered: Gloria was Nico’s middle name.

“What is this?” I asked Alberto quietly. “Is there some kind of other world?”

“It would seem so,” he said. “But no conclusions can be made yet.”

Later, when night fell and I was done with the debrief, I decided to walk for a while in the direction of home. After all these years I still lived in Echo Park, across an entire city from the Harbor City neighbourhood, but I’ve always liked walking alone at night and a breeze from the ocean broke the heat. Surveillance drones hummed softly overhead. A delivery robot trundled past, carrying someone’s dinner, its round lights like startled cartoon eyes in the half-light. “Hey, buddy,” I murmured softly, as it passed. I knew it was a strange instinct, talking to it like it was a friendly dog, but I felt lonely and undone. I walked east for a half-hour, until the breeze was gone, then boarded a light rail that deposited me eventually near the base of the hill on which I lived. I climbed the public stairs to the cul-de-sac where the jacaranda trees had scattered purple blossoms over the sidewalk, and entered the key code to my terrace.

I sat out there for an hour or so before I went in, looking at the lights of the downtown towers. I knew this strange other version of Kareem wasn’t lying, because of the tattoo he’d described to me, TRUE DILIGENCE on the back of Ari’s left wrist. Had we had the same childhood, this other person and I? My grasp of quantum physics was weak at best, but that line of text, I thought now, was an entanglement between us, between me and Ari. When I thought of the tattoo, it was easy to imagine a scenario where I’d done something quite different, where I’d become a criminal instead of becoming the police. Two sides of the same coin, I thought, and the inevitable next thought was that if I had become a criminal, I would have been good at it, because I was good at everything I’d ever tried in my life. It was an absurd line of thought. I was very tired. Strange to think there weren’t just two versions of me, and two versions of Kareem and Nico and possibly everyone else, but two versions of our country. There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist. A line I remembered from the first day at the Service Academy: The State is a fortress and Service is the wall. I was the wall, but I’d been corrupted now. My most prized secret possession was a pair of glasses that foiled sensors, and I was harbouring a secret for Nico. If I was corrupt, was the rest of the wall crumbling too?

6

In the days that followed, I tried to return to my life. I was assigned to a different investigation, involving a group of people who had been accused of selling counterfeit exit visas out of a warehouse in East Hollywood. But the case was fraught. The entire thing hinged on a single informant, who had volunteered the information of her own accord, and who was, I quickly discovered, in contentious divorce proceedings with one of the men she was accusing. I thought the odds were fairly good that I’d find nothing except empty accusations and a desire for revenge, but on a warm afternoon in late May I drove to the informant’s place of work, a hair salon in Culver City.

The salon was a midrange kind of place, where a row of women stared at their own reflections in the mirror while stylists worked on their hair and talked about everything except politics. That spring all the women in Los Angeles were wearing white T-shirts with blue pants or blue skirts, and I understood the instinct for conformity—who wants to stand out, in a country like ours?—but it was jarring sometimes to see women in a group, a line of nearly identical outfits from one end of the salon to the other.

“I’m looking for Latika,” I said to the receptionist. The receptionist was a young person, no older than eighteen, and I saw the countless small calculations she made as she looked at me, the way her eyes skittered over my clothes, face, hair, bearing, demeanour, a pause by my hip to see if she could spot the bulge of a handgun. I felt exhausted for her, actually exhausted for both of us. The calculations wear you down.

“She’s booked all afternoon,” the receptionist said, very carefully, “unless, of course, there’s a mitigating fact that I’m unaware of . . . ?”

“Service,” I said. “Is there a back room?”

The receptionist went pale. She rose, waving to Latika. It took a moment to get Latika’s attention, but I saw the way terror crossed Latika’s face, mirroring the girl’s expression. I didn’t mean to become terrifying, that was the thing I was thinking as I walked with Latika into the cluttered back office. But I’d chosen this. I’d done well in school as a child. I could have done anything with my life, anything within the confines of the State, I could possibly even have figured out a way to emigrate, but I chose Service. I’d told myself that Service was a pathway to an interesting life and the kind of detective work I was drawn to, but of course I knew all along that this was the secret police. I want to swim away into the dark.

“You’ve nothing to fear,” I said, as soon as the door was closed. “You did the right thing, reporting your suspicions.”

She stared at me, wary, and then managed a nod. “It’s illegal,” she said. “Exiting without a visa is a threat to the State, isn’t it?” Her voice was high-pitched, and I wondered if that was how she always spoke, or if it was just that she was frightened. There were beads of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. “I’m an Aries,” she said. “We’re just very honest.”

“Of course you are.” I was using my warmest voice. We’re friends, the voice said, just two reasonable adults having a discussion, and we will solve this together. Latika relaxed, just slightly. “Sometimes people think that if they were peripherally involved in something,” I said, “then they’ll get in trouble too. But nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, we know that the longer you’ve been involved in something, the more strength of character it takes to extricate yourself and to do the right thing.”

“It was my husband’s deal,” she said. “Well, my ex-husband.”

“How did it start?”

“He has family in China. About four years ago he wanted to go visit them, because his mother was dying, but he couldn’t get an exit visa.”