Page 80 of Exit Party

“Everything all right?” Anton asked, when I returned to him.

I shrugged. “Work,” I said.

“Are you okay, Ibari?”

“I’m fine.”

He pulled a small notebook and pen from his jacket pocket. I watched while he wrote something, using the menu as a shield: YOU KNOW WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT LIFE IN AN AUTHORITARIAN STATE?

“Anton,” I said.

He was shredding the paper into minuscule pieces now, still covered by the menu. “How exhausting it is,” he said, very quietly, “pretending everything’s fine. The way it warps you, having to pretend.” The paper was shredded beyond any point where it could be reconstructed, and even if it were reconstructed, the sentence wasn’t particularly damning. He understood something about covering his tracks.

What I wanted desperately was to tell him about Kareem, the foreign Kareem in the green silk shirt, telling me a story about my double—no, a story about a doubled country, a country very unlike the State—in an interrogation room six months ago. I wished I could say to Anton what Kareem had said in passing to me, No country lasts forever, because there was such hope in that, but I couldn’t take the risk. I was thinking about the silver tape that Anton had left in my old house in Fillmore. I remembered his twins using it for their art projects, but why did Anton own tape that could foil facial recognition sensors? I didn’t want to know. The only way to keep him safe was by not knowing, and I feared for him now. I remembered Nico shaking her head and refusing to hear me when I’d mentioned the way the tape foiled the sensors all those years ago, and recognized the same instinct in myself, that desperate desire not to learn anything that I’d have to report. There’s so much you have to ignore to live peacefully in a place like this.

“I don’t have to leave for another thirty minutes,” I said. “Shall we get some dessert?”

“There’s a line I’ve been trying to walk,” Alberto said, “for literally my entire professional career.” It was late now, around eight thirty p.m., and we were staring at his fish.

“What kind of line?”

“Humanity versus not, I suppose. I don’t mean to be grandiose about it. In the past several weeks,” Alberto said, “you’ve deviated from your usual routes to walk by Nico Li’s house nine times. What are you looking for?”

“I’m concerned,” I said, after a moment. I was watching a particular fish, bright blue with black stripes. “As a friend, not as a Service agent. Nico and Kareem have two small children, and I don’t think Kareem’s a good father.”

“Our psychologists would back you up on that,” Alberto said. “Listen, the reason I brought you in tonight is to tell you I’m modifying the recusal order. You won’t speak with either of those men again, but I want you running surveillance on the children.”

“To what end?”

“Nico broke a number of internal rules,” Alberto said, “and needs to be interrogated. If she ever returns, our analysis is that she’ll go directly to her children.”

“The children are bait, then?”

“Essentially.” He glanced at me. “If our work were easy,” he said, “anyone could do it.”

“Can I ask you something about the case?”

“Yes.”

“Will their father be arrested?”

“Tentatively, no. We’re more interested in Nico.”

“So her husband’s also bait?”

“I wish you’d stop using that word,” Alberto said.

“What happened to the other man? The version of Kareem Fayed from . . . the other place. From somewhere else.”

“Well.” Alberto rose and went to the fish tank. He was studying a zebra fish down in a corner, a lethargic little creature with its face close to the glass. He tapped the glass lightly, and the fish zigzagged away. “The question to ask here isn’t really what’s in the best interest of the individual, but what’s in the best interest of the State. We have this man, this reluctant arrival from a different world. The place he’s from, Ibari, it’s some kind of violent nightmare version of our country, isn’t it? You read his interview transcripts. There is no State where he’s from, just militias battling for control of the fragments. It’s the absolute opposite of the harmony we work for, you and I.”

“Hardly his fault, though,” I said carefully.

“Not his fault at all. It’s regrettable on every level. But imagine the potential,” he said, “of having a man out in the world who comes from a place where the State doesn’t exist. Spreading wild ideas about an alternate system, or absence thereof. Talking about a place that isn’t an idea, but that actually exists, so far as anyone can tell, because this man is the living proof of its existence. That’s in no one’s best interest, is it? Spreading subversive ideas?”

“I see your point.” I want to dive into the ocean and keep swimming through the blue. Was this an old passphrase? It was an idea that I couldn’t shake. Lately I’d come to an awareness that I wasn’t entirely well. “Has he been imprisoned?”

Alberto glanced at me. I was asking too many questions. “We’re not monsters,” he said. “Of course not. He’s in Camp Five. Working in exchange for room and board, surrounded by scenic desert. It’s a pleasant place by all accounts. There’s a pool. The deal we’ve reached with him is that so long as he doesn’t talk about where he’s from, he will never be imprisoned.”