Page 92 of Exit Party

A day or two earlier, I’d purchased a holographic video camera. After a kilometre or so I fished it out of my pocket, clicked it on, and angled it toward him as we walked.

“I never thought Detective Grissom would be arrested,” I said. “He’s a good detective with an otherwise excellent record.”

Alberto shrugged. “Sometimes it’s best to set an example.”

“What will happen to him?”

“He’s out of my hands now,” Alberto said.

The sun was at the horizon now, the desert sliding into a shadowed territory where distance was uncertain. There was a light on the platform, just one, a beacon. Sometimes on long walks I slip into something like a fugue state, where I start to believe that I’ve always been walking and will be walking forever. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed before I spoke again.

“I know you’ve talked about this before,” I said. “Probably more often than you would’ve liked. But I need you to tell me what happened. How you arrived here.”

“Why?”

“I want to understand what happened to my friend,” I said. “Her name was Nico. She disappeared.”

He sighed. “I saw her. She was at my party.”

“Back up. Tell me about the place where the party was.”

“Los Angeles,” he said, “but a different Los Angeles. I don’t understand it.”

“What was that place like? Let’s just say it was a different city, for the sake of our sanity. Describe it to me.”

“Well,” he said, “it was full of refugees. There’d been a war. Los Angeles wasn’t disputed territory, so people came into the city when the California Republic borders were being settled, because it was safer inside the city than outside the city. And then there was a time when the fighting had ended, for the most part, just sporadic violence here and there, and then after a while the curfew was finally lifted.”

“What did you do when the curfew was lifted?”

“I decided to throw a party,” Kareem said.

Thirty years later, in a shantytown in the burn zone on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Marlowe sat in a makeshift building and watched the long-ago recording: a holographic version of the man she’d always known as her father, dazed and dressed in ragged clothing, telling the story to Ibari as he walked toward the Los Angeles train.

Several hours later, she walked out of the burn zone and down to the beach. Was her father alive or dead? Both. Vehicles had been driven on the sand, quite recently, the tire tracks fresh. She walked south for a while, dazed from hours of conversation with the genetic double of the man who’d raised her, and swam around the burn zone fence.

On the other side, by the Santa Monica Pier, two men in grey approached her. State agents, conducting random interrogations in the wake of a historic data breach. Marlowe stood on the sand and submitted to their questions. Had she done or seen anything unusual this evening? Had she heard anyone talking about any breach of State secrets from Service headquarters, or expressing opinions on those secrets? No, Marlowe said. She’d seen and heard nothing. She’d spoken with no one. She’d just been out for a walk on the beach.

Samir had told her she’d someday recover from her marriage and she wanted to believe that, she thought that might be true, but she still carried such doubt. She still didn’t believe herself, most of the time, and it seemed to her later that her doubt was what saved her that night, while she was being questioned on the sand. Nothing at all out of the ordinary? the agents asked. And she was so used to doubting herself, she was so accustomed to rewriting the experiences of her life, that it didn’t feel like lying when she said No, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing at all, just out for a walk on the beach, because how could she be sure that she’d seen what she remembered seeing?

The agents moved on to another target, and Marlowe continued walking down the shore.

3. EXIT WOUND

1

Kareem loved antique cocktails, and was sipping an old-fashioned as the first guests arrived: Gloria, in a sparkly sequined shirt—Kareem appreciated the effort—and her new roommate, a very pretty woman with short dark hair who flashed a dazzling smile and introduced herself as Ari. They smiled when he told them to throw their jackets on the bed and hung them on hooks instead, from which he concluded that one or both had some experience with bedbugs. But there was no time to ask, more guests were arriving, the party was flowing up the stairs and taking shape in the room around him, and he felt a pleasant looseness in his movements, the cocktail settling into his blood.

“Kareem!” someone said. It was his friend Saraya from work. “The place looks beautiful.”

“Thank you,” he said.

It was his first party since his girlfriend had moved out. He’d worried about hosting without her, but to his delight, the evening was taking on a golden quality. The timing here is important: this was the late spring of 2031, days after the formal declaration of secession by the California Republic. The foreign soldiers were gone from Los Angeles, the curfew had been lifted, and the night was ecstatic. Had he gone overboard with the flowers? He had taken some care. There were vases everywhere, on every surface, with candles burning between them. The chandeliers were turned down low. The windows were cracked, and the scent of rain on pavement wafted in.

“I love your dress,” someone said to Saraya in the tumult, “the construction is really remarkable,” and he noticed that Saraya’s dress involved hundreds or thousands of tiny pleats. But his friend Bruno was coming in, doing that double-kiss thing that Kareem had always found embarrassing—he knew it was standard in France and possibly elsewhere in Europe, but on his home continent he found it horribly affected—and then something drew Kareem’s attention to the kitchen door. A woman was coming out of the kitchen, but he couldn’t remember her having entered the apartment.

Then he recognized her.

“Saraya,” he said, “you changed your clothes!” Saraya was wearing shorts now, and a pink T-shirt. “Did you spill something on that gorgeous dress?”