Page 93 of Exit Party

“What dress?” Saraya asked. She looked scared, Kareem realized. Something was wrong. Saraya was looking around as if she’d never seen this place before, no recognition in her eyes. She sank back against a wall. “Kareem,” she said, “what is this place?”

“Are you okay?” he asked, but as he spoke he was turning toward the windows, where the other Saraya—still in her silver dress—was admiring a flower arrangement.

Kareem felt like he was drowning. He reached out and grabbed hold of the closest steady thing in his immediate vicinity, which was his friend James’s arm.

“You okay?” James asked.

“Look,” Kareem whispered. He pointed, and James looked: at the woman standing stunned against a wall in the corner of the room, and her double over by the windows.

“What the fuck,” James said. “She has a twin?”

“Am I crazy?” Kareem felt crazy. “There’s two of them, right?”

The Saraya by the window turned and smiled at James and Kareem. They’re beautiful, she mouthed, meaning the flowers.

“We’re mistaken,” James said softly to Kareem. “We are definitely mistaken.”

“But you weren’t mistaken,” Ibari said, a year later, in a different world. Walking beside him across kilometres of desert in the fading light, a train platform shining in the near distance.

“Yeah,” Kareem said. “There were two of them. But we had to be mistaken, because the alternative was insanity.”

But Kareem felt nauseous now, and he wasn’t too obtuse to understand what that meant. Sometimes the body knows things that the conscious mind won’t accept, a therapist had once told him. The conversation with the therapist had involved this awkward phenomenon where Kareem felt ill every time he had to see his family, but the principle was the same. Someone said his name, new guests were arriving, and Kareem’s attention was diverted, although as he greeted them he did register that the second Saraya had slipped past—a flash of pink shirt on her way out of the apartment. He decided to pretend she hadn’t been there, although this was made harder by the way James was staring at the silver-dress Saraya by the window. Also there was no time, more people were coming in and he had to greet them and pretend nothing was wrong.

“Bold shirt,” someone said. It was a friend who’d brought an armload of flowers.

“Thank you,” Kareem said, and then, “Great to see you!” and then, “Let me get these flowers into a vase!” as he moved through the gathering crowd to the kitchen. When had he become an actor? James was trailing after him with a lost expression.

“I know countries don’t last forever and there’s always going to be new ones,” someone said as he passed, “but it feels like a miracle, right?”

“To the Republic of California,” someone said, raising a bottle.

“Where you’re from,” Ibari said, just confirming, “California is an independent republic?”

“Yes,” Kareem said. “The whole country fractured. But I can’t tell you what a good moment that was, the night of the party. The curfews had finally lifted.”

“That moment didn’t happen here,” Ibari said. “Tell me more about it.”

“It’s just, everything had been hard for so long by then, years. But then there was a new country, and we were so excited. Like a new country meant we were going to be new people.”

The kitchen was crowded. Kareem knelt between his guests to look under the sink for a vase.

“Kareem,” someone said softly, nearby. A woman had crouched beside him. “Kareem, where are we?”

“Hi,” Kareem said, and then, “Gloria?”

The woman frowned, seemingly confused. “It’s me,” she said. “Kareem, it’s me, it’s Nico.”

Kareem clutched the cupboard door, lightheaded. He’d known Gloria for years, and this was the first time he’d heard her use that name.

“Kareem,” the woman said urgently, “Kareem, what happened? Where are we? What is this place?”

This wasn’t exactly Gloria, he saw now. She had Gloria’s face, and Gloria’s voice, but different clothes, different hair, and she didn’t have Gloria’s scar from the Highland Park attack.

“It was happening again,” Ibari said.

“Yeah, it was happening again.”

“And you’re absolutely sure that was the name she used? She introduced herself as Nico?”