Page 94 of Exit Party

“Yes,” Kareem said.

“What did you do?”

“I kept it together.”

He kept it together because that was what Kareem did. Keeping it together was his superpower. “You’re at my party,” he said to this not-Gloria. The thought occurred to him that he might be having a psychotic break. He had no history of mental illness, but what else could it mean that he was seeing extra people, for lack of a better phrase, people who wore his friends’ faces but who weren’t quite his friends, people who were essentially wrong? It felt important to stay very calm.

“Okay,” the woman—Nico—said. She looked so scared.

“Kareem,” Bruno said, “are you Team San Diego Stays or San Diego Goes?” That was the month when San Diego was waffling on the question of whether to commit to the Republic of California or form its own independent city-state.

“If they have to think that hard about it,” someone else said, “they can go join the Pacific Ocean.”

“I’m neutral on San Diego,” Kareem said, without taking his eyes off Nico.

“I think we should keep them,” said Bruno. “I like beach volleyball boys.”

“Kareem, you got a bottle opener?” someone asked. Kareem stood, and Nico rose too. Nico looked like she was on the verge of a panic attack. She looked like she knew no one else in this room.

“Sure,” Kareem said, “just in that drawer over there—” And this time it was less of a shock when Gloria came in, the version of Gloria who didn’t call herself Nico and whom he’d known for ten or eleven years, with her sequined shirt, her familiar curtain of hair, her scarred forehead. Gloria was focused on refilling a cup of Pepsi and Nico seemed not to have seen her, because Nico, it seemed to Kareem, wanted only to escape. Nico was slipping away through the crowd, and then gone. Kareem was vastly relieved that they hadn’t noticed one another. He was aware of the absurdity of wanting to be a good host to both his real guest and his real guest’s doppelgänger, but hosting was something he cared about.

“This is crazy,” James said quietly, beside him.

“We must be wrong,” Kareem said. “Lots of people look alike.” But he felt delirious at this point. He was aware that his shirt was unattractively blotched with sweat. “Excuse me a moment,” he murmured, to James or maybe to no one in particular, and left his own party. It was surprisingly easy to just walk out. “I’ll be right back,” he said brightly to a couple climbing the stairs, and then he slipped past them and down into the street.

Nico was gone. The street was empty, and the cool rain on his face made him feel less insane. He was walking quickly before he’d decided on a direction. He wanted so desperately to get away. He summoned an Uber and a moment later was staring dazed out the window of a westbound car. Traffic was light at this hour. He’d selected the most recent destination in the Uber app, which was, he realized dimly, a seafood restaurant by the Santa Monica Pier.

He stared out the window through miles of night, past strip malls and taco trucks, bakeries with elaborate layered cakes in lit-up windows, auto repair places and apartment buildings, gas stations, new tent cities that had sprung up like mushrooms to house refugees from the inland fighting. The city was less desolate now, he found himself thinking, less desolate but also even more incoherent. Less space between buildings, more people out on the streets. There was no more unused land now, the blank spaces on the banks of expressways colonized for housing. He wanted to get as far away from his apartment as possible.

By the Santa Monica Pier he walked out onto the sand, toward the water. The ocean breeze was beautiful. There were parties here and there on the beach, people gathered around illegal bonfires. He walked to the ocean and stared at the horizon. A ship was passing in the far distance, the faintest constellation of lights. He tried to let his mind go blank, to use all the calming exercises his therapist had taught him, but it was impossible not to imagine the guests at his party doubling in his absence. Perhaps even now other Brunos and other Jameses were spilling down the stairs to hang out with the other Saraya and the other Gloria, a shadow party congregating on the street.

It was the thought of the other Gloria that brought him to his senses. When he spoke with the other Gloria, the version of Gloria who called herself Nico, she hadn’t been menacing. She’d been terrified. Why had Kareem fled? He was struck by the realization that he was being a terrible host—he’d abandoned his apartment, his party, his guests—so he summoned a car that spirited him home. But when he was close to his house he found he was desperate to be outside in fresh air, so he had the driver pull over early and he walked the last half-mile.

Someone was sitting at the bottom of the steps leading up to his apartment. A woman with short dark hair, seemingly staring at nothing in particular, resting there. She looked up, and his heart seized for just a moment, but it was neither Gloria nor Saraya nor their strange doubles. It was Ari.

“It’s strange talking about this,” he said. “I know she isn’t you.”

“Did you speak with her?” Ibari asked.

She smiled when she recognized him. He said, “You’re Ari, right?”

“Hi. Yes.”

For just a moment, he wanted desperately to tell her. “There’s something wrong with the party,” he said. But what if she thought he was crazy? He sighed.

“What do you mean?”

“I’d tell you more,” he said, “but you’d think I’m insane.”

“I doubt that.”

“No, it’s actually crazy. You don’t want to know.”

“If I didn’t want to know I wouldn’t have asked,” Ari said, and Kareem saw that he’d annoyed her a little. He was desperate to change the subject. He saw black tattoo letters on her wrist.

“What’s that tattoo?” he asked. “Do you mind me asking? I like tattoos.”

Ari pushed up her sleeve, and he saw the words TRUE DILIGENCE. The lettering was uneven.