Page 18 of Exit Party

“I’m in favour of avoiding death traps,” Ari said. Avoiding Tulsa took them a day out of their way. There were few signs of life on the periphery of the city, just abandoned farms and abandoned businesses, fast-food places with broken signs and smashed windows. There were wind farms out here, turbines spinning silently in the dark, then the plains subsided to desert, to plateaus and sandy buttes. The expressway was full but few people seemed to live out here. There were places where stopping felt like death and other places where stopping seemed reasonable. The dirt was orange now, and the air was warmer. As they neared Phoenix, checkpoints started appearing more often. In the distance there were massive tracts of housing, patrolled by armed guards. “Keep moving,” the men at the checkpoints told them, “keep moving, you’re not welcome here, you cannot stop.”

They arrived at two in the morning in a territory of big box stores and strip malls, and found Felix’s friend and his wife waiting for them at the designated meeting point—the parking lot of an office supply store—with bottled water that tasted like plastic.

“Felix Washington,” Drew said, and performed an elaborate handshake/pull-in/half-hug choreography that Ari had only ever seen between men. Drew had a body like a wire and dark hair that flopped over one eye.

“Drew,” Felix said. “And you must be Cali.”

Cali was Drew’s new wife, a small woman who wore her hair spiked short and dyed the colour of a pomegranate, eyes a little wild in a way that made Ari nervous.

“You didn’t have to get up at this hour, Cali,” Felix said, apologetic.

“We never leave each other’s side,” Cali said, “and that way we can’t lose each other.”

“Do people live here?” Ari was looking at the office supply store. The doors were open, and people were passing in and out, but the lighting was strange. It wasn’t the glaring overhead lighting she remembered from the big box stores of the past, in other places. It was bright little lights strung up inside, Christmas lights disappearing down the aisles.

“Staplestown,” Drew said. “We’ve lived here for a year. It’s not a bad place.”

“Busy for this hour, isn’t it?” A family was coming out, with children, headed for a taco stand near the doors. One of the children, a little girl, turned a quick cartwheel on her way to the tacos.

“It’s too hot during the day in summer,” Cali said. “It’s dangerous. If that kid did that cartwheel in daylight, in August, she’d have third-degree burns on both hands. So a lot of people sleep all day and stay up all night in summer here, and then some never switch back when the seasons change.”

“Stay here long enough, you’ll turn into a night creature,” Drew said.

Drew knew the owner of a motel nearby. He called ahead, then they drove a few more minutes and Ari and Felix unloaded the merchandise while Drew and Cali talked to the owner, and a short time later Ari found herself sitting in the new motel room with a sense of déjà vu. Days of travel to come to a place almost identical to the place she’d left. Only the details varied. There was a generic painting of a meadow hanging above the bed. She’d brought her record player from the old place, and she set it up carefully on a fake-wood dresser.

Felix was lying on one of the beds, too tired for sleep.

“Do you mind music?” she asked.

“Please,” he said. “I wondered what you listened to on that.”

She put on the Bach cello suites again, for continuity.

“We did it,” Felix said quietly. “We made it.”

“Made it to where? I don’t mean to be negative.” Ari went to the window. The parking lot seemed benign to her. There were vendors set up nearby, two groups of teenagers selling groceries and odds and ends, bright packages that might have been headphones and socks. There were flickers of light in the hills across the expressway. A firefight, she realized, too distant for sound. “Isn’t this almost identical to the place we just left?”

“Yeah, but no one from Ohio knows where we are. I trust Drew,” Felix said. “We can do business here. Listen, what happened back in Ohio, whatever that was, it wasn’t personal. They just wanted the merchandise.”

“I guess it’s almost never personal,” Ari said, but the thought was exhausting. It isn’t personal because it’s chaos. She wished she could return to Los Angeles, but when she thought of those months after prison when she lived in Echo Park, the time of trees exploding into purple blossoms and the party at Kareem’s place, it was like remembering a lost world. What she’d liked about talking with Nico, she realized, back in Ohio, was that Nico made her time in Los Angeles feel real. They’d been to the same party, and that wasn’t much but it was something. If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.

“Maybe you should sleep,” Felix said.

“I could try.” Sleep felt far away, but nevertheless she lay on the other bed, staring at the ceiling. Thinking of Nico, whom now she would probably never see again, which led to thoughts of the party, of James. When she turned her head, Felix was looking at her. “Come here,” she said.

Business was good in the outer suburbs, because Phoenix was trying to become a city-state and the boundaries were unclear. They think their wealth gives them the right to the Colorado River, the customers said, and bought weaponry to carry to the downtown core. There was a dance party every night in front of the mall across the street, dancers backlit against bonfires and battery strobe lights, an atmosphere of desperate joy. By now Felix and Ari were low on stock. Felix needed to meet his contact who brought the weapons in by sea, which meant driving to the Port of Houston.

“I’d invite you to come with me,” Felix said, “but I’m afraid you might die.”

Ari was moved by this. “You’ll be safer if I’m with you,” she said. There were traces of chivalry among some of the militias. She felt the van was marginally less likely to get shot up at a checkpoint if there were a woman in the front seat. They moved through a day and a black night streaked with checkpoints, Felix driving, Ari in the passenger seat, and she wore a dress, makeup, a voluminous wig. They were travelling to see her sister who was having a baby, she told the teenagers at the checkpoints, who shrugged—they didn’t care—and asked for money or clean water. It took eleven hundred dollars in bribes to get to the Port of Houston, where they waited for six hours in a parking lot with the skeleton silhouettes of shipping cranes black against the sky. They waited through the blazing afternoon and into a tropical evening, the air hot and still, scents of saltwater brine and diesel drifting in from the gulf. A great white bird passed overhead, something like a heron but pale in the fading light.

“He isn’t coming,” she said finally, stating the obvious. Felix sighed. He knew. There was gunfire in the near distance, scaring a flock of seagulls that wheeled through the sky. They were quiet for a while, listening, but the sound didn’t come again.

“There’s a secondary location,” he said. “We’ve literally never used it.”

They got back in the van and drove away from the port, into a neighbourhood of decrepit little houses separated by high chain-link fences and razor wire. Muscular dogs stared from dead-grass yards. The sight made Ari tired. It was getting on toward eight in the evening and there was no one else on the street, no people or cars. She knew something dangerous was going to happen soon. She wished she were somewhere quiet and safe.

“This seems like a bad place,” Felix said. Ari was driving, and he was twisting his baseball cap in his lap.