Page 23 of Exit Party

“Eight years, isn’t it? That seems . . .”

“You can say it,” she said. “That seems like he’s dead, right? But on the other hand, he had this fantasy. He was obsessed with this thing he saw on the internet once. There was a website where you could send in secrets.”

“For what purpose?” (Maybe I could create a distraction and pour the coffee down the sink?)

“Well, just to tell someone, I guess. Some people just want to confess.” Gloria paused for a moment, took a sip of her coffee. She seemed actually to be enjoying it. “Anyway, there was this one secret he really liked. Someone sent in a postcard that said, ‘Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I’m dead.’ Words to that effect. I might be getting the wording wrong.”

“Well, I suppose if you were going to fake your own death, that would’ve been the moment,” I said.

“He brought it up a few times. It would just come up in conversation every so often, over the years.”

“You think he had it in him? Disappearing like that?”

“I don’t know. I think I just don’t want to think he’s dead.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to talk about loss. If the conversation were more boring, might it end sooner? I steered us into one of those tedious expat discussions of paperwork and visa requirements, in the course of which I remembered that I’d never found Gloria to be a particularly interesting person. The boy in the armchair—Sebastian—finally took off his headphones. “I’m hungry,” he said. “I didn’t have lunch.” I glanced at my watch. It was four p.m. For the first time, I noticed the blanket and pillow crumpled around him.

“Does he sleep out here?” I asked. “On the couch?”

“Well,” Gloria said, suddenly unable to meet my gaze, “we should probably settle up.”

“What do you think would be a reasonable price?”

She hesitated. “I don’t really know what it’s worth.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Just what Kareem told me. It belonged to his uncle, who I guess was a painter in New York in the 1950s, and it was painted by his uncle’s friend.”

I nodded. “Would five thousand euros seem fair to you?”

“Yes,” she said, and the relief that washed over her face was almost enough to make me feel guilty, almost. “Thank you.”

When I left the apartment a few minutes later, I found that my driver had fallen asleep. I knocked on the window and he woke with an accusatory look, like I wasn’t paying him by the hour for his nap. The two of us rode back to my apartment in stony silence. I remember that ride, that feeling of watching the streets of my beloved city slip past with the painting wrapped like a beautiful secret beside me on the seat. You buy art to own a piece of history, or to own a piece of beauty, or just for love. The painting beside me in the car was worth around a hundred thousand euros, but that isn’t why I wanted it. I wanted it because it was my only link to an unimaginably distant life.

“You were the boy in Vincennes,” I say now, in the apartment in Paris, over a dozen years later. “Of course you were.”

But Sebastian hasn’t returned from the restroom, and I realize my mistake: my calculus had been that Pilar would see him if he ventured through the kitchen, which is to say beyond the restroom and back in the direction of Swan Dive, but Pilar is cooking and listening to a podcast, her back to the room, which means Sebastian could easily have passed by without her noticing. I make my way to the kitchen—past the open restroom door—and find her stirring the soup.

“Did Sebastian come through here?” I ask. But she’s hopelessly distracted, listening to a rapid-fire conversation about European unity, and I have to repeat the question.

“Your young guest, madame? You’ve misplaced him?”

“I’m afraid I have. He had to have come through here.”

She comes to me and takes my elbow, which provides additional safety but not additional speed, and then at a pace that makes me want to jump out the window we make our way across the kitchen, to the living room—no Sebastian—and then to the dining room, where there’s also no Sebastian.

I know what I’m going to see before I look at the wall. Swan Dive is gone.

I would like to speed through the city in an open-top car. When I first arrived in Paris, the taxi that picked me and Felix up from the airport had a glass roof, and the sun was rising as we entered the city. It was late spring, leaves flashing overhead against the morning sky, buildings so beautiful that I wanted to weep. I’d been living a ghostly kind of life in the former United States, the Republic of Ohio and then the Ex-Phoenix Protectorate, a life of guns and motels and large quantities of cash. Even if I hadn’t been fleeing for my life, I would’ve wanted to come to Paris in search of solidity, if nothing else. I wanted buildings constructed with an eye toward permanence. I wanted a place that wasn’t overrun with warring militias. I wanted—

“Ari,” Pilar says softly, summoning me back.

I nod briskly, to show her I’ve returned. In a previous iteration I might have apologized for absent-mindedness, but I became much less apologetic after the explosion. Thinking of my arrival in Paris and open-top cars is preferable to thinking about the lost painting. I can’t bear to look at the naked white rectangle of wall where it hung.

“Where did you find him?” she asks.

“He found me.” At the usual café, where I like to eat chocolate croissants and watch the fashions of passersby, the ballet of the delivery drones floating through the air outside, the way light glints off the inside surface of the Paris dome. An impeccably dressed young man came to my table, and said, “Forgive me the intrusion, but are you Ari Soriano?” in such perfect English that I’d thought he was a tourist.