Page 26 of Exit Party

I wait for a while in the shadows of a doorway across the street, a rectangle of darkness. Under the Paris dome the weather is never terrible, but tonight I’ve worn the wrong jacket for a scheduled rainfall, and I’m cold. I expect to see Sebastian at any moment—there are so few constants in my life, but this is one of them, this unpleasant awareness of pending events—and he emerges within a half-hour, with a suspiciously Swan Dive–shaped bundle under his arm. He looks both ways, then sets off to the south.

I follow as rapidly as I can, breathing hard, trying to strike a balance between not losing him and not falling—one misjudged footfall on a rain-slick night street and I’ll break my already shattered and pinned-together leg—but the street curves just ahead and he disappears. There’s a light coming from around the curve, from high above, a dim blue glow that I don’t quite understand. I approach the corner very cautiously—don’t fall, don’t fall—and on the other side of a dark building, I see the massive shadow of a castle keep, the Château de Vincennes, and beyond that, lights and movement in the sky. It’s a moment before I understand what I’m looking at: this section of the Paris dome has been undergoing maintenance and upgrades for some weeks. The construction project is directly above the forest.

I can’t see Sebastian—or anyone, actually, the street by the château is all but deserted tonight—but I’m certain that this is the direction he walked, and so I follow as quickly as possible. Alongside the château, past the goats grazing peacefully behind fences and a guard in a raincoat who’s there to prevent people from stealing the goats, to the thoroughfare that’s been empty of cars since the dome was constructed. Before me, across the deserted road, there’s an empty square, beyond which the forest is a mass of darkness. A billboard-sized sign warns of danger from the construction project overhead, access forbidden, etc., but there’s no one around to enforce this rule.

What I should do, if I’m being rational, is summon a taxi and go home. But I have a sense of fulfilling an appointment. I need to go into the forest, because I’m meant to be somewhere up ahead, at a specific time, in a specific place. There’s something I need to see, or perhaps someone I need to meet. In any event I’m crossing the empty expressway, making my way over the gravel square that lies between me and the woods.

Walking is an excruciatingly slow meditation, placing the cane deliberately before each step. It’s almost impossible to think of anything else. I hear someone growling and realize that it’s me. When I was a child in Brooklyn I loved to run through the streets after a rainstorm, and the speed and momentum are so close to the surface that the memory makes my muscles twitch. After approximately a half-century I’m on the other side of the square, just on the edge of the woods.

Before me, the avenue extends into the darkness of the park. There are lamps at intervals, sentry-like, but their pools of light serve only to deepen the shadows. I see no one, but I’m certain that I’m not alone, and the disquieting next thought is that anyone out here will, like me, be a person who pays little attention to boundaries. In another life I had a boyfriend in Brooklyn who had an enormous dog, and when we went out walking at night people crossed the street to avoid us. I haven’t thought of that animal in years, but I wish now it were with me. I resume walking, my bad leg throbbing, and there’s a shift: the forest is abruptly cast in a silvery light. It’s like being onstage. The construction workers above me have switched on a new, intensely brilliant work light that casts a faint glow down to the ground, like starlight.

I stand for a moment looking up at the workers, tiny dark figures suspended on their safety wires, sounds of music and machinery coming from above. What if I chose, just once, not to look into the future? I always thought of it as an involuntary tic, but on the other hand I never really tried to control it. Perhaps the hazy knowledge of coming events might be dialed back somehow, like turning down the volume on a radio. What good does it do? There were protests all over Paris when the dome was announced, and again when construction began. Some protesters resorted to violence to try to stop the dome. One group tried to blow up a construction site and instead blew up my left leg and my second husband. But the future arrives regardless. I walk forward again, into the dark, until finally I hear voices and music in the distance.

There are settlements here and there in the forest, I know that, little clusters of tarps and tents under the trees, and I know they’re hypothetically dangerous but I don’t really care. I’m coming up on a village of sorts, a settlement constructed on the grounds of a former equestrian centre, a blaze of light in the forest. I smell meat cooking on a grill.

Here, finally, is Sebastian. He’s standing some distance away, waiting for food from a roadside stand where an old woman is ladling something over rice. He’s clearly nervous, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the painting under his arm. Out here in the dim light, he looks younger than I thought he was. But my attention is drawn to another man, approaching rapidly. This man’s attention is directed at me, and I realize my mistake: I am carrying an expensive handbag. I cannot run.

“Sebastian,” I call out.

He turns and sees me, and then registers the other man, who is by now quite close and smiling in a predatory way. But Sebastian seems to not quite understand what’s unfolding. The man is almost upon me. In a swift, practised motion, he separates me from my handbag with one hand and shoves me with the other, the fall too fast to register: I’m standing and then there’s a sound that I realize is my skull connecting with the pavement. Footsteps running away.

“Ari.” Sebastian is kneeling beside me. “Ari, Ms. Soriano, keep your eyes open, let me just call . . .”

Felix is standing behind him, peering down at me with a look of concern.

I blink hard, trying to stay awake, but it’s useless. Someone has turned down the volume on Sebastian—his lips are still moving, but now without sound—and I feel myself receding from the scene.

When I was a child I used to run full-speed over the Williamsburg Bridge and the thing I most wanted when I was six and seven and eight, which I knew better than to ever admit aloud, was to take off like an airplane. I wanted to run so fast that my feet skimmed over the pavement, so fast that I might begin to rise, perhaps to float. I receded from Sebastian, I was on the ground, then floating—just as I’d always wished for!—then there was a lurching sensation and I realized that I’d been mistaken. I wasn’t floating at all. Sebastian was beside me. I was propped up against glass, looking at an abstract pattern of blurred lights that resolved gradually into passing windows and streetlights, details filling in until I understood that I was in the back of a taxi. The pain hit me just then, and I gasped aloud.

“Ari,” Sebastian said, “Ms. Soriano, can you hear me?”

“You stole my painting.” The words took some effort. The pain was dazzling. It had form and substance. It had hammers. It was made of light.

“We’re going to the hospital,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“No,” I said, “no hospitals.”

“You need a hospital.”

“I hate hospitals. I won’t go.”

The driver was taking some interest in the conversation, but trying not to show it. He looked like a nightclub bouncer.

“Don’t be . . . You have to,” Sebastian said. “You were just knocked out.”

“Oh, now you’re telling me what to do? What are you, seventeen?”

“Twenty,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s just—”

“If you take me to the hospital,” I said, “I will tell them that you stole my painting.”

“I’m trying to help,” Sebastian said. “You were unconscious in the forest, and I—”

“Shall we talk about what I was doing in the forest in the first place? I was recovering the painting you stole from me, thief.”

“Is there a problem?” the driver asked, interested. I could tell he was a man who liked problems that could be solved with fists.

“None,” I said, and switched to English: “Take me where you were going. Wherever you were going with my stolen property.”