Page 28 of Exit Party

“Where’s the garden?” I asked. “In real life.”

“Far away,” he said. “The place Nico’s from.”

I couldn’t bear the coffee, so I set it carefully on the side table, and closed my eyes. The pain in my head was extraordinary. This was my last coffee, I realized. I’d been paying attention to endings all my life.

“Sebastian, could I lie down somewhere?” It was difficult to form the words.

“Of course,” he said. “There’s a guest bedroom just through here.”

He helped me into a small room whose door I hadn’t noticed, camouflaged by the mural.

“Was this your room?” I asked. The bedroom was aggressively minimalist, just a bed under a window, a narrow dresser, a mirror. It had possibly been intended as a walk-in closet.

“I stayed here on school breaks,” he said. “Gloria didn’t like it, but she couldn’t really stop me. I’d run away from her apartment every time she brought me back there.”

The bed was so soft. “I’m just going to rest for a moment.”

“Okay. Nico should be home soon.”

“Then what?” I was genuinely interested. I had no idea how any of this would play out.

“I don’t know.” Sebastian left the room, and returned with the painting. He unwrapped it with a certain reverence, and placed it carefully on the dresser, leaning against the wall, facing me. He closed the door then, and I was alone in the room, in the dim light coming in from the street. No, not entirely alone. The ghost of Felix was standing by the window, looking out. When I looked past him I could see the curve of the Paris dome in the distance, farther away than I would have thought.

Sebastian was back in the room a moment later. “I just looked it up,” he said, “and it’s important that you stay awake.”

He looked very young in the half-light. Also the ghost of my second husband had entered too, wandering in behind him.

“Soriano,” I said, but Soriano paid me no mind, just stood in front of the painting and considered it with his hands behind his back.

“I’m not Soriano,” Sebastian said, in tones of genuine fear.

“I know. You’re Sebastian. Is that your real name?”

“It actually is.”

“What’s your real age?”

“Twenty,” he said. I nodded. I was drifting again. When I was about that age I’d recently met my friend Ilieva, my only real friend in New York when I thought about it. She was a waitress at the Russian Café in the East Village, and I’d spent hours down there with her, crafting the beginnings of a business idea—

“Listen,” Sebastian said, “you have to stay awake.”

“I’m very tired.”

“Can you keep talking?”

“About what?”

“Tell me about your life,” he said.

“That’s too general.”

“Then tell me why you came to Paris.”

“I chose the city at random,” I said.

2

Because the avoidance of patterns can save your life. I was speeding through the dark down a Texas highway, Felix in shock beside me, that scrap of paper with one word—RUN—held loosely in his hand, and then a short time later in the Houston airport I stood in front of a screen showing departing flights, calculated that the next flight we could reasonably catch was the flight to London, but the former UK was at least as unstable as the former United States in those days, and also was the next flight too obvious? Possibly. I considered the next two flights after that, and flipped a coin: heads for Paris, tails for Vancouver.