Page 39 of Exit Party

A: I’ll talk about anything, but why do you record conversations?

N: . . .

A: I suppose. I wish I understood the world better too sometimes.

N: . . .

A: Well. I had two reasons for coming to Los Angeles after prison. One is just that I wasn’t far away. There were all these prisoner transfers toward the end, as the corrections system was falling apart. I ended my sentence in Nevada, of all places. I didn’t want to make my way back to New York, it was too far away and there was nothing there for me. Also, I had a contact in LA. My girlfriend in prison had a cousin in Los Angeles who needed a roommate.

N: . . .

A: Yes, Gloria. I met her, and she agreed to let me move in. I had some money from before I went to prison, a bank account under my mother’s name that the Feds hadn’t found. So those first weeks, I took a vacation. I had enough money to pay my rent, for a little while, before I had to find a job.

N: . . .

A: You mean you want to know about the beginning. The reason why I went to prison in the first place, back in New York.

N: . . .

A: Well. I’d have to take you back a ways. What you have to understand is, I was raised with a degree of corruption. From twelve onward I lived with my aunt and uncle, and my cousin Anton. Anton and I, we were like siblings. His parents were dealers in stolen antiques. I worked for them as a teenager, but their business didn’t really interest me. I wanted a business of my own, so I started running a small operation in my twenties. It was a strange time. The 9/11 attacks had just happened, a year or two earlier.

N: . . .

A: Seriously?

N: . . .

A: Okay. Well, in that case you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you it was a hinge moment. Can I ask you something?

N: . . .

A: Do you believe in ghosts?

N: . . .

A: No reason. I was just wondering.

N: . . .

A: No. It’s just a topic that interests me. I’m on a lot of painkillers.

N: . . .

A: When I say it was a hinge moment, I mean the world wasn’t the same afterward as before. Men from other countries crashed planes into buildings in two cities, killed around three thousand people, and after that, immigration got a lot harder. There was a demand for US passports. I’d been engaging in criminal activity for a while by then, mostly theft, but—

N: . . .

A: Yeah, well, I’m not Ibari. I started selling passports. Can you pass me that controller? The blue thing hanging on the cord there.

N: . . .

A: Thank you. If I press the button, I get more painkillers. Okay.

N: . . .

A: Right, yes. Okay, so, my passport business, it all hinged on a single post office clerk. Luis. I still think about him.

N: . . .