Page 54 of Exit Party

“Happy birthday,” I said.

5. PARIS

The back room in Nico’s apartment is dim, lit only by streetlights filtering in from outside, but Swan Dive is propped up on a dresser, facing me, and it shines with an aquatic light. I can hear Sebastian moving around the apartment. I have reached a destination, and all I have is desire: I want to dive off a cliff into the sea in a warm country. No, the opposite. I want to dive off an iceberg into the Arctic Ocean. I want to plummet through clear air into shocking cold. I want to surface with the aurora borealis shifting overhead, green light rippling through the sky. I want to climb aboard a passing boat and set off for an unknown country. I want extremity. I want annihilation. I want to blow up my life and remake it, but how many times do you get to do that? I have spent my whole life pulling pins on grenades.

No, what I want is to run time backward, all the way back to a party in LA, and when that door opens to take Kareem, I want to step through too. No, further: I want to go back to a moment in the first few years of this exhausting century, and instead of hiring a man to kill my cousin Anton, I’d like to go to Anton in Italy and tell him he’s free, I’m sorry, the transaction’s off, he can leave the business if he wants. Go home, Anton, it’s okay, it’s okay. I want a less haunted life. I would like to have been less villainous. I want a cocktail, or absolution, or to get out of bed.

Eddie has entered the room and now she approaches, smiling at me, the ghost I’ve most wanted to see all this time.

“Eddie.” I can still speak, just barely. One or two breaths remain to me. “Eddie, my love. You’re finally here.”

“I came for you,” she says gently, that voice I’ve missed so much. “We don’t have to be apart anymore.” I am so close to Swan Dive now. The painting is expanding behind Eddie and it’s become real, translucent, the ocean rippling through the room, until finally I take her hand and rise from the bed—I don’t need my body anymore, it’s finished and anyway I’m feeling much better—and there’s a diving board here that I didn’t see before, extending before me.

“Go on,” Eddie says, with a smile, “you know you want to.” Swan Dive is all around me, and I’ve somehow misjudged the situation: this isn’t a room at all. The sea ripples below. I take a few steps out onto the diving board, and dive into the blue.

1. TRANSPORT

1

Picture Marlowe at night in a different world, thirty-three years old, married but chronically lonely, on her way home from a faculty party. In the passenger seat, as always, because her husband insisted on driving. By this point she hadn’t driven a car in several years. She’d gone to some effort with her appearance: hair down around her shoulders, which she knew was how her husband preferred it; careful makeup; a matching set of onyx earrings and necklace that her in-laws had given her on her wedding day. Her dress was the wrong size, but she wouldn’t realize that for another year.

There were few other cars on the road at this hour, mostly just long electric trolleys carrying passengers across the city of Los Angeles. Having a car in LA was an extravagance—so few people used them anymore, and the State imposed a significant annual fee for car ownership—but Marlowe’s husband, Hugo, liked driving. Their car moved silently through the quiet streets of Culver City, between the massive towers where thousands of people lived, glass walkways strung across the expressway like corridors of light. In this part of the city, the camera arrays were supplemented by surveillance drones, and at night the drones looked like fireflies, drifting golden through the air.

Marlowe liked how fragile the towers looked at night, steel fading into darkness so the buildings looked like constructions of light and glass, stacked lives with luminescent kitchens. As they travelled east, the massive solar fans that cooled the city stopped spinning for the night, a gradual cessation of movement in the sky overhead.

Usually Marlowe didn’t go to faculty parties, because there was no way to not bring her husband, and when Hugo and Marlowe saw people together, she somehow always said the wrong thing. But she’d been so lonely, and on her way home that night she felt, at first, that going to the party had been worth the risk. While the car slipped past the first array of State cameras, she was reviewing her every move. She’d thought the evening was beautiful. There were good conversations. The room was gorgeous. Hugo had seemed happy. He’d smiled when people praised the transport lecture she’d been developing, he’d raised his glass for her, he’d charmed her colleagues and made them laugh. They were passing under a second camera array. A light flashed yellow and her husband slowed the car. Marlowe and Hugo leaned forward, looking up into the yellow light—looking at a lens—until a moment later the light turned white and Hugo drove them onward.

“I heard the array’s getting upgraded,” she said. “Soon the cameras will be embedded in the buildings, so we won’t even see them anymore.”

Hugo said nothing. She glanced at his profile, and felt a familiar falling sensation. His jaw was set.

“Is something wrong?” Marlowe asked.

“What were you thinking?” he asked quietly.

“What do you mean?” She touched one hand to her chest, absently, because her heart was beginning to speed up. It was important to breathe very slowly and carefully. She was replaying the evening in her head. Where was the mistake? It wasn’t always obvious.

“The way you introduced me,” he said. “I just can’t imagine what you were thinking.”

How had she introduced him? She remembered having said, “This is my husband, Hugo,” on several occasions throughout the night, but Marlowe was exquisitely sensitive to her own shortcomings, and in memory there was no unease attached to those moments.

“What do you mean? How did I introduce you?”

“The way I was just so clearly an afterthought,” he said. “It’s just, do you not even see me? Do you understand that we’re in a marriage? When you say, ‘This is my husband . . . ’”—he exaggerated the pause, longer and longer—“‘This is my husband . . . Hugo,’ like you could barely remember my name.”

“I don’t think I did that,” she said. “I don’t think I paused like that.”

“Oh, you did, and people noticed,” he said. “I saw them react. It was humiliating.” He glanced at her, and a warning light pulsed softly on the windshield. The car had registered that he’d looked away from the road. He looked forward again.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He ignored this, because no apology would ever be enough. There was an agonizing period of silence. The car glided onward between shining towers. Marlowe let her mind go blank while she waited for the next round. In her peripheral vision, Hugo ran his hand through his hair. He only did that when he was particularly agitated. He would still be angry tomorrow, and the day after that.

“I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it,” he said. “That’s how much difficulty you have, socially. It’s hard for you to read social cues and connect with people.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You really can’t hear yourself in those moments, can you?”