Page 57 of Exit Party

“Okay,” the client said, “but Proxima Centauri B, that’s in the Goldilocks zone, am I right?”

*dying

The client’s second-in-command flashed her most helpful smile. “Not too hot, not too cold.”

“Right,” the client said. “Neither too far from nor too close to its nearest star.”

“Between the two of you, you just said the same thing three times,” Samir said. He sent another fast text under the table:

There isn’t much time

“Which makes me think,” the client said, as if Samir hadn’t spoken, “we’re not thinking big enough. Let’s think bigger. Let’s build on the surface. Let’s make this work.”

“We can’t make this work,” Samir said.

“Can’t? I’m sorry,” the client said, with a business-school smile, “that word’s not in my vocabulary.”

“We cannot build on the surface of this planet, because there are gale-force winds one hundred percent of the time. It’s hard on structures. You have to have a structure, a dome, because we can’t breathe the air there.” Samir was working very hard to keep his voice steady. Why hadn’t he gone home more often? He couldn’t have asked for a better father.

“Well,” someone said, “but there’s no atmosphere on the moon, bro, and here we are.” Someone laughed. “Home sweet home on Moon Colony One.”

“You’re right,” Samir said. “The moon has no atmosphere. But you know what else the moon doesn’t have? Permanent fucking gale-force winds.”

Everyone was staring at him, but all his thoughts were of his father. How could Marlowe not have responded? He texted her again, not bothering to conceal it this time:

I’m sorry to tell you via text but we both know you won’t call me back

“Hey, Samir,” his colleague said. “Let’s maybe just—”

“What I am asking for,” the client said, very slowly and clearly, “is simply—Samir, where are you going?”

Samir himself wasn’t sure, but he did know that he was leaving the room.

6

PTSD is timeline corruption. The past interrupts the present. Marlowe had waited too long to leave her marriage, and the price was that she could no longer sleep. Some nights she woke at two a.m. and there was a feeling almost of clockwork, of gears engaging; her thoughts began to whirr and once that mechanism was in motion it was difficult to stop. It was sometimes possible to fall asleep around dawn, but she only knew she’d slept when she realized she was thinking of a recent nightmare. She tried sleeping pills but they made her feel like a ghost.

In the dazed weeks after her divorce was finalized, when the panic attacks were just beginning to surface, she visited a therapist who diagnosed her with PTSD and talked about emotional abuse and domestic violence support groups. But was violence exactly what had happened? She had doubts about the terminology because there were gaps in her memory, and because she had doubts about everything. She had doubts about everything because her husband had worked very hard, over a long period of time, to ensure that she doubted herself. She had undergone something subtle and profound, a kind of rewiring. It was hard to fully grasp what had happened to her, which left her perpetually in search of evidence.

Sometimes the evidence was terror. There was a night not long after she moved out when she pulled a clean set of sheets out of a cupboard—sheets she’d brought with her from the marital home—and froze. The sheets were attached to a memory, she was certain of it, but the memory itself was gone. What remained was something like an afterimage. Marlowe only knew that looking at the sheets made her feel like she was going to die. She threw them away and didn’t sleep that night. Sometimes the evidence was a nervous habit: she needed to be told things two or three times, which she knew had to be annoying, but after a decade of gaslighting it was hard to ever fully believe that she’d heard what she thought she’d heard. (“You’re not the most reliable narrator,” her husband used to say, laughing to turn it into a joke. “Bit of a fantasist, I’d say.”)

Once the evidence was a size XS sweater: “I think this one’s more your size,” a clerk in a clothing store said, and when Marlowe protested that the sweater would be too small, the clerk looked confused. The sweater fit perfectly. Marlowe stared at herself in a mirror, and realized that all of her own clothes were three sizes too big. Her husband liked very thin women, and had gone to some effort to instill a belief that Marlowe was considerably larger than she actually was—how often had he casually referred to her as “big-boned,” or suggested that a larger size of clothing might be more flattering?—which had been effective, she realized belatedly, because in her teens she’d had an eating disorder. (Did she still have an eating disorder? For some time she’d made a practise of eating less food than she wanted to eat, she realized, and had managed somehow to avoid thinking about it.) How many years had it been since she’d worn clothes that fit?

That first year after Marlowe left her husband, she was consumed by a horrible and belated realization of strategy. When they met she’d been twenty-one, and he’d been in his midthirties, and she hadn’t previously considered the implications of this, the way she’d come to him half-formed and he’d shaped her. She was pleasantly surprised to find that she was not actually chronically socially inept and unable to connect with other people, as he’d always suggested, but devastated to realize that he’d encouraged that belief in order to keep her as isolated as possible. She found at the end of the marriage that she didn’t know what music she liked, or what food she preferred, or how she wanted to spend any given day, or the size of her body. It was like discovering that she’d been the subject of a long-term experiment.

But of course all of this was invisible to outsiders. She wasn’t sure what to tell people, but there was almost no one to tell. She wasn’t close with her brother. She loved her father and wanted to protect him from heartbreak, so she spared him all of the details. She had only one friend now, Violet, mostly because of the isolation but also because if you leave, you’re the villain. How could she have left him, Hugo asked, when they’d been so happy? He proclaimed himself blindsided. Sympathetic friends flocked to his side. The friends took him to dinner and listened to a sad story about his wife deciding overnight that she wanted a new life and throwing the marriage away on a whim. Did the friends believe the story? Apparently. Only Violet was immune to it, because Violet was the one friend she’d retained from before her marriage and they’d known one another since kindergarten.

But even Violet:

“You’re so successful, though,” Violet said once, “and you make money, so doesn’t that make your life relatively easy?” and after that Marlowe was careful not to lean on her, because if she lost Violet there would be no more friends.

What Marlowe wanted was for time to pass. She wished to speed forward into some imagined point in the future where she didn’t lie awake half the night. There was solace in work. She cut back on teaching, because on her worst days it was hard to look at all those faces staring at her in the classroom, but she accepted every lecture opportunity that came to her. Faces stared at her during the lectures, too, but she couldn’t see them, because the audience was always dark. Onstage, holding the room, she never felt like an unreliable narrator or an imposter. And then she learned that her father was dying, and a few hours later she was on a high-speed ship gliding east over the Pacific.

The ship docked in Los Angeles in the early evening, and Marlowe made her way slowly down the ramp with her suitcase, toward closed steel gates. She stood for a moment before an array of cameras and placed her right hand on a scanner, and a moment later the gates opened and she was free to walk into the city. It was cooler here than in Hong Kong, less humid, a suggestion of the desert in the breeze. Her face ached from crying, a dull congested pressure behind her eyes. Her jacket was inadequate, but her father’s house wasn’t far and she longed for fresh air, so she ignored the waiting taxis and walked inland. She was startled for a moment by fireflies, a cloud of them moving through the air in yellow pinpricks of light, but they were only a new model of weather drones measuring atmospheric conditions.

She hadn’t been back here in a year. Her ex-husband was still in this city, so she preferred to avoid it, but on the other hand there was no reason to think he was anywhere near this neighbourhood. A construction site by the commuter harbour had transformed into a cluster of residential towers, made of the blue-green glass that had been in fashion for the past decade or so. There was more air traffic than she remembered, drones wheeling between towers on mysterious errands. She passed between two towers linked by a glass-bottom swimming pool that formed a bridge around the ninth or tenth floor, and was momentarily distracted by the tiny black silhouettes of swimmers high above. (Might swimming be a model for a kind of transport? Interesting to imagine a ship with fins like a flutter kick.)

Her walk took her through the centre of the Harbor City neighbourhood, and past the statue of the Lost Travellers in Memorial Square. Her father had always liked to pause here, and now she did too. Marlowe walked to the statue of the two lost physicists and gazed for a while at their faces, at the plaques with their names: Nico Li and Saraya de Santos, vanished in a catastrophically botched teleportation experiment.