Page 66 of Exit Party

Nico smiled. “Your poor glasses,” she said. “Yes, iced tea sounds perfect.”

We walked slowly, in the direction of iced tea. It was a hot day, but the solar fans in the business district created a gentle breeze. There was a man walking a block or so ahead of us. One of the former pro-democracy agitators whom I’d been surveilling. I’d studied him so carefully that I’d have known him anywhere.

“When do you need to be back in LA?” I asked.

“I thought I’d take the four o’clock train.” It was still only late morning. As we entered the tea shop, a discreet scanner embedded in the door frame flashed white—Face not found—but confirmation didn’t come until I reached the front of the line, ordered an iced tea, and stared directly into the screen to pay with credit.

“I’m sorry,” the barista said, and swivelled the screen so I could read the message: Facial recognition error. “I can’t remember the last time this happened.”

“Oh,” I said, “no problem, let’s do fingerprints.” I pressed my right index finger to the screen, and a moment later a green check mark appeared. Nico was studying the muffins.

“I think these glasses are throwing off the scanners,” I said.

Nico went still for just a second, and shook her head. The movement was barely perceptible. She was still looking at the baked goods.

“The muffins here look good,” she said, as if I’d said nothing.

This was when I understood: my friend was Service. I had no doubt that she was who she said she was, which is to say an associate professor in the physics department at UCLA, but also she was something else. It shouldn’t be disappointing, I told myself. A lot of people were Service. I was Service. The barista could be Service. Anyone around you, at any given moment, could be observing and reporting. But was she reporting on me? We were quiet on the walk back to the house. The iced tea tasted like cardboard.

“I’ve never reported on you,” Nico said, when we were close to my house. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her, and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she’d waited until our backs were to the downtown camera array.

“Okay.” I felt vastly relieved. I knew that rationally there was no reason to believe her, but all my life I’ve had a sense of intuition, and I felt very strongly that she was telling the truth. And then, because she was my closest friend and she’d taken the risk first: “I’ve never reported on you either,” I said.

She didn’t stop walking, but I heard a slight intake of breath.

“You know,” she said, again very softly, “I think it doesn’t take that much to become a ghost.”

“You’re probably right.” I appreciated the warning. Ghost was slang for a person who ran afoul of the State. A ghost is undesirable. A ghost lives in the shadows. A ghost is not entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law, or a social security number, bank account, credit, or entry into most spaces, because does a ghost even really entirely exist? There were rumours of people out in the hinterlands who hunted ghosts for sport.

I have lived all my life in the ordered calm of the State, and I have always believed in its essential contract, which can be summarized as follows: The opposite of disorder is harmony. Peace is achieved through surveillance. Service is the surveillance department of the State. Harmony at any cost.

This last one was the most important, and if you grow up here, it’s the first of the tenets that you learn. Three-year-olds memorize it in preschool. But my broken glasses revealed anomalies in the surveillance, and what is an anomaly if not the encroachment of disorder? In the weeks after Nico’s visit, I found myself distracted. I kept it together in my work, because I am nothing if not a professional, but sometimes when I was alone in my house I found myself drifting into strange thoughts, and I’d realize that I’d been staring into space while the teakettle shrieked, or that I’d let my pasta boil over. The surprise wasn’t that chaos had always been there, embedded just under the surface. The surprise was that I liked it.

When the silver tape was on my face, facial recognition almost invariably failed, but these failures played out on a spectrum of mystery. When I wore the broken glasses, screens flashed white instead of green. Usually this meant that access or payment was denied—my identity couldn’t be verified—but sometimes I was allowed through doors that shouldn’t have opened.

When I wore my broken glasses, the Donors Lounge at the college let me in. A discreet light on the door frame glowed white when I approached, no name appeared on the screen below, but the lock clicked open and I was allowed into a quiet, beautifully designed space with a view of the Santa Clara River, where the only other people were extremely wealthy visiting donors, and everyone assumed I belonged there, because if I didn’t belong, then how could I have gotten in? I enjoyed the circularity.

When I wore my glasses, I couldn’t enter the local public pool where I’d been swimming for years, but I could enter the private botanical garden up in the hills. Before my glasses broke, I’d only been in there once, years earlier, for a birthday party. Now I visited every few days, for the pleasure of wandering through a green oasis in this desert state. I graded papers and prepared for my classes at a little table by the waterfall in the garden, green fronds all around. When I wasn’t there, I missed the waterfall’s rushing white noise. I thought, I want to dive into freezing water. A strange idea that came out of nowhere, and where on the Southern California coast could one even find an ice-water pool with a diving board? I wasn’t sure that such a thing existed. But the idea stayed with me. One evening I lost track of time and remained later than usual, until an employee came to me and said they were closing.

I rose to leave, and then it occurred to me: I could probably come here at night. No, coming here at night wouldn’t work, because of surveillance cameras. What I could do, though, is steal an employee uniform—easy enough with my magic glasses, my unrecognizable face—and then anyone watching the surveillance would think I was a security guard. Only then did it hit me that I was considering committing a crime.

“Ma’am,” the employee said.

“I’m going.” On my way out, I passed a white bus coming in. It was filled with children, a line of unsmiling faces pressed to the windows. There was something off about them, but it didn’t register until I was standing a few minutes later on the Botanical Garden Station platform, waiting for the trolley that would carry me downtown. All of the children’s heads had been shaved. What I’d seen was an orphanage outing.

From here, on the platform up in the chaparral hills, the business district was lit up like a distant stage set below me. What I’d discovered in myself was a faint shadow of corruption. I could become a criminal, I realized, and there was freedom in that. With the glasses, I’d already in a small way stopped following certain rules. But this thought was followed by terror, because people who broke the rules disappeared, everyone knew that. Their children filled the State orphanages. In distant childhood memory, a girl whose name I couldn’t remember waved at me from across the street and disappeared into the back of a State car with her parents.

The trolley was gliding toward me. I took off my glasses before I stepped aboard. Without them, the world was softer and a little dreamlike, the lights on the ceiling possessed of a gentle aura, and I couldn’t read the propaganda screens inside the train. The problem was that the broken glasses had exposed some underlying flaw in the world, and I couldn’t unsee it. I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t there. If I were to avoid becoming a criminal, I thought, then perhaps my safest option would be to move deeper into the police.

I applied for a competitive promotion to the rank of detective. Some weeks passed while I waited for a response, and in those weeks Fillmore took on an almost supernatural beauty. I knew that I would get the promotion, in the way that sometimes all through my life I’ve just known things, and the nearness of my departure made everything vivid. This is one of the last times I’ll walk up this street, I thought, on the walk from the college to my house at dusk in the evenings, and the double row of palms was otherworldly in its symmetry. This is one of the last mornings I’ll wake up here, I thought, when my alarm went off in the mornings, and I admired the patch of sunlight that came through leaves to land in a gilt square on my bedroom floor. After about three weeks, a man I’d never seen before knocked on my office door at the college.

“Good morning, Ibari,” he said, when I looked up. “David Grissom.” He closed the door behind him and sat on the other side of my desk. “I’m here from Service.”

Grissom was aggressively ordinary, that was my first impression. He was dressed like every professor on campus, like every dad in the park near my house, in jeans and a short-sleeve button-down. He was dressed to disappear into a local crowd. If I’d needed confirmation that I’d been surrounded all my life by other Service agents, Grissom was the proof.

“Good morning,” I said. I touched the confirmation button on my watch, and he did the same.

“Three cities later you look up from the table,” he said.