1 #4
Ari had some money from her old, pre-prison life, a little, not enough to live on by itself but enough that she could stretch it for a while with the addition of the dishwashing money, but the thought that kept her up at night was: Is this it?
It wasn’t that she thought she deserved more than what she had, or more than other people, it was just that she’d once had a considerable amount of money, her own business, and a beautiful apartment in a tower in New York City, and now she felt disoriented and a little incredulous.
Before prison she’d operated under the assumption that she could bend reality to her will, but that had been an entirely different version of the world.
Was this going to be the rest of her life?
That was the question she was thinking about when she woke on the seventh morning (afternoon) after the party, drifted into the kitchen in her bathrobe, and almost walked into James.
He was leaning on the stove, arms crossed, and he was holding a little spiral notebook and a pen.
Gloria was at the table with another man whom Ari vaguely remembered from the party.
“Morning,” James said. “Sorry for materializing in your kitchen.”
“Good morning,” Ari said. The bathrobe was long, but she felt naked.
“This is James,” Gloria said, as if Ari weren’t presently caught up in some extremely pleasant flashbacks, “and Bruno.”
“Hey,” the man at the table said. He also had a little notebook and pen. There were only two chairs, which was why James was standing by the oven. Ari took another step into the room, and stood with her back pressed to the fridge. The kitchen was too small for four people.
“They’re here about Kareem,” Gloria said softly. “He’s missing.”
“You still haven’t heard from him?” Ari and Gloria had been keeping opposite schedules. She hadn’t seen Gloria in days.
“Not since the party,” Gloria said. “I thought he was just ghosting me, but . . .”
“You must be the roommate,” Bruno said. He glanced at his notes. “Ari . . . Walker?”
“Waker. Are you a detective?”
“The LAPD doesn’t have time for this kind of thing,” James said. “We’re doing our best.”
“Yeah, we’re just talking to everyone who was at the party,” Bruno said. “Trying to figure out if anyone saw anything, if he said anything to anyone.”
“You haven’t seen him since the party, have you?” James asked. This close to him, she could smell the detergent he used on his clothes.
“No. You’re saying no one’s heard from Kareem?”
“No one,” Bruno said. “Did you talk to him at the party?”
“Not really,” Ari said. “One brief conversation. He said nothing memorable.”
“Did you see him leave?” Bruno was leaning forward, pen over his notebook.
“No,” Ari said, “I remember I saw him go into the kitchen, and then we left a few minutes later.”
“This was when?”
“Around two or two thirty?”
“Someone else said that,” James said to Bruno.
“Said what? The thing about the kitchen?”
“Yeah, the kitchen, and then not being able to find him after that.”
“It’s the weirdest thing,” Gloria said to Ari. “They told me everyone said the same thing. No one’s talked to him since the party, and it seems like no one actually saw him leave.” Her voice wavered. “It’s awful, right?”
“Yes,” Bruno said quietly, “it is absolutely awful.”
“Has anyone searched the house?” Ari asked.
“I mean the building where the party was. There were two apartments, right? One upstairs, one downstairs.” She was thinking of a woman she’d known in prison, a mild-mannered person with pretty blond hair who’d shot her husband five times and then attempted to conceal the body in the basement.
Gloria and the two men stared at her, and she watched Bruno recalibrate his initial impression.
“Yeah,” James said, after a pause. “We talked to the downstairs neighbour and we checked the basement.”
“The basement?” Gloria asked. “Why would he be living there?” And in that verb Ari felt the vastness of the gulf between their respective life experiences. Gloria knew about collapse, but she didn’t understand murder.
Weeks passed, weeks of dirty dishes that became clean, chapped hands from too much soap and hot water, weeks of drinking with the kitchen staff after work and walking home too late at night through quiet streets, weeks of rising in desperate need of coffee in the guilt-inducing light of late morning, early afternoon, weeks in which Kareem remained missing and his face appeared amidst all the other MISSING PERSON posters on the east side, until finally Gloria decided to leave the city.
It had been seven weeks since the party.
A sous-chef at the restaurant wanted to rent out her garage, so Ari moved out of Gloria’s apartment and into the garage, then out of the garage and also out of Los Angeles, into an exhausting five years of retail and restaurant jobs, through three relationships of varying quality—two women, one man—and from the West Coast over the mountains into the city-state of Las Vegas, to the Kingdom of Deseret, and then through innumerable small countries until she came to rest in exurban Ohio.
The Republic of California was fairly stable by then, and therefore unaffordable.
In most other places, it was a time of collapse and disarray.
Some cities had declared themselves city-states, while others had been swallowed up by larger new countries.
Most territory was contested. There were militias everywhere, flashes of gunfire at night.
The skirmishes were constant but stopped just short of all-out war.
The combatant groups were innumerable, militias forming and breaking apart in complex and ever-shifting allegiances.
Gun runners passed through the towns like smoke, shadows moving over the landscape.
There was constant migration, cars laden with luggage and boxes traversing the expressways, because what does it mean to belong to a territory?
The question had practical implications.
Some people stayed where they were, because for them the idea of home was a physical place, but for others home meant something like memory or blood, so they moved closer to the people and the places they didn’t want to lose, back to hometowns and aging parents.
Was Ari doing the same thing? She’d driven east and north in search of cheaper housing and jobs and less violence, but it was undeniable that this drift was bringing her ever closer to New York.
But New York was the capital of the Atlantic Republic now, and the Atlantic Republic wasn’t affordable either, because it was the most stable part of the entire former nation and people will pay anything for the feeling of not living in a war.
In the Ohio Republic, Ari lived in a motel and worked in a retail stockroom, handling clothes mostly.
The Ohio Republic borders were more or less settled at this point, except for an area in the east that was held by a consortium of militias from Pittsburgh, but the would-be city-states were an open question.
The collapse had been in motion for so long by then.
She kept expecting outright anarchy but it kept not arriving.
There were displaced people living in malls but there were also functional stores, a few jobs, gas in the gas stations; people still got married, signed leases, sent their children to makeshift schools, bought things.
There were still a few doctors, but now their services had to be paid for with cash or in trade, and the only functional hospitals were run by Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.
There was no mail. There were unending supply chain issues, gunfights between rival militias on the edge of town, permanent unease.
By then she was long past the point of believing that her life was going to be extraordinary except in bad, unmentionable ways—but even there, was there really anything exceptional about being an American who’s done time in prison?
Possibly not—but what she did sometimes hope for was a more interesting job.
Boxes arrived at irregular intervals, the contents always a surprise, and she unloaded them, sorted them into categories, laid them out for her boss to examine.
It was someone else’s job to figure out how much all the things in the boxes should cost. She unboxed, she sorted, she listened to music on her phone and moved quietly through the days with her earbuds.
A relationship had ended a month before she’d arrived here, and now she spent her evenings alone.
There were entire afternoons that she couldn’t account for later.
In those months she felt like she was haunting her own life.
But then after six months she was laid off with a few other people, after which she spent a week trying to find a new job. No one was hiring.
At the end of that week she came home exhausted one late afternoon—she was worried about being able to afford gas, so she’d been walking for miles—and found her next-door neighbour sitting outside his door, admiring the sunset.
“Good evening,” he said. He was a few years younger than Ari. He’d arrived a few days earlier, in the middle of the night, and she thought he might be an arms dealer. People came and went from his room at all hours, walking in empty-handed and leaving with duffel bags.
“Evening,” Ari said. She sank into the lawn chair outside her room door. Why not? She was tired, and the sunset was beautiful, rose shades fading to watery blue and a cloud lit red.
“I’m Felix.”
“Ari. Nice to meet you.”