1 #7
There was a wail of sirens from the expressway just then, and she looked up to watch a convoy pass, a long line of mismatched pickup trucks with the Ohio Republic and Cincinnati United flags fluttering.
Some of the militia commanders had taken to using sirens to get wherever they were going faster, although this time of day it was hardly necessary.
She watched the convoy and then when she turned back to Nico, the answer came to her, so unlikely that she had to close her eyes momentarily to absorb it.
She had lived with this woman. Except the woman had been fundamentally different.
Not just her name, which hadn’t been Nico, or her hair, which had been a good twelve inches longer and a different colour, or her glasses, which in Ari’s memory didn’t exist, but something in the way she carried herself.
And yet the woman’s face was exactly the same.
Ari was looking at her former roommate Gloria, whom she’d last seen six years ago in Los Angeles.
Ari sat up straight, blinking. Impossible, but there it was.
She decided that her work was done. She would make the report to Nico/Gloria’s husband: his wife wasn’t having an affair, his wife just preferred eating sandwiches alone in her car to dinner with her spouse.
There was no good reason, Ari decided, why she couldn’t suddenly come upon her former roommate here in the parking lot, in a strictly personal and nonprofessional—the word that flitted through her mind was unprofessional—capacity.
She got out of her car, walked over to Nico’s car, and waved through the driver’s-side window.
Nico started when she saw her, and lowered the window.
“Ibari,” she said.
Ari stepped back. Perhaps if she hadn’t just been thinking about her time in Los Angeles with Gloria, which is to say thinking about Kareem’s party, it wouldn’t have registered.
But these were the facts: although the name Ibari was on her birth certificate, in homage to a long-ago woman who’d saved her father from drowning, she had never once in her life used that name.
She’d been Ari as a very small child, Aria from the beginning of kindergarten through the end of her prison sentence, Ari again afterward.
“I’ve never gone by that name,” Ari said. “Are you . . . you’re not Gloria, are you?”
Nico hesitated, as if trying to think of how to explain something extremely complicated. “No,” she said, “but I know who you mean.” Her voice was Gloria’s voice. It was unmistakable.
“You look exactly like her. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, I just saw you here, and . . . you actually have her voice. It’s kind of uncanny.”
“That is uncanny,” Nico said, but it was obvious to Ari that she was only playing along. She knew something Ari didn’t. There was one small difference, Ari saw now, between Nico and Gloria. Gloria had a scar on her forehead, and Nico didn’t.
“Can I ask you something?” Ari asked.
“Sure.”
“You’re the second person in my life who’s called me Ibari, but I’ve never used that name. Do I look like . . . is there another Ibari? Someone who looks like me?”
“Yes,” Nico said with a sigh. “You look like someone else.”
“Someone in Los Angeles?”
“Someone very far away,” Nico said. “I don’t think I can explain it.”
“Can you try?”
“I would, but I don’t think I understand it myself.” Nico was quiet, gazing out at the meadow again. “I hope you find the person you wanted to find,” she said.
“Thanks,” Ari said. “You too. I hope you find Ibari.”
Nico’s pleasant expression didn’t waver, but Ari felt her sadness. “I won’t find Ibari,” she said. “She’s . . .” Nico shook her head.
“She’s what?” Ari asked softly.
“She’s . . . elsewhere,” Nico said. “In a very fundamental way. I’m going to go now.”
Ari stepped back. It seemed to her that Nico wasn’t talking about death but something quite different.
Nico closed her window and was gone seconds later, pulling out of the lot.
Ari watched her taillights recede before she turned back to the meadow.
Was meadow the word for it? She knew the tall grass hid all manner of foulness, discarded beer bottles and random trash.
If a person were going to hide a body—which she realized was a morbid line of thinking, but that’s what comes from forced association with murderers—the middle of the meadow wouldn’t be the worst choice.
It was a forgotten, neglected place, just an acre or two between a parking lot and an expressway.
It wasn’t clear who owned it. And yet it was beautiful sometimes.
The wind had picked up, and the grass rippled in the fading light.
There was a burst of gunfire. Ari dropped into the grass at the edge of the meadow and lay flat, listening.
It was on the other side of the mall, she thought.
Sure enough, two pickup trucks came screeching around the side of the building, full-speed toward the expressway, flying the black-and-yellow flag of one of the Pittsburgh militias.
Why had they ventured so far into Ohio? Ari rolled over and lay on her back, looking up at the sky.
Small clouds passed slowly against the darkening blue.
Another vehicle—no, another two or three vehicles, marked with the Cincinnati United insignia, were chasing the Pittsburgh trucks.
She watched the clouds and listened to the gunfight moving away from her.
She had dinner the following evening with her boss. Eduardo Harris had an uncanny talent for invisibility. It took a moment to spot him when she came into the diner. Her gaze slid over him twice before she saw him, sitting against the far wall, reading something on his phone.
“Interesting,” he said, when she told him about her day. She sometimes thought they were friends, but it’s hard to be certain when you’re working for someone. If they were friends, then she had exactly one friend in the world. “You think Gloria has a twin?”
“Maybe. But that’s like a bad B movie, right?”
“I like B movies,” Eduardo said, but he smiled in a way that conceded the point.
Ari went quiet, concentrating on her chicken wings. “It’s the thing with the name,” she said.
“Ibari,” Eduardo said. “Unusual name in this country. I don’t know that I’ve heard it.”
“I know. It’s . . .” But she was afraid of being called crazy, so she didn’t finish the thought.
“We’re talking about a kind of doubling, aren’t we?
” Eduardo said. This was something she liked about him, his willingness to put things into words when sometimes she wasn’t.
“There’s you, and also apparently someone who looks exactly like you, with the same name.
There’s my cousin’s wife, Nico, and also this Gloria person, who looks like her. ”
“Yeah. I don’t know if there’s a word for what we’re talking about.”
“There is,” he said, and they were silent, because it was a word that Ari wasn’t ready to say. “You know, Ari, if it were me, I’d probably start running down leads, just to satisfy my own curiosity.”
“Do you have any work for me this week?” She’d done nothing for him in the two weeks before photographing Nico.
“My operation’s shrinking,” he said. “A lot of my people defected to the new militia.”
“The Pittsburgh group?”
He nodded.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“To you? To the region? I don’t know the answer either way.” Eduardo sighed. “I thought Nico might be meeting with them,” he said. “That’s why I had you watch her. But sounds like she’s just eating sandwiches.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” He signalled for the bill. “It’s an exhausting moment to be alive, don’t you think?”
If Nico knew who Gloria was, did Gloria know Nico?
That night after dinner Ari let herself into her motel room and switched on the bedside lamp, which cast the room in her favourite kind of light.
Apartment rent was cheap here, but she preferred the scale and anonymity of motel rooms. She didn’t like signing leases.
She would never have enough money to buy a home.
Her belongings fit in the trunk of her car, and she went to some effort to keep it that way.
Her most treasured possession was a record player, which she loved for reasons that extended back into childhood.
She had placed it on the room’s small table, and now she carefully selected a record from her crate—Bach’s cello suites, played by Yo-Yo Ma—and settled down with her laptop and a beer.
First the soft crackle of static, which she loved, and then the first notes, for which she momentarily closed her eyes.
Then she opened her laptop and began looking for Gloria, but quickly came up against an impediment: she absolutely could not remember Gloria’s last name.
She’d known it, once, but there had been too many people and too many names since, and the information had been crowded out.
After a while the wifi stopped working. She fell asleep a few hours later, lying on top of her bed with an arm draped over her forehead, trying and trying and trying to remember.