1 #10
“Paris.” Ari sensed an opening. “Nico,” she said, “were you at Kareem’s party in Los Angeles?”
“Yes,” Nico said.
“You were the woman in the kitchen,” Ari said, testing James’s story. “Kneeling by the cupboard, beside Kareem.”
“Yeah. I remember that. I’d thought I knew him, but he wasn’t . . . he’s not the person I thought he was.”
“The same way I turned out not to be Ibari.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” Ari asked. “To Kareem?”
“What do you mean?” Nico asked.
Ari hadn’t actually known Kareem at all—he’d been a momentary presence, flickering into her life for the length of a party and no longer—but still, it was a terrible weight to have to tell someone. “He disappeared,” she said. “He was at that party, and then no one ever saw him again.”
“He must have gone the other way,” Nico said.
“What?”
But Nico was staring out over the meadow, and Ari realized she was talking to herself. “You said Gloria was pregnant,” Nico said then. “Who was the other parent?”
“The father was Kareem,” Ari said, “but like I said, he disappeared at the party.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Nico said, and left Ari there in the parking lot.
In the far distance, the digging man was leaving too, a small figure receding toward a car parked on the shoulder of the expressway, carrying his shovel over his shoulder.
Ari was alone in the scene, in the end-of-day light.
There were things she knew, although it was difficult to say whether they were obvious things that anyone might have known just then.
She knew Nico had lost a child, or children.
She knew the man in the distance had been digging a grave.
Ari was back in Felix’s motel room that night, and the night after that.
She realized that the customers wanted to talk, and that was the key that unlocked the business.
They began offering the customers a drink, a cigarette, bowls of chips.
The customers relaxed a little, spent more money.
The motel room became a lounge. There were long nights with the militias, the air dense with cigarette smoke.
She learned their language and their fears.
Protect the homeland, they said, and they understood the homeland to be Ohio, or at least most of Ohio, sectors having been lost to the Pittsburgh militias and to two cities that wanted to become city-states.
Some of them felt this was just as well.
Cultural differences was another line she heard often in the haze, delivered in a sarcastic tone but meant sincerely.
Ghost strikes, they said, which was shorthand for the way they operated.
They rose up in insurgency and then melted back into the crowd before the remnants of the US military arrived.
There was a morning when Ari woke with a sense of imminent departure.
She lay in the bed for a long time before she got up, trying to understand why she was leaving, but came to no conclusions.
She was alert through the day for signs and portents, but felt only a series of certainties: this is the last shower I’ll take in this bathroom, this is the last time I’ll pull these jeans from this drawer, this is the last time I’ll brush my hair with this hairbrush.
She couldn’t account for it, but had suffered these certainties often enough in her life to accept them as facts.
In the late afternoon she drove down the expressway a few miles, toward the store where Nico worked.
There were fewer cars on the road than there had been.
Gas was so expensive now that motorists often drove to within a mile or two of their destination and then walked.
Everyone had locks on their gas caps. The demand for bicycles far outpaced the supply.
Ari had some time, so she parked a mile from the mall and walked from there, in a route that brought her eventually to the far side of the derelict meadow between expressway and mall parking lot.
She could see Nico’s car parked up there in the distance.
She was tempted to cut across the meadow, but she didn’t want to know what was hidden in that grass, so she walked all the way around and by the time she reached the parking lot Nico was already in her car, eating her dinner sandwich.
Ari waved as she walked in front of the windshield—Nico stared at her, frozen, sandwich in mouth.
Ari was very tired, less from the walk than from the certainty that her life was about to change again.
She wished she could rest. She sat on a cement block with her back to the parking lot, and waited until Nico came to sit beside her.
“There’s something I remembered from the party,” Ari said. “I wanted to tell you, in case I don’t see you again.”
“Are you leaving?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. There was a woman at the party,” Ari said. “She seemed confused, and then I saw her on the street later, and she asked what city she was in.”
Nico frowned. “Do you remember her name?”
“Sarah. No, something like Sarah. I feel like I’m getting her name wrong. The reason I thought of this is, she called me Ibari too.”
“Saraya,” Nico said flatly. “She came through too, but she didn’t really make it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I last saw her in a psych ward in LA,” Nico said. “She wasn’t able to adjust.”
“Nico,” Ari said, “was the party also some kind of door?”
“It’s complicated,” Nico said. “I don’t understand it, so I can’t even try to explain.
” A long silence passed while Ari tried to think of how to get Nico to tell her more, because whatever had happened at that party was beginning to seem like the strangest thing Ari had encountered in her entire life.
She gave up after a while, and opted for a different line of questioning:
“Why did you come to Ohio?”
“I met my husband in LA,” Nico said. “He wanted to move back to the Midwest, and Ohio was cheap and not that dangerous.”
“Can I ask you something about Ibari?” This other me. It seemed a fair transaction, for what she’d just told Nico.
“What about her?”
“Is she from New York?”
“Yes.”
“Did she ever know when things were going to happen?”
“Sometimes,” Nico said. “Just little things.”
“Like what?”
“Like we’d be going out, and she’d say, ‘I feel like I’m going to need a pair of scissors later,’ and I’d dissuade her from putting scissors in her handbag, because that’s insane, but then later in the day there’d somehow be some kind of unforeseen circumstance where we actually did need scissors.”
“She was like that her whole life?” Ari was distracted by trying to imagine what a scissors emergency might look like.
“I think so. As long as I knew her.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“Why do you want to know?” Nico asked.
“Can you blame me for being curious? She’s another me, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” Nico said, and it seemed to Ari that she was making a considerable effort to hide her despair. “I don’t know how much like you she actually is. I don’t know how similar I am to Gloria.”
“I don’t know either,” Ari said. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen Gloria, and I don’t know you well enough to say.”
A breeze rippled across the long grass in the quiet.
“We met at university,” Nico said. “She was doing a master’s degree and I was in undergrad, and we were always studying in the library at the same time, then one day we got lunch together and became friends.”
“I didn’t go to college.”
“You didn’t?” Nico seemed genuinely startled.
“I had some business opportunities,” Ari said, but she couldn’t meet Nico’s eyes, because actually what she’d had was corruption.
She’d discovered in the tenth grade that she could make a lot of money buying and selling luxury goods with stolen credit card numbers, after which it was difficult to seriously entertain the idea of either a straight job or college.
“Ibari held two master’s degrees,” Nico said.
“Then I guess we aren’t much alike.” Ari had a sense of another, unimaginable life passing by in the near distance, like a ship with no lights.
“I don’t know.” Nico was looking at Ari, and there was such sadness in her. “You might be more like her than you think. The last time I saw her, she’d just been promoted to detective.”
“She was police?”
“Something like that.”
Nico fell silent, lost somewhere distant.
“Who was Ibari to you?” Ari asked.
“She was someone I trusted,” Nico said. “She was my closest friend.”
Was Nico her friend? Friendship was a puzzle to Ari and always had been.
That night a group of buyers came to the motel room with a girl Ari had never seen before.
The girl was about nineteen, quiet and polite, dressed all in black with a feather in her hair.
They were all regular customers, except for the girl.
“She’s cool,” the others said, offhandedly, but their tone was too casual, the girl too watchful, and Ari felt death moving through the room.
The girl and Ari spent hours engaged in a kind of dance: Ari offered the girl drinks, and the girl sipped just enough to make it look like she was drinking but not enough to get drunk.
The last customers left at four in the morning, all of them drunk except the girl, who was only pretending.
Felix was yawning as he closed the door.
“Why are you brewing more coffee?” he asked.
“Because we’re not sleeping tonight,” Ari said, and they were gone in under forty minutes, in Felix’s van, the vehicle packed to the ceiling with guns and ammunition.
“But how did you know she was casing the room?” Felix asked, for what must have been the fifth time. They were on the expressway by then, his face lit by passing lights.
“I just know things sometimes, Felix.”
He seemed to accept this. It was a time in which almost anything seemed possible. The van had false plates because no one was checking plates by then. Ari wore big glasses and they both wore wigs. They joined a flow of displaced people moving south and west.
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