Exit Party
The back room in Nico’s apartment is dim, lit only by streetlights filtering in from outside, but Swan Dive is propped up on a dresser, facing me, and it shines with an aquatic light.
I can hear Sebastian moving around the apartment.
I have reached a destination, and all I have is desire: I want to dive off a cliff into the sea in a warm country.
No, the opposite. I want to dive off an iceberg into the Arctic Ocean.
I want to plummet through clear air into shocking cold.
I want to surface with the aurora borealis shifting overhead, green light rippling through the sky.
I want to climb aboard a passing boat and set off for an unknown country.
I want extremity. I want annihilation. I want to blow up my life and remake it, but how many times do you get to do that?
I have spent my whole life pulling pins on grenades.
No, what I want is to run time backward, all the way back to a party in LA, and when that door opens to take Kareem, I want to step through too.
No, further: I want to go back to a moment in the first few years of this exhausting century, and instead of hiring a man to kill my cousin Anton, I’d like to go to Anton in Italy and tell him he’s free, I’m sorry, the transaction’s off, he can leave the business if he wants.
Go home, Anton, it’s okay, it’s okay. I want a less haunted life.
I would like to have been less villainous.
I want a cocktail, or absolution, or to get out of bed.
Eddie has entered the room and now she approaches, smiling at me, the ghost I’ve most wanted to see all this time.
“Eddie.” I can still speak, just barely. One or two breaths remain to me. “Eddie, my love. You’re finally here.”
“I came for you,” she says gently, that voice I’ve missed so much.
“We don’t have to be apart anymore.” I am so close to Swan Dive now.
The painting is expanding behind Eddie and it’s become real, translucent, the ocean rippling through the room, until finally I take her hand and rise from the bed—I don’t need my body anymore, it’s finished and anyway I’m feeling much better—and there’s a diving board here that I didn’t see before, extending before me.
“Go on,” Eddie says, with a smile, “you know you want to.” Swan Dive is all around me, and I’ve somehow misjudged the situation: this isn’t a room at all. The sea ripples below. I take a few steps out onto the diving board, and dive into the blue.