1
Kareem loved antique cocktails, and was sipping an old-fashioned as the first guests arrived: Gloria, in a sparkly sequined shirt—Kareem appreciated the effort—and her new roommate, a very pretty woman with short dark hair who flashed a dazzling smile and introduced herself as Ari.
They smiled when he told them to throw their jackets on the bed and hung them on hooks instead, from which he concluded that one or both had some experience with bedbugs.
But there was no time to ask, more guests were arriving, the party was flowing up the stairs and taking shape in the room around him, and he felt a pleasant looseness in his movements, the cocktail settling into his blood.
“Kareem!” someone said. It was his friend Saraya from work. “The place looks beautiful.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I love your dress,” someone said to Saraya in the tumult, “the construction is really remarkable,” and he noticed that Saraya’s dress involved hundreds or thousands of tiny pleats.
But his friend Bruno was coming in, doing that double-kiss thing that Kareem had always found embarrassing—he knew it was standard in France and possibly elsewhere in Europe, but on his home continent he found it horribly affected—and then something drew Kareem’s attention to the kitchen door.
A woman was coming out of the kitchen, but he couldn’t remember her having entered the apartment.
Then he recognized her.
“Saraya,” he said, “you changed your clothes!” Saraya was wearing shorts now, and a pink T-shirt. “Did you spill something on that gorgeous dress?”
“What dress?” Saraya asked. She looked scared, Kareem realized. Something was wrong. Saraya was looking around as if she’d never seen this place before, no recognition in her eyes. She sank back against a wall. “Kareem,” she said, “what is this place?”
“Are you okay?” he asked, but as he spoke he was turning toward the windows, where the other Saraya—still in her silver dress—was admiring a flower arrangement.
Kareem felt like he was drowning. He reached out and grabbed hold of the closest steady thing in his immediate vicinity, which was his friend James’s arm.
“You okay?” James asked.
“Look,” Kareem whispered. He pointed, and James looked: at the woman standing stunned against a wall in the corner of the room, and her double over by the windows.
“What the fuck,” James said. “She has a twin?”
“Am I crazy?” Kareem felt crazy. “There’s two of them, right?”
The Saraya by the window turned and smiled at James and Kareem. They’re beautiful, she mouthed, meaning the flowers.
“We’re mistaken,” James said softly to Kareem. “We are definitely mistaken.”
“But you weren’t mistaken,” Ibari said, a year later, in a different world. Walking beside him across kilometres of desert in the fading light, a train platform shining in the near distance.
“Yeah,” Kareem said. “There were two of them. But we had to be mistaken, because the alternative was insanity.”
But Kareem felt nauseous now, and he wasn’t too obtuse to understand what that meant.
Sometimes the body knows things that the conscious mind won’t accept, a therapist had once told him.
The conversation with the therapist had involved this awkward phenomenon where Kareem felt ill every time he had to see his family, but the principle was the same.
Someone said his name, new guests were arriving, and Kareem’s attention was diverted, although as he greeted them he did register that the second Saraya had slipped past—a flash of pink shirt on her way out of the apartment.
He decided to pretend she hadn’t been there, although this was made harder by the way James was staring at the silver-dress Saraya by the window.
Also there was no time, more people were coming in and he had to greet them and pretend nothing was wrong.
“Bold shirt,” someone said. It was a friend who’d brought an armload of flowers.
“Thank you,” Kareem said, and then, “Great to see you!” and then, “Let me get these flowers into a vase!” as he moved through the gathering crowd to the kitchen. When had he become an actor? James was trailing after him with a lost expression.
“I know countries don’t last forever and there’s always going to be new ones,” someone said as he passed, “but it feels like a miracle, right?”
“To the Republic of California,” someone said, raising a bottle.
“Where you’re from,” Ibari said, just confirming, “California is an independent republic?”
“Yes,” Kareem said. “The whole country fractured. But I can’t tell you what a good moment that was, the night of the party. The curfews had finally lifted.”
“That moment didn’t happen here,” Ibari said. “Tell me more about it.”
“It’s just, everything had been hard for so long by then, years. But then there was a new country, and we were so excited. Like a new country meant we were going to be new people.”
The kitchen was crowded. Kareem knelt between his guests to look under the sink for a vase.
“Kareem,” someone said softly, nearby. A woman had crouched beside him. “Kareem, where are we?”
“Hi,” Kareem said, and then, “Gloria?”
The woman frowned, seemingly confused. “It’s me,” she said. “Kareem, it’s me, it’s Nico.”
Kareem clutched the cupboard door, lightheaded. He’d known Gloria for years, and this was the first time he’d heard her use that name.
“Kareem,” the woman said urgently, “Kareem, what happened? Where are we? What is this place?”
This wasn’t exactly Gloria, he saw now. She had Gloria’s face, and Gloria’s voice, but different clothes, different hair, and she didn’t have Gloria’s scar from the Highland Park attack.
“It was happening again,” Ibari said.
“Yeah, it was happening again.”
“And you’re absolutely sure that was the name she used? She introduced herself as Nico?”
“Yes,” Kareem said.
“What did you do?”
“I kept it together.”
He kept it together because that was what Kareem did.
Keeping it together was his superpower. “You’re at my party,” he said to this not-Gloria.
The thought occurred to him that he might be having a psychotic break.
He had no history of mental illness, but what else could it mean that he was seeing extra people, for lack of a better phrase, people who wore his friends’ faces but who weren’t quite his friends, people who were essentially wrong? It felt important to stay very calm.
“Okay,” the woman—Nico—said. She looked so scared.
“Kareem,” Bruno said, “are you Team San Diego Stays or San Diego Goes?” That was the month when San Diego was waffling on the question of whether to commit to the Republic of California or form its own independent city-state.
“If they have to think that hard about it,” someone else said, “they can go join the Pacific Ocean.”
“I’m neutral on San Diego,” Kareem said, without taking his eyes off Nico.
“I think we should keep them,” said Bruno. “I like beach volleyball boys.”
“Kareem, you got a bottle opener?” someone asked. Kareem stood, and Nico rose too. Nico looked like she was on the verge of a panic attack. She looked like she knew no one else in this room.
“Sure,” Kareem said, “just in that drawer over there—” And this time it was less of a shock when Gloria came in, the version of Gloria who didn’t call herself Nico and whom he’d known for ten or eleven years, with her sequined shirt, her familiar curtain of hair, her scarred forehead.
Gloria was focused on refilling a cup of Pepsi and Nico seemed not to have seen her, because Nico, it seemed to Kareem, wanted only to escape.
Nico was slipping away through the crowd, and then gone.
Kareem was vastly relieved that they hadn’t noticed one another.
He was aware of the absurdity of wanting to be a good host to both his real guest and his real guest’s doppelg?nger, but hosting was something he cared about.
“This is crazy,” James said quietly, beside him.
“We must be wrong,” Kareem said. “Lots of people look alike.” But he felt delirious at this point.
He was aware that his shirt was unattractively blotched with sweat.
“Excuse me a moment,” he murmured, to James or maybe to no one in particular, and left his own party.
It was surprisingly easy to just walk out.
“I’ll be right back,” he said brightly to a couple climbing the stairs, and then he slipped past them and down into the street.
Nico was gone. The street was empty, and the cool rain on his face made him feel less insane.
He was walking quickly before he’d decided on a direction.
He wanted so desperately to get away. He summoned an Uber and a moment later was staring dazed out the window of a westbound car.
Traffic was light at this hour. He’d selected the most recent destination in the Uber app, which was, he realized dimly, a seafood restaurant by the Santa Monica Pier.
He stared out the window through miles of night, past strip malls and taco trucks, bakeries with elaborate layered cakes in lit-up windows, auto repair places and apartment buildings, gas stations, new tent cities that had sprung up like mushrooms to house refugees from the inland fighting.
The city was less desolate now, he found himself thinking, less desolate but also even more incoherent.
Less space between buildings, more people out on the streets.
There was no more unused land now, the blank spaces on the banks of expressways colonized for housing.
He wanted to get as far away from his apartment as possible.