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What Ari would remember for the duration of her life was that from the moment Kareem swept her into the room, the party carried an electric charge.
All those people. It was overwhelming in the way that stepping into a grocery store for the first time after nearly twenty years in prison is overwhelming, a sensory-overload explosion.
The air was warm and the mood was ecstatic.
There were lilies in vases, roses spilling out of glass bowls.
Either Kareem had sprayed a quantity of expensive air freshener around, or the flowers had caught the mood and were on some kind of fragrance overdrive.
The air by the windows was soft with rain.
“I thought the curfew would last forever,” someone was saying, as Ari poured red wine for herself and Gloria.
“Here,” Ari said to Gloria, who was looking a little strained.
“I mean, I just never wanted to be a part of history,” someone else said, quite near to Ari.
“Thanks.” Gloria accepted the glass. “I’m going to go out to the terrace.”
“Where’s the terrace?” But Gloria was gone. “Hi, I’m Ari,” she said to the man who didn’t want to be a part of history.
“James,” he said.
“So,” a woman near her right elbow said. “How’s the collapse of the country going for you?”
“Oh, you know,” Ari said. “Could’ve been worse.”
“Sounds about right,” the woman said, and launched into a story about the morning she realized the country was really breaking apart, that one strange day when Texas seceded in the morning and Arizona followed in the afternoon, the day her sister called to say she’d pulled her children out of school and maybe there was going to be a war, then the woman went to fill up her car and the gas line extended around the corner, and that was how she knew it was real.
It was a boring story that Ari had already heard in a dozen variations.
“What about you?” the woman asked finally. “When did you know it was real?”
“I don’t think about the past at all,” Ari said.
“That’s it,” James said approvingly. “Face the future head-on, right?”
“Only way to live,” Ari said.
“I’m just trying to connect,” the woman said, and it looked to Ari like she was about to cry, so she relented.
“Okay,” Ari said, “I was living with a few other people, and then one night I woke up and someone was listening to the radio.”
“See, I’m a Taurus, so I can’t live with other people,” a man said. “You had a lot of roommates?”
“Yeah,” Ari said. “A lot of roommates.” She’d been drifting in and out of sleep that night, because her cellmate was listening to a radio tuned low in the lower bunk, but then she woke up and caught the words.
Troops, militias, secession, shots fired.
What Ari remembered of that night was lying unblinking in the darkness and thinking, At least this is finally something new.
Her life had been unchanging for so long.
When had she last felt any excitement or any dread at all, about anything?
The murmured radio voices followed her into sleep and became dreams of dark streets and faceless soldiers.
“The problem is we didn’t know anything,” the woman said, “like how does a person prepare for something like that? But I’m a Virgo, so, you know, logic, so I just went to the gas station and filled my car, then went to the bank and withdrew most of my chequing account and went home.
” Ari nodded. She was trying to look interested.
James was standing by her side. He wasn’t paying attention to her, just looking at his phone, but she was extremely aware of his presence, the warmth of his body so near to hers.
When the woman stopped talking, he leaned in close.
“You know what I didn’t expect about living in a dramatic historic moment?” He was speaking softly, hot gin breath in her ear. “How unbelievably boring it is, because everyone around you lived through the exact same thing and they all need to process their complicated feelings.”
Ari smiled. “You read my mind.”
“Where were you living with all those roommates?” he asked. “DP camp?”
“No,” Ari said. “Do you know where the terrace is?”
“Right this way. I could use some air myself.” The party was so crowded now.
Ari was trying to remember when she’d last been in a room with so many other people.
No, it wasn’t that, she’d been in crowds in the recent past, but what was dazzling was the way everyone in this crowd wore different colours, fabrics of different textures, instead of a sea of prison-issue beige.
There was a pretty woman with soft lips in a silver dress like tinfoil, a thousand tiny pleats; Ari admired the effect as she brushed past. She would have liked to kiss the woman.
The terrace was a balcony on the side of the building, with a view of a hillside, trees, distant glimmering lights.
A handwritten sign forbade smoking. There were a few people out here, Gloria and Kareem among them.
“Okay,” Gloria was saying, “yeah, that was crazy, but you remember that night with the double graduation parties?” and Ari knew they were talking about the long-closed West Hollywood restaurant where Kareem and Gloria had met as servers.
“How do you know Kareem?” Ari asked James. “Same restaurant?”
“We lived in the same dorm in college, believe it or not,” James said. “And now we’re roommates again.”
“You live here too?”
“Yeah, I crash in the living room. The sofa folds out.”
“Is Kareem a good roommate?”
“Much better than he used to be. He’s much better than he used to be.”
This was interesting to Ari, who toyed intermittently with the idea of becoming a better person. “Better how?”
“Just better overall. Better able to not completely lose his shit at the slightest provocation.”
“There you are,” Gloria said to Ari, and she looked a bit lost, so Ari put an arm over Gloria’s shoulder.
“How do you two know each other?” James asked.
“We’re roommates,” Gloria said, and Ari felt a flush of something like love in that moment. She knew Gloria because she’d been in prison with Gloria’s cousin.
Time passed; the conversation moved on; Kareem went in to attend to something; at some point Ari looked up, and a woman she didn’t know was standing in the doorway, staring at them.
“Hey, Saraya,” someone said, “you coming out? The rain stopped.”
Ari realized that this was the same woman she’d seen earlier, wearing a silver pleated dress, but she’d changed into casual clothes now, jean shorts and a T-shirt. There was something oddly focused in the way the woman was looking at them, specifically in the way she was looking at Ari.
“Ibari,” she said, “where are we?”
There was a beat of silence, then Gloria said, “Who?”
It was a moment before Ari could speak.
“Ibari is my legal name.” Ari was staring at this stranger, this Saraya. “How did you know that name?”
“Really?” Gloria said. “I didn’t know that was your name.”
“Because I’ve literally never used it. It’s just the name on my ID.”
“I don’t know where I am,” Saraya said. There was panic in her voice. “I don’t know where I am.” She was looking at Gloria now. No, looking at the scar on Gloria’s forehead. Gloria’s hand drifted up to touch the scar.
“You look like someone,” Saraya said to Gloria. Gloria frowned.
“I thought she’d left the party,” James said in a choked voice.
Ari glanced at him and saw fear on his face.
He was afraid of Saraya. It didn’t make sense to her—Saraya was a small person, much smaller than James, and she seemed disoriented—but then Saraya turned away and slipped back inside, and he exhaled.
“Is she on something?” someone asked.
“It’s a stressful world,” someone else said. “Who isn’t on something.”
“Excuse me,” Ari said, and went to find Saraya, because she’d never been more baffled by an interaction.
She moved through crowded rooms, she looked into every face, she circled back through the kitchen and stepped out for a moment onto the landing to look down the stairs at the quiet street.
Saraya was gone. But there: in the crowded living room, by the window, a small knot of people were talking and laughing.
One of them was the woman in the silver pleated dress.
The fabric gleamed in the lamplight as she moved.
Her back was to Ari, but she was Saraya, Ari was certain of it.
No, that wasn’t possible. Saraya must have had a twin.
Ari moved on through the apartment and realized there was one room she hadn’t checked, a closed door by the bathroom.
It was Kareem’s bedroom, jackets piled on the bed. James was here, sitting on the bed with his eyes closed.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I feel crazy,” he said.
She closed the door behind her, and then, on impulse, locked it. She came to sit beside him. “I feel crazy too.”
They sat for a moment in silence, listening to the party on the other side of the door.
“There’s . . . too many people out there,” James said, but she wouldn’t fully understand what he meant by this for several years. In the moment, she just thought he didn’t like crowds. “Nothing makes sense,” he murmured, and then, “Could I kiss you?”
“Yes,” she said, and five minutes later they were having sex on top of the pile of jackets. When they were done she kissed him again, and left him there blinking with his pants around his ankles.
The rest of the party was a blur in retrospect.
You don’t remember parties, you remember snapshots: a passing comment, a drink, a feeling of companionship, a green silk shirt, a rain jacket pressed to the side of your face in a locked bedroom.
There was a moment around midnight when Gloria seemed tearful—she couldn’t find Kareem, which was confusing, because why would he leave his own party—but she recovered and a half-hour later was dancing with Ari and some other people in the middle of the living room, furniture pushed to the sides.
James was somewhere on the periphery, talking with everyone, a little flushed.