1 #8
Ari woke from a confused dream of prison at three in the morning, sweaty and disoriented.
She’d left the record spinning on the player.
She lay for a while listening to the crackling static, resting in the sound.
She’d always liked these early in-between hours.
Ari let her thoughts drift, hoping that Gloria’s last name might come to her, but there was nothing.
Who remembers their roommate’s surname, years later?
They’d lived together for four months, give or take, before Gloria went to Europe and Ari began her northeasterly drift across a fracturing continent, to come to rest in this territory of big box stores and strip malls and ever-shifting governance.
Four months that nonetheless loomed large in memory, because those were the first months out of prison, and in those months the non-prison world held a wonder and sheen that was gone now, however much she might have wished to hold on to it.
She filled the kettle in the white glare of the bathroom and began the ritual of instant coffee.
She stood gazing at the kettle’s blue light, hoping something would come to her, and then something did: Kareem’s last name had been Fayed.
She’d seen it on the MISSING posters. But data was throttled on her phone because she hadn’t paid her bill on time, and the motel wifi was still down.
Ari dressed in her usual uniform—jeans, white button-down shirt, black sneakers, lipstick—and this morning she added a jacket. The motel parking lot glittered with frost when she left the room around seven in the morning.
The walk to the RE/MAX office took her across an expressway, along a back road that led to the service entrance of a massive convention centre that had functioned as a Red Cross regional headquarters for the past three years, through several parking lots, past all of the usual names and places: Chili’s, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts.
She stepped over a drainage ditch behind the doughnut shop and crossed a strip of long grass to the parking lot behind the Walmart.
At the back of the parking lot there was a mass of blackberry vines that no one seemed to care about, a thicket of thorns and green.
This was her favourite part of the walk.
The Cincinnati United mall was just ahead.
No one else was in the office at this hour, so she let herself in and settled in front of a computer.
It took her some time to find Kareem. There were so many missing people now, dead or just out of touch with loved ones, and she was unsure of the spelling of his name.
But once she found him, she pieced the story together quickly, mostly through his friend James’s social media posts.
(“I feel crazy,” James said, in some back corridor of memory, and she locked the door and came to sit beside him on a bed with a pile of jackets.) Kareem had disappeared from a party in Los Angeles in the spring of 2031.
He’d never resurfaced, and his body was never found.
It took very little time to find James’s phone number.
“I’m not sure if you’ll remember me,” she said, when they’d gotten names out of the way, “but we met at the party where Kareem disappeared.”
He laughed. “You’re not sure if I’ll remember you? I don’t know what kind of parties you go to, Ari, but that wasn’t the kind of thing I’d normally do.”
“That was memorable,” she said.
“It certainly was. You calling to reminisce? Because I’m here for that, if you are.”
“I’m trying to track down my friend Gloria. She was at that party. Did you know her?”
James was quiet. “Yeah,” he said, in a guarded way.
“She moved to Europe, right?”
“I think Paris. But that was years ago already, who knows where she is now.”
“James, did Gloria have a twin?”
He said nothing, but there was tension in his silence.
“I live in Ohio now,” Ari said. “Outside Cincinnati.”
“I heard the Republic of Ohio’s splintering. North and south republics, or something?”
“Yeah, it seems like it,” Ari said. “It’s definitely less stable now than a year ago. Anyway, I work for a militia.”
“Sounds like a dangerous line of work.”
“It’s more boring than you’d think. It’s a lot of sitting around in cars and hanging out in bars waiting for people. No one really notices me. But the other day I was assigned to photograph a woman, and, well, she looks exactly like Gloria. I mean, exactly the same face.”
“Christ,” James murmured, seemingly to himself.
“It took me a while to see it, because every detail is different. When I knew Gloria she had long dark hair, no glasses, too much makeup. This woman, her hair’s buzzed and bleached, she wears these big glasses, but their faces are exactly the same.
A lot of people look alike,” Ari said. “But it’s her voice, her voice is the same too.
And even then, okay, that’s weird but not impossible, but she called me Ibari. ”
“But you’re Ari, right?”
“Yeah. Ibari’s the name on my birth certificate, but I literally never use it, and the last time a stranger called me Ibari, it was at that party in LA.” There was a sound from outside, gunfire in the far distance. Ari listened but it didn’t come again.
“This woman,” James said, “this other Gloria. She looks the same, but she doesn’t have the scar on her forehead, right?”
“Right,” Ari said. “You know her?”
“No. But I’ve seen her before. I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand what happened at that party,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’ll think I’m some kind of maniac if I try to describe it.”
“I promise I won’t think you’re crazy.”
James sighed. “There was a problem at that party, even before Kareem disappeared. Hours before. There were . . .” He paused, seemingly searching for words. “There were extra people.”
“You mean uninvited guests?”
He laughed in a rough, mirthless way. “You could say that, yeah.”
“Could you please just tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Look, I’m not trying to be mysterious. It’s just, we had a fun time together, but I hardly know you.”
“Okay. My name is Ari Smith. I’m from New York City.”
“Yeah, okay, but I still hardly know you.”
“There was this thing a friend of mine used to say, when she wanted something.”
“Go on.”
“She’d say, ‘Can we trade a story for a story?’ and then she’d tell the other person something they didn’t know, in exchange for information.”
“Interesting,” James said. “I like that.”
“Me too. So let me tell you something I never tell anyone, and then maybe you’ll feel like you know me better. Okay?”
There was a beat of silence on the line. “Okay. Why not. I’m literally just sitting here waiting for my laundry.”
“I had a business selling fake passports in my twenties,” Ari said, “but that’s not why I went to prison.”
“You went to—wait, what? Like, are we talking prison prison? As in actual, literal—?”
“Yes, an actual literal medium-security federal penitentiary, because I committed an actual serious crime.”
“What kind of crime?”
“Will you tell me about the party if I tell you?”
“Sure. Yes.”
“I tried to kill someone,” she said. “I took out a contract on my cousin. He’s fine, by the way. The plan failed.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Listen, I’m not that person anymore. But now I’m here, in this place, and there’s a person who’s .
. . very much like Gloria, but isn’t Gloria, in a way that I don’t understand, and I just .
. . James, now you know more about me than anyone except possibly my cousin and my parents, and I don’t even know if any of those people are still alive.
Whatever happened at that party, I promise I won’t think you’re crazy. ”
James drew a shaky breath. “Okay,” he said, and it seemed to Ari that he was speaking more to himself now. “Okay. There was this girl—there was this woman at the party, Saraya. She arrived not that long after I did, but then a little while later, another Saraya was there too.”
“What do you mean, another Saraya?”
“I’d gone out to get more alcohol when the first guests started arriving, because Kareem was worried we didn’t have enough.
When I got back, people were coming in. I took the beer to the kitchen, and then I came out to the living room and he was staring at someone across the room.
So I look, and there’s his friend Saraya, by the window, in this beautiful silver dress. ”
“Okay. Why was that strange?”
“Because another Saraya had just come in from the kitchen, wearing a pink shirt and shorts. I remember Kareem said something like ‘James, there’s two of them.’ I remember we just stood there for a minute, staring from one to the other, then Kareem went into the kitchen and I followed. I was so freaked out.”
“What happened then?”
“Kareem was dissociating, I think. He didn’t know what to do, so he was just busying himself.
He was looking for a bottle opener or something, I remember he was kneeling down looking in a cupboard.
Then I saw a woman kneeling next to him.
I got a funny feeling, something about the way Kareem was staring at her.
I knew something was wrong. He stands up, the woman stands too, and it’s another Gloria. ”
“It was Gloria?”
“No, another Gloria. It was a version of Gloria, but with different hair and no scar on her face. The woman you just met, presumably. Then a second later, our friend Gloria comes into the room, and the other Gloria slips out. I went out into the living room, and there was only one Saraya, the Saraya in the silver dress. We were out on the terrace together a little while later, and that’s when the other Saraya appeared again, the woman in the T-shirt and shorts who called you Ibari.
We had our little thing in the bedroom, you and I, which by the way I’ve never had that much fun at a party before or since.
Later I looked everywhere but the second Saraya was gone, and I could only find one Gloria.
Our Gloria. So those two extra women, those two . . . copies, they must’ve slipped out.”