Exit Party #2
N: There’s a whole religion devoted to the idea, in the place I’m from.
The idea is that after you die, your neurons keep firing for a while.
Something like seven minutes. What’s that time like, when your body’s dead and your brain is trying to make sense of that?
Obviously no one knows what that time is like, I mean the subjective experience of that time, but some people think when you die, you get one last dream.
Think about the way time works in dreams. Those seven minutes might feel like a lifetime.
That’s what I thought Kareem’s party was, when I arrived there.
I thought I’d died and arrived in the final dream.
A: . . .
N: My working life now isn’t very interesting.
I pick up retail shifts at a department store when I can, and I transport packages for the men who run my neighbourhood.
I assume those packages have drugs in them, and that isn’t what I wanted for my life, but financially speaking, I have no real choice.
But in the other place, the place I came from, I had a more interesting job.
I was a physicist. I don’t really want to talk about the other place, because I don’t want to think about how much I’ve lost.
A: . . .
N: Getting from one place to the other, it was .
. . it’s hard to describe the sensation.
I was in the other place, then there was a feeling like plucking the string of a guitar, but I was the string.
Then I was in a kitchen, at a party. I remember opening my eyes, and thinking, This is it.
I’m dead, and this is the final dream. That was the only explanation that made sense to me, because I was in a lab in the other place, and then I was in a party, with absolutely no intermediate step.
There was a man kneeling beside me, looking for something in a cupboard, so I crouched next to him and it was my husband, it was Kareem, but like a dream version.
It wasn’t just the clothes, or the haircut, it was that there was something different about him, like he had a different soul.
I know that sounds crazy. I asked him where I was, and he said, “My kitchen.” He called me by the wrong name.
A: . . .
N: Yes, he called me Gloria. I didn’t understand why until much later.
Anyway, it was obvious to me that this Kareem wasn’t actually my husband.
He was some kind of doppelg?nger. I felt like I was losing my mind.
I moved out into the next room, trying to get my bearings or find someone I recognized, but there was no one.
All these strangers. They were talking about things I didn’t understand.
It was all place names I didn’t know and references to events I’d never heard of.
A: . . .
N: Well, Saraya came through too. My colleague. I found her in a psych ward in Los Angeles. She was completely undone.
A: . . .
N: The shock was too much, I guess, and Saraya had completely broken from reality. When I saw her, she wasn’t coherent. I know the kind thing would’ve been to stay in Los Angeles, to try to help her, but I’d lost everything too and I was trying to stay alive. I had to keep moving.
A: . . .
N: Well, after a while I left the apartment and walked down a flight of stairs to the street.
I remember wandering for a long time, staring up at the streetlights, because they were just completely wrong.
The shape of them, I mean, the colour of the light, everything.
A car passed and I almost didn’t understand what it was.
A: . . .
N: Yeah, I know, I’m used to all of that now.
But at the beginning the tiny differences were so jarring, it was all I could see.
I just kept walking. I had no idea where I was.
After a while it began to seem to me that the dream was lasting too long.
Also it didn’t feel like a dream anymore, after the first half-hour or so.
A: . . .
N: I was walking and walking, but I had no destination.
I was in shock, I think. Crying and stumbling around in the dark.
But then I had this awful thought: obviously the experiment had gone wrong and I’d passed through some kind of door.
What if the door opened again, in the same place as before, but I wasn’t there to pass back through?
I had to get back to the party. I had to get home. All I could think of was my children.
A: . . .
N: I have two children. Marlowe and Samir. Marlowe was two when I left, and Samir was almost four.
A: . . .
N: Marlowe was named for a fictional detective. Samir was my husband’s grandfather’s name.
A: . . .
N: My husband? He was a revolutionary, or he wanted to be. He was secretive about it. He didn’t know that I knew. But to explain all that, I’d have to tell you about an entire world that I don’t want to think about too much. Ask me about something different.
A: . . .
N: So I retraced my steps, or tried to, but it took me until morning to find Kareem’s apartment again. I walked back up the stairs at the side of the building, and the door was unlocked, but the apartment was empty.
A: . . .
N: I guess Kareem had left by then. I know no one saw him again, you told me that in Ohio.
The party had been abandoned. All the lights were on.
I smelled something burning. Someone had left a candle burning in the living room, and a flower had fallen into it and caught fire, so it was kind of smouldering there, just slowly ruining the shelf it was sitting on.
I put it out, and started looking around.
I remember I was desperately thirsty. It took me a minute to figure out how the taps worked in the kitchen, because the design of everything was just completely different than where I’m from.
I ate and drank whatever I could find. I didn’t know what I was searching for, but I kept looking.
I kept walking in and out of rooms, but there was no .
. . there was nothing. I wasn’t transported back.
I could find no door. The empty rooms were just empty rooms.
A: . . .
N: I don’t know what I expected to find.
A: . . .
N: Well, after a while I gave up on the idea of the door reopening, for the moment.
I knew it wasn’t my apartment and I had to leave, but I was desperate.
You have to understand, I was in a foreign place and I had no money, nothing.
I found a suitcase. All of the clothes in the apartment were men’s clothes, but Kareem wasn’t very large.
I found some things I could wear. I packed them up, also some soap and shampoo from the bathroom, a towel, all the things I thought I could use.
I’m not a thief. I’m not usually a thief.
A: . . .