1 #3
I liked looking her up online and trying to divine clues to her character in photographs.
Ari Soriano was still beautiful, in a formidable way, but she had that haunted air that’s common among refugees, that look of having seen too much damage and of having lost too much too quickly.
That whole generation was a little wrecked.
Her current spouse was a pianist. Eddie Kalisa no longer performed, except for the occasional fundraiser for the music school with which she was affiliated.
She taught students at a Paris conservatory, mentored at-risk youth in some music-based program out in the suburbs, and always smiled for photographers.
Cole had told me that she and Ari often went to the opera, so when I came back to Paris for spring break, when Nico asked what I wanted to do, I said the opera and we went together.
I might have asked for the opera even if I didn’t have an ulterior motive, or at least that’s what I told myself during the first act.
I’d always liked doing things like that with Nico.
She sat perfectly still, perfectly focused.
She’d told me once that if she was stuck in this world, she could at least try to understand it, which was why she recorded conversations, made lists of things that to me seemed both everyday and random, and absorbed every experience she could.
At fifteen I was only just beginning to realize that these activities were a counterweight to despair.
She was busying herself in my timeline because she couldn’t get home to hers.
“Did you used to go to the opera, before?” I asked, during intermission. Before was our shorthand for the place she’d come from.
“Where I’m from,” she said, “opera hasn’t been a thing since my parents’ generation. I was surprised to find it here.”
“I mean, opera’s evolved, though,” I said, feeling obscurely protective of my home universe. The opera we’d been watching involved a DJ and breakdancers.
“I just never had much time for concerts,” she said.
“I was always working, and then . . .” She stopped there, but I knew the and then meant her children, Samir and Marlowe, very young when she was separated from them.
She couldn’t quite look at me. “Life gets in the way of doing things like this,” she said.
“But I did occasionally go to the ballet with friends.”
I was looking past her, because I’d just spotted Ari Soriano and Eddie Kalisa.
Eddie was a small woman in rumpled tweed.
Ari was better-dressed, in an elegant dark suit, with a shock of white hair that ended just above her collar.
Her silk scarf was a dash of red that perfectly matched her lipstick.
She walked slowly and used a cane. Eddie stayed by Ari’s side, her hand on Ari’s back.
Nico looked where I was looking, and winced.
“Did you know they’d be here?”
“No,” I said. “I knew Eddie came to the opera sometimes, but not her wife.”
“I don’t believe you.” She didn’t sound angry though, because in my experience Nico was almost never angry. The worst thing she could imagine had already happened to her, and nothing that followed was worth getting all that upset about.
“I swear. My plan was to approach Ari through Eddie.”
“Well,” she said, “perhaps now you won’t have to.
” But a few minutes later Ari had vanished into the crowd.
I watched Eddie Kalisa carefully after that.
She seemed to be alone now. I saw her on a mezzanine staircase.
From our seats on the lower level, I craned my neck until she appeared on a side balcony.
The chair next to hers was empty and remained so when the lights went down.
Her wife had seemingly left at intermission.
“It’s data,” Nico said later, out on the street.
We were walking together toward the metro, on a narrow street empty except for delivery robots, these sweet-looking animalistic characters who glowed softly on their wheels.
“Now you know that Eddie and Ari go to the opera, but Eddie likes it more than she does.”
“Well,” I said, “Eddie’s the musician.”
“What are you doing, Sebastian? Why are you so fixated on this?”
“I’m a fixative person,” I said. “I get fixated very easily.”
“I know, but you’re avoiding the question,” she said.
“Before you, I was always by myself.” I didn’t like to talk about it.
“I know,” Nico said. “I’d never met someone so alone as you.”
“With my mother in the same apartment.” I was trying to keep my voice light, but I felt and sounded like I was choking.
“You know she wasn’t really there,” Nico said.
I didn’t know what to say to this. What does it mean to be with someone, what does it mean to be there?
I’d liked the way Eddie stayed so close to Ari as they moved through the lobby at the opera; it wasn’t just Eddie’s hand on her wife’s back, it was an overall impression of care.
When I saw the two of them together, I felt that she loved her.
Nico and I were almost at the metro now.
“Listen,” Nico was saying, “your mother sold it. You have to accept that. The painting was hers to sell.”
“I know,” I said. “But it was my father’s. It was the only thing I had of his. I’d like to see it again.”
Nico gave me a sidelong glance. I’d like to see him was the thing I didn’t say.
4
I didn’t return to Paris till I was seventeen.
Nico drove me back the day after graduation, in a rickety little car she’d just purchased.
She was a wild driver, because she’d purchased the driver’s licence too.
“I’m not sitting through classes,” she said, when I asked her about it.
“I’ve known some idiots who could drive.
” In the place she came from, cars were apparently quite different.
She insisted that the basic steering principles were the same, but I had my doubts as she braked and veered on the Paris-bound expressway.
My plan was to live with Nico for a few months and find a job while I decided what to do next.
What had Gloria been doing, while I was away at school?
I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years by then, but Nico checked in on her occasionally.
“She just works,” Nico said. “She’s always on that computer, talking to her office in LA. You know work’s always been her coping mechanism.” A solar truck passed so close that the car shook, the driver leaning on his air horn.
“Coping with what?” I said. “Life in general?”
“You know what happened to her,” Nico said.
I knew what had happened to her, but only because Nico had told me.
I knew that one night in Los Angeles, before I was born, Gloria went to a party at a house in Highland Park.
I knew that someone at that party blew himself up with a bomb vest, someone aligned with a terrorist campaign by United States loyalists trying to destabilize the emerging Republic of California, and that she walked over bodies—pieces of bodies—to get out.
I knew the gash on her forehead had required ten stitches to close.
I knew the bomb was the reason she was the way she was, why she flinched at loud noises, why she avoided leaving the apartment, why she was such a goddamned ghost in this world, but the unkind thought that flitted through me was Get over it.
How long after a terrible event do you get to be a ghost?
I knew the question made me a bad person.
“That was a long time ago,” I said, testing the waters.
“You can’t predict how you’ll be affected by the things that happen to you.
” Nico was attempting to switch lanes. I closed my eyes and clutched the edge of my seat.
She made two failed attempts—horns blaring, a screech of tires to our right—and then managed, and a beat later the Paris dome came into view.
My heart was too fast but I felt exhilarated, in a near-death-experience way.
“I’m not sure how we all ended up living in a pile of soap bubbles,” I said. The dome—really domes, plural, but no one called it that—looked dim and greasy on the horizon, considerably less iridescent than the architectural renderings had led me to expect.
“It’s the only domed city outside of Asia,” she said. “We should all be grateful.” We were passing through an area that had been blasted by wildfires a year or two earlier, blackened ruins collapsing in the near distance.
“There are domes going up over Toronto and Sydney,” I said.
“Really? Well, good for them. My information’s outdated.” She was frowning at the road. “I’m not a particularly good driver,” she said, “but some days I think almost everyone else is worse.”
“Does Gloria ever talk about it?” I asked.
“The bomb?”
“The bomb.”
“Never,” Nico said. “I had to pry it out of her. I gather she has a habit of telling people she was at an entirely different party that night. Hold on, I need to switch lanes again.” I closed my eyes.
“You can stay with me for as long as you’d like,” she said, while my eyes were still closed.
“I’ll help you find your own apartment when you’re ready. ”
Nico’s apartment wasn’t far from the dome.
She lived a kilometre or two from that inhuman wall of composite glass for which a thousand centuries-old buildings had been razed, this glass that broke the city into an inside and an outside and rose too high into the air.
The anti-dome protests had kept her awake for a year, but now the dome was a reality.
I didn’t like the way it looked outside my window, that greyish semitransparent wall where once a building had stood, other buildings faded out like ghosts on the other side.
In the quiet of my tiny bedroom in Nico’s apartment, I read through my notes on Ari Soriano and Eddie Kalisa. I was formulating a plan.