Page 65 of Exit Party

“I was cleaning out the storage unit,” she said, “and thought you might like to have it. What does the phrase mean?”

“True diligence?” I was going for lightness. I felt I’d succeeded. “Just a phrase I liked when I was a little kid. I think I must have seen it on TV or read it in a book somewhere.” If asked, I could have cited the book title, the author, and possibly the page number. Why was I lying about it? Because lying was my job. I pushed this thought down.

“I opened it up,” she said, “before I knew what it was. You should’ve been a detective.”

“Why,” I said, “what’s in it?” She was passing it across the table. I opened it, and for a moment didn’t understand what I was looking at. A timetable? No, the times of day when the neighbour at the apartment building across the street entered or left the building, except it was all only between four p.m. and six p.m., because that was the time when I was sitting at my desk by the window doing homework, between school and dinner. He came and went a lot during that period, which I’d apparently found suspicious. The heading was straightforward: Times when Andy Commidy (sp?) enters or leaves home, with separate columns for enters and leaves. His schedule was remarkably consistent. I’d started the notebook after my friend across the street had disappeared, I remembered now. I was seven. But all these years later, I couldn’t remember my friend’s name.

“Wow,” I said, “I’d forgotten what a weird kid I was.”

“You should’ve been a detective,” she said again. Could she possibly know? It wasn’t possible, I told myself, but on the other hand, how did I know my mother wasn’t Service too? One of the more exhausting aspects of life in a surveillance state is that anyone can be surveilling you at any time, including the person whom you are yourself surveilling.

“I like the academic life,” I said. “It’s peaceful.”

“Anything you did here would seem peaceful, I’d think,” my father said. “Nice little town.”

“Well, Ibari,” my mother said, and raised her wineglass. “It looks like you’ve found a quiet life in a beautiful place.”

“Here’s to that,” my father said, and I smiled and joined them in sipping wine. Why did that comment bother me so much? She’d meant it kindly. Soon enough they returned to Ohio, and I settled back into the rhythms of my life. I was good at my work, both in Service and at the college. My students seemed to like me well enough, and I enjoyed teaching them. My Service work involved surveillance on a handful of local people, adults much older than me, who’d attended the last pro-democracy demonstrations a decade earlier.

It was easy work, observing their activities, listening to their mind-numbingly boring phone calls, meeting regularly with their next-door neighbours, friends, and colleagues. In my cover life, I liked my colleagues at the college. My home was beautiful. The dating pool was small, but I maximized it by dating both women and men. I collected a few local friends and enjoyed their company.

But in the years that followed my parents’ first visit, my mother’s comment—a quiet life in a beautiful place—stayed with me in a way I didn’t understand. It was like a splinter I could ignore for months at a time. Occasionally, in unexpected moments, I was struck by an uneasy sense that I was living the wrong life, or conducting my life in the same way I checked items off my grocery lists, or doing the wrong thing, or in stasis.

Sometime around my fortieth birthday, while my friend Nico was visiting, I broke my glasses. I was picking oranges in the backyard when it happened. I’d taken the glasses off for only a moment, to wipe sweat from my face, but managed to drop them. I stepped back, looking at the ground in the dim greenish light under the orange tree, and heard a quiet snap under my shoe. The nose bridge was broken.

“You got a backup pair?” Nico asked, from the lounge chair. She’d been reading a book.

“In my office at the college,” I said.

“Do you have tape?”

“Probably. Keep reading, I’ve got this.” But all I seemed to have in the house, tape-wise, was a reflective silver tape that my cousin Anton had left behind on a recent visit, when he’d come for a few days with his four-year-old twins, who were forever immersed in complicated art projects. The tape was very narrow but surprisingly strong. I carefully wound it around the broken section, then the right lens popped out, so I added more tape on the right. The glasses felt secure when I put them on, but the overall look was insane. I was staring in the mirror when the doorbell rang.

“Nice repair job, Ibari,” the UPS driver said. He came around often enough that we were on a first-name basis. In those days I did a lot of online shopping.

“Thank you. I just stepped on them.”

“Happens to the best of us,” he said, and raised his device close to my face. “Voice?”

“My voice is my passcode,” I said reflexively, and waited, with the driver, for the signature of my voice and the image of my face to match with my address in the UPS system, so that the driver could leave the small package he held, which I thought was probably my new toothbrush. Instead, his device emitted a sharp warning beep.

“Seems like there’s a problem with the face scan,” the driver said. “Let’s try that again.” He raised the device.

“My voice is my passcode.” The beep came again.

“Try again without the glasses?”

“My glasses have never been a problem,” I said, but took them off anyway. “You’re sure you can’t just leave the package?”

“Without ID verification?” The driver grinned. “I didn’t know you did stand-up. Okay, take three?”

“My voice is my passcode,” I said, with the glasses in my hand, and this time the machine produced a melodic chime.

“There you go,” the driver said. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

I thanked him, and brought the little package in. I felt very strange. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside, just for a second, and I’d seen the machinery hidden behind it. I’d never really thought about facial recognition systems before, because they were everywhere and always had been, my face recorded and uploaded to a central database several times a day since earliest memory. The question was whether the glasses could thwart any facial recognition software, or if it was just a faulty UPS scanner. I returned to the backyard with a feeling of carrying a dangerous secret. I wanted to test my glasses again.

“Nico,” I said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe get some iced tea downtown?”