Page 97 of Exit Party

“What does motherfucker mean?” the little girl asked.

When Ibari left, Kareem took a shower and changed into his double’s clothes. He found the children in the kitchen, eating oranges and watching cartoons on a tablet, and he felt panic rising in his chest. What did they need? The girl—Marlowe—was tiny. Her hair hadn’t been brushed in at least a couple of days, he saw now. No, it had been brushed in the front but not in the back. In the back it was matted. What was he supposed to do with two children? The children and Kareem stared at each other.

“Do you have a hairbrush?” he asked Marlowe. “Maybe a comb?”

“Brushing her hair is my job,” Samir said gravely.

“You’re four,” Kareem said.

“I turned five.”

“How’d you like to just watch TV,” Kareem said, “and I’ll take care of Marlowe’s hair?”

“Yeah,” Samir said.

It took an hour to get the knots out of Marlowe’s hair. When had it last been brushed? No, a better question was why a five-year-old was in charge of brushing it. He left them there afterward, to explore the house. There were three bedrooms, but it seemed that all three were in use by the children’s father. One was a home office, and then there was the storage room. The storage room had unicorn wallpaper, and the ceiling light fixture was shaped like a cloud. Now there were untidy heaps of a woman’s clothes, a woman’s shoes, several boxes with NICO written on them in all-caps. Tomorrow, he decided, when the children were in school, he’d restore their bedrooms to them.

That first afternoon and evening were long and strange. They played tag in the garden. Kareem read aloud to them for a long time, book after book. They watched more cartoons. Kareem cooked frozen chicken nuggets and made a salad for dinner.

“Do you know where our mom is?” Samir asked, at dinner. At the word Mom, Marlowe stopped eating and looked at the floor.

“No,” Kareem said. A year had passed since his party, and by now Nico could have been anywhere, or dead. “But I think she’s trying to come back.” This had to be true, he reasoned. He saw Nico/Gloria in these children’s faces. The boy had Kareem’s eyes. His double’s eyes, he told himself, but was that not the same thing? A wild thought occurred to him: if he was these children’s father’s genetic double, and Nico was Gloria’s genetic double, then these two children were the siblings of his and Gloria’s baby. He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Are you going to take care of us now?” Samir asked.

I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what I’m doing.

“I’m taking care of you now,” Kareem said. Trying not to think about Nico stumbling out of his party into a dream version of the city she knew, the horror of being jolted from this orderly place into that other, vastly wilder Los Angeles.

“You’re nicer than our other dad,” Samir said.

On the third day, Kareem took the children to the park by the ocean. He’d known a version of this place from rare forays to the west side in the city he’d come from, but here the park was much larger. In his city of origin, this park was a narrow green strip above the beach, a ribbon of palm trees and grass between a wide street and a sheer bluff, with the Santa Monica Pier gleaming and spinning like a collection of toys in the near distance. Here the pier was longer, or so it seemed to him, and the green strip was a field with palm trees that extended inland for the equivalent of several blocks, with fountains and playgrounds.

“Can we go to the swings?” Samir asked.

“Sure. Let’s do it.” The swings were some distance away across the green. The three of them walked there together, orbiting each other clumsily. He kept almost tripping over Marlowe, who kept stopping unexpectedly to look at things. What was he to these children? A babysitter, he decided. That was the only sane way to think about it. He stood behind and between two swings and pushed both kids, Marlowe with his left hand and Samir with his right. They loosened up while they were swinging, as if they were creatures meant to live in air, in motion, and he’d returned them to their preferred natural element. Marlowe was laughing now, and this made Samir laugh too. After an eternity had passed, Kareem’s arms were too tired to continue—if he spent time with small children regularly, he thought, he’d have to start lifting weights—and he stopped.

“More!” Marlowe shouted. “Swing more!”

“Do you like ice cream?” he asked in mild desperation.

“I do like ice cream,” Marlowe said.

“We never get ice cream!” Samir said. There was a little ice cream shop installed here in the park, a round building nearby with a spire on the roof and a steel ice cream cone atop the spire. The cone glinted in the sunlight. Kareem ordered ice cream for the three of them, then sparkling water in pink glass bottles. The clerk rotated a screen to face him, and there was a graphic of two eyes. Most people here paid for everything by means of an iris scan, Ibari had told him that, the biometrics connected to a bank account, but this would only work, he realized, if the system thought he was his double.

For an agonizing moment he stared at the screen, not breathing, then there was a soft chime, a green check mark, and the ice cream and sparkling water were his. He felt like he was dreaming. Who are these children? Their little hands reaching for him, for the ice cream. They went back outside and sat on a bench for a while in the sun. After the ice cream, Samir found a Frisbee that had been forgotten nearby and they played for what seemed like a very long time, after which Marlowe said she was hungry, so Kareem bought sandwiches. Was this his life now? Why did all the sandwiches here seem to involve sliced radishes?

The three of them sat together on a bench again, and the kids seemed happy and at ease. Kareem himself was happier than he could remember being in a long time. When he could forget the strangeness, there was such peace in these small actions. They ate their sandwiches while the sun dropped and the light shifted into the golden hour.

“Where do you live when you’re not with us?” Samir asked.

“Nearby,” Kareem said.

“I can do cartwheels,” Samir said.

“Show me!” But then Kareem looked up, and Ibari was approaching. Kareem had a sense that she’d been studying the three of them for some time.

“Samir,” Kareem said, “you’re pretty big.”