It would be a parade of ghosts from my past, too, and I wasn’t sure I liked the thought of that. Still, I needed the money if I wanted to keep my apartment. The tour guide business had been bad of late.

And, oh, the dead, the ghosts, cataloged but never accounted for among the living. The people I have known who thought they knew me. Each astonished face I tracked down vied more seriously for the winner of the most-startled-Janice-is-alive contest. Each astonished face would be a way to shore up Lake’s ego by showing what a mediocrity Insert First & Last Name had turned out to be.

Most of them were people who had been oddly absent whenever I’d been in any kind of real trouble, coincidentally enough. During the ceremonial slitting of the wrists. During the gallery’s financial woes. While I was in the hospital reconciling myself to the empty space where once five toes had cavorted like penned-up rutting pigs.

No, if it were to be a party of my peers (of veneers and sneers, more like), then it would just be my luck that I uncovered “acquaintances” or “not quite friends” or outright enemies. Most of my lovers had vanished during the war—they’d survived me, but, still, somehow, the sight of bloodshed scared them—seeking out less eventful lives in Stockton, Morrow, or Nicea. Bonmot and Sybel had both died, of course, and Sirin—through his writing—had ascended to a place where he was, in a way, untouchable. Sybel, of course, was by my side throughout all of the planning for the party; how could I possibly plan a party without him?

When I think of the people I knew back then, I realize that each of us had such private, personal, and immediate experiences that discussion with anyone about them, let alone achieving some kind of joint catharsis, would be meaningless—like a Blythe Academy reunion that invited only strangers from different years. The jargon used might have some kind of similarity, but beyond that, an aching void. That had been the whole point of the New Art—pour all of that empathy into the work, leaving only the surface as a connection to other people. I wonder now if any of it was worth it to any of us.

Still, despite reservations—and, trust me, I had reservations about many of them—I managed to exhume enough of Lake’s long-dormant, sleep-tinged, hibernating friends and their dusty, packed-in-storage-for-decades artwork to earn my salary and be kept on for the party.