Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  “Oh, one final confession…” It was Will. “I should tell the whole truth before we leave, and admit that I downplayed it—all of it, unfortunately. Each was, in fact, the best I’ve ever had.”

  Whitney laughed, an overwhelming release of pent-up tension. “I downplayed it, too.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “‘A new record,’” she said.

  “A new record,” he said. “Jesus.”

  A piece of chocolate cake arrived, as though their waitress had understood where they’d wound up. And with the cake, the check. All that food, chef’s choice, for half as much as they’d expected. What a meal. What a final night. What a way to cinch up the experiment. It went as well as they could’ve hoped. A vacation. A revelation. An eradication of the gnawing questions.

  And now they were ready. They would leave in the morning. They would return once again to the apartment they shared, to the places where they existed both separately and together, to the country and to the life. They would be married in ten to fourteen months, on a cliff or in a meadow or near the windows of a restaurant that didn’t cost too much to buy out. They would pick up the societal soldering iron, and carefully, consciously, fuse themselves together for good. They’d acted as they’d intended. They’d done what they needed to do. They’d played by the rules and they’d come clean. Now they would walk to the Airbnb, wake up early, catch a cab to the airport, and settle into their seats for the plane ride back to New York. The trip was finally over. It was time to go home.

  Holudjöfulsins

  The blackness is first, the puff of pumice and methane and ash, the dense clouds gathering over the vent, thick as balls of yarn. The breath condenses when it touches the freezing northern sky. A diffuse hot rain falls all around. Then there is fire, the first sprigs of neon pinking the undersides of the black mass. Orange threads from the overflowing cone extend in all directions. With the sound of the sky splitting in two, there comes, unsubtly, a rising red column, the dense vertical, the ultimate expulsion that seems, at its height, not to be lifting from the earth but rather pouring from the clouds like molten steel in a mill. The column holds on its true plumb for eternity-spanning seconds before it slips from its height, wavering like a slackened line, and falls as red rain back to the mouth of the volcano. The fountain reduces itself to a stewing boil and the overspill comes slower, a steady slip of the rim, orange and black icing streaming down the slopes, creeping to the valley floor and ultimately to the sea. There is for half an hour a deafening rumbling of thunder, matched in volume only by the sizzling of the lava at the surf’s edge. Ash falls like pillow-fight feathers. There is ash all around. Ash, and then steam, rising from the waves that pound the ragged shore.

  The fire subsides in the evening, but the ash tumbles out tirelessly for days. It rises in ever-replenished walls of soot, puddling up in the heights above the vent. And then it spreads. Wider. Farther. Drifting as swiftly as a scent into unoccupied air. The ash moves on currents in the sky. It passes into the virgin emptinesses of the troposphere. It finds new altitudes, new canopies, new expanses of sky when there is nowhere else to go. The ashcloud speeds across the reach, darkening land and sea, a blanket of blackness stitched extra tight, indifferent to the lives of the living things below.

  II.

  Volcano Barcelona

  Sunday

  Will and Whitney woke up an hour later than they’d planned. Instead of setting an alarm, they had relied each morning of the trip on the fade-up of the sunrise that flooded the apartment. The place was spacious, twice what they had in New York at what they knew to be half the price. They were Airbnb-ing their own studio while they were away, after all. Here there were big simple rooms with not enough furniture and a sound system the owner had struggled to demo at check-in. Tall ceilings and wide windows onto the street. Sky and trees and strung-up laundry on rooftops—and towering above them all, the rainbow-scaled Nouvel in the neighborhood to the north.

  The apartment had been a placid base camp for four days. It had been still. No sharp edges, no nerves. But this morning they’d shot up in a panic, their hands grasping for phones. They’d blown the grace period for the international flight. They’d be cutting it close even if they somehow got out the door in fifteen minutes. Before Will had rolled over in bed, Whitney was across the bedroom, dirty laundry flying from the floor of the closet into her butterflied suitcase.

  Will was still flat, staring at his phone.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “I think our flight’s canceled.”

  “What?”

  “They emailed a few hours ago. I just got the notice. Red strike through the time of our flight. But doesn’t say postponed. Let me call.”

  He was put on hold.

  “How the fuck is it so dark out?” he said to Whitney, who was rushing still.

  The wait for the next available team member was “…for-ty min-utes.”

  Since entering the working world, he’d suffered those in his life who lived to discuss their airline-loyalty programs. Recently the subject had elicited more genuine excitement among friends and colleagues than movies, politics, sports, or streaming. Platinum. Agate. Elite. The systems had their languages, their incentive structures, their marginal benefits. Will knew picking a loyalty program was the prudent thing to do, but he worried it would only make him more boring than he suspected he already was, joining his colleagues in their deadly speech-codes of medallion-qualification miles and fare classes. Nonetheless, he coveted the ultimate benefit: the assurance that at a certain level of status, every phone call, no matter the hour, would be tended to by a real live person. A new dull passion was worth it if he could guarantee getting a human being during an emergency.

  “Our flight is canceled,” Will said. “And I have no status.”

  “I know that,” Whitney said from the bathroom. “If anyone knows how little status you have, it’s me.”

  “I” he said. “It’s I.”

  “It’s me,” she said, certain at first, but feeling that certainty halve, and then halve again.

  They’d have to go to the airport and get the answers direct. And so they packed as quickly as they could. They tended to move at similar speeds, on similar schedules. They woke up with each other and tried to turn out the lights at the same time. They had read that there were such things as larks and owls and sometimes one of each fell in love at their own peril. But they seemed to be calibrated in almost all the ways that mattered.

  Outside it was socked in. They hadn’t noticed the full extent of the weather. It reminded Will of the foggiest days at the beach growing up. Soft streetlights were boring through the haze at low heights. But no suggestion of sky. Way up was a yellow glow that slipped down a gradient into white, a thick white that threw one’s relationship to space all out of whack. It was like looking out the window of an airplane during a banked turn and not knowing which way was the sun and which way the ground. Wobbling through the fog toward the cab made Will think of the word yaw. He should’ve been a pilot. The whole effect of the low light had him queasy and tripping over his feet.

  They made the thirty-minute drive in twenty. The streets were empty. The boulevards were slick. The curbside at the international terminal was cluttered with passengers who looked like people with nowhere to go. Inside it was worse.

  The international terminal was stacked up hundreds deep at the desks. The dense fog. This weather, apparently. If it was all just some system glitch—if everything was indeed good to go—there was no way they’d get to the front of the line in time to get an answer and make their flight. And so they found a roving representative and asked her what was going on.

  “You haven’t heard?” the woman said.

  Will reached uncertainly for his phone. He hadn’t expected the reason to be something they could’ve heard about.

  “There’s been a…” the woman said.

  “Cancellation?” Will said.<
br />
  “Computer crash?” Whitney said.

  “There’s been a volcano,” the woman said. “The volcano in Iceland that”—she made an eruption with both hands—“a few days ago. It is worse now. It kept going. They thought it is small, but now it is big. The cloud it made, it is into Europe. London, first, yesterday. Today, France and Espanya. The howdoyousay…” She trickled with her fingers.

  “Rain,” Will said.

  “Ash,” Whitney said.

  “The ash. There is no way for planes to go. Because of the ash.”

  “A volcano,” Will said.

  The woman squinted at him. She seemed skeptical still that they hadn’t heard.

  “We’ve been on vacation…” Whitney said, by way of explanation. “We tried to take a couple days away from our phones…” The truth was that they had skimped on international coverage. Or rather that Will had insisted they not pay for the exorbitant daily roaming. And so they pulled up their maps and email only when absolutely necessary. They’d spent yesterday distracted anyway, fixated on their dinner all morning and afternoon, and had passed out after the confessions like a pair of tension knots poked by needles.

  “The volcano has been a problem before, but never like this,” the woman said. “Is what they say on TV. No flights. Barcelona. Madrid. Paris. London. Not like this since nine-eleven.”

  “No flights,” Will said, still catching up. “How are we supposed to get home? What are we supposed to do?”

  “This is…” the woman said, gesturing to the crowds, to the chaos in evidence, to the wider crisis that was obviously greater than the concerns of Will and Whitney’s small, specific circumstances. The lines in the woman’s forehead suggested that she needed them to start thinking in grander terms, beyond themselves. That if they were going to understand and she was going to be permitted to carry on with more pressing matters, they would need to calibrate to the scale here. “There is no news. No instruction. You can see yourself. You can wait in line to speak to someone, but the only thing we know right now is no flights.”

  “But how do they handle the rebooking?” Will said. “The cost of—”

  “Don’t look so…” Whitney said, cutting him off, impatient. “They’re not gonna make you pay for new tickets, okay?”

  “So, tomorrow, then?” Will said, ignoring her, and reaching for the woman’s shoulder as she slid away from them.

  “It is impossible to say,” she said, halting again. “Maybe today. Maybe three days. Maybe a week. They say the volcano still…” The hands again, erupting.

  “Iceland,” Will said.

  “Incredible, no?” The woman smiled and her eyes drifted to the ceiling, to the wavy ribs of the roof, to the luminous architecture. There was a light glowing beneath the woman’s skin. There was wonder in her face so plain that it lifted her chin.

  “I still don’t totally understand what we’re supposed to do,” Whitney said.

  “Maybe you wait in the line like the others?” the woman said, smiling and turning to leave finally.

  The shape of the problem was letting itself in. Whitney thanked the woman and started rolling her bag to the end of the check-in line. They’d given themselves over to it. Will turned on his network coverage. It drew a foreign carrier that appeared in the upper corner of his screen. He dialed customer service and the wait was over an hour now. He hung up and opened a browser. The volcano led the news on the Times and on the Guardian. The volcano was trending in pole position on Twitter. Pictures of the volcano. Pictures of the ashcloud. Retweets of up-close images and faraway images, taken by farmers and fishermen and satellites. Everywhere the cauliflower plumes. Retweets of maps. Retweets of thoughts and prayers. Retweets of groundings in Munich and Milan. Holudjöfulsins, it was called. The Devil’s Hole. They scuffed forward in line.

  Will messaged the owner of their Airbnb through the app. He asked, on the off-est chance, if she had availability for tonight. Right away he saw the response bubbles. She said the apartment was not available, but that according to the information she had, the new renters may be in the same trouble as Will and Whitney. They were coming from Athens. There were no outs from Barcelona, but no ins, either. Will and Whitney were welcome to return to the apartment until she got word that the others were in fact en route. It was, Will remarked, the same convenient arrangement that had worked out for them at the restaurant the night before.

  It turned out to be as bad as the representative had suggested. The woman at the desk even showed them a map on her display. The picture looked worse than the map on CNN’s site. More aggression in the spread. Greater-seeming impenetrability. The way the winds had swung it, England was sealed beneath an even thicker ceiling than usual. From there it followed a path down the Atlantic coast of France, over the Pyrenees, and into Spain, widening like a mudslide as it went. The effects Europe-wide were greater than they had understood, too—more damage, greater disruption. A second tine of ashcloud had blown north over Scandinavia; groundings in Oslo and Copenhagen and Stockholm. It looked like it would reach Russia the same time it hit Portugal. Maybe today, even.

  The best the desk agent could do was add Will and Whitney to the list in the system. The purgatory to which they’d collectively been condemned. Because of their fare class, the agent was happy to report that they would be placed in Clearing Zone 6—which was, she explained when Will asked if that was good or bad, at least ahead of Clearing Zones 7 and 8.

  “So…come back tomorrow?” Will said.

  “Oh, no no. No no no. The line, of course, is on the computer. Not a real standby at the airport. I’m not allowed to guess on these things. But if I have to share, the earliest would be two days. What they say on the news is two days to…five, six, seven days.”

  Will and Whitney looked at each other and their eyes widened. All around them travelers were pacing, raising their voices with the agents, gesturing with their hands in hyperanimation. Wordlessly, Will and Whitney met the moment at last, accepting that there was nothing to be done, that no amount of effortful human unpleasantness could get them on an airplane today. Whitney pursed her lips and gave a little puff of resignation, the way she’d seen the women of Western Europe do it. She’d been practicing for days, and here, here it came out before she’d even thought it, like speaking a foreign language brainlessly for the first time. It pleased her immensely and she felt convinced that things would work out okay for them in the end.

  They thanked the agent. They hailed a cab. They rode back into the city beneath the infinite edgeless sky.

  The Greeks had indeed been grounded, the owner of the apartment messaged. They were canceling their trip to Barcelona altogether. The apartment was Will and Whitney’s for at least a few more days, then.

  It could have been so much worse. They had jobs, of course, but they had an excuse now. An international incident. A seismic event of superseding magnitude. What could anyone say? They had the limitless Wi-Fi of their adopted apartment. They had laptops with conversion plugs. Coworkers would cover for them, at least for a couple days. And it wasn’t as though they had left children back home with their parents. No cats or dogs or tropical fish. No pending lawsuits or shooting schedules that couldn’t be monitored from the couch of the rental. The houseplant in their studio might die, but they could ask their renters to water it on their way out the door and to just leave the keys at the bodega on the corner. There was nothing left for them to do but extend the trip and pray the internet never cut out. What a convenient week for the world to end.

  Before they left the apartment again, they emailed their parents and their bosses. Will held his breath as he checked for an email that he knew deep down wouldn’t have come through early on a Sunday morning. Whitney spent an extra-long time drafting an email of her own, and then posted a picture of the view outside, a picture in natural gray scale that struck a contrast with the view she’d posted the day before, all blues and greens and creams of lucent May. The ashcloud was white in spots and yellow in o
thers, but at all times shadowless-seeming. No dimensions, no curves or ends or holes through which they could spy the heights. The light was soft, the whole world diffuse. It was uncanny but not exactly ominous. It was like winter. Winter but with the ideal temperature. She posted the photo of the view with the volcano icon and the grimace emoji.

  They read more about the volcano on their way out the door. How it had last erupted in 1961. How scientists had been waiting impatiently for it to go again for decades. It was a thing Icelanders somehow lived with. Ash and rock and orange-hot lava occasionally spilling into farmland like batter into a cake sheet. There were evacuations from the valley at the volcano’s base and from the fishing town on the water. There was likely extensive destruction. But miraculously no one had died. Not yet, at least. The villagers near Holudjöfulsins had somehow known in advance and fled. It was the one everyone had suspected would be next up. And now it would be finished soon. The experts were fifty percent certain that it would be over tomorrow. But the ashcloud would take days to dissipate, maybe even a week. They couldn’t predict the winds.

  They had a free Sunday at their disposal. In their four days, they’d done the things in Barcelona they’d heard they had to do, which meant now they could really start seeing the city. Let Clearing Zones 1 through 5 go on ahead of them and wait out their purgatory at the airport. They’d gladly stay trapped in the city center. They walked down to El Born to toast the convenience of their inconvenience. They chose a bar on a tree-shaded plaza because of the almonds in the window. The server said the almonds were for the cooks, but she brought some over anyway. They ate almonds and cheese and tomatoes and drank glasses of Moritz near a projection of the soccer match. Barça was on the road, in Bilbao, and it looked even worse there. The cameras were heavily fuzzed as they shot through the particulate. It looked the way a sporting event does after fireworks or flares. Whitney couldn’t believe they were putting players out in it, those invaluable pink lungs. They’d never have allowed such a thing when she played. It got worse as the minutes ticked up. And when Barcelona scored, Will and Whitney could tell only by the pitch of the announcer’s voice. There was nothing to see until they cut to a secondary camera on the sideline, and the striker who’d claimed the goal jammed a thumb in his mouth in tribute to his baby.