Barcelona Days

by Daniel Riley

  They took an elevator to the top floor. The ceiling and walls were covered with screw-in light bulbs, whites and reds and blues, that pulsed with the beat of the DJs at center stage. At the bar, Leonard explained there would be an unbroken string of thirty-minute sets until eight in the morning. The bright green numbers at the cash register said 01:32. They were early. The drinks were surprisingly inexpensive. Will and Whitney drank tequila. They drank beers from tiny bottles. They drank vodka mixed with Red Bull. They’d been exhausted, but now they felt further from sleep than they had six hours ago.

  Leonard and Jack were easy to keep an eye on. Jack’s head grazed the light bulbs on the ceiling. They moved from the dance floor to one of the wings, and then to the stage. Will and Whitney danced together near the bar, dancing like they never did at home. They faced forward, moving side by side. Everyone faced forward, bodies toward the DJ. It was the crowd-facings of a political rally. They didn’t look at one another, they looked at the person working the faders and the knobs. Everyone but Jack and Leonard, at least, who locked inward instead. Jack bent over a little awkwardly. He must’ve had his legs spread to lower himself to her height. She fit between his legs and he was low enough then for her to sling her arm over his shoulders, one hand on the back of his neck. Will and Whitney watched them dance. Will and Whitney could sense each other watching them dance. They could see, out of the sides of their eyes, the other shift toward them like the face of a flower to light. They could feel the other drawing in with curiosity, with concern, with whatever the feeling was when you need to see something and can’t stop looking.

  They hadn’t gone out dancing for years—not since Will was in law school, probably, when the two of them would burn off the endless hours of Will’s case law and Whitney’s assistant work with friends who were in the same boat. They’d eat falafel and suck down shots on MacDougal and spill out onto the streets in an all-points-Lower-East stream to the underground rock ’n’ roll bars below Delancey. They’d squeeze in together and dance themselves dripping, until their shirts and pants and dresses sweat through, until somebody lost a shoe. And then they’d wander back, waiting for the cheapest slice of pizza to present itself, so that they might eat a few bites and give the crust to a bum dog, and then head to the law dorms, and hope that the bars downstairs had called it for the night, so that they—the two semi-strivers in question—might be able to fall asleep now that they were through, now that their fun had been had, instead of being forced to listen to all the same keening pop melodies they’d danced to a few hours ago, before it had been time to catch their Zs.

  This wasn’t quite like that. This was electronica. This was another language that at least Whitney didn’t speak. This was a face-off among the DJs, but also a propping up of one another, passing the beat like a baton. People moved spastically in tight quarters, like they were trying to dance their way out of a Porta-Potty. For Will and Whitney, it had kept feeling better until all of a sudden the music made no sense, and it was as though the link had failed between the cheap booze they kept buying and the way it manifested itself in their blood. There was nothing left to do but look around and realize it was a strange place where they didn’t belong. Not just because they were illiterate to the music, not just because they didn’t have any money left, but because, it occurred to them as bluntly as a crashing wave, they were the oldest people there—they were practically thirty.

  Before they left, they found Jack and Leonard in line for the bathroom. They would’ve ordinarily let the night be the night and gone off forever without a trace—their MO at weddings, at dinner parties, at gatherings where they didn’t have the time or energy to make new friends. But there was no telling how long they’d be trapped. It might actually be nice to hang out with someone else in the coming days. And so they all exchanged contacts, and Will explained that he wasn’t always on the network—that he tended to keep his roaming turned off, it was so expensive—and that the best way to be in touch was probably via email. They learned from Leonard that before she’d left Paris, a whole impossibly long day ago, she’d thrown her phone into the Seine. It was the end of something significant, Leonard explained, and she couldn’t possibly need it anymore.

  Will and Whitney and Jack nodded like they understood completely, and then the couples detached and Will and Whitney found themselves riding the elevator down alone, and then spilling outside onto the asphalt, where there was a line fifty deep, now that it was four-thirty in the morning and time for people to really start coming out for the night. Will asked Whitney if she wanted to take a cab, but she said she’d prefer to walk along the water, to let some of the booze run its course while the music in her brain and body dialed down.

  They wound up back at the long flat benches, at the palm trees, at the edge of Barceloneta. The sky was lightening, if vaguely. To the left was the Gehry fish. To the right was that giant hotel, out there on the point like the sail of a sixteenth-century galleon. The light was changing, but it was a matter of grays. The sun was coming up, somewhere behind the blackout shade of the ashcloud. But there was no color, there were no cones at work, just pencil shadings, just gradations. They’d made it to dawn. They had endured.

  They slumped there on one of the backless benches, Whitney’s head on Will’s shoulder, Will’s shoulders pushed way up to his ears. They had stayed out, they had been interesting enough, they had done something new and unexpected and wholly unlike themselves. Whitney rubbed her fingers through Will’s salt-crystalled hair. And though she knew that what he wanted most just then was for her to say it first, to concede her desire to finally go home, she resisted, which he knew she would, which only confirmed for him just how well he knew what was going on in her head, too. Instead, she stood up, in silence, and wondered if he was really going to make her say it, she was too exhausted for words, and he must know what she wanted, anyway.

  They let each other dangle there, they deferred the curtain. He needed her to say it, to name it, to be the dull one, to be the bore—just for a change of pace. He needed to prove his interestingness, his ability to last. They played this game at home sometimes. Who would call it quits first? Who would be the first to go down for the night? They would sometimes fall asleep with the lights on, they were both so stubborn—lights bright, a mutual abeyance. Most of the time, though, Will would pass out right out of the blocks. He was, after all, as deficient as he suspected sometimes, limited in all the ways he feared. Tonight, for once, he had been convincing as the sort of young American who stays out late in Barcelona. He had played the part, and it had even felt easy at times.

  At the party, she had been never less cool than the coolness of her career. Which meant she hadn’t had to be from anywhere in particular. She hadn’t had to speak, as she sometimes did, on behalf of the legislature and laws of the state where her parents happened to live. She hadn’t had to answer questions about Aikman or Cruz or JR. She could simply be American, and quite beautiful, and young enough still. And so she wouldn’t be the one to concede. But she knew that he wouldn’t either, resisting with every fiber in his bones being the one who ended the unending night.

  So instead, she just started back in the direction of the apartment alone. She was barefoot now; her footsteps were light and Will didn’t hear her go. Which was why when he turned around to finally call it, to officially say the words, he saw that she was well down the alley, practically halfway home.

  Kýr

  The black-hot jelly burned through the valley with a speed all its own. It was slow compared with the geyser that had lit the canopy the day before. It was slow compared with the spread of the ash above, the tephra and the smoke. The liquid fire, rather, crept like a slurry down the gentle slopes of the volcano—in one gravitationally destined direction toward the sizzle and the steam of the sea, and in the other toward the flats of the farmland.

  The farmers and fishermen had evacuated without incident but had left behind their homes, the possessions they couldn’t pack away, the p
ermanent things that were too heavy for itinerants. They’d unlocked the fences and encouraged the animals to run. The horses and the pigs had been wise enough to flee, the ducks and geese swift enough to fly. But the cows had stayed behind and grazed as ever, in the shadow of the ridge of their eternal home.

  A cow called Blár, alone and unafraid, approached the edge of a lazy stream, liquid in abundance like she hadn’t encountered since a trip to the far side of the mountain for a festival in her youth. A festival for which she’d worn flowers on her back and a bell around her neck, and been paraded through her town and the next and the one beside that. They’d marched her to the lake in the hills and she’d drunk from the lake until she was full, and then they’d marched her back in the bright light of a summer midnight, and she’d slept as never before.

  She saw the stream approaching, and she hooved up to its edge, even as she felt a great heat all around. As she lowered her mouth to drink, the liquid splashed her legs, and she cried out at the shock of it. But slow as it rolled, the stream was still much too fast for Blár. The hide of her forelegs separated from the muscle, and the muscle peeled from the bone. Her legs crumpled, and her chest and face fell into the fire, cutting her agonizing bellow like an ax, a severing of the sound. There was a final desperate jerk as her flaming head reached for the sky, and a new noise came out this time—an atavistic sound—that resembled most closely the bark of a dog. Embroiled in fire, short on breath: a death cry.

  The ash fell soft as snow all around. The sparse trees of the valley burned like stovetop flames. The air grew hot, unbearably so, each movement in the vents of Holudjöfulsins like the door of an oven opening up. The volcano was finished but the consequences kept coming, kept working over the land, kept running their course. Lava and ash, on earth and in heaven, spread with impunity and took on all comers.

  Monday

  They slept until noon, but it didn’t feel like sleep at all. The apartment had been wide-awake when they got home—lamps on, ash-light through the open windows—and the rooms had been lit up with daybreak. But before they could summon their zombie reserves to lower the blinds, they’d passed out half-clothed, smothering their faces with pillows and sheets for six restless hours.

  Now it was the exhaustion of a transatlantic redeye all over again. The grime in Will’s stubble, the slime in Whitney’s pores. The burning red rings sapping the liquid from their eyes. They’d grumbled and they’d showered and then they hit the street feeling their legs and bodies and heads abuzz. The faint stench of sewage found their nostrils. They hadn’t been hungover in the afternoon in years. They hadn’t been hungover in the morning since 1-2-3.

  It was too late for the commuting crowds and too early for the lunch rush. But there were more working-age people who didn’t seem to be working than they’d seen anywhere in the world besides lower Manhattan. A grave unemployment rate, protests and drum circles at Plaça de Catalunya, panhandling on La Rambla. They passed the unworking in droves, and that didn’t even count the old men who seemed to stroll—alone, driven toward fixed points—three to a block. These were not the European men of graphic T-shirts and jungle-cat jeans, of shiny sunglasses and tangles of jewelry in chest hair. These were the old dignified Catalans. Of reserved judgment and austerity. Of loafers and slacks and moth-eaten cardigans. Cardigans for all seasons. Cardigans for every occasion: for separatist rallies, for lunches of ham and espresso, for football matches late into the evenings. Hunched forward ever so, reading materials clamped and concealed behind their backs. Fresh copies of La Vanguardia and treatises with names like “L’Idea de Europe.” They were like French philosophers without the pretension; like English farmers without the melancholy of the countryside; like Italians of the breezy north without the worship of textiles. These were men who hadn’t realized that they lived on the Mediterranean Sea until development for the Olympics had brought their city back down to the waterfront. Of average-est height, of average-est wealth, of average-est ambition—they were a vision of resolve and of pleasure worth pursuing. They loved coffee, they loved wine. They loved to read the print edition of the newspaper.

  Will and Whitney followed a few of them up the mountain. One peeled off into an empty bar. Another disappeared into a café where he was greeted with roars. A third, with a leashless Labrador retriever, slipped through a small door on the lower slope of Montjuïc that led, they could see when they peeked, into a courtyard like Gram’s. From there, the road steepened abruptly. A transition to sea-facing buildings, of more modest verticals with drying lines. Will and Whitney felt themselves lean back with the road, as steep as a pedestrian could handle. They found the stairs. A hundred to the top. They gained altitude in large gulps. They felt their legs burning and the urge to break, to turn back to look, but denied themselves that pleasure in exchange for the payoff at the top.

  At the clearing, they made faces at each other for their heavy breathing, for the seizure of conversation, for the crimson in their cheeks and the veins in their foreheads. They were still drunk, they were still reckoning with the booze and the strawberry tinge to their acid reflux. They barely even remembered ordering Red Bulls at the club.

  The view was north, astonishing, into the bowl of the city, the strip of sea-blue to the right, the baked oranges of the roofs like pointillist pastels. Each building stood at its near-uniform height. The Gótico jumble nearer the beach, the orderly octagons of the Eixample well off the water—the city plan. Everything looking itself, in harmony, with the exception of the great cathedral, whose completion seemed eternally forbidden.

  The mountain, Montjuïc, was lush. A gondola fell down its backside toward the water. Buses delivered tourists to the castle at its crest. Will and Whitney ordered espressos from a stand in the clearing at the top of the steps. They didn’t say anything that wasn’t essential. They were exhausted, sweaty, a little sick of hearing each other inhale and exhale. They passed the public swimming pool where the diving at the 1992 Olympics had been held—two-and-a-halfs off the platform in the foreground, the sweeping panorama of the city behind. Will bent himself around a barricade to take a crummy photo with his phone. The ashcloud had sealed impenetrably over the lambent blues of those famous diving shots. The ashcloud had trapped the whole of the city under tinfoil.

  They found the line at the Fundació Miró, their destination. They hadn’t been able to squeeze it in during their shorter stay, so they had put it on the napkin list. The building was all flats and crescents, unshowy curves in glass and concrete that looked composed of the limited building blocks of a play set. The structure spread leisurely out from the entrance into a series of spacious rooms and terraces. The floors were made of a buffed brown tile. The whole place seemed deliberately run-down, architected to take the piss out of the expectation of the sort of art-induced reverie Whitney was always seeking. Here, there was no pinch of anxiety about saying the wrong thing or stepping into the wrong room at the wrong moment. It was no wonder there were children everywhere, lounging on the floors, making their own art to match the artist’s. Children spreading out into wider shapes in larger rooms still, some drifting off to sleep. In the new world beneath the volcano, life had been paused indefinitely for Will and Whitney, but it had gone on for everyone else here, which meant work, which meant school, which meant field trips to art museums, and to this place in particular. It was their home, their city, their museu—it so very much belonged to them.

  They paid for their tickets and drifted in different directions, into separate rooms. Rooms of arcs and moons, of primary colors. On the canvases, Will detected a shakiness of line, a shimmer from the application of paint that betrayed a human hand. There was a serenity to the works, an in-suck that imparted a quiet on body and mind that approached, for Will, the lift he got half an hour after a run. But that pleasant helium lasted only until he ran smack into something he wasn’t prepared for.

  On the far wall of the farthest room, alone and in strange still windowless light, a perfectly pleasan
t mural transported Will suddenly to the lobby of his office, to the abstract monstrosity that hung on the accent wall opposite the security check-in counter. The mural at Turtle Bay Tower was meant to signify to all employees that right here, in this most select office building, there existed abundant exposure to external culture and a well-balanced life: a life of humanism, a life of art. The mural was also meant to more literally represent a map of the hubs and spokes of connectivity between the media conglomerate and the law firm that represented it globally—cartographed right there on the wall for all who gazed upon it. The mural had become the centerpiece of Will’s interminable days at work, passing it six or eight times each morning, afternoon, and evening, depending on how often he went for coffee or food or fresh air; depending on how often he felt even one more minute at his desk might result in sudden capitulation to death.

  He wasn’t supposed to be a lawyer. Lawyer had been a dirty word in his house growing up. And yet one lazy grade after another in the weed-out courses in college had led him through the laundry list of pre-professional tracks he knew he’d never possessed the facility for anyway. And so it was for all the wrong reasons—he’d followed a beautiful new acquaintance into the lecture hall, on the off chance that they might spend the semester studying together—that Will wound up in the undergraduate Constitutional Law lecture in his final fall semester. And it was perhaps only fate showing its face that the afternoon he received his first eviscerating critique in an Intro to Screenwriting course he also received near-perfect marks on his conlaw midterm. The mastery of the facts, the creative application of available materials, had more in common with the work he did in summers building houses with his father than anything he’d encountered in the classroom before. Like an attorney, Will’s father was hired to execute on someone else’s objective, but he got his reputation for the way he solved the puzzle. Even his father’s motto—We’re expensive, but we’re slow—sounded to Will like a lawyer’s boast.