by Daniel Riley
He was returned to his body when he heard the clamor in the valley. The fishermen were whistling at him. They were waving their arms. They were a mile away, but the sound carried up the slopes. He fixed them through his viewfinder. They were pointing back toward the shore. He gathered his equipment and packed his lenses. He slung his cameras over his shoulder and turned to start down the slope. But before he set off, he gazed up one last time at the belly of the cloud. At the graveness and the density. At the infinite-seeming blackness and the immeasurable weight.
“Do you have any idea how much bloody trouble you’ve caused?” he shouted. And he laughed like the last man on Earth. Then he turned his back to the ashcloud and trotted down the slope beside the runways of rock to the sea.
Tuesday
Will spent the first part of his morning on the phone with the airline and got a human for the first time yet. It would be another day of nothing. But, as they were sure he’d heard, it wasn’t a matter of accumulation anymore so much as dispersion. Things were socked in. It was still heavy. They needed some assistance from the heavens. A high-pressure system could make tomorrow a possibility. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that—just don’t hold your breath.
Whitney had left for a run over an hour ago. She’d woken up before Will and jumped out of bed and cut over to the arch and down past the zoo and over the tracks they’d crossed the other night as a company of four. She ran along the beach in one direction, then back again in the other, all the way out to the promontory with the hotel that sat raised like a sail.
Will waited for Whitney to return. He read and reread the same dumb pages of his book. He checked his email: no new nothing from the producer. Maybe today, now that everyone would be back from the long holiday weekend. He went out for coffee but didn’t go far—just across the street, worried that Whitney might get home and, finding him out with the key, grow only more incensed than she already was. He brought his book with him. He drank a café con leche quickly. He ate a chocolate croissant and then a second. He swept up his mess of flakes and felt sick with sugar and walked back across the street with his head down and almost got hit by a garbage truck. Two men hung off the back and another drove. They were handsome and tan and had clean uniforms and the same haircuts as the soccer players. Will bet they made a living wage. He bet it was enough to get on happily, pridefully, in this city of extreme reasonableness. He couldn’t quit his job, could he? He’d made more than she had at first, and then she’d rocketed past him. She’d deferred her loans but had been paying them off quickly now. She was just comfortable in a way he wasn’t. She didn’t think about it incessantly anymore. But even with the gap, he insisted on splitting everything down the middle. He couldn’t afford to regress to zero. The two men on the back waved at him and hopped off to clear the human-size recycling receptacle on the forty-fived corner of the city block. Everywhere people looked pleased with the temperature, with the state of the city’s sidewalks and trees. They didn’t seem bothered by the volcano. He finally understood in his gut—unless that was just the sugar surge—their collective desire for secession. He understood it on some level in California and it was beginning to make sense on another in Catalonia. It was beautiful all around. Everyone seemed content. Fucking Whitney. Fucking Will. Why were they wasting their morning apart in this place of immeasurable pleasantness?
Whitney stretched on the beach in front of the hotel. She watched three women with a decade on her spread out on mats near the water and salute the steel-trap sky. She spread her legs and pressed her palms into the sand and heard a wolf whistle behind her. She ignored it and then heard it again and flipped around with acid in her eyes, only to find a woman whistling at her daughter to get away from the gulls in the garbage can. The mother recognized that Whitney had turned, and she smiled sweetly. Whitney smiled back and then brushed the sweat from her exposed stomach. She wrung out her ponytail and took a deep breath. She spread her feet to match the width of her shoulders and straightened her spine as though she were being reeled in by a fisherman. She dusted the sand off her legs. They were thicker than she liked—soccer legs still, only stiffer in the joints. But they were effective, thirty miles a week. She brushed off her stomach again, some sand stuck to her sticky skin. Her stomach was hard and flat, and possessed a pleasing deflated-ness—she hadn’t eaten since the snacks at dinner. She put her hands on her ribs, finding their individual frets beneath her skin, fingering their notes. She breathed deeply and felt her cage expand. She felt hungry and it was energizing. She’d woken up ashamed of how the night had ended. The rage on the walk and then the silence that had choked them to sleep in their shared bed. She’d burned it off in the first hour, running it out of herself, but then she’d pushed it farther, harder, pushed herself into the ground, and now she felt good and empty, but a little sick, too. It was growing darker by the minute. The yoga women were rolling up their mats. The ashcloud was about to break open, she could tell. She was several miles from the apartment. She would be caught out here and need to hail a cab. She followed the women into the lobby of the hotel.
Will made coffee. He checked in with work. He reviewed his boss’s careful recommendations to the magazine now that his boss was back from his island and willing to do his job again. Will proposed changes to some new contracts. He sent a response to an agent. He read the next email slowly, without comprehension. He started on another and then, as though tied to the crack of thunder out the window, he realized that he might not ever be able to read another contract again. It seemed he might not be able to read and comprehend anything at all ever again, all those electronic words were so scrambled as they traveled from his eyes to his brain. There was zero sensemaking. There were rights and there was money and there was Will in the middle, with not a drop left in the tank. He couldn’t do it for even another day. It had started to pour outside. Where the hell was she? He was worried now. He was enraged.
It was cool inside the lobby. It was pink and purple, lit like a bachelorette party. She went to the bathroom to dry herself off with some paper towels. She admired her stomach and arms in the mirror—different, she was certain, from what she’d seen in the mirror when she woke up. Nine miles of sweat. Nine miles of compression. She needed a glass of water and took the elevator to the sky lounge. It was ten in the morning, but the place was half full. Because it was morning, because they were serving breakfast, she didn’t stick out as sorely in her workout clothes as she suspected she might have. The woman behind the bar filled a glass with her water gun and Whitney took a seat by the window. They were on the twenty-eighth floor. It felt like the same raw height as the terrace at the Miró. But the rain seemed to have brought the ashcloud closer. They were amidst it, inside the cloud, mixed up with the Icelandic ash that had traversed thousands of miles. She felt like she could reach out and touch it through the window. From her side of the lounge, it was water and cloud forever; but from the other side, she saw as she approached the glass, it was a look back toward the city. Through the black mist she could make out the Nouvel office building with its rainbow scales, the unfinished cathedral, the towers near the water that had been built for the Olympics, the ones she imagined Jack living in. Jack and Jenna probably weren’t so far away. She tried to guess which floor they were fucking on.
Will stretched out full-bodied on the leather couch in front of the television. The blackness from the storm pressed heavily against the windows. He felt unpleasant pricks on his skin each time a new email pinged his inbox. He needed something to airlift him from the corner he’d painted himself into. But he knew he wouldn’t solve it now. Now was a time for staying hidden, for huddling up beneath the ashcloud. Now was a time for watching the ten-year-old girls’ soccer game on the FC Barcelona channel. The game was slow, but they held their shape on the field. No swarming. Long lanes, diagonal balls, rapid one-touch passes in crowded space. He imagined little Whitney, dominating on the wing, and he loved her again. Precision crosses from the flank. Crunching tac
kles in open play. He imagined the long flat eternities in Euless and Richardson and Haney, running, lifting, training each day in pain and solitude for the opportunity to get out of Dallas. Barcelona scored twice in fifteen minutes and he flipped it off. He couldn’t do anything for longer than fifteen minutes anymore. He went to the bed and dialed into their streaming services, but none of them apparently worked in Spain. He tried to sleep but was wired from the coffee. He flipped out of bed and did three sets of push-ups and then connected to the Wi-Fi to text Whitney. A message popped up from a number he didn’t recognize. It was Jack. They were getting a bite in the early afternoon, if they wanted to meet up. Even after last night, even after all that. Still nothing from Whitney. He stared at their last text exchange, a packing list from before they left New York. Converters. Passports. Swimsuits. Shades. They hadn’t needed to text while they were here; they’d been together the whole time. He listened to the rain pound the window. He texted: You okay?
You okay? The text popped up on her screen as her water glass was refilled by the bartender. She was young and extra friendly and she looked a little like Jewel. Whitney was tapped into the hotel Wi-Fi, checking her email, composing a reply to a message she’d received overnight. “Would you like anything else?” the bartender said, lingering, and Whitney looked up a little flustered, and reflexively said no thank you. But before the bartender went back to chopping her limes, Whitney said, “Actually…” and ordered an Aperol spritz. It was voluminous, filled to the brim with ice, and bright in ways it seemed the outside never would be again. She was so thirsty still. She watched the waterline recede as she sucked her straw. Got caught in this rain and waiting it out in a hotel. Be home when I can. She watched his bubbles. They’d appear and then disappear and then appear and then disappear, and finally what came through was: K
He did push-ups again until his arms failed. He did sit-ups until his tailbone was sore. He had the taste of stale butter and chocolate and steamed milk in his mouth. He finished a set and burped and felt like throwing up. He had a buzz in his extremities, a healthy strain. But he had a new surge in his blood as well, the new anxiety that no battery of body-weight exercises could neutralize: Would he get what he needed at another law firm? Would he get it anywhere in New York? Who hadn’t he thought of yet that could use a lawyer, or at least someone with a law degree? He could serve a startup, a place with equity, a place where his long hours meant skin in the game. He’d rest and vest. He’d cash out. He’d be tethered to the new economy rather than the old, dying one. He wrote an email to the producer asking if there was any news. He sent the email and regretted it instantly. The stink of desperation. He’d broken his own code. Maybe it was time for the nuclear option. Maybe it was time to ask Whitney for help. To hand over the secret project to the wife-to-be who knew more than anyone else about what worked and what didn’t. She had her things. She had her things that made him crazy. But she was going to be one of the best there was at the thing she’d chosen to do. He knew it. It made him impossibly proud. It made him corrosively envious. It was like his father had bored into him: It didn’t really matter what work you did, so long as you were great. Talent above all else. God, Whitney. It made his heart beat faster. He couldn’t hand her a draft and sit there through her polite defanged criticism, her pulled punches, her encouraging nudges. He didn’t have any business touching those rails. He’d been good at law school. He was good at the rules, the regulations, the statutes, even the interpretation. But he’d had no business writing the script. He was a lawyer. He could at least do something with it. He could work trials. He could clerk for a judge. He was smart enough, he believed. He could be a judge someday. But first he needed to get back to basics. He needed to remember how to read emails and documents and finish the job he still had. He couldn’t walk away cold. Not yet. They were to get married soon. They might even try to buy an apartment someday, if anyone their generation was able to do that still. He must contribute half, no matter what. He must finish his work the right way before blowing things up. Maybe he could get fired. Downsized. Severance and all, he’d been there almost three years now. He knew it was important to tune in to the frequency of the universe—to listen to where it said he should go. He thought of the rules of growing up in the ocean, of swimming in riptides: Let it pull you, don’t fight it, don’t tire yourself out paddling against the insurmountable currents. Let the forces push you to the better place you’re meant to be. God, he loved California. Maybe that was what was next. He went to the fridge and cracked the last beer. It would soften things. The fuzz would make him focus. He halved it. He opened another counterproposal from an agent. He read two pages. He opened a new browser. NYTimes. ESPN. SCOTUSblog. He googled Jenna Leonard, but weirdly nothing on their Jenna Leonard came up. He opened a different browser and went to one of his porn sites. The videos streamed slowly. It would never load all the way on the weak Wi-Fi. He toggled back to the marked-up contract, made it another couple pages. He did some more sit-ups. He started the shower. He brought his beer in with him, finished it while the water heated up. He jerked off in the shower, imagining the girl from the Young Lawyers Night slowly turning herself around without his asking; imagining Kelly Kyle making eye contact from between his legs; imagining Whitney in the body-slackened haze of her Santa Monica hotel room and, in a surge of useful jealousy, knowing that he needed to work harder from here on out or else he might lose her for good—to world-famous actors or Euroleague basketball stars or whoever else might turn her head. He toweled off and went to the fridge and found zero beers remaining. He looked outside and it was raining harder. He couldn’t even cross the street to the supermercat without getting soaked. He found some ice and a bottle of whiskey hidden in an otherwise-empty cabinet, and made himself a mixed drink with a 250ml Coca Lite. He texted Whitney an emoji of a raincloud. And then he sat back down with his work.
Whitney texted back three emojis of lightning. She’d ordered a second drink. She googled Jenna Leonard and still couldn’t find a picture of her online. Jenna reminded her so much of the girls she’d encountered her freshman year of college, the girls she couldn’t have fathomed before arriving on campus—girls, in particular from those cities from the show that she’d admired so feverishly as a teenager. Girls from Los Angeles (season 2) and San Francisco (season 3) and New York (seasons 1 and 10). Girls who’d lived entire lives already, it seemed, by the time they arrived on campus. Girls who’d had so much to drink in high school that they were already practicing moderation on behalf of their bodies. Girls who’d done all the drugs there were to do, and were already over most of them. Girls who’d had so much sex that they were more focused now on their relationships with one another than on any boy in a Polo shirt or Nantucket reds. These girls knew the names of directors and playwrights and gallerists; they’d gone to prep school with their children. They knew the books on the bestseller lists and had opinions on which ones didn’t belong. They knew about things not just in their home cities, but in other cities, too. They knew the neighborhoods, the street names, the restaurants, the stores. They had boyfriends in those cities. They had boyfriends, somehow, with jobs in office buildings. Whitney had been watching girls like that from behind glass for practically half her life. She sat at the window of the hotel lounge facing the sea and the storm. They were very much in the ashcloud now. The room jumped with the next flash of lightning. She finished the email she’d started at the bar, and sent it. She looked exhausted, a little flushed. When she drained her spritz, the busser approached and asked in English if she was finished with her drink. She turned up into his face and said she still had some left even though they could both see that she didn’t. He was wearing all white. He had slick black hair and strong tanned arms. He looked college-aged, Jenna-aged. She imagined Jenna in a place like this, in a place like this or any other place like it in Barcelona or Paris or New York or L.A. The same general outlines, the same purple and pleather. The sort of place no one wanted to see with the lights all the w
ay up. Jenna Saisquoi. What the hell was that the other night? Some double life. Some party life. It had never been Whitney’s scene. And it never would be again. The darkness. The anonymity of it. The slipping into corners, into bathroom stalls. The scumminess of the whole thing. The danger, the needless vulnerability. The pit that she’d experience the next morning, in daylight, at the office, seated at the conference-room table during a meeting, knowing what she’d done the night before and how and where and with whom. That guilt. Always that guilt. It lived inside her like a broken gene. The busser returned and he had another fresh drink with him. “She says it’s on the house, third one’s free at brunch, her special rule for you,” he said. “Wow,” Whitney said, waving thanks to the grinning bartender, “lush life.” “Hmm?” he said, and Whitney smiled the full width of her head and pulled herself higher in her seat. He lingered there and she felt his eyes on her body. On her exposed stomach and waist, on her neck and arms and chest, on her legs that stretched all the way up into the running shorts that had ridden up practically to her hip bones. She let him hang there and her skin felt like oil in a skillet. She met his eyes and he was waiting for an answer to something. “What’s that?” she said. And he said, “I just wanted to know if you’d like me to take the empty one now.” Her face felt hot and she laughed stupidly and nodded and ran her hand through her hair. He smiled and took the glass and left her alone at the window. She had to pee and the bartender pointed to the bathroom, touching her shoulder as he showed the way. Her skin was humming, turned all the way up. She caught herself in the mirror again. It was the best her body had looked all trip. She felt empty, her stomach felt coated with spritz. She hadn’t eaten all day and now she wasn’t even hungry. The lines of her body shimmered in her reflection thanks to the sparkling wine. The room smelled like the honeysuckle of her summers growing up. The doors of the three stalls were ajar but she bent herself over, looking for shoes. She tested the air with an “Hola?” and nothing replied but the drone of the centralized air. She pulled the edges of her shorts up farther than they’d been in her seat near the window. She pulled them way up and admired the tautness of her ass, clenched like fists, hard and soft at the same time like boxing gloves. Her face was losing some of its snap—she knew she had only a couple more years before she’d have to double the effort. But her butt looked good and it dialed her up further. She looked at the door that led back into the bar and when it didn’t move she slowly peeled down the front of her shorts and admired the way the plane of her stomach fell flatly into her pubic hair. She slipped a hand down the front of her shorts and was surprised to find herself as wet as she was. She moved to the stall farthest from the door and locked herself in. She dropped her shorts and sat on the hard plastic seat and lowered her longest finger between her legs. She felt the busboy’s eyes on her body again. The sizzling skin still. College-aged, Jenna-aged. She imagined the busboy watching her now. She imagined the bartender watching him watch her. She imagined the two of them slipping her into one of the hotel suites. 1-2-Tres. She imagined herself in a hotel suite that looked like the hotel suite in Santa Monica. She imagined Adrien Green. She imagined herself with Adrien, in all the ways it had gone. She felt that surge in her body she’d never felt before that night, the suspicion that it was going where it was going, the rush. She couldn’t push it to that place again herself—it was a door she didn’t have a key to. And so as it backed away from an edge, the images shifted. She imagined Will with a faceless young associate at a Young Lawyers Night, his hungry mouth and hungry eyes and hungry fingers moving across her body the way they rarely moved across hers anymore. She imagined him with Kelly Kyle, doing whatever men did with tits that were that much bigger than her own, whatever it was that boys in school had been dreaming about since they were nine years old, fantasies she’d never understand and would never be able to grant someone herself. She imagined herself back with the busboy, the busboy and the bartender, less anything specific than his watching her, his walking in on her now. Him or the bartender. Either of them: college-aged, Jenna-aged. She imagined Jack and Jenna. She imagined Jack and Jenna in that skyrise apartment down the rainy beach. She imagined them there now, screams and laughter. Jenna Saisquoi. Whitney knew she’d be loud. Whitney knew she’d be a performer. That blonde hair thrown around like a sparkler. That perfect little taut body put to good use. Curling up inside the shape of Jack, consumed, subsumed. All the work to earn her place in that big bed. She imagined Will this time, Will with Jenna, back at their Airbnb. Will with a look of concentration, of gratitude, like she’d never seen on his face before, a sense of having leveled up to something extra special, forbidden and golden-glittered, a taste of something made with lots of butter and chocolate and steamed milk. Someone who, at the very least, knew what she was doing in a youthful and unmoored kind of way, who might rub off some lavender-scented lotion and leave the smell on his skin for a few days. Who would leave a hole in him that couldn’t be filled the old way ever again, certainly not by the likes of Whitney. That was enough, that thought. That emptiness, that hole at the center of each of them that might not be satisfied by the other anymore. That was enough to do it. She sat there breathing heavily, her eyes still closed, her brain a little dizzy, her bladder still full. That final thought—that helplessness, that powerlessness, that realization that it might be something they’d have to cope with for the rest of their lives—almost made her cry. She peed and she washed her hands and her body looked back at her in the mirror, and it looked slacker to Whitney than it had even ten minutes ago, her skin splotchy and red, lines everywhere she looked. Her head was empty. She was getting so old. She was almost thirty. She was drunk. She walked back to the bar and sat back down in her seat near the window. She sipped her drink and checked her work email. She typed out responses without reading them through and sent them having forgotten where the responses had begun. She looked up and out the window. The rain had stopped. There was still the thick ash, but it wasn’t pouring anymore. Will texted a sun and a running girl. She texted a thumbs up. She paid her tab with two twenty-euro bills that she’d slotted into her cellphone case for an emergency. The bartender thanked her for the tip and wished her a pleasant afternoon and smiled one final time. Whitney hit the street, she mapped the distance, she balked at the mileage. A cab was waiting at the curb. She gave the address with practiced pronunciation. She got carsick on the way and shut her eyes.