by Daniel Riley
Smiður
The carpenter’s home had been saved. It was a good joke. He’d returned to find it musty and worn as ever, but still standing, impervious. The fire had split at his gate—he’d raised his foundation to ward off flooding—and the lava had flowed like a forked tongue around his property. The flames had licked his iron fence but left the rest intact.
For all the houses he’d built in town, he hadn’t made improvements on his own in twenty years. It was the last thing he could bring himself to undertake after long days of framing and finish work—to buckle up his tool belt, knot his boots, and perform repairs in his downtime. His twins had left five years earlier for university, and then work in the capital. His wife had left the summer before for another man, in another town, on the other side of the island—a man she’d met online. She said she left him because of their fundamental incompatibilities as human beings, but he knew she left him because he’d refused to work on the house. Rotten beams. Eroded insulation. Electrical wires chewed through by mice. And that was just the stuff inside the walls. The house was a decaying heap, a tomb bereft of life. He could’ve used a clean start, he told the neighbor with whom he’d feuded for years. He wished it had been his home that had got burned up instead of all of theirs.
But it had gone the way it had gone—that fateful indifference of the volcano. And so he went to work as never before. He foremanned a crew composed of all the capable hands in the valley. Neighbors put their property-line disputes aside, forgave differences in Christian doctrine, erased financial debts since the ledger at the general store had been destroyed, too. They scrounged for materials and received lumber and steel and concrete mix from the countryside. They borrowed tools from villages up and down the coast. The carpenter led them like a wartime general through the meticulous stages of a lengthy siege. Foundations. Framing. Windows and doors. Roofs and siding. Electrical and plumbing. Insulation and drywall. And, at last, his beloved finish work. Hand planes. Band saws. Dovetail joints. He cherished the words and the tools in his toolshed.
Up they went, thirty-six houses in sixty days. The displaced slept in the chapel, high on the hillside. When the weather warmed, some slept outside in tents and sleeping bags donated by an American manufacturer of environmentally conscious outerwear. By the middle of summer, when the sun barely set, they were back in their homes, and the carpenter was back in his. It had been chaotic, but never hasty. It had been urgent, but never rushed. They had done what was necessary, and they had been blessed with occasionally sunny skies.
Their lives had been upended, but no one was dead, at least not yet. They were small, and the volcano was large, immeasurably so, and one day in the future it would come for them again. That compact between villager and volcano was the one intrinsic truth of their existence. How inconsequential were the lives of the citizens of the valley, how insignificant their free will. And yet they would persist collectively, choosing to exist in the shadow of death and destruction, so long as they could live out their lives in the land of their ancestors. They would look upon the volcano, day and night, and thank it for its presence, for the perpetual charge it provided them, those in close proximity to that judgment. Their lives, after all, were solitary notes in a universe of ceaseless symphony; they were minuscule and fleeting, and it was useful to be reminded how soon they would all ring out and resolve.
And yet still: before bed each night, the carpenter would look out his kitchen window to the looming mass he’d known all his life as the horizon, and, like so many before him in the valley, and all those who would follow, make his negligible appeal for mercy. He’d pray to the volcano on behalf of himself and every neighbor who’d found a way to carry on with life in the wake of disaster. He’d smile and tap the glass with a defiant finger, standing up for the living in a world composed overwhelmingly of rock and metal and swift-moving fire, and whisper to Holudjöfulsins, the volcano through the pane: “Ekki enn. Ekki enn.” Not yet. Not yet.
He still had the repairs to his own house to make. He needed to win back the love of his life. He needed more time. They all needed more time to figure things out and to live the right way, at long last.
“Ekki enn. Ekki enn,” he’d say. Let’s not end this quite yet.
III.
After Volcano
Thursday
They woke with a start to their simultaneous midnight alarms, Whitney locked to her side of the bed, Will to his. It was morning all over again, but blackest morning, night-morning. The airport had stacked up the departures so that the flights were running all through the night. They’d drawn their pair of seats on the three a.m. back to New York. Clearing Zone 6. Limited status. But today was the day they’d finally be going home.
The shock of the alarm made Will want to barf. They’d slept for four hours, and he was at the peak of a fresh hangover. Whitney looked worse than when she’d gone to bed. Her skin was leached of color. All that work, all that self-care, was no match for the fallout of blowing up one’s life.
They’d packed in the afternoon to give themselves something to do besides talk about what had happened. When they were through packing, they’d gone for a long walk up to Parc Güell. They’d walked beneath the corridors of twisted-stone tree trunks, they’d looked out from the generous heights over the city from the terrace of broken tiles, and taken a picture together with their one working phone, the one phone left between them. They hadn’t taken a picture together the whole trip, and in this one they smiled gingerly. They were drunk and hadn’t eaten much—but neither of them had a huge appetite. Later, they bought some sticks of salami and two cans of Coke at the Mercado de Santa Caterina, and ate together on a wooden bench beside a dirt soccer pitch in El Born. Then, with the sun still up but the shutters closed, they got in bed, turned out the lights, and kept to their sides. That was it. That was how they spent the last night of the trip.
He asked her if she wanted coffee and she didn’t and he said he didn’t really, either. They didn’t have much food left in the refrigerator, anyway, it’d be better to get something at the airport at this point. They cut wide lines around one another as they moved through the apartment in the surgical light. They moved with an underwater slowness. They glanced at one another to take in the ghostly stranger they’d seemingly never encountered before. They packed their stragglers, they kicked orphan socks across the floor toward the other’s bag. They made sure the lengths of their showers weren’t inconvenient. They made sure their toothbrushes didn’t touch. They carved up the apartment with invisible incisions. They knew that what had happened couldn’t have happened—that was two other people in a whole other time and place. They left the keys to the front door on the dining-room table. They shut up the apartment one last time.
In the cab it was wordless, just the rush of the silent streets and the occasional tick of the meter. Will mouthed his goodbyes to the city as they passed through. Goodbye apartment. Goodbye Eixample. Goodbye mountains, goodbye beach. Goodbye cafés con leche and pans con tomate. Goodbye Gaudí, Columbus, and Miró. Goodbye seaport, cemetery, and Montjuïc. Goodbye yellow ribbons and red-and-gold dreams of separatist rule. Goodbye Neymar, goodbye Messi.
As they pulled into the war-zone lineup at the departures curb, Will opened his mouth and spoke finally. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. Seriously. I don’t want you to think I don’t understand, or that I don’t believe you that you don’t really know what’s going on, or that I don’t appreciate how hard that must’ve been to say all that out loud. I just…I’m pretty confused myself, and I’m just fucking sad. Not because I don’t get what you’re feeling—but because I do. Something has happened, and it’s messed you up. That scares me. And it hurts me. And it just really, really bums me out. And it makes me wonder about what happens with a lot of things.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”
He paid the cab driver with his single leftover bill and pulled their bags out of the t
runk.
After the zombie routines of check-in, they moved like husks across the crowded gleaming floors of the international terminal, where most travelers had lived in a pop-up refugee camp while the two of them had carried on with their charades in the city. It was Thursday now. It had been just four days since they’d been here last, just ninety hours since they’d been denied their initial escape. A village had been built in the terminal in that time, and now they were pushing through it—the packs, the stalls, the new order.
They had a suitcase each—Whitney’s rolling bag and Will’s duffel—and a bag each with their laptops and their chargers and their unread books. Whitney listened to a gossip podcast while they waited in the security line; Will plugged his headphones into his laptop and listened to some music. When they were through to the other side, Will went to the bathroom and Whitney waited with their things, and then they traded. They didn’t speak except to tell the other that passport control was to the right not the left, and did she want a coffee and croissant, or a proper breakfast from a proper restaurant with the thirty euros in coins they had left?
They went to McDonald’s. Two Egg McMuffins, two hash browns, two black coffees. The food was gone before their coffees had cooled. Will got in the long line again and ordered seconds. They had time to wait in all of the lines. They’d never flown out in the middle of the night before. They’d heard about the airports in the Middle East, the midnight flights to beat the heat. But this was a clearinghouse now. They couldn’t move. The line at McDonald’s was tangled again, which was fine with Will and it was fine with Whitney. It meant another break. It meant acceptable silence. It meant she could keep her headphones in until Will returned with a fresh tray.
They drank their coffees. They felt better, gradually themselves. A woman sat down next to them. She was long, reedy, olive. From Barcelona or Rio de Janeiro or El Paso. She was precisely the size and shape of female species that Will had always found a little alien-seeming but that Whitney had long admired. She was six feet tall. She was runway-thin. Her skin was the tone of all future citizens of Earth, circa 2350. They knew the type from their neighborhood. She looked like seemingly all of them looked: white T-shirt, no makeup, beautiful but brittle.
Will crumpled up the wrapper of his second sandwich and flexed his eyebrows at Whitney.
“What?”
He did it again, this time with an exaggerated nod in the woman’s direction.
“What?” she said again.
“Is that…”
“What are you saying?”
“Is she your…you know, is she your type?”
Whitney was on her feet at once. Will stood from the table to cut her off, reached for her waist and then her hand. But she snapped it from his grip and shoved him back down into his seat with the strength of a former college athlete.
The model looked up, innocent and alarmed. Whitney clopped away down the concourse. Will didn’t bother chasing her and sat with the trash on the table.
He knew she wasn’t coming back, not for a while. He sipped his coffee, scalding still. He looked around at the swarms, as crowded as he’d ever seen an airport outside of a snowstorm. His eyes caught the television—some soccer highlights, some news from home. The endless stream. And then, astonishingly, there was the familiar B-roll of the murder in Paris. Of the apartment, of the police tape. But over the images, a decipherable chyron: an arrest. New footage of a young man in glasses and a quarter-zip sweatshirt walking in cuffs beneath that familiar shadowless silver of the ashcloud in Paris. Will stood up and walked toward the monitor. Sure enough—charges. Su novio. Her boyfriend. Jenna Leonard Silverstein was off the hook. Will shook his head. He couldn’t believe he’d believed her. He couldn’t believe he’d believed any part of it. But as he turned his head from the monitor, Will wondered all over again if Jenna had maybe gotten away with murder.
Will grabbed Whitney’s bags, stacked his on top of hers, and slowly, awkwardly, wheeled their collective haul to the gate. No sign of Whitney there, either. He found two seats near the window. They would be boarding in twenty minutes.
She monitored him from the adjacent gate, concealed by the camp of hundreds who’d been holding out at the airport for days. She didn’t have any money of her own. She didn’t have her suitcase or her bag. All she had was her passport and her ticket, and that couldn’t get her anywhere but on her flight, next to the same person she’d flown over with. She never should’ve told him. Of course she shouldn’t have. She should’ve known better. He would never understand all the way, what it had meant to her. Or, worse, he would. He would understand that it might change everything. That something had happened, that something was happening, and that she alone would have to decide what to do with it.
She approached his terrible shape, his wrinkled clothes and mussed hair and week-old stubble. He was so thick and heavy and meat-filled. And after one week abroad, there was more hair now. The correlative stink of his pits, the swamp of his crotch, the wiry sprigs on his shoulders, the mess of his ass crack. There were things all over his body, growths and blemishes and scourges of irritation that a woman would never get away with. How fortunate for Will. Always and forever, favored. How fortunate for him that he could do nothing at all and be just fine. He was going to quit his job when they got home, she could sense it. They’d been here before, but he seemed over the edge now, he seemed to really mean it this time. And then what? She’d cover their costs, she’d help with his loans. All while he floundered and toiled in the fantasy of writing that movie he thought she wasn’t aware of. The stubble would get thicker. He’d waste his days on infinite subsequent drafts. She knew the current version of the script was with a C-minus production company, this guy he’d gone to law school with, and that he’d find out soon, if he hadn’t already, that there wouldn’t be interest until she introduced him to some real people herself. When he finally came to her asking for a lift, she’d have to tell him the truth about what he’d written, but not all the way. It would be a phase—maybe just the summer. And then he’d go back to an office, a better job. Enough money to bring him back in line with her, at least for the time being. But for now, there was that future beard for her to worry about, that haggard thatch. She’d have to tell him the truth about that, too. How much she hated it. How much less handsome it made him when he grew it out. How much less serious he looked. How much rougher it was on her thighs, how much it had always bothered her, for seven years, how much she’d always detested it, if he wanted her to be honest.
But, no, she couldn’t say all that, either. Not given everything she’d just revealed. Not with the subtext. Everything now would be seen through the new lens. The eggshells of what it might mean, of what might really be going on inside her heart and mind. She could live with it. She would have to. Because she couldn’t live her life without him, that was all she knew. They’d come this far, a lifetime it seemed, and there was certainly no one else on earth as much for her as he was. No man in the world who could know her better. She felt something on her face and caught a tear with her tongue. She wasn’t even in a crying mood, she hadn’t even felt it coming. Her face was just leaking now, it had been so warped out of shape—it just did it on its own. It had been a terrible run of days and nights. She couldn’t take full responsibility for the involuntary tears.
She knew she would have to decide. If it was even up to her, if it could even be her decision. Of course she knew it was the sort of thing one couldn’t decide, but she would have to. Today, though, all they had to do was board a flight. They had to keep it going for now. It was okay. Okay, Whitney? It’ll be okay.
She approached him, sat in the empty seat, appealed tentatively with her eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, looking up at her. “I was just kidding. But I realize this isn’t the kidding kind of thing right now, is it?”
She smiled softly in appreciation.
They sat there next to one another in the airport of the strange city where they’d been tr
apped by the clouds.
“Let’s just…” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“I know everything that I shouldn’t have—”
“I know. Me, too,” she said.
“I’m sorry about the things I did that made this worse.”
“I am, too. I’m sorry for the things I said and the things I did and the things that made this what it became. I never meant for this to—”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
They didn’t touch hands. They didn’t kiss. But they smiled teethlessly at one another. It was the first time they’d really looked each other in the eyes since they’d woken up. There was an agreement in the look, some sort of temporary contract. Or maybe a toast, something more like: to safety, to gratitude, to comfort, to pleasure, and to the unthinking lightness of just getting along for now, okay? Traveling companions. The dearest of friends. It was a shared look that was of no place or time, of no context, except a cilial comprehension that there was still plenty of good left here. One-Two. Him. Her. That was all there was to understand as they heard their zone called to board the plane. Not yet, the look seemed to say. We can’t destroy each other all the way, at least not yet.