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 trunk.
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
