Before they stood, Will turned in his seat and Whitney turned in hers. Then he grabbed her head with both palms and framed her face. He held her firmly, as though it were everything there was in the world. Then he moved his own face toward hers and, as she turned her mouth up to meet his, he plunged his tongue into her nostril. She shoved him away and punched his arm, hard enough to leave a mark, they both knew at once. Like the old days. It flooded them both with relief. He pinned her hands to her sides and attempted to restrain her with one arm. Her nails ripped into his flesh, drawing out two threads of under-skin. She grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back like the Pez dispenser that it could sometimes be, and licked his hairless forehead. She released him, and they were breathing heavily. Not smiling. Not laughing. Exhausted. Relieved.
Eyes traced in at them from several vantages. They were being watched. By passengers in the lineup, by the brittle young thing from McDonald’s, who was of course on their flight.
“Truce?” she said.
“Truce,” he said.
“Even?” she said.
He looked at her, conceding nothing, and then she nodded, understanding.
“We’re up,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
It was finally time for them to get out of there. It was finally time to go home.
They boarded slowly. They had a pair of seats on the left side of the plane. Will unlatched the overhead compartment and the door thumped open. He put their bags up. He sat in a clatter near the window, giving her the aisle to stretch out her knee and hip. The standard routine. She pulled a script from her bag and plunked the brass tacks with her nails. He crushed his knees into the seat in front of him. He plugged into the armrest and screwed in his earbuds. The masses came streaming up the pair of aisles for twenty minutes, the hundreds on their flight. Out the window the planes were lined up, ready to roll out all through the night, dozens upon dozens of previously unscheduled flights, the collective effort of their great escape.
They’d been trapped, Will and Whitney. It had been the most essential fact of their lives these past five days. But all the rest of them had been trapped, too. Each person on their flight and in the airport, and the millions well beyond the limits of the city—each individual, a life disrupted, broken, recast, redirected. The volcano effect. It had affected them, all of them here, more than they would ever fully comprehend. And yet somewhere far away, they knew in the logic parts of their brains, some lives had been truly destroyed, human beings burnt up like insects. The indifferent volcano. The volcano that didn’t give a shit about the billions walking its planet, and about Will and Whitney least of all. The indifferent volcano that didn’t care about 1-2-3 or a murder in Paris or the end of a basketball career or the lies twisted up amid them. Their lives were small. Smaller than small. All their lives, with all their adorable little inconsequential human concerns. The only thing Will and Whitney knew deep down was that in face of the volcano, in face of that geological scale, none of it, none of them, mattered one smidge.
Only they had to matter. They had to. Otherwise what was the point of getting on the plane? What was the point of leaving here and getting on with it at all? In the wells of their solipsism, they knew that they had to matter, that everyone did—but the two of them most of all. They mattered to each other, at the very least. Will and Whitney. What they were and what would become of them mattered to Will and mattered to Whitney. Him. Her. Now. Later. They were of consequence. They were of importance. They mattered they mattered they mattered. They had to. They mattered to each other. They mattered to Whitney and they mattered to Will.
Will listened to the classical music channel and felt like he might drop off to sleep right away. It had caught up to him—everything, the hours of the last few days, the math of it all. The betrayal. The bone exhaustion. The ways they’d wrung each other out. He drifted through the boarding announcements. He was dead to the safety demonstration. He startled at the blasts from the PA and got bopped in the head by a carry-on stuffing in behind him. He woke more widely at the first sudden lurch of the plane, ninth for take-off, and then sixth, and then third. It was three-thirty in the morning, blacker than black out, and it was finally time. Whitney was beside him. He could feel her heat and her weight, and he wanted to see her without letting her know that he was looking. He saw her flip from page 32 to 33. She had a red pen in her hand, a red pen he’d never seen before. She had a life of pens he knew nothing about, separate from him, out there in the world.
She felt his eyes out of the corner of her
