Holudjöfulsins
The blackness is first, the puff of pumice and methane and ash, the dense clouds gathering over the vent, thick as balls of yarn. The breath condenses when it touches the freezing northern sky. A diffuse hot rain falls all around. Then there is fire, the first sprigs of neon pinking the undersides of the black mass. Orange threads from the overflowing cone extend in all directions. With the sound of the sky splitting in two, there comes, unsubtly, a rising red column, the dense vertical, the ultimate expulsion that seems, at its height, not to be lifting from the earth but rather pouring from the clouds like molten steel in a mill. The column holds on its true plumb for eternity-spanning seconds before it slips from its height, wavering like a slackened line, and falls as red rain back to the mouth of the volcano. The fountain reduces itself to a stewing boil and the overspill comes slower, a steady slip of the rim, orange and black icing streaming down the slopes, creeping to the valley floor and ultimately to the sea. There is for half an hour a deafening rumbling of thunder, matched in volume only by the sizzling of the lava at the surf’s edge. Ash falls like pillow-fight feathers. There is ash all around. Ash, and then steam, rising from the waves that pound the ragged shore.
The fire subsides in the evening, but the ash tumbles out tirelessly for days. It rises in ever-replenished walls of soot, puddling up in the heights above the vent. And then it spreads. Wider. Farther. Drifting as swiftly as a scent into unoccupied air. The ash moves on currents in the sky. It passes into the virgin emptinesses of the troposphere. It finds new altitudes, new canopies, new expanses of sky when there is nowhere else to go. The ashcloud speeds across the reach, darkening land and sea, a blanket of blackness stitched extra tight, indifferent to the lives of the living things below.
II.Volcano Barcelona
Sunday
Will and Whitney woke up an hour later than they’d planned. Instead of setting an alarm, they had relied each morning of the trip on the fade-up of the sunrise that flooded the apartment. The place was spacious, twice what they had in New York at what they knew to be half the price. They were Airbnb-ing their own studio while they were away, after all. Here there were big simple rooms with not enough furniture and a sound system the owner had struggled to demo at check-in. Tall ceilings and wide windows onto the street. Sky and trees and strung-up laundry on rooftops—and towering above them all, the rainbow-scaled Nouvel in the neighborhood to the north.
The apartment had been a placid base camp for four days. It had been still. No sharp edges, no nerves. But this morning they’d shot up in a panic, their hands grasping for phones. They’d blown the grace period for the international flight. They’d be cutting it close even if they somehow got out the door in fifteen minutes. Before Will had rolled over in bed, Whitney was across the bedroom, dirty laundry flying from the floor of the closet into her butterflied suitcase.
Will was still flat, staring at his phone.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Let’s go.”
“I think our flight’s canceled.”
“What?”
“They emailed a few hours ago. I just got the notice. Red strike through the time of our flight. But doesn’t say postponed. Let me call.”
He was put on hold.
“How the fuck is it so dark out?” he said to Whitney, who was rushing still.
The wait for the next available team member was “…for-ty min-utes.”
Since entering the working world, he’d suffered those in his life who lived to discuss their airline-loyalty programs. Recently the subject had elicited more genuine excitement among friends and colleagues than movies, politics, sports, or streaming. Platinum. Agate. Elite. The systems had their languages, their incentive structures, their marginal benefits. Will knew picking a loyalty program was the prudent thing to do, but he worried it would only make him more boring than he suspected he already was, joining his colleagues in their deadly speech-codes of medallion-qualification miles and fare classes. Nonetheless, he coveted the ultimate benefit: the assurance that at a certain level of status, every phone call, no matter the hour, would be tended to by a real live person. A new dull passion was worth it if he could guarantee getting a human being during an emergency.
“Our flight is canceled,” Will said. “And I have no status.”
“I know that,” Whitney said from the bathroom. “If anyone knows how little status you have, it’s me.”
“I” he said. “It’s I.”
“It’s me,” she said, certain at first, but feeling that certainty halve, and then halve again.
They’d have to go to the airport and get the answers direct. And so they packed as quickly as they could. They tended to move at similar speeds, on similar schedules. They woke up with each other and tried to turn out the lights at the same time. They had read that there were such things as larks and owls and sometimes one of each fell in love at their own peril. But they seemed to be calibrated in almost all the ways that mattered.
Outside it was socked in. They hadn’t noticed the full extent of the weather. It reminded Will of the foggiest days at the beach growing up. Soft streetlights were boring through the haze at low heights. But no suggestion of sky. Way up was a yellow glow that slipped down a gradient into white, a thick white that threw one’s relationship to space all out of whack. It was like looking out the window of an airplane during a banked turn and not knowing which way was the sun and which way the ground. Wobbling through the fog toward the cab made Will think of the word yaw. He should’ve been a pilot. The whole effect of the low light had him queasy and
