They made the thirty-minute drive in twenty. The streets were empty. The boulevards were slick. The curbside at the international terminal was cluttered with passengers who looked like people with nowhere to go. Inside it was worse.
The international terminal was stacked up hundreds deep at the desks. The dense fog. This weather, apparently. If it was all just some system glitch—if everything was indeed good to go—there was no way they’d get to the front of the line in time to get an answer and make their flight. And so they found a roving representative and asked her what was going on.
“You haven’t heard?” the woman said.
Will reached uncertainly for his phone. He hadn’t expected the reason to be something they could’ve heard about.
“There’s been a…” the woman said.
“Cancellation?” Will said.
“Computer crash?” Whitney said.
“There’s been a volcano,” the woman said. “The volcano in Iceland that”—she made an eruption with both hands—“a few days ago. It is worse now. It kept going. They thought it is small, but now it is big. The cloud it made, it is into Europe. London, first, yesterday. Today, France and Espanya. The howdoyousay…” She trickled with her fingers.
“Rain,” Will said.
“Ash,” Whitney said.
“The ash. There is no way for planes to go. Because of the ash.”
“A volcano,” Will said.
The woman squinted at him. She seemed skeptical still that they hadn’t heard.
“We’ve been on vacation…” Whitney said, by way of explanation. “We tried to take a couple days away from our phones…” The truth was that they had skimped on international coverage. Or rather that Will had insisted they not pay for the exorbitant daily roaming. And so they pulled up their maps and email only when absolutely necessary. They’d spent yesterday distracted anyway, fixated on their dinner all morning and afternoon, and had passed out after the confessions like a pair of tension knots poked by needles.
“The volcano has been a problem before, but never like this,” the woman said. “Is what they say on TV. No flights. Barcelona. Madrid. Paris. London. Not like this since nine-eleven.”
“No flights,” Will said, still catching up. “How are we supposed to get home? What are we supposed to do?”
“This is…” the woman said, gesturing to the crowds, to the chaos in evidence, to the wider crisis that was obviously greater than the concerns of Will and Whitney’s small, specific circumstances. The lines in the woman’s forehead suggested that she needed them to start thinking in grander terms, beyond themselves. That if they were going to understand and she was going to be permitted to carry on with more pressing matters, they would need to calibrate to the scale here. “There is no news. No instruction. You can see yourself. You can wait in line to speak to someone, but the only thing we know right now is no flights.”
“But how do they handle the rebooking?” Will said. “The cost of—”
“Don’t look so…” Whitney said, cutting him off, impatient. “They’re not gonna make you pay for new tickets, okay?”
“So, tomorrow, then?” Will said, ignoring her, and reaching for the woman’s shoulder as she slid away from them.
“It is impossible to say,” she said, halting again. “Maybe today. Maybe three days. Maybe a week. They say the volcano still…” The hands again, erupting.
“Iceland,” Will said.
“Incredible, no?” The woman smiled and her eyes drifted to the ceiling, to the wavy ribs of the roof, to the luminous architecture. There was a light glowing beneath the woman’s skin. There was wonder in her face so plain that it lifted her chin.
“I still don’t totally understand what we’re supposed to do,” Whitney said.
“Maybe you wait in the line like the others?” the woman said, smiling and turning to leave finally.
The shape of the problem was letting itself in. Whitney thanked the woman and started rolling her bag to the end of the check-in line. They’d given themselves over to it. Will turned on his network coverage. It drew a foreign carrier that appeared in the upper corner of his screen. He dialed customer service and the wait was over an hour now. He hung up and opened a browser. The volcano led the news on the Times and on the Guardian. The volcano was trending in pole position on Twitter. Pictures of the volcano. Pictures of the ashcloud. Retweets of up-close images and faraway images, taken by farmers and fishermen and satellites. Everywhere the cauliflower plumes. Retweets of maps. Retweets of thoughts and prayers. Retweets of groundings in Munich and Milan. Holudjöfulsins, it was called. The Devil’s Hole. They scuffed forward in line.
Will messaged the owner of their Airbnb through the app. He asked, on the off-est chance, if she had availability for tonight. Right away he saw the response bubbles. She said the apartment was not available, but that according to the information she had, the new renters may be in the same trouble as Will and Whitney. They were coming from Athens. There were no outs from Barcelona, but no ins, either. Will and Whitney were welcome to return to the apartment until she got word that the others were in fact en route. It was, Will remarked, the same convenient arrangement that had worked out for them at the restaurant the night before.
It turned out to be as bad as the representative had suggested. The woman at the desk even showed them a map on her display. The picture looked worse than the map on CNN’s site. More aggression in the spread. Greater-seeming impenetrability. The way the winds had swung it, England was sealed beneath an even thicker ceiling than usual. From there it followed a path down the Atlantic coast of France, over the Pyrenees, and into Spain, widening like a mudslide as it went. The effects Europe-wide were greater than they had understood, too—more damage, greater disruption. A second tine of ashcloud had blown north over Scandinavia; groundings in Oslo and Copenhagen and Stockholm. It looked like it would reach Russia the same time it hit
