The buzzer-beater landed JJ on the cover of Sports Illustrated, flipped wrist held high, frozen above his head, the arm posture of textbook form. Inside, the magazine had Photoshopped a foam pickle over his shooting arm; Will knew he had the issue in a cardboard box somewhere at home. They won another game that run—the same night Will and Whitney met, in fact, the game Will had left the gardens to watch downtown. They’d slept together for the first time that night; the two events were tied inextricably for all time. It was a win that would be JJ’s last in the tournament, as teams finally figured out how to guard him, to smother him, to force his middling handle in the double-team. They were antibodies that would neutralize him not just in that Elite Eight game but all the following season—when, with the pressure rising for a replication of their Cinderella success, they failed to be anything but a smudgy Xerox of the magic that had made a brief household name out of JJ Pickle.
Will reminded Whitney of all of it when Jack went to the bathroom. The parts that Will knew well, the parts before Jack’s time in Europe. Whitney had been an athlete, too—a college athlete even. But the day she’d quit was the day she’d lost interest in sports as anything other than a factory of human-interest narratives or ripe worlds in which to set a series. And so Will explained that to stand even a remote chance of playing basketball professionally in the U.S., you needed more than JJ’s single special jump shot; NBA players were expected to pass and rebound and play defense, too.
They stood together, just the two of them now, squeezed on all sides by the chatting masses, whose engagement made Will and Whitney only more susceptible to expulsion. They were suddenly worried they might be spotted, flagged, booted for breaking Rule No. 1. They needed Jack to come back at once. They moved across the room to give the illusion of an essential destination. They moved as slowly as possible toward a bookshelf.
They overheard conversations about the volcano. New predictions that it would be a disruption of six days, or three days, or two weeks. That not only would there be no flights, but no sign of breaking light, either. A sort of hot humid winter was what they all were in for. Will and Whitney keyed into loud theories from the academics who asserted that though nobody would wind up dead, fingers crossed, it would feel like a sort of raid-alert state. Life would go on, but with limited ins and outs, limited exchange between the city and the state, the heart and the extremities. They really believed themselves to be trapped, the conversations made clear. And it would force each country, each metropolis, to act ever more like itself, shaded inward, selfishly, nationalistically. They spoke of it with a panicky catch in the throat, those graying art-adjacent capitalists, those conscientious proponents of liberal democracy, who lived their lives with freedom of food and language and transport, taking for granted the fluid membranes of the Schengen Area. But the ashcloud would bring a temporary halt to all that. The shape and the shadow resembled that of an old-fashioned European crisis, one not so close to them in time but close enough, and with a weight of ever-presence, of psychic occupation.
As the conversations evolved, the guests began speaking of the ashcloud as though it had been in their lives for months. There was a pitch shift—Will and Whitney both heard it—as the talk turned to the logistics of a battening down. There was a raw energy among the guests, nostalgia almost, for the safe parts of the wars that had come before, the wars that they themselves had not experienced firsthand, but that they had dreamed of all their lives. To be trapped on the edge of the sea…no goings and no comings. A packed, pressurized containment. The comforts of claustrophobia. They craved it. It would be like getting stuck in a cabin during a snowstorm, someone said, but with plenty of wine and cigarettes. Which is when Whitney finally whispered it to Will: “They’re getting a thrill out of this.” She said it into his ear: “It’s like how people get before a blizzard at home. They’re literally getting turned on by the prospect of being stuck.”
Jack made his way back across the room to them. He had updates too, they could tell.
“You should see the photos in line for the bathroom,” he said. “I recognized some of the actors and musicians. But if the others I didn’t recognize are just as famous, he seems to have met a lot of interesting people.”
“As a sculptor?” Will said.
“Sculptor now,” Jack said. “But other things before, I guess. Fighter pilot? Record producer? The whole thing with those porn magazines? That girl I mentioned before was telling me about it.”
They glanced in the direction of Gram. He was still on the stool, kissing the cheek of a woman his age with streaked hair and roomy skin the color and consistency of parchment paper. He kissed her other cheek and said something in Spanish, then kissed the first cheek again and said something in German. Then he kissed her deeply on the mouth. They both laughed and he checked something off his list.
“I guess he’s still sculpting,” Jack said. “That girl I mentioned, she actually models for him. She’s around somewhere. I think she maybe stays here while she’s visiting.”
“Like a nude model?” Whitney said.
“What she said was that she was picked because of her feet.”
“A foot model!” Whitney said, tipping the rest of her wine down her
