They approached Gram cautiously, wanting nothing less than to spark a fresh lecture. Will offered him the forty euros again. This time, after a brief and half-hearted protest, Gram handed him an envelope and asked him to write their names on it. There were already dozens of names, crossed out, Sundays for months, maybe years. Names of every nationality, like one of those posters with all the ways in the world to say hello. While Will filled out the envelope, Gram took his turn with Whitney. He wrapped an arm around her delicate, freckled shoulders. He complimented her eyes and her brows and her skin. Gram was still wearing the apron. He’d long lost his glasses. He told Whitney to come back anytime; Will, maybe one out of three of those anytimes, ha ha. It was a joke that prompted Whitney’s polite laughter, which led to a heartier embrace. She made a final appeal with a smile that meant goodbye, and Gram kissed her on the cheek, and then the other cheek, just as anyone would bid farewell to a friend at a party in a city such as this one.
As they made their way to the entrance, they heard a soft “Hey” and then a louder “Yo!” They turned to the sound, up to the loft that hung over the main room. Jack and Leonard were waving at them. “Are you leaving?” Leonard said. And they nodded and waved goodbye and Whitney blew a kiss.
“Hold up,” Leonard said. “We’re coming with.”
Which is how they found themselves through the iron gate and out onto the street, mere hours after entering, but with seemingly a shift of seasons in the air.
“Where to?” Leonard said. She seemed recharged again, loose-jawed.
“Don’t know,” Whitney said. “We were just gonna head home, I guess.”
“Walk with us, at least,” Leonard said. “I needed out.”
“It wasn’t so bad, was it?” Jack said.
“It was only beginning,” Leonard said. “It was going to get weird so fast. It’s a nice night. No need to be stuck there as the party really gets going for the olds.”
They walked three blocks in the wrong direction at first, and they were at the edge, suddenly, of one of the parks at La Sagrada Familia. It was already later than they’d realized, eleven-thirty, and the church was closed for the night, but bathed in the golden spotlights that kept the drip-castle spires visible at all hours. The cathedral was, Whitney had read, Gaudí’s dying obsession, his lasting appeal to God to look after his one true love, Catalonia. A dark familiar feeling seized Whitney, as rarely happened anymore—a vestigial reminder that Sundays were meant for appeals for salvation, for family, for laundered skirts and blouses, not for getting drunk and staying out late with strangers. The feeling lasted only as long as a nervous tic, and then it was gone. Around the cathedral were Costa Coffees and Burger Kings. Open late for different travelers than the ones they’d just spent the evening with. The brightly lit vacant chains gave her an altogether different sense of dread.
“Wrong way,” Leonard said, course-correcting to the Passeig de Sant Joan. The pedestrian walkway led toward the water, ever so faintly downhill. It was a long way, but they all seemed to have a sense that it was the where worth heading to. The passeig saved them from the pedestrian-unfriendly corners of the blocks in the neighborhood. Instead, they had a straight line to the sea. When the walkway disappeared, they looped around the Plaça de Tetuan to the wide boulevard leading to the Arc de Triomf and the entrance to the parks. Whitney took a picture of Will in the glow of the red-brick arch. Jack and Leonard were cozy shapes at the edge of the frame. She was pleased to have something to remember them by, to remember the night by, when it was all just a surreal story that Will and Whitney laughed about one day in the future.
They caught up to Jack and Leonard on the stone avenue of the park, lined on either side by sodium lights. They crossed into the Parc de la Ciutadella and happened upon several Sunday-evening dinner parties stretching later even than the one they’d escaped. There were balloons tied to lights and crepe paper in the trees. There were children still playing soccer in the low yellow light. There was no quit. Not yet. There was so much night left.
They passed beside the zoo. They heard animals rustling the trees, scraping their sides on the stone partition that kept the big cats out of the park. They crossed the train tracks—the heavy cargo rails that led into the Estació de França, that divided the planned part of the city from the old-world beach tenements of Barceloneta. They found stairs to a burned-out clearing and a modest pedestrian footpath buried beneath fresh spring foliage. At least three of them had no idea where they were going, yet they worked like a platoon, unquestioning, pressing collectively onward, ten steps at a time in the direction forward.
On the other side of the tracks, they smelled the ocean. There was a breeze in their faces, a breeze that was doing to Whitney’s hair what appeared to have been done to Leonard’s earlier. It punched Will in the gut when he realized just how close the water was: hundreds, not thousands, of feet from them now. They crossed the street and there, in the darkness—a gradient of blues, of midnights and Yves Kleins—were the sky and the sea. Immediately before them, palm trees stitched into the concrete of a promenade at even intervals. Between the palms were long flat backless benches. And then a railing before a
