Kýr
The black-hot jelly burned through the valley with a speed all its own. It was slow compared with the geyser that had lit the canopy the day before. It was slow compared with the spread of the ash above, the tephra and the smoke. The liquid fire, rather, crept like a slurry down the gentle slopes of the volcano—in one gravitationally destined direction toward the sizzle and the steam of the sea, and in the other toward the flats of the farmland.
The farmers and fishermen had evacuated without incident but had left behind their homes, the possessions they couldn’t pack away, the permanent things that were too heavy for itinerants. They’d unlocked the fences and encouraged the animals to run. The horses and the pigs had been wise enough to flee, the ducks and geese swift enough to fly. But the cows had stayed behind and grazed as ever, in the shadow of the ridge of their eternal home.
A cow called Blár, alone and unafraid, approached the edge of a lazy stream, liquid in abundance like she hadn’t encountered since a trip to the far side of the mountain for a festival in her youth. A festival for which she’d worn flowers on her back and a bell around her neck, and been paraded through her town and the next and the one beside that. They’d marched her to the lake in the hills and she’d drunk from the lake until she was full, and then they’d marched her back in the bright light of a summer midnight, and she’d slept as never before.
She saw the stream approaching, and she hooved up to its edge, even as she felt a great heat all around. As she lowered her mouth to drink, the liquid splashed her legs, and she cried out at the shock of it. But slow as it rolled, the stream was still much too fast for Blár. The hide of her forelegs separated from the muscle, and the muscle peeled from the bone. Her legs crumpled, and her chest and face fell into the fire, cutting her agonizing bellow like an ax, a severing of the sound. There was a final desperate jerk as her flaming head reached for the sky, and a new noise came out this time—an atavistic sound—that resembled most closely the bark of a dog. Embroiled in fire, short on breath: a death cry.
The ash fell soft as snow all around. The sparse trees of the valley burned like stovetop flames. The air grew hot, unbearably so, each movement in the vents of Holudjöfulsins like the door of an oven opening up. The volcano was finished but the consequences kept coming, kept working over the land, kept running their course. Lava and ash, on earth and in heaven, spread with impunity and took on all comers.
Monday
They slept until noon, but it didn’t feel like sleep at all. The apartment had been wide-awake when they got home—lamps on, ash-light through the open windows—and the rooms had been lit up with daybreak. But before they could summon their zombie reserves to lower the blinds, they’d passed out half-clothed, smothering their faces with pillows and sheets for six restless hours.
Now it was the exhaustion of a transatlantic redeye all over again. The grime in Will’s stubble, the slime in Whitney’s pores. The burning red rings sapping the liquid from their eyes. They’d grumbled and they’d showered and then they hit the street feeling their legs and bodies and heads abuzz. The faint stench of sewage found their nostrils. They hadn’t been hungover in the afternoon in years. They hadn’t been hungover in the morning since 1-2-3.
It was too late for the commuting crowds and too early for the lunch rush. But there were more working-age people who didn’t seem to be working than they’d seen anywhere in the world besides lower Manhattan. A grave unemployment rate, protests and drum circles at Plaça de Catalunya, panhandling on La Rambla. They passed the unworking in droves, and that didn’t even count the old men who seemed to stroll—alone, driven toward fixed points—three to a block. These were not the European men of graphic T-shirts and jungle-cat jeans, of shiny sunglasses and tangles of jewelry in chest hair. These were the old dignified Catalans. Of reserved judgment and austerity. Of loafers and slacks and moth-eaten cardigans. Cardigans for all seasons. Cardigans for every occasion: for separatist rallies, for lunches of ham and espresso, for football matches late into the evenings. Hunched forward ever so, reading materials clamped and concealed behind their backs. Fresh copies of La Vanguardia and treatises with names like “L’Idea de Europe.” They were like French philosophers without the pretension; like English farmers without the melancholy of the countryside; like Italians of the breezy north without the worship of textiles. These were men who hadn’t realized that they lived on the Mediterranean Sea until development for the Olympics had brought their city back down to the waterfront. Of average-est height, of average-est wealth, of average-est ambition—they were a vision of resolve and of pleasure worth pursuing. They loved coffee, they loved wine. They loved to read the print edition of the newspaper.
Will and Whitney followed a few of them up the mountain. One peeled off into an empty bar. Another disappeared into a café where he was greeted with roars. A third, with a leashless Labrador retriever, slipped through a small door on the lower slope of Montjuïc that led, they could see when they peeked, into a courtyard like Gram’s. From there, the road steepened abruptly. A transition to sea-facing buildings, of more modest verticals with drying lines. Will and Whitney felt themselves lean back with the road, as steep as a pedestrian could handle. They
