At the clearing, they made faces at each other for their heavy breathing, for the seizure of conversation, for the crimson in their cheeks and the veins in their foreheads. They were still drunk, they were still reckoning with the booze and the strawberry tinge to their acid reflux. They barely even remembered ordering Red Bulls at the club.
The view was north, astonishing, into the bowl of the city, the strip of sea-blue to the right, the baked oranges of the roofs like pointillist pastels. Each building stood at its near-uniform height. The Gótico jumble nearer the beach, the orderly octagons of the Eixample well off the water—the city plan. Everything looking itself, in harmony, with the exception of the great cathedral, whose completion seemed eternally forbidden.
The mountain, Montjuïc, was lush. A gondola fell down its backside toward the water. Buses delivered tourists to the castle at its crest. Will and Whitney ordered espressos from a stand in the clearing at the top of the steps. They didn’t say anything that wasn’t essential. They were exhausted, sweaty, a little sick of hearing each other inhale and exhale. They passed the public swimming pool where the diving at the 1992 Olympics had been held—two-and-a-halfs off the platform in the foreground, the sweeping panorama of the city behind. Will bent himself around a barricade to take a crummy photo with his phone. The ashcloud had sealed impenetrably over the lambent blues of those famous diving shots. The ashcloud had trapped the whole of the city under tinfoil.
They found the line at the Fundació Miró, their destination. They hadn’t been able to squeeze it in during their shorter stay, so they had put it on the napkin list. The building was all flats and crescents, unshowy curves in glass and concrete that looked composed of the limited building blocks of a play set. The structure spread leisurely out from the entrance into a series of spacious rooms and terraces. The floors were made of a buffed brown tile. The whole place seemed deliberately run-down, architected to take the piss out of the expectation of the sort of art-induced reverie Whitney was always seeking. Here, there was no pinch of anxiety about saying the wrong thing or stepping into the wrong room at the wrong moment. It was no wonder there were children everywhere, lounging on the floors, making their own art to match the artist’s. Children spreading out into wider shapes in larger rooms still, some drifting off to sleep. In the new world beneath the volcano, life had been paused indefinitely for Will and Whitney, but it had gone on for everyone else here, which meant work, which meant school, which meant field trips to art museums, and to this place in particular. It was their home, their city, their museu—it so very much belonged to them.
They paid for their tickets and drifted in different directions, into separate rooms. Rooms of arcs and moons, of primary colors. On the canvases, Will detected a shakiness of line, a shimmer from the application of paint that betrayed a human hand. There was a serenity to the works, an in-suck that imparted a quiet on body and mind that approached, for Will, the lift he got half an hour after a run. But that pleasant helium lasted only until he ran smack into something he wasn’t prepared for.
On the far wall of the farthest room, alone and in strange still windowless light, a perfectly pleasant mural transported Will suddenly to the lobby of his office, to the abstract monstrosity that hung on the accent wall opposite the security check-in counter. The mural at Turtle Bay Tower was meant to signify to all employees that right here, in this most select office building, there existed abundant exposure to external culture and a well-balanced life: a life of humanism, a life of art. The mural was also meant to more literally represent a map of the hubs and spokes of connectivity between the media conglomerate and the law firm that represented it globally—cartographed right there on the wall for all who gazed upon it. The mural had become the centerpiece of Will’s interminable days at work, passing it six or eight times each morning, afternoon, and evening, depending on how often he went for coffee or food or fresh air; depending on how often he felt even one more minute at his desk might result in sudden capitulation to death.
He wasn’t supposed to be a lawyer. Lawyer had been a dirty word in his house growing up. And yet one lazy grade after another in the weed-out courses in college had led him through the laundry list of pre-professional tracks he knew he’d never possessed the facility for anyway. And so it was for all the wrong reasons—he’d followed a beautiful new acquaintance into the lecture hall, on the off chance that they might spend the semester studying together—that Will wound up in the undergraduate Constitutional Law lecture in his final fall semester. And it was perhaps only fate showing its face that the afternoon he received his first eviscerating critique in an Intro to Screenwriting course he also received near-perfect marks on his conlaw midterm. The mastery of the facts, the creative application of available materials, had more in common with the work he did in summers building houses with his father than anything he’d encountered in the classroom before. Like an attorney, Will’s father was hired to execute on someone else’s objective, but he got his reputation for the way he solved the puzzle. Even his father’s motto—We’re expensive, but we’re slow—sounded to Will like a lawyer’s boast.
Will had spent every summer of college at home, at the beach. Where he could cut lumber
