He was returned to his body when he heard the clamor in the valley. The fishermen were whistling at him. They were waving their arms. They were a mile away, but the sound carried up the slopes. He fixed them through his viewfinder. They were pointing back toward the shore. He gathered his equipment and packed his lenses. He slung his cameras over his shoulder and turned to start down the slope. But before he set off, he gazed up one last time at the belly of the cloud. At the graveness and the density. At the infinite-seeming blackness and the immeasurable weight.
“Do you have any idea how much bloody trouble you’ve caused?” he shouted. And he laughed like the last man on Earth. Then he turned his back to the ashcloud and trotted down the slope beside the runways of rock to the sea.
Tuesday
Will spent the first part of his morning on the phone with the airline and got a human for the first time yet. It would be another day of nothing. But, as they were sure he’d heard, it wasn’t a matter of accumulation anymore so much as dispersion. Things were socked in. It was still heavy. They needed some assistance from the heavens. A high-pressure system could make tomorrow a possibility. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that—just don’t hold your breath.
Whitney had left for a run over an hour ago. She’d woken up before Will and jumped out of bed and cut over to the arch and down past the zoo and over the tracks they’d crossed the other night as a company of four. She ran along the beach in one direction, then back again in the other, all the way out to the promontory with the hotel that sat raised like a sail.
Will waited for Whitney to return. He read and reread the same dumb pages of his book. He checked his email: no new nothing from the producer. Maybe today, now that everyone would be back from the long holiday weekend. He went out for coffee but didn’t go far—just across the street, worried that Whitney might get home and, finding him out with the key, grow only more incensed than she already was. He brought his book with him. He drank a café con leche quickly. He ate a chocolate croissant and then a second. He swept up his mess of flakes and felt sick with sugar and walked back across the street with his head down and almost got hit by a garbage truck. Two men hung off the back and another drove. They were handsome and tan and had clean uniforms and the same haircuts as the soccer players. Will bet they made a living wage. He bet it was enough to get on happily, pridefully, in this city of extreme reasonableness. He couldn’t quit his job, could he? He’d made more than she had at first, and then she’d rocketed past him. She’d deferred her loans but had been paying them off quickly now. She was just comfortable in a way he wasn’t. She didn’t think about it incessantly anymore. But even with the gap, he insisted on splitting everything down the middle. He couldn’t afford to regress to zero. The two men on the back waved at him and hopped off to clear the human-size recycling receptacle on the forty-fived corner of the city block. Everywhere people looked pleased with the temperature, with the state of the city’s sidewalks and trees. They didn’t seem bothered by the volcano. He finally understood in his gut—unless that was just the sugar surge—their collective desire for secession. He understood it on some level in California and it was beginning to make sense on another in Catalonia. It was beautiful all around. Everyone seemed content. Fucking Whitney. Fucking Will. Why were they wasting their morning apart in this place of immeasurable pleasantness?
Whitney stretched on the beach in front of the hotel. She watched three women with a decade on her spread out on mats near the water and salute the steel-trap sky. She spread her legs and pressed her palms into the sand and heard a wolf whistle behind her. She ignored it and then heard it again and flipped around with acid in her eyes, only to find a woman whistling at her daughter to get away from the gulls in the garbage can. The mother recognized that Whitney had turned, and she smiled sweetly. Whitney smiled back and then brushed the sweat from her exposed stomach. She wrung out her ponytail and took a deep breath. She spread her feet to match the width of her shoulders and straightened her spine as though she were being reeled in by a fisherman. She dusted the sand off her legs. They were thicker than she liked—soccer legs still, only stiffer in the joints. But they were effective, thirty miles a week. She brushed off her stomach again, some sand stuck to her sticky skin. Her stomach was hard and flat, and possessed a pleasing deflated-ness—she hadn’t eaten since the snacks at dinner. She put her hands on her ribs, finding their individual frets beneath her skin, fingering their notes. She breathed deeply and felt her cage expand. She felt hungry and it was energizing. She’d woken up ashamed of how the night had ended. The rage on the walk and then the silence that had choked them to sleep in their shared bed. She’d burned it off in the first hour, running it out of herself, but then
