“I guess we can at least head down there with you and see something new,” she said.
They took the metro. The subterranean station was gleaming. The tiles were scrubbed. The sides of the escalator issued crisp reflections. The tracks were free of rust and garbage. The electronic signs on each platform announced the time of the next arriving train down to the second.
They moved as four in a comfortable quiet. They clustered there in equilibrium, surfing the smoothness of the ride. Eight stops, twenty minutes. They talked about their glimpses of the news—the president, the special counsel—and Jack read updates to them off his phone about the latest on the ashcloud. They could expect rain again soon, but a clearing following the rain. Meteorologists were predicting flights could be up and running as early as tomorrow now.
They exited the station at the base of Avinguda Diagonal. A light-rail tram split the boulevard the way the trolley in New Orleans split St. Charles. The streets hummed like trees in summer, taxis and buses carrying workers to and from indistinguishable glass office buildings. Down this way, things clipped commercially. There were trim suits and Bluetooth earpieces and frameless eyeglasses and pointy shoes. Down here, it was less Barcelona, more Brussels—or any other European city that didn’t have Gothic buildings and beaches and mountains on the water.
Jenna led them in the direction of the gate, and was at once in negotiation with a scalper. It was forty euros apiece, Jenna told them. She’d talked the man down from sixty. Will and Whitney exchanged a wordless look that neither could read definitively, and so, one beer deeper into the day, and sick of Whitney’s unhelpful indifference, Will stepped forward and opened his wallet and before thinking through the consequences of what he was about to do pulled out his last hundred-euro bill, a bill he’d tried and failed to rid himself of at any tapas bar or café—and, in exchange, received the tickets, printed out on real-live ticket stock, printed with red and black ink, like the kind he’d received in the mail all through high school for the shows at the Troubadour and the Palladium and the Hollywood Bowl he’d attended with the pink-haired girls of his early-driving years. The scalper gave him his change. He reached back for Whitney’s hand, who took the pair of tens like someone neither pleased nor displeased, like someone with nothing better to do on a trapped afternoon.
They were at the edge of the continent. The sea and sky were gray. The Parc del Fòrum, Jack said, was only maybe fifteen years old. It was a reclaimed industrial slip on the waterfront that had been transformed into a provocation of concrete planes and angles. It looked to Will like the models he sometimes spied in the windows of the Cooper Union on his walk to and from the subway. There were primary colors and blocks, cement and steel the way Olmsted used grass and trees. It reminded Will of the few days he spent in Berlin during a summer of law school, the concrete that had been poured after the Wall fell, the concrete Oz of the government buildings on the river.
At the water there was an enormous solar-power panel soaring above the Fòrum like a pergola. It rose at a disconcerting angle, summoning the sun through the blackness of the ash veil. It looked built to power an entire city. Before it, made miniature by the scale, was the band shell, around which were gathered the masses, the flashing signs of underemployment and of endless summer. Life went on beneath the volcano. There were thumpings of a DJ beat all around.
Will handed his newly purchased tickets to the attendant at the gate, and a pit fixed itself in his throat. He never trusted scalpers. He always presumed that he was getting screwed. But the pleasing green sound of go followed the scanning of each of his tickets, and he and Whitney filed through the turnstile.
Jenna handed the attendant her printouts and waited for the same sound. Whitney watched Jenna’s face hold its lineless liquid form while the moment distended and the attendant fumbled around, spraying the red laser on the bar code over and over. Whitney moved her eyes between the tickets and Jenna’s face, and saw Jenna’s lips part uncertain and her eyes flutter scared.
The attendant said something quickly in Spanish and Jenna had to ask her to repeat herself. The attendant was holding out the tickets as she said it again. And all Whitney and Will heard Jenna say was: “Qué? Qué? Es imposible.”
“She says they’re counterfeit,” Jenna said, incredulously. “She says they’re no good.”
Jack put his arm on her shoulder and she flinched.
“Fuck,” Jenna said. “I guess we’ll go see about those guys back there, see what else they have. This is fucking insane. This has never happened before.”
She stretched the elastic straps of her leotard off her neck and shoulders, as though her clothes were beginning to squeeze too tightly. She turned and had taken a marching step in the other direction when Whitney said, “Wait…wait, Jenna. Just take our tickets. It’s your thing. It’s not worth spending even more money. Just take—”
“No, no, don’t be ridiculous. I mean, thank you,” she said. “But that’s not—”
“How ’bout this, then,” Jack said. “I’m in the same boat as you guys, you know? I mean, I don’t need to go. I’m behind on packing, anyway. I have plenty else I should be doing. How ’bout you three go, and I’ll meet you afterward?”
Jenna stared at him. Whitney’s face was stony.
“Or in that case, what if, Jenna, you just take mine?” Whitney said. “A one-for-one swap.”
Whitney didn’t want to be here. She wasn’t at all interested in the music and she was still a little sick of Will. She felt a rush
