But Will knew the news report. He’d seen it, plain as anything yesterday, before he’d fallen asleep. Or had he dreamed it? He’d been drunk and beat then, too, and had been drifting off. He couldn’t remember anything after it. He’d seen the report about the murder in Paris, the apartment building, the two young Germans. But he couldn’t tell what was real or not anymore. She’d scrambled the baseline of fact. Then again, what was he doing thinking a baseline of fact existed at all? He didn’t know a thing about her. And he’d known less than nothing until two days ago. It had been just forty-eight hours. He couldn’t believe it. He knew nothing about her except what he’d seen and heard in her presence, and she was doing her best to make him question the certainty of even that shared reality.
She was still smiling and then she was rolling her eyes, like he’d taken the joke way too seriously again. The cold blood coursing through his body had choked off any arousal, and now he was sitting in damp clothes, working too hard to make sense of what was true. She might’ve killed someone, or she might’ve seen the news and made the whole thing up. Who knew if she’d even had roommates in Paris? Who knew for certain if she’d even studied abroad there? Or if she’d gone to NYU at all? Or if she was twenty-two or from Los Angeles or named Ms. Leonard or Ms. Silverstein—or lived a single detail of the life she’d described to him at Gram’s party?
This woman was the body before him, but that was the only thing he could say for sure.
It was at that point that she walked slowly toward him. It didn’t take all that many steps to cross the room. The steam had moved from the bathroom into the bedroom, the steam and the scent of the shampoo. She was ten feet away, facing squarely toward him as before. She had an idea written on her face and he understood it clearly. He didn’t move. She ran her tongue over her teeth, beneath her lips. He sat on the edge of the bed and she stood in the center of the room. Neither of them said anything. She kept her mouth shut and her tongue moving. He heard himself breathing through his nose. He heard himself swallow. She cocked her head to the side and then dropped her eyes to the floor, and her whole body slackened, like the audition was over.
“You have remarkable restraint,” she said, and chuckled, and then turned toward the bathroom, dropping her towel as she went, so that it was the whole of the back of her—wet blonde, firm butt, park-blackened pads of her feet—that Will watched slip into what was left of the steam.
Endurkoman
For thirteen days they’d waited out the volcano, slept on floors in nearby villages, cooked in strange kitchens with pots and pans that were in all the wrong places, with ovens that ran too hot and too cold. They’d read the papers. They’d seen the photographs in the foreign magazines. They’d consumed radio broadcasts and television programs and internet websites with updates. They’d prayed for their neighbors, they’d prayed for their cows, they’d prayed for resilience of spirit. They’d tuned in each night for the assessment by the volcanologists at the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management. All while they waited patiently for the all-clear to return to the valley. When it finally came, it came via robocall from the President herself.
Much of what was left in the valley was stone and ash. Entire plots were slurried black and still smoldering. Some homes stood untouched, soot on the windowpanes and side paneling, but interiors preserved in a panorama of aquamarine light. Gardens, even, were blooming casually, complacently, from autumn-buried bulbs. For most, though, it was an end of things. Entire material lives ceased to exist, worldly possessions swallowed by liquid flame. But as far as anyone could count, no neighbors had been killed. And, in that way, nothing had truly been lost at all.
They’d known it had been coming. They’d known it had been near time. They’d fled before the worst of it, lifted out as though by valkyries, and were set down in their purgatories up the coast and down the coast and inland. But then the President lowered the threat of further activity to green. The eruptions were through and they had survived. So the angels set them right back down where they’d been before, where their grandparents had lived and their grandparents before them, and they puzzled through how to move forward. How to lay new foundations in the ashes.
Wednesday
“Where the fuck have you been?” he said.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she said.
He was at the apartment when she buzzed up, six-thirty in the morning, bright light through the windows, a broken ashcloud at last.
“I’ve been here all night,” he said.
“Bullshit,” she said. “I was here at six and eight last night. Buzzing up. Beating down the door. Waiting around in the street. Calling over and over. Nothing. Just that same straight-to-voicemail over and over.”
“My phone broke,” he said.
“Your phone broke,” she said.
“Screen’s shattered and it’s been dead since last night. But I was home by eight. If you were really here, I must’ve just missed you. I even tried you from a pay phone around then. Three or four times. It was your phone that was dead. And your mailbox is full, as always. How can you possibly be putting this on me? I thought something terrible had happened. I didn’t fucking sleep.”
“I was at his apartment,” she said. “After you weren’t here, twice, we walked all the way back and I went to sleep. I don’t know what you want from me. You weren’t here.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, either. I’m certainly not the one at
