Loneliness, Lava, and Love
On the one hundred and eighty-third day, Elias Brandt walked out to the edge of the cliff and stood there for a long time, watching the fire come up out of the sea.
It never got old. That was the strange thing. Six months, and it still stopped his breath every time.
The island had no official name. On the maps it was a speck in the Greenland Sea, a slab of black basalt three miles long, with no trees, no animals larger than a gull, and weather that tried to kill you nine months of the year. Nobody had ever had a reason to come here. Then, two years ago, a fishing trawler passing at night had radioed in a report that the sea beside the island was on fire.
It was. Somewhere beneath the black water, along the foot of the island’s eastern cliffs, there was a volcano no one had known existed. And every eleven minutes, exactly, it sent a fountain of lava roaring up out of the waves, a great curling wall of orange and gold that climbed the face of the cliff and burst into the sky in a spray of molten droplets, while snow went on falling calmly all around it.
Fire and ice, side by side. It should not have been possible.
When the Nordic Geophysical Institute had offered Elias a two-year contract to come and study it, alone, he had said yes before they finished the sentence. It was the chance of a lifetime. Every volcanologist on Earth would have traded places with him.
That had been six months ago. He still had more questions than answers.
The lava was too hot. Far hotter than it had any right to be, for the depth it was coming from. The eruptions were too regular, eleven minutes apart, never ten, never twelve, like the ticking of an enormous clock. There had been no earthquakes before it started. No swelling of the seabed. No warning at all. Elias had filled four notebooks and three hard drives with measurements, and sent a dozen reports back to the Institute, and published three short field notes in the journals. And every scientist who read them wrote back with the same thing: Fascinating. But why?
He didn’t know. Nobody did.
The research station was a cluster of three prefabricated huts bolted to the bedrock a quarter mile back from the cliffs. A supply plane landed on the gravel strip every six weeks, stayed for exactly as long as it took to unload, and left again. The pilot, a taciturn Norwegian named Haakon, said perhaps a dozen words per visit. Elias had started saving up things to tell him and then watching him leave before he could say them.
The Institute sent messages by satellite once a week. They were brief and practical. Data received. Continue monitoring. Please confirm fuel levels.
Nobody asked how he was. Why would they? He was a scientist doing a job.
He had not expected the loneliness. That was the truth of it. He had always thought of himself as a solitary person, happy with his books and his instruments. He had lived alone in Oslo for years. But living alone in a city, he discovered, is not the same as being alone on a rock at the top of the world. In the city, there is always someone. A voice in the next apartment. A stranger on the tram. A woman at the bakery who says "good morning". You don’t realize how much those small things are holding you up until they are gone.
After the first two months, he began talking to himself. After the third, he began talking to the gulls. After the fourth, he stopped talking at all, because the sound of his own voice in the empty hut had begun to frighten him.
And now it was the one hundred and eighty-third day, and he was standing at the edge of the cliff, and the fountain was about to rise.
He felt it before he saw it. A deep tremor through the soles of his boots. A rising hiss from below, as the sea began to boil. Then the fire came up the face of the cliff in a great roaring wave, so close he could feel the heat on his face through the falling snow. It curled up past him, gold and orange and white, and burst into the gray sky in a storm of glowing sparks.
It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
And a thought came into his head, very quietly, the way the cold creeps into your fingers before you notice.
It would be so easy.
Just a few steps. Just lean forward a little, into the light and the warmth. No more empty huts. No more silent dinners. No more waking at three in the morning in the dark with nothing but the wind for company. Eighteen more months of this. He did not think he could do eighteen more months.
He stood very still at the edge of the cliff, with the snow falling on his shoulders and the fire roaring up beside him, and he felt the thought pull at him like a current.
Then the fountain fell back into the sea.
The fire sank away down the cliff face, hissing, and the gray quiet came back. A gull cried somewhere overhead. The snow went on falling, small and white and gentle, the way it always did.
And Elias stepped back from the edge.
One step. Then another. Then he turned around and walked all the way back to the huts, with his hands shaking in his coat pockets, not looking back once. He went inside and sat down on the edge of his bunk and stayed there for a long time, breathing.
He had not jumped. He knew he would not jump. But he also knew, sitting there, that he had come closer to it than he had ever imagined a person like him could come. And that frightened him more than anything the volcano had ever done.
He told no one.
Who would he tell? That night, he sent his weekly report to the Institute, exactly as he always did. Temperatures. Timings. Gas readings. He read it over twice to make sure nothing in it sounded strange. Nothing did. He was very careful about that.
Because he knew how it would look. The scientist who couldn’t handle a little solitude. The man who cracked. Word got around in a field as small as volcanology, and he had spent fifteen years building a reputation as someone steady, someone reliable, someone you could send to the end of the earth. He was not going to throw that away by admitting that the end of the earth had nearly beaten him.
The Institute’s reply came the next morning, brief and practical as always. Data received. Continue monitoring.
So he continued. He went out to the cliffs every day to take his measurements, and he did his job, and he did not stand as close to the edge as he used to. He counted the days. Five hundred and forty-seven to go. He tried not to think about the number.
Twelve days later, the supply plane came in low through the snow and bumped down onto the gravel strip as it always did. Elias walked out to meet it, as he always did, his hands in his pockets, already rehearsing the things he would not get a chance to say to Haakon.
The cargo door opened. Haakon climbed out. And then, behind him, someone else.
A woman. She jumped down onto the gravel in a bright red parka, with two enormous duffel bags and a hard-shell case of instruments, and stood there squinting into the wind. She had dark, curling hair escaping from under a gray knit cap, and snow catching in her eyelashes, and a wide, generous mouth that was already halfway to a smile. She looked at the black cliffs, and the tiny cluster of huts, and the gray sea, and then at Elias.
He forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.
It was not only that she was beautiful, though she was. Breathtakingly. It was that she was there, solid and warm and real and alive, standing on his island, after six months of nothing but rock and snow and fire.
“Dr. Brandt?” she said. She pulled off a glove and held out her hand. “Leila Navarro. Geochemistry, University of Lisbon. I’m your new colleague.” She took in his expression and her smile faltered a little. “Oh no. They didn’t tell you, did they?”
Elias opened his mouth. What came out was a sort of rusty croak. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“No,” he managed. “They didn’t.”
Behind her, Haakon finished unloading the crates, climbed back into the plane, and gave Elias a long, unreadable look through the window. Then, for the first time in six months, the old pilot smiled. And the plane was gone.
That night, Leila made dinner, because she had brought real food: cheese, and chorizo, and a bag of good Portuguese coffee, and a bottle of wine she had wrapped in three sweaters to keep it from freezing. They sat across from each other at the little table in the main hut, and the wind howled outside, and the stove ticked, and Elias discovered that he had forgotten how to have a conversation.
She didn’t seem to mind. She talked enough for both of them. She told him about Lisbon, and her lab, and the terrible flight from Reykjavik. She asked him about the fountain, and listened to every word of his answer, leaning forward with her chin on her hand. Slowly, haltingly, he began to talk back. By the time the wine was gone, he had remembered how.
“I don’t understand,” he said finally. “Why are you here? The Institute never said anything about a second position.”
Leila looked down at her cup. For the first time all evening, she seemed a little shy.
“There wasn’t one,” she admitted. “I asked them to make one. Four months ago.”
“You asked?”
“I read your field notes. All three of them.” She turned her cup around in her hands. “The one about the eleven-minute cycle, I must have read twenty times. I kept thinking, he’s so close, he just needs the chemistry side. Somebody who can analyze what’s actually in that lava. So I wrote to the Institute, and I kept writing until they got tired of me.” She smiled ruefully. “They kept saying there wasn’t enough money. Then a new grant came through last month, and they suddenly called and asked how quickly I could pack.”
Elias looked at her across the little table, at the snow still melting in her hair, and thought about the edge of the cliff. About how close he had come. And about the fact that, all that time, someone on the other side of the world had been writing letters, trying to find a way to get here.
He didn’t say anything. But something in his chest that had been clenched tight for six months began, very slowly, to unclench.
“Also,” Leila added, not quite looking at him, “there’s a photograph of you in the Institute’s staff directory.” A faint pink crept into her cheeks. “And I thought you were cute. That might have been part of it. A small part.” She cleared her throat. “A medium part.”
Elias stared at her. And then he laughed.
It came out of him all at once, surprised and helpless, and it went on and on, and he could not stop it. It was the first time he had laughed in six months. Leila watched him with her chin on her hand and her eyes shining, and after a moment, she began to laugh too.
“How long is your contract?” he asked, when he could speak again.
“Eighteen months,” said Leila. “I asked them to make it end when yours does.”
Three weeks later, on a gray afternoon, they walked out to the cliffs together, the way they did every day now.
The snow was falling, as it always was, small and white and gentle. The black rock was slick under their boots. Elias stopped well back from the edge, farther back than he used to, and Leila stopped beside him.
Without either of them quite deciding to, her gloved hand found its way into the crook of his arm.
“You always stop right here,” Leila said. “Every day. Never any closer.” She glanced up at him. “I’ve been wondering why.”
Elias did not answer for a long time. The wind pulled at his coat. He had not told anyone. He had been quite sure that he never would.
But she was standing beside him in the snow, waiting, not pushing. And somehow, in three weeks, she had become the one person on earth he did not want to lie to.
“Before you came,” he said quietly, “there was a day. I stood right at the edge, when the fountain came up. And for a minute…” He stopped. Swallowed. “For a minute, I wasn’t sure I was going to step back.”
He waited for her to pull her hand away. To look at him differently. She didn’t. She only stood there beside him, very still, and her hand tightened on his arm.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said at last. Her voice was not quite steady. “I’m so glad you stepped back.”
“So am I,” said Elias. “More than I can tell you.”
“Next time it gets that heavy,” Leila said, “for either one of us, we say so. Out loud. Deal?”
He looked down at her, at her stubborn chin and her snow-flecked eyelashes, and felt something loosen in his chest that had been knotted tight for a very long time.
“Deal,” he said.
“How long until the next one?” she asked.
He checked his watch. “Forty seconds.”
They waited. He felt the tremor rise through the soles of his boots, and heard the deep hiss of the sea beginning to boil. Then the fire came roaring up the face of the cliff, a great curling wave of orange and gold and white, and burst into the gray sky in a storm of sparks, and the falling snow glowed like a million tiny lanterns all around them.
Leila caught her breath. Her hand tightened on his arm.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Elias. It’s beautiful.”
He looked at the fire. Then he looked at her, at her face turned up to the light, her dark hair blowing loose from her cap, the snow catching in her eyelashes and the glow of the fountain warm on her cheeks.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It is.”
They still did not know why the lava was so hot, or why it came every eleven minutes, never ten, never twelve. But they had eighteen months to find out.
And for the first time since he had arrived on that cold black rock at the top of the world, Elias Brandt found himself hoping that eighteen months would not be nearly long enough.
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