In the Volcano House movie theater, red lights pulsed beneath chairs. On screen, I watched ash and pumice slowly bury homes in the Westman Islands in 1973. Watched men and women in pale wool sweaters shovel ash off metal roofs.

Some days I drove, aimless, or read about tectonic and volcanic areas, rift zones, main lateral volcanic belts. Read about fracture zones, areas of transformed lineaments, grabens. “The mantle plume disappears under the new Iceland, the island grows and its oldest parts become eroded and disappear below sea level.” [1]

 *

In the hospital when my father was dying, a tube inserted into his nose and throat gave him the pleasure of tasting water but kept the water from reaching his stomach, so he wouldn’t vomit. The day before he died he took big swigs of water, which wasn’t allowed. I’d asked him to stop when we were alone so he could refuse me privately. He wouldn’t give it up, always the rebel I knew. Both of us stubborn. I share his willfulness, his instinct to disobedience that can wound people. His exes called him reckless, mine have called me cruel.

He shrugged me off. “Makes no difference. I’m terminal.”

 *

The water that sinks through pores, fissures and cavities into the abysses below Iceland acquires its own character. It interacts chemically with the volcanic soil and the volcanic bedrock, dissolving minerals and enriching the clay fraction of the soil. The water becomes low in calcium compounds (alias chalk) but relatively high in chlorine (a result of its marine origins) and has an underground pH-value of 9-10. It retains a small fraction of minerals and gases, making it pleasant tasting. [2]

 *

I swam. Took on the scent of the water on my skin, a metallic, mineral smell. Sulphur, clay. After, I felt feral, less domesticated, far from my son, less recognizable to myself, smelling of the soil of an ecosystem to which I did not belong.

 *

Chemotherapy changes the body’s smell too. Over time my father smelled like a different man. Metallic. The oldest parts of how we’d communicate—his hoisting me up in the air as a baby, or sitting silent on long drives in his truck smelling like cigarettes and gas station coffee, sweaty from jobsites—eroded and disappeared.

 *

One day I took a mysterious photo of a page inside a now more mysterious book at the national library in Reykjavík. The page references a novel with characters named Josephine and Bethe and Count Sheridan. The snippet is of a scene after a volcano has erupted. There is a deafening clap of thunder as though the world had been blown in two. The night had vanished and after fiery fragments from the centre of the earth were flying through the sky and missiles like jagged lumps of fire, coming apart in their flight, as liquidy as sealing wax, fell dripping to the water, a crowd of dancers ran from the terraces that surrounded Count Sheridan’s house, ran for their lives.

To study a volcano, to predict large eruptions, geologists measure small earthquakes that happen inside and around the volcano. If pressure increases in a volcano, it produces little earthquakes, and the more pressure on a volcano, the more little earthquakes in that volcano. This slow breakdown of stability inside the volcano produces big eruptions. I learn this and think how human, how frustratingly human. [3]

All that year, my father’s stomach rupturing, holes in his GI tract leaching acid.

 *

Here’s a memory: The day before he died, the last day he could speak, we had a fight about hospice. He was mean, and I was mean back.

I don’t romanticize death as if it were a lesson in loving, as if he were, finally, a lesson in pain and relief, presence and absence, but I know this one hospice nurse who talks about the dying in a breathless giddy way. Everyone’s relationships are realer, she’s told me. All their shit rising up.

I read Ben Fama’s Fantasy in Iceland.

 *

My heart went crazy too. Delusional, from Latin deludere “to play false,” from de- “down” and ludere “to play.” Shape-shifting—the concrete body as fantasy, as an unending unfurling of other bodies. He has not died; or, I catch my reflection and see his face inside my face. I am blown in two.

One day in Iceland, I watched a young couple pose for wedding photos on a volcanic beach, in mist, before the mouth of a cave. It was cold, and the bride’s arms were bare in her pale crepe dress. The bride’s body, simultaneously real and mythological. Like the dead. 

I don’t romanticize death.

Some die / I thought / I saw her today.

But maybe I romanticize the crowd of dancers running from the terrace of Count Sheridan’s imaginary house, romanticize them running, alive with want and terrified, full of their own life’s meaning, running fast for their lives.

__________

Notes

[1] Living Earth: Outline of the Geology of Iceland by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, p. 288

[2] Living Earth: Outline of the Geology of Iceland by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, p. 90

[3] With thanks to Páll Einarsson at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, who researches volcanology, tectonism, and earthquake seismology and who I interviewed on July 16, 2018.

[4] Ben Fama, Fantasy, Ugly Duckling Press, 2015