

Effusion

L.L. Press

Texas

Liam Llewellyn

Copyright © 2017 Liam Llewellyn

All rights reserved. Published by L.L. Press

liampublisher.com

liamauthor.com

ISBN: 1979599149

ISBN-13: 978-1979909082

A twig snapped under one of the spectator's feet and the heads of the tribesmen—skin burnt orange and dirty with old blood, noses impaled with small bones, bodies adorned with animal-tooth jewelry, black hair long, unkempt, licey—snapped their heads toward the direction of the noise.

Emiel Lane, through the viewfinder of his camcorder and kneeling behind a fat wiry bush, watched them scrutinize Brazil's Mapia-Inauini National Forest, which was more correctly described as a jungle, surrounding their primitive village: huts of sticks and branches held together with mud and feces and roofed with palm-tree leaves, a fire-pit smoking as one of the tribesmen tried to start it with fast whistling air through his lips and start the roast of a skinned panther—parts lying dismembered on the ground and awaiting skewering on the rotisserie above a bed of rocks and the smoking kindling.

Five feet away from him, along the boundary of the village, his wife, MaryAnn, huddled behind another bush and numerous times glanced at Emiel to see what he would do. She, like Emiel and like Simon and Rainy Midwood and Sergei Mostrovski, wore camouflage and their faces were masked with mud. These latter individuals hid behind bushes surrounding the village.

Emiel's hands steadily held the camcorder, recording the movements of the indigenous people, looking around at each other, making hand gestures but not speaking as they repeatedly glanced at the forest.

One of the tribesmen went into a hut and returned with wooden bows and animal-skin quivers of arrows and wood-handled axes and hammers of sharpened blunted rocks and he distributed these to the rest of the men of the village while the bare-breasted distended-bellied mothers and their children were ordered into the huts.

The tribesmen drew arrows, held the axes and the hammers with both hands, as they spread out, heading for the fringes of the jungle, their feet almost silent as they moved along the damp dirt of the ground.

Emiel felt his wife look at him desperately, eyes dilated with anxiety, and Emiel shot out a hand to prevent her from moving, speaking. He panned across the line of tribesmen with the camcorder, zooming in on their faces to capture the unwavering concentration, the fearless approach. His breath shook, a bead of sweat dropping off the tip of his nose.

He zoomed in on a tribesman stepping toward the bush behind which Mostrovski invisibly hid. The hunter's sweaty hands clutched the handle of his axe with white-knuckle intensity.

Emiel didn't blink, stopped breathing. The tribesman stopped in front of the bush, raised the axe above his head, torso muscles taut and sweaty, froze.

Emiel's eyes were locked on the camcorder's screen while the eyes of MaryAnn and Simon and Rainy peered out of their bushes, silently willing the tribesmen to leave.

Mostrovski dashed out from behind his bush, ran away, narrowly escaping the swipe of the tribesman's axe, which succinctly sliced through the bush.

The hunter hooted at his fellows, one of whom raised his bow and loosed a feathered arrow, which punched through Mostrovski's back, punctured his lung, and protruded through his front, the arrowhead spilling a channel of blood.

MaryAnn screamed and Emiel swore as the hunters looked over their shoulders. Simon and Rainy darted out from behind their bushes and bolted into the forest.

Emiel dashed beside MaryAnn, grabbed her arm, and told her to run as he heard the rustling of foliage behind them, the hunters pursuing them.

Emiel and MaryAnn ran low to the ground, their heads down, the raucous hooting of the tribesmen constant behind them while the endless appendages of the jungle slashed and gouged them.

Emiel opened the camcorder and took out the SD card, stuffed it in his pocket, then threw the camera behind him and suddenly the pursuit of the tribesmen stopped but Emiel and his wife didn't, ran on, breaking through the unending thickets of trees branches and tearing their feet out of entanglements of vines.

She was crying as she ran but Emiel took her hand and kept her up with him. They ran without stopping for what felt like hours, then an arrow blew through the trees and pierced MaryAnn's shoulder. She screamed, fell, inadvertently pulling Emiel down with her. He got upon his knees and saw MaryAnn lying on one side, caressing her wounded shoulder fully penetrated by the arrow. She writhed on the damp weedy ground and Emiel cluelessly looked at the grisly scene. He took the arrow by the head shaft and started pulling it out the front but MaryAnn screamed horribly and before he'd pulled the arrow out, a tribesman's axe sunk into his shoulder and he was torn away from his wife.

The hunters were all around them suddenly and ropes of vines were tossed around their necks and used to drag them back toward the village.

Emiel and MaryAnn struggled at their nooses and groped for anything to grab onto along the forest floor but they were beaten with the handles of the tribesmen's weapons and pulled along.

Back in the village, their wrists and ankles were bound with vine ropes before being dumped into open-top wooden cages.

In the corner of his cage, Emiel huddled, covering the gash in his shoulder, and looked across to MaryAnn's cage, where she lay on her side with the arrow shaft between her fingers.

"Talk to me," he said to her quietly, glancing to check he did not attract the tribesmen's attention but they were preoccupied sharpening their weapons, talking to each other in their language.

"What the fuck," MaryAnn groaned, weakly pulling at the arrow but wincing.

"Leave it in," he told her. "You'll get gangrene."

She whimpered and writhed to the back of her cage, sat up, looked at the tribesmen.

"What are they doing?"

"I don't know."

"What the fuck do they want with us?"

Emiel hesitated.

"I don't know."

"Fuck fuck fuck..."

"Simon and Rainy are gonna get back to Boca Acre and get the police."

"What if they don't make it back?"

Emiel was silent and MaryAnn's eyes went wide at him.

The tribesmen moved out of their sight but their works—hammering, cutting, smashing, sharpening—remained audible.

MaryAnn soon fell asleep and Emiel struggled not to do the same but the humidity of the day, even as it transitioned into evening and the sun was darker behind the trees, caused his will to slip and his head slumped.

Emiel was wakened by MaryAnn screaming his name for help.

The night was darker than he'd ever seen before entering these jungles but there was a bizarre source of light radiating in the village center outside his cage and in his prewaking state of mind, he might have mistaken it for a glimmering mountain of gold but the heat and ash and smoke blowing in his face through the interstices of the cage corrected him that it was an enormous fire.

The tribesmen were hoisting MaryAnn out of her cage and besides rocking side to side and kicking her knees, her vine fetters prevented her from putting up much resistance.

Emiel stood and went to the side of his cage nearest MaryAnn's and yelled at the tribesmen just within hand's reach—if his hands had been free—and told them to leave her alone.

The tribesmen looked unconcernedly over their shoulders at him but otherwise ignored his strengthening protests, his rabid-voiced cursing at them as MaryAnn was fully removed from the cage and carried beside the bonfire, where the tribesmen carrying her were met by others, coming around the corner of the village from which the sounds of toiling had previously come in the afternoon and these bore a wooden frame, six feet tall and wide, that resembled a tic-tac board.

Emiel raged more, bashing his shoulder against the bars of the cage but only succeeded in deeply cutting his forehead, dislocating his shoulder.

The tribesmen cut MaryAnn's bondage only to lift her onto the frame and tie her once again to it.

She screamed Emiel's name and wept and he yelled back at her he was here, he tried to break apart his ankles and wrists but the braided vines were too strong and his one shoulder too weak, so he tried kicking through the cage but the wood was impervious to his efforts and his only reward was a sprained ankle and he screamed at the tribesmen more to stop, screamed until his voice was nearly gone, screamed until his mouth was full of blood, his teeth orange in the firelight.

A tribesman with an axe stood beside the frame MaryAnn was bound to and she gazed up at him with breathless fear and she shook her head and tried to restrain her crying to plead with him no, please let us go, no, please...

The tribesman was unaffected, his people—women and children as young as babies—surrounding, watching as he raised his axe.

MaryAnn flinched, gasped, pled louder, and Emiel screamed at the axeman, please! Begged him. MaryAnn cried Emiel's name but before he could say hers, the tribesman dropped the axehead down upon her neck.

Everything went silent, suffocated by the action, leaving only the crackling of the flames and the dripping of blood and the strange tearing of flesh, which had no sound, like the tearing of rubber, as MaryAnn's head hung off her neck by a few grisly strands of muscle.

Emiel looked like he'd just encountered a landmine. He crawled back to the corner of his cage, watching the executioner tear off MaryAnn's head and hand it to an old woman, who took it to a boulder and sat with a knife and started shearing off the hair, chipping out the teeth, eventually removing all the flesh from the skull, which was then emptied of the brain and the resulting void used to collect a cupful of blood from the dripping neck stump while the flesh was skewered and roasted in the fire.

The clothes were cut off the body, then the body was vivisected from either armpit down to the waist and small rocks were inserted into these long cuts. The rack was positioned over the fire, which soon consumed the headless naked body, and once the front side was blackened, the rack was turned over to char the back.

In the next two hours, the body cooked, the skull of blood passed around for all the tribespeople to drink from. Mothers dabbed their pinkies and dripped it into their babies' mouths.

The meat from the head was the first done and was passed around. The people ate it with no savoring but with the dutifulness of eating a wafer at communion.

After the body was cooked, it was carved, chunks given to all until all that remained was mostly skeletal.

A tribesman tossed into Emiel's cage a chunk of the body's quadriceps the size of a Cornish game hen. It sat on the floor of the cage, through which protruded prickly grass, smoking, still sizzling, Emiel sitting as far away from it as possible.

The smell of the whole village then was of barbecue and Emiel turned onto his stomach and vomited into the earth.

By morning the shank was covered in fire ants and flies. Emiel sat in the corner, staring at it as though it were a thing he was trying to prove to himself had supernatural autonomy.

For the next three days, Emiel was ignored, watching the tribesmen return from hunting with various small game—birds, rats, snakes—some of which they cooked and ate at irregular intervals.

He didn't sleep for these three days and at night, heard the growling and prowling of large predators unseen, kept at bay by an ever-burning fire and guardsmen surrounding the perimeter of the village, whom he occasionally caught gazing at him as at a coveted item.

On the third day, he watched as another large fire was constructed and a hardened-mud cauldron of water put over it. The tribespeople deposited skinned rats, birds, snakes, and other game into this boiling water and let it boil all day and by nightfall, the ingredients had melted from solid states to liquid, which was now coalescing into a thick pearly substance.

They took the cauldron off the fire and set it out to cool overnight and by the fourth morning, it had hardened into a substance like bacon grease in a coffee can under your sink.

They came for him then. He didn't put up a fight as they lifted him out of the cage and tied him upon a new frame. He was stripped naked and his body coated with cut-out chunks of the hardened grease, which started melting like ice upon touching his burning skin.

As he was being marinated, voices yelled into the village from the forest in the language Emiel and his team had heard in Boca Acre and he heard one tribesman loose an arrow with an earthy grunt of his bow, which was responded to by the firing of semiautomatic rifles into the village, puncturing the chests and arms and heads of the tribespeople. The bullets blasted through the huts and women and children and babies within shrieked and cried and came rushing out, holding bloody wounds, carrying dead and dying children in their arms and they gazed in horror at the scene of their men being slaughtered, the village being invaded then by camouflage-uniformed officers of the National Police.

Emiel had lain still on the frame. He was speckled in bloodsplatter but did not appear affected—or alive, as one officer put fingers to his neck, staring straight up between the treetops through which slices of sunshine shone.

The events in the jungle were international news for the next week.

"Noted explorer and adventurer Emiel Lane and his team were attacked in the forest of Amazonas, Brazil, while on a series of explorations to observe and record the indigenous tribes there, about whom next to nothing is known. Lane and his team were hired by Sergei Mostrovski, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, to lead the explorations. Mostrovski, as well as Lane's wife, were murdered when their presence became known to one of the tribes they were filming. Lane's partners, Rainy and Simon Midwood, escaped the jungles to the village of Boco do Acre, where they alerted Brazil's National Police, who infiltrated the remote tribe and saved Lane as the indigenous people were preparing to murder him in a 'cannibalistic ceremony,' according to a National Police spokesman. Lane and his partners are currently being treated at an unidentified Brazilian hospital while National Police investigate the incident using Lane's footage, as well as witness reports, though they do not expect to find any evidence of foul play or criminal activity, said the spokesman."

Human-rights groups in western countries condemned what they deemed the massacre in Brazil and a genocide of a people who wished to remain apart from modern society. They requested the United Nations bring charges of crimes against humanity against Lane and his company, Lane Expeditions, and the Brazilian police but the requests never amounted to anything but 2:31-long newsbits.

After his physical condition was determined stable and safe for travel, Emiel was transported to a hospital in Galveston and admitted into the psychiatric ward.

He'd not said a word since being rescued, had not spoken to the psychiatrist at the Brazilian hospital, and continued his silence in America. His arms were wrapped around his hospital-gowned waist as he gazed at the Galveston psychiatrist with the kind of expression someone might give a family taking pictures of fireworks.

During his first night at the new hospital, he tried to kill himself by biting his wrists. His wincing and gnashing alerted his roommate, who screamed for the nurses. They rushed in to stop him and when he tried to leap out of bed, an orderly stuck him with a syringe and sedated him. When he came to the next morning, his wrists were thickly bandaged and he was fastened to his bed with leather straps.

After his futile therapy session that day, he was returned to his room, where he set to biting through his tongue and would have succeeded in severing it if a nurse hadn't come in with the first dose of Xanax, which the psychiatrist had prescribed.

Orderlies were called in again and he was sedated once more and the following morning, he found an oral gag in place, preventing his jaw from closing. Strapped, gagged, and helpless, he wept.

His therapy sessions were the only times when his limbs were free and during his session on the third day, he smashed his head into the room's cinderblock wall, breaking open his flesh, shattering his nose, fracturing his skull, and giving himself a concussion before he fell unconscious. He was briefly put on chlorpromazine and underwent therapy then on from his bed.

His first words came near the end of his first month in Galveston. He asked the psychiatrist to discharge him.

"I can't do that until I'm sure you won't hurt yourself anymore."

"If I wanna kill myself, that's my business, I should be able to do it—in my home."

"Doctors don't work like that. People don't wanna kill themselves unless they're in too much pain to bear. It's our job to ease that pain."

"I don't want to ease the pain. I don't want help. I don't want to live with these memories. And there's no fixing them, there's no...making them better. Sometimes people are just ruined and you have to let them go."

"I can't believe that. I have to believe, no matter the case, there's always hope for healing."

"Why? For job security?"

"No. Because of progress: When you came here, you were totally mute. Now you're talking."

"That's not a sign of healing."

"Maybe not. But maybe it is. It's enough for me to keep hoping."

He and the psychiatrist worked out a deal: Emiel would talk, soon enough about what had happened, if he were sedated for the other 23 hours of the day.

Emiel, MaryAnn, Simon, and Rainy had lived in Denver and operated their business out of there.

They'd met as undergrads at the University of Massachusetts. Emiel had been a journalism major, MaryAnn biology, Simon electrical engineering, and Rainy geology.

Emiel had been a tourboat guide during the summers, taking people to Nantucket and showing them around. The rest of the year, he was a private investigator, for lack of a better term, following husbands, wives, boyfriends, and girlfriends and filming them engaging in affairs for his employers.

MaryAnn had befriended Simon and Rainy, who had started dating as sophomores. The summer of their last year, the three had gone to Nantucket together—with Emiel as their guide and MaryAnn, on Rainy's prodding, had asked for his number after they returned to port.

MaryAnn's primary interest as a biologist was birds and she and Emiel, who quit the tour-guide business shortly after meeting her, traveled that summer throughout New England and spent hours in trees, behind bushes, beside rivers, and in blinds, arriving in the early morning and staying until past midnight, to capture footage of rare New England birds: wood sandpipers, American avocets, white-winged crossbills, black-tailed godwits, and ruffs, to name a few.

She would use this footage for her senior research project and to get into graduate school at Illinois State University in Normal.

She suggested Emiel start a YouTube channel and post the bird footage. He was at first skeptical and asked who would be interested in birds other than ornithologists and amateur birders? MaryAnn asked him why shouldn't he want to attract the interest of such folk?

So he did start a channel and was surprised when, after a month, his channel got more than a million views.

After graduating Simon went to work with Honeywell, taking a position in San Francisco, where Rainy got into graduate school at UC. She and Simon lived together and kept in daily contact with MaryAnn in Illinois.

Emiel, meanwhile, traveled to Israel on a Birthright Israel trip.

During the days of the 10-day trip, Emiel and other participants toured Tel Gezer, West Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the Dead Sea, and talked with soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces.

At night Emiel snuck out of the hotel and past the guards who patrolled their rooms. He entered East Jerusalem and filmed the activities of the Palestinians. He went to the West Bank and captured footage of the damage inflicted by Israel's bombings. He interviewed residents of the West Bank, whom he found out in the streets, and their interviews were emotional. They cried as they relived the events that had led to the deaths of their sons and daughters. Some blamed Palestinian leadership, others the Israeli. Emiel recorded both the Muslims and the Zionists praying to their gods for peace between the two nations.

He posted this footage to his YouTube and by the time he returned to the States, he'd garnered another million views—as well as ignited the ire of Palestine's and Israel's government. Israel criticized him for exploiting the Birthright program, which was meant to strengthen people's Jewish identities, for muckraking fame and after Emiel's footage was posted, violence between Israel and Palestine escalated, which many pro-Zionist politicians blamed on Emiel.

In any case he moved to Normal after that to live with MaryAnn. He got a job as a cameraman with a local TV station, which sparked his interest in tornado chasing. The job only required him to film a reporter talking to the audience against a pastoral landscape of gray storm clouds, recording ambient noise, and interviewing locals for their resigned fear—"This happens every year. Just make sure you have property insurance and your cellar's stocked up and wait it out."

But soon, on his own, he'd take his 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee with 169,000 miles on the odometer and mount a camera on the dashboard, another on the hood, and follow the trail of the tornadoes. He got footage of one tearing through an old cabin in the middle of nowhere, of another razing a farm whose livestock had been taken into the cellar, and of one forming, touching ground mere yards away from him as he was buffeted with dirt and grass and high winds but no deadly debris.

This latter video got him work as a producer for research footage for ISU, whose biology and geology departments hired him to lead teams into the Blackball Mine, Rimrock, Stoneface Boulder, and other caves throughout the state—to study the flora and fauna and the geological statuses of the deepest regions of these caves.

His reputation spread because of this work. He traveled to Vietnam with Rainy to explore the Son Doong Cave and its network of more than 150 caverns, then traveled to northern Greenland with a group of geologists, volcanologists, geographers, and seismologists to research the uninhabited newly discovered islands of that region.

He was hired to accompany a team of biologists from Australia's James Cook University to explore Cape Melville, 900 miles from Brisbane, to document the behaviors of six previously unknown species of sharks, frogs, skunks, and flowers living among the stacks of granite boulders that made movement difficult for the average or even journeyman cameraman.

He traveled to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula with scientists to record the activities of the peninsula's brown bears, the heaviest concentration in the world, as well as the region's volcanoes.

Mostrovski had hired Emiel following his work in India's North Sentinel Island. The people of this island had had limited contact with people outside the island and had always met outsiders with hostility if not outright violence. Emiel had snuck around the forest surrounding the inhabitants' villages and recorded them, took pictures of various plants and animals for use by several departments at the University of Madras.

Emiel was 40 by the time the Brazil expedition came. He and MaryAnn had been married for 10 years, Rainy and Simon for 15. Together the four had started Lane Expeditions, a multimillion-dollar business open to government, academic, and private institutions and people who needed or wanted help in exploring, documenting, and organizing trips to hazardous areas.

Rainy and Simon had not seen Emiel in person since they'd been in the Brazilian hospital, where he'd looked at them from his bed with an unreadable expression and did not move an inch when they hugged him.

He was prohibited from having visitors until his condition improved.

Rainy cried every day in the first month after Brazil. Simon tried to talk to her but she always left whatever room they were in.

Simon started frequenting a bar in downtown Denver. It was a dive and should have been demolished long ago. Who knew how much coke had been done in the bathrooms, how many drunk women had been finger banged in the booths, how many drunk men had been blown in the graffiti-walled stalls.

They'd met as sophomores, both taking the same natural-disasters upper-division class. At first it had just been casual sex. Then, after several months, Simon told her he loved her. She'd been petrified. Her parents, she said, were married but should have divorced years ago. They had four kids including her and all had been audience to and victims of endless physical and verbal abuse.

A common punishment for the children misbehaving, Rainy said, was to be handcuffed to the chain-link fence in the backyard for several hours.

Violence was not constrained to just them, she said. Their parents also fought, with fists as often as their tongues. The sound of dishes shattering, the clattering of silverware, and countless other mundane incidences provoked in her panic attacks.

"There's no such thing as love," she had said.

They stopped talking and seeing each other for seven months. They both cried in their dorm rooms and their bodies went awash with paralyzing electricity when they occasionally inevitably ran into or spotted one another on campus.

Simon had just started to talk to someone new when Rainy texted him, "I miss you" and he replied he missed her too. They met that night on campus and sat on a bench and talked until three a.m.

She told him she'd tried to kill herself on New Year's Eve by drinking bleach. She said she wanted help, felt weak without him.

She found a therapist across town but didn't have a car. Simon drove her there for her once-a-week appointment, picked up her prescription of Paxil when she needed it refilled. In the last semester of their junior year, the university had notified her that her financial aid hadn't covered all of her tuition, that she still owed $1,300 and would be disenrolled in a month if she couldn't pay. None of her family could afford to pay nor would if they could, she said, and her job as a front-desk assistant for the College of Education and Human Development paid her only enough to subsist.

In the end Simon took out a loan from his bank to give her the money. That summer, while he was in Atlanta for a Honeywell internship, they talked on the phone every night.

"Do you still love me?" she asked one of these nights.

Simon was tensely quiet for a moment, his jaw clenching.

"Yes."

"I love you too," her voice wobbling.

When they'd gone back to school, they started a formal relationship—tentatively, for Rainy's sake. They fought a lot, screaming at each other in his car because he'd crossed a line—told a joke, made a comment, wanted to have sex when she didn't—he didn't know was there.

They broke up but got back together a dozen times in this period.

They talked admiringly and often of how well Emiel and MaryAnn got along, how supportive they were of each other. As Emiel's work became more dangerous, MaryAnn worried for him but understood the part in him that craved such danger.

Before going to Vietnam with Emiel, Rainy told Simon she was worried about MaryAnn and him being alone together, as they would surely spend time together.

"Why? Do I have to worry about you and Emiel?"

"You know he would never do that to MaryAnn."

"But I would to you and him?"

But nothing had happened on the trip on either side.

Simon and Rainy had good times too. In between the breakups and the bickerings of their last summer of undergrad, life had been akin to that of which Bryan Adams had sung: eating at seafood restaurants along the harbor under the moon and stars, reading side by side on the couches in their apartments, stirring in the night to find the other beside, admiring their sleeping form in the moonlight coming through the thin bedroom curtains, looking into each other's eyes while making love, feeling the other's damp skin as they lay entwined in each other afterward.

In San Francisco, work and school had made each other's presence scarce and so they fought less.

Simon proposed in her last summer before getting her doctorate and she'd said yes but they didn't have sex that night.

They fought a lot in planning the wedding—where and when, whom to invite, what to eat. Then MaryAnn had asked them why they didn't just elope and then, feeling like a universe had been taken off their shoulders, that's just what they did: They and Emiel and MaryAnn flew to Nantucket to marry on a beach beside a lighthouse.

By this time Emiel's career as a professional explorer was just taking off. He was in high demand for his willingness to go anywhere, do anything, and he was making good money.

He brought Simon and Rainy and MaryAnn with him on the trip to the north of Greenland, after Rainy and MaryAnn had both earned their doctorates, and at the end, both Simon and Rainy told him how cathartic the trip had been for them. That's when Emiel asked Simon to quit his job at Honeywell, Rainy not to take the adjunct faculty position she'd been offered at Miami Dade College. Instead, come work with MaryAnn and me.

It was one of the few decisions Rainy and Simon made without any conflict.

Seeing the world together kept the fighting at bay, aside from little squabbles about forgetting to exchange their money, not packing the right shoes, not understanding the conversion tables at foreign retails stores. But MaryAnn and Emiel helped in quelling these by telling them these little things didn't matter, they loved each other and were a team and teamwork was needed for this work.

Rainy eventually went off the Paxil and she and Simon enjoyed a number of emotionally stable years together with Emiel and MaryAnn.

Now they didn't talk.

They shut down the business after Brazil and Rainy cried and Simon drank and tried to stay out of the house as long as he could. They slept apart, Simon on the couch, and by the second month he'd begun an affair with a woman he'd seen at the bar several times and finally took her up on the message she was sendin'.

With her he didn't talk about his life. They joked, laughed. He tapped his nose and made coarse doorbell noises and she laughed and when they lay in bed, they held hands and looked at each other in silence and smiled for no apparent reason. When they made love, it was slow, intense, touching, heavy breathing and afterward they both acted as though it had merely been something as mundane as grocery shopping but something infinitely more enjoyable.

With no subterfuge Simon spent more and more nights with his mistress and in the mornings, came home to get coffee, get cleaned, and change clothes. Normally the house was silent enough to hear a ghost but one morning, a couple of weeks after he'd begun the affair—the hours and days melted into one long strand differentiated only by the times he was with Rainy and when he was with the other woman—Rainy met him in the kitchen as the pot was brewing.

She leaned against the counter with folded arms and he half-smiled at her.

"How are you?"

She didn't answer, only studied him with Emiel's intensity in observing the Brazilian tribes. Simon looked away, perhaps not having expected an answer, and he poured himself coffee when it was ready and left the kitchen sipping.

He and the other woman went hiking in the Rockies, rented a cabin near Vallecito Lake, and spent a week swimming, fishing, and boating, eating in small diners, watching movies beside their cabin fire.

When he came back, all of Rainy's things were gone. He called her and she said she wanted a divorce. They met later that day at a coffeeshop, hands clasped around their mugs, and Simon told her about the affair she'd suspected.

She cried, wiped her eyes angrily, and reiterated her desire for a divorce.

"We can't just give up," Simon said.

"You have."

"You won't talk to me."

"You never try."

"I've tried since we got back from Brazil but you've pushed me away. I want to talk, I want us to get through this together."

"What, MaryAnn? Or your fucking whore?"

Simon sighed, sat back.

"I'm sorry. I had my reasons but that doesn't make it OK."

"What were your fucking reasons?"

"Maybe I needed someone to talk to. MaryAnn wasn't just your friend, Emiel's in a mental hospital, I needed to talk."

"You coulda gotten a fucking therapist."

"I'm sorry my first instinct was to wanna talk to my wife instead of a stranger."

"But you still went to a stranger, the only difference is you didn't have to pay this one. What about me? You think I didn't need to talk?"

"I tried, Rainy."

"You didn't try hard enough, I needed time—"

"Bullshit, you coulda had a year and you still wouldn't wanna talk about it—"

"—you didn't wanna wait—for sex, for attention—"

"—you used it as an excuse to push me away, to create distance, that's how you cope—"

"—you're selfish."

"I'm selfish? I did everything to help you when you needed it, when you asked for it, I crucified myself on your fucking lover's cross to try to make you comfortable and happy and even after 15 goddamn years, you still don't trust me enough to talk about your feelings."

"I've told you everything, you know I don't handle bad things well, don't you? After 15 years—"

"And I've told you to see a therapist for all that time, I've offered to go to marriage counseling, I've found numbers and people and made appointments but you've always backed out."

"So it's my fault you cheated on me?"

"I'm saying it's not all mine."

Rainy's fingers writhed around her ceramic mug.

"The summer you had your internship in Atlanta, I fucked Will, James, and Phil. A lot."

Simon's chest expanded, shoulders rose, nostrils flared. He struggled for something to say for a moment.

"You're a fucking white-trash whore."

He stood and left.

He booked a flight home to Boston and stayed with his parents for a month, ignoring the other woman's texts and phone calls until they no longer came.

"Do you love her?" his mom asked after they had watched several episodes of My 600-lb Life late into one night.

Simon thought, then nodded.

"Why?"

"We've been through a lot together."

"That's no reason to stay married."

Simon looked away, thought. He covered his face to hide his crying.

"She's funny. Smart. Stimulating. She challenges me."

"How?"

"To be a better person," Simon sniffled. "To be more...sensitive, sympathetic—empathetic. More human."

"To help her?"

Simon hesitated.

"Yes."

His mother's eyes gently surveyed his red wet wrinkled face.

"You're her husband, not her therapist."

"She won't go to a therapist."

"What does that tell you?"

Simon searched his brain.

"She's scared of what she'll find."

"She seeks comfort from you. Comfort is not love."

"It can lead to love."

"Does she love you?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"We've been married 15..."

But he realized the naïveté of what he was saying.

"Do you not like her? Why didn't you say anything after I proposed?"

"We didn't know any of what was going on beneath the surface. You seemed happy. But right now it's clear you're not."

"I have been fine, we've had fine times."

"When? Out of the country with Emiel and MaryAnn?"

Simon dropped his head, held the back of his neck.

His mother hugged him tightly, whispered into his ear:

"I want you to be happy, baby. You have to ask yourself: Can you be happy, content, just the two of you sitting together at the dinner table?"

Several nights afterward he called Rainy. He told her where he was, that he'd broken it off with the other woman, that he was sorry—for what he'd done and said.

"I'm sorry too."

Simon clenched his teeth, mashing his cell phone against his ear as he sat on the side of his old high-school bed. He rubbed his temple, shoulders jerking as he strangled his crying:

"I want us to work this out," he said, mouth dry and voice ragged, nasally from his stuffed sinuses. "I know we can."

She was softly crying too:

"Me too...I love you."

"I love you too, sweetheart, I love you so much!"

"Are you sleeping all right? Patients often have difficulty reacclimating to natural sleep after periods of sedation."

It was Emiel's third month in the hospital. The doctor had stopped sedating him throughout the day and had taken him off chlorpromazine two weeks ago. In that time, orderlies had not been called into his room because of nightmares or violence against himself, so Emiel had been allowed to be ambulatory.

Despite the psychiatrist's optimism, the real reason for Emiel's lack of nightmares was Emiel not sleeping but taking micronaps throughout the day.

His skin had lost all the color it had gained from long repeated exposure to sunlight on his trips. Though he'd not attempted suicide since before the period of sedation, he was still permitted no razors and so had grown a scraggly much-gray beard. His hair had curled into knots. His eyes were red, purple-ringed, and bloodshot, the result of his vomiting up the Xanax he was still on once the administering nurse had left the room.

His mouth seemed perpetually snarling and he glared at anyone near him, so he'd not talked to anyone in the hospital except the psychiatrist and no one spoke to him except to ask him to take his pills or to announce they were bringing food into his room.

"I'm fine, when can I go home?"

"We've barely scratched the surface, Emiel. We haven't even gotten near the incident in the jungle."

"And we won't."

"Why?"

"Because I'm thinking of pitching it to Hollywood producers and I don't want you to steal it from me."

Initially the doctor seemed to judge the legitimacy of this statement.

"You're a gullible fool, aren't you?"

"Where does this hostility come from?"

"From being held against my will."

"We're trying to help you, Emiel."

"Is this how you would help a rape victim? Force them to relive it?"

"You were a danger to yourself, Emiel. You've shown improvement but this hostility concerns me."

"It should," Emiel muttered, looking down beside the chair.

"I didn't hear you," the doctor leaned in.

Emiel lunged out of his seat and leapt at the doctor and smashed his cheek with a punch that broke three of Emiel's knuckles and knocked out the doctor. He searched his belt loop, then his pockets, and when Emiel could find no keys, he opened the drawers of the doctor's desk but still could find no keys.

The office was monitored by closed-circuit cameras that didn't record noise and the orderlies in the surveillance room were on their feet after the punch and racing down the hall.

They broke into the room in the middle of Emiel's search, three of them with more coming up behind, their black boots squeaking on the linoleum floor, which reflected and intensified the grotesque fluorescent lights in the hall.

Emiel tore out one drawer and swung it at an orderly trying to move in on him. He missed, the contents scattering against the painted stone walls, and the orderly tackled Emiel against a file cabinet and disarmed him, tried to pin him against the cabinet while the others moved in, stepping over the doctor, who was pulled out of the room by the last orderly in the line.

Emiel smashed the back of his head into the orderly's face to free himself, then tossed the broken-bleeding-nosed orderly into the others and they toppled like the bowling pins they resembled in their white uniforms.

Emiel tore off one guard's key cards from the extending cord on his belt, then jumped over the desk and rammed through the guard taking out the doctor.

Outside the office he ran to the end of the hall, more orderlies coming after him from the other side of the hall, yelling at him to stop where he was, but he scanned the key card and the white-painted iron-barred door buzzed open.

There was nothing in the cement hall leading to the elevators to wedge against the door, Emiel saw after a quick scan as he slammed the door shut. So he just ran for the elevators, smacking the call buttons and gazing up at the floor-number display above as the elevators started up from the first floor to this, the 18th and last.

The iron door slammed shut again and Emiel's head snapped to the side and he saw a dozen orderlies approaching him with a mixture of haste and wariness.

Emiel turned to fully face them, putting his fists up, scanning them all as they encircled him.

"You can't keep me imprisoned here—I've done nothing wrong, I'm not a fucking criminal!"

They pounced at him all at once and suffered his kicks and punches but eventually wrestled him to the cold stone ground, where he wriggled and growled and cursed and screamed.

The doctor, holding his bruised cheek, hurried out to them, tapping a filled syringe. The orderlies exposed one of Emiel's buttocks and the doctor stuck him and injected the fluid.

In seconds Emiel was unconscious.

Back to square one then.

Deemed too dangerous for a roommate, Emiel was placed in a single bed, to which he remained strapped for most of his days, pissing and shitting into a bedpan and fed by an orderly wearing steel-mesh gloves.

He was put back on chlorpromazine during the nights, which kept him from screaming and cursing until his voice vanished while the doctor struggled to find a more appropriate and weaker medication to ease Emiel's morbid depression.

Until the nights, however, he was lucid and when he could no longer scream, he wept with cries crackling dryly like oil in a frying pan.

His therapy regressed to hour-long sessions of silence to the doctor's questions. He no longer glared fiercely at the doctor but looked into the porous walls behind the foot of his bed.

He did not utter a word for four more months.

The first night after this he went without chlorpromazine, he wakened from a micronap hearing a buzzing. His eyes didn't scan the darkness of the room. He lay like a stone slab, listening. A fly appeared on the wall that was now always the view of his world. It moved between the slats of moonlight created by the windowblinds, then stopped directly in his unwavering line of sight, as though an amateur performer freezing upon a stage before a hundred pairs of eyes.

Emiel's throat clicked and his eyes welled up.

"I'm sorry, baby...I'm sorry. The Sentinelese, the others, it was...fine, everything was fine...Someone...stepped on a twig...It was me...An anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, he...wants to research uncontacted tribes around Brazil...They're indigenous people who...they live in the jungles, hunt for their food, like the Native Americans before the pilgrims...Yeah, I didn't either but...apparently there are a lot of them in South America...Yeah, it should be fine, we did Sentinel, that was fine...If there's any...any Cannibal Holocaust shit going on, we won't do it..."

The doctor came in the next morning to find a note left on his desk by one of the orderlies from the night shift in the surveillance room: He's talking.

The doctor entered Emiel's room in the midst of Emiel speaking with the wall but didn't attempt to interrupt, probably wouldn't have been able to anyhow, and Emiel didn't stop speaking, didn't seem to register the doctor's presence as he entered and carried a metal folding chair beside Emiel's bed.

"—shots for hepatitis A and B, yellow fever, typhoid, and rabies, lots of...mosquito spray, there's malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya...No, none of us is pregnant so we don't need to worry about Zika—Rainy's not pregnant, is she? Good—not that it wouldn't be good if she were, just...pregnant in the jungle, fuckin' Christ—"

"Can you hear me, Emiel?" the doctor asked quietly.

Emiel responded in no visible way, continued his conversation.

The doctor did not interrupt again and after 15 minutes left. From then on the doctor stopped trying to find the proper antidepressant and started testing antipsychotics on Emiel.

Simon flew back to Denver. He and Rainy agreed to remain separated but saw each other regularly and made careful jokes that it was like they were dating again.

"Maybe that'd be good for us," Simon said one night at dinner.

"What, start dating again?"

"Yeah or act like it. Start from scratch again?"

"So I should just sit here and all through dinner wonder how big your dick is?"

Simon laughed.

"Even on our first official date, you already knew."

They made love at Rainy's apartment afterward, the first time since before Brazil five months ago.

"Have you spoken to Emiel at all?" Rainy asked on their third such date.

Simon kept his eyes down at his food.

"No. His...doctor left some voicemails but..."

"Is he still in Galveston?"

"At that time, two or three months ago."

They were silent for a moment.

"Are you doing OK on money?" Simon asked.

"Yeah I'm fine. You?"

"Yeah, yeah."

Another period of silence.

"What's gonna happen to the business?" Rainy asked.

"I don't know."

"There's no way Emiel could do any more trips once he gets out, right?"

"'If.'"

Rainy looked up at Simon and saw the seriousness in his face.

"You really think he's that bad?"

"Did you read what the Brazil surgeon general said happened to MaryAnn?"

"No, I avoided all the news."

"You don't wanna hear it, what they did. But yeah, I think...I don't think Emiel..."

He sighed, set his fork and knife down as though exasperated, put his hands together as if in prayer, then looked around the dim restaurant.

"OK, OK, happy talk," Rainy insisted.

Simon smiled.

"Right, sorry."

"OK, let's say we get too old and rickety to go on these trips anymore but we can't retire yet, what would you do? Find an engineering job?"

"God no, I don't think I could stand it now."

"What would you do?"

"I don't know. Guide hikes, rafting trips in the Rockies?"

"I said we were too old and rickety to go on these crazy trips anymore, that means you'd be too old to hike and raft."

"Too old to do that stuff but not old enough to retire? How old are we talking about?"

"I don't know, it's a hypothetical."

"If I'm not old enough to retire, I'm not too old to go hiking and rafting."

"Whatever."

"I don't know, maybe write for a magazine—travel writing."

Rainy nodded.

"What about you?" Simon asked.

"Well...like all those invitations from universities I've gotten? To be a visiting professor for a semester or two?"

Simon nodded.

"I think I'd like to do that. They've invited me from all over the U.S., Canada, Ireland, England, Germany, Australia, Japan."

"Why don't you accept?"

Rainy shrugged.

"Would you come with me?" she asked.

Simon smiled at her.

"You want me to?"

"If you don't mind a nomadic lifestyle."

"At this point I think I prefer it."

"And you could do hiking tours, rafting, skiing, snowboarding, all that. And write for local magazines if you wanted."

"OK, where are we going first?"

Rainy sat back, her eyebrows arching.

"Are we really talking about this?"

"Or are we just...speaking about this?"

They laughed.

"'Coffee's for closers, you sonofabitch,'" Simon said. "Yeah, why not?"

"I don't know...It seems big or...I don't know."

"The best times we've ever had have been when we're not at home, right?"

"...Yeah."

"So let's just not have a home. Let's stay on the move."

"Doesn't that seem like we're just avoiding our problems?"

"Or is that what typical married couples tell us? Do we have to conform to their ideas of marriage? Or should we do what we think is best for us?"

Rainy thought, smirked.

"I got an invitation from Ulster University in Northern Ireland. I've always wanted to research the Giant's Causeway there."

"So accept. We'll put the house up for sale, they provide housing, all that?"

"Yeah."

"So what are we debating?"

Rainy chuckled, blushed.

"I don't know."

So she accepted. It was February then and the school's geology department head asked if she would be ready to teach by the start of the summer session and she excitedly said yes.

Simon and Rainy packed up the few things they would not sell along with the furnished house, which they listed with a realtor for $230,000, then flew to Ulster in early March.

The house the university provided was a single story, fully furnished, quaint but nothing special but neither thought of it as a home so much as a basecamp.

They bought bikes to explore the countryside, both too reticent to drive on the wrong side of the road in the wrong side of the car.

Simon, from the daily excursions, which lasted into the deep of the nights sometimes, as well as from intricate maps, guidebooks, and talking with locals, soon became well-versed in the paths and secrets and tourist attractions within a 10-mile radius outside the town.

In May he placed ads in Ulster's Herald, The Mirror, and the Republic's Examiner and Independent. He also set up Facebook and webpages to advertise tours of the area and he quickly had a waiting list that would carry him into August and make his informal business a nice profit.

Rainy's teaching consisted of lectures to graduate students, much to her relief—having previously worried she would be teaching introductory geology to freshmen. Using a school van, she took her students out into the field quite often. She took them to the causeway, to north County Fermanagh, where the island's oldest rocks were located, took samples of the hypersaline lakes and the salt deposits of rivers near Carrickfergus in County Antrim. She showed them the red soils of County Tyrone—the result of mountain erosion in the Carboniferous Era—then the rocks of Counties Donegal and Derry—remnants of an ocean that had covered this part of the island 600 million years ago.

Emiel had been institutionalized for seven months now and to the doctor's dismay, had gotten worse.

Emiel's days consisted of reliving the weeks leading up to the Brazil expedition, as well as his time in the jungle filming the various tribes.

The doctor listened and watched with acute forlorn interest.

When the time came for Emiel to re-experience the events involving the final tribe, the doctor watched Emiel's face—terror, disbelief. He screamed MaryAnn's name, pled with the tribesmen of memory not to kill her. He sobbed and screamed when they did, struggling against the bedstraps, and the doctor himself cried quietly.

After this final episode in the jungle, Emiel's brain reset:

"An anthropologist...at the University of São Paulo...wants to research uncontacted tribes around Brazil..."

Haloperidol proved effective in calming Emiel's hallucinations after a couple days' dosages. Emiel slept then, a miraculous occurrence, and continued to do so peacefully for a week.

After this week was over, Emiel groggily returned to reality and the doctor, spending every available second beside him, was there to welcome him:

"Do you know who I am?"

Emiel blinked, smacked his tongue:

"Dr. Brent."

"Do you know who you are?"

"...Emiel Lane."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

Emiel thought a long time.

"I punched you."

The doctor nodded.

"Have Rainy and Simon...they called or...?"

The doctor shook his head.

"You've not been well enough to have visitors."

"Yeah but...have they called or tried to see me?"

The doctor reluctantly shook his head. Emiel looked at him as though he couldn't comprehend what he'd been told.

"I know you wanna go home, Emiel," the doctor said. "I wanna get you home. The medicine you're on now is the most promising we've tried. But for it to be effective as it needs to be, to help you reintegrate, we need to talk about Brazil."

Emiel's eyes studied the doctor's brown loafers.

"What's wrong with me?"

The doctor took a deep breath.

"Is there a history of mental illness in your family?"

Emiel looked up, thought.

"Depression I guess. My grandfather killed himself with painkillers. I think my mother had borderline."

"Any schizophrenia?"

The word visibly frightened Emiel.

"No."

The doctor thought.

"From what I've observed, I'd diagnose you with PTSD-induced psychosis."

Emiel turned his head on the pillow to look at the ceiling, swallowed, lips trembling.

"Psychosis is a difficult word to take because of pop-culture use. But in clinical terms, it's nothing that can't be managed with medicine and therapy. Given time you may not need either anymore."

Emiel's arms struggled to move from under the straps so he could wipe his face. When he couldn't free himself, his face wrenched and he turned his head as far away from the doctor as he could get.

"The fact that what I said upsets you is reason for hope," the doctor said. "You're not totally detached from reality, you're not hopeless."

"I wish they'd killed me."

"That's not an unusual thing to think given your situation. But you need to realize that you can get better and live a good life again with as little pain as possible. You need to want that and trust me to help you get there."

Emiel kept crying into his pillow.

"Your friends, Emiel, Rainy and Simon love you and wanna see you again and want you to get better."

It took a minute for these words to sink into Emiel. Then he turned back to the doctor.

"You don't know. How could you? Where have they been?"

The doctor's mouth hung open unsurely.

"If your roles were reversed, wouldn't you want MaryAnn to get OK again, lead a good life?"

Emiel didn't respond.

"I'm here to help you, Emiel. As long as it takes. But we need to talk about Brazil, either now or in five years."

Emiel gazed at the wall at the foot of his bed.

"All right. What do you want to know?"

At the end of the summer term, Rainy was in the midst of writing a research paper with a graduate student on the formation of the 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns that made up the Giant's Causeway and how nature could create such a seemingly manmade design. Their research would require another semester in Ulster, which the school offered and Simon encouraged.

The summer gone, Simon's outdoor expeditions ceased for the worsening rains and he did not devise another occupation for the fall.

As her research deepened, Rainy spent more time at the causeway, at the university.

The graduate student was a young man from Liverpool and Rainy and Simon invited him over to dinner at their house several times or to a pub. He and Rainy talked technically about their research, then excitedly about other geological sites they wished to visit and study.

Simon sat silently drinking and watching their interactions.

By September he began an affair with a woman he noticed in one of the pubs he frequented. She was a student at the university who'd taken the semester off to help her ailing grandmother. Simon took off his ring before approaching her and she never knew about Rainy.

When she wasn't caring for her grandmother, she and Simon spent the days together at his house, in bed, or went for hikes through the countryside on Simon's expertise or had lunch or, if Rainy's schedule permitted, dinner.

Rainy suspected nothing, Simon always home when she came in, dishes washed, sheets laundered.

Rainy and her student published their research in November and they would both receive praise from geologists throughout the world in the coming months.

Energetically Rainy asked Simon where they should go next one morning near the end of the term.

Simon was mystified by the suggestion, perhaps thinking Rainy would find yet another reason to prolong their sojourn here.

"What about..."

Rainy peered at him curiously.

"Desmond?"

"Yeah."

"What about him?"

Simon quickly studied her countenance lest his own thoughts become apparent.

"I don't know, I guess I was wondering about the research, if there was anything else he needed you for but..."

"No, I gave him a glowing recommendation to give to the dissertation board when he applies for his doctorate, he has copies of all our research, he'll be fine. Now us: Where should we go next?"

Simon rubbed his neck.

"Wherever you want."

She smirked mischievously.

"Greenland? Explore the ice sheet and the bergs?"

Simon nodded.

"Sounds fun."

"We'd need a spelunking guide, I'm sure I could talk the university into paying you something, give you something to do other than just sitting around bored."

Simon matched her excitement and she giggled, hugged him, desperately happy.

They left in December, Simon abandoning the superficial relationship he'd begun, and were settled into their new home in Nuuk just in time for the start of the spring semester at the University of Greenland.

Rainy convinced the department to give Simon a stipend and allow him to lead expeditions into and around the icebergs to the north in March, when the weather would be more conducive to exploration.

Until then Simon ventured out on his own, as far as he could go in a snowmobile, until the ground became too rocky and threatened to overturn the machine. Then he trekked ahead in black snowshoes and bundled in several layers of non-absorbing ventilated jackets.

Rainy had given him a topographical map of the north and had marked the icebergs and chasms and crevasses in the earth she wanted her students to explore.

He found these with little difficulty with a compass.

For the bergs, he inserted ice screws by hand into the base. Then he hooked himself to this anchor screw with a quickdraw—two carabiners or rope hooks on either end of a rope piece—then threaded a rope attached to his waist harness through the bent gate of the quickdraw. Then he belayed this rope to a higher screw he installed.

For the chasms and crevasses, he inserted screws into the ledge and similarly hooked and threaded a quickdraw with a rope. Then he spelunked—lowered himself into the opening—and installed more screws to create a reliable path for future spelunkers.

He changed his snowshoes for boots with crampons—grappling hooks for shoes—and carried two ice axes on his waist to help his climbing.

He went as deep or as high as he could, turning on his headlamp in the deeper regions of the ice where the sunlight above abandoned him.

The ropes jingling with the quickdraws, carabiners, which connected the ropes so he could keep climbing, the scraping of his 10-point crampons, the hacks of his axes into the ice, and his heavy breathing occupied all his senses until he made it to the site's terminus.

The bottoms of the chasms and crevasses, his headlamp revealed, were either pure opaque ice or damp soil.

He often stayed down in these nether recesses long after he had regained his breath and strength and could proceed back up. He stood in the darkness that was barely penetrated by his LED headlamp perfectly still, hearing the ice thinly crack all around him. The more he listened, the greater the sound became, almost a symphony. As his ears became hypersensitive, he heard more: the bergs and ice sheet below grumbling, actually moving with the subtlety of your car, how it can move without you realizing, thinking your foot is fully upon the brake.

It smelled of earth down here but was more stringent, as though mint were in the air, the feeling you get in your sinuses after eating horseradish or wasabi—a cleaning burn.

At the bottom of one crevasse, which the length of his cable holding onto the anchor on the faraway ledge told him was more than 4,000 feet deep, he screamed at the top of his lungs a long-drawn-out fuck!

The expeditions with Rainy's students went off without a hitch. Simon served as lead climber, all the others attached to him, Rainy on the end of the line. They climbed up or down and once at the terminus, they examined the ice, the walls, the soil, took samples, carved out portions of ice for further testing. They took measurements of the lengths and widths of the chasms' and crevasses' bottoms and compared these to those of their tops and measured their depths. On top of the bergs and glaciers, they found crevasses too small—as yet—to venture into. These were covered with snow and were called snowbridges. Simon had scoped these out previously and demarcated them with ice screws topped with red flags.

In June the department head held a staff party at his house to celebrate Ullortuneq, Greenland's national day. Rainy and Simon went together and she talked about her research to her colleagues, who watched with rapt admiration, and this course eventually led them to enquire what Simon would do now that the summer would make the bergs and glaciers too unstable for climbing. He said he'd probably guide kayak and hiking tours along the coasts and he got several informal reservations from the staff that night. One of these was a black-haired pale-skinned woman with freckles.

He started his tour-guide business again in July, renting a van to take clients a few miles out of the city to a rocky beach where kayaks awaited them.

Most of his clients were tourist-couples from all over the world, on the younger side. The only single client was the freckled black-haired woman.

After driving the people back to the university where they'd parked and departed in the van, the woman stuck around and talked with Simon.

"Your wife's quite a brilliant woman."

"Yeah, I know because when she talks about her research, I have no idea what she's saying."

The late afternoon was cold and the frequent breeze sharpened the chill's teeth.

"Can you talk with anyone else?"

"Of course. I talked to all of you on the tour."

"I mean...more than that."

She peered at him and he suddenly recognized the intensity in her subtle gaze.

"Someone you can be honest with?"

"What makes you think I'm not honest with Rainy?"

"Are you?"

"Honest about what?"

"Anything...Everything. Are you happy?"

She moved in closer to him, took a handful of his sweater in hand. He staggered backward, self-consciously glancing toward the university building but realizing he and the woman were on the hidden side of the van, felt no eyes on them.

He turned back to her and kissed her with lust, no passion, and she returned it. His eyes tightly shut, he groped for the van's sliding door latch and he yanked the door open and pushed the woman inside, slamming it shut again after he got in with her.

After the semester was over, Rainy asked Simon what he wanted to do. She presented him with printed emails inviting her to the Universities of Sydney and Oslo, Dongseo University in South Korea, and the University of Alberta.

Simon sat looking at the invitations laid out in front of him on their bed and was silent. He took a deep breath.

"What if...we took some time off?"

"A vacation?"

"...Yeah. Somewhere...warm and bright? Some place we just relax instead of explore?"

Rainy thought, smiled ebulliently.

"Like where?"

"I don't know. South France or Acapulco, Belize? Bali?"

Rainy nodded, smiling more.

"Yeah. Fuck yeah!"

Simon smiled back at her for the first time.

"Let's leave tomorrow."

Rainy was struck offguard by this.

"Really?"

"Yeah, I'll find a flight somewhere and we can just go. Is that all right?"

"Yeah, I just thought your clients and reservations—"

"Fuck 'em, let's just go."

Rainy shrugged, giddy.

"All right!"

So they left for the airport early the next morning to board a plane bound for Martinique. Simon showed Rainy pictures of the tropical France-owned island as they sat at the gate. He clutched her hand constantly and kept kissing her and she remarked often at his affection and excitement, which reminded her of their early relationship, she said.

They both marveled at the resplendent island out the window of their row: vanilla beaches, water that looked to be made of blue liquid glass, piers dotted with pastel-colored flags and pure-white sailboats and yachts, palm trees and other foliage of glimmering green.

They landed at Aimé Césaire in the late afternoon and took a taxi to their beachfront bungalow in Case-Pilote.

The cabbie told them about various points of interest that attracted tourists.

"What about places the locals like?" Rainy asked.

The cabbie told them about these places then.

"When you are in Martinique, you are in France," said the cabbie, who was black and spoke Franglish in a Jamaican accent. "The Beaujolais Nouveau you drink here is the same as in France, the croissants, the Brie, all the same. Very important to us."

The bungalow was owned and maintained by an inland hotel and was built out in the water on stilts. It was made of glazed horizontal wooden planks that gleamed even under the setting sun. The pitched roves of the main house, the bathroom building, and the dining building were capped with strips of palm-tree bark and these billowed in the light warm breeze. The various buildings of the bungalow were interconnected via catwalks and the porch of the bungalow had three steps leading right down to the water if you felt like stepping in instead of diving.

The sheets and curtains inside were silk, so soft you were almost afraid to touch it for fearing of inflicting hurt. The furniture was some type of sturdy wood cushioned with Memory foam.

The cabinets, pantry, freezer, and refrigerator were completely stocked with various fine foods and alcohol.

Rainy and Simon were slack-jawed as they inspected the place.

"As fun as the last year has been living like regular people, it is nice to say 'Fuck you' to humility and just act like rich pricks once in a while," Rainy said.

Simon smiled, setting down their half-full suitcases on the wooden floor of the main house, floor carpeted with Sherpa rugs that made you want to jump out of your clothes and roll around naked on them.

They opted to do this in bed, however, and afterward opened a bottle of the pre-stocked wine—Beaujolais Nouveau no less—and drank it nude out on the porch, looking out at the moon-reflecting ocean.

"I've never had Beaujolais Nouveau in France but this is fucking good wine," Rainy said.

"They should just call it that—Fuckin' Good Wine—instead of all these fancy unpronounceable names."

They didn't talk about when they would leave. Simon had bought one-way plane tickets and paid for the bungalow for a month but could re-up. The subject never came up though in the first week, in which they had seemingly endless sex, swam, slept, then slowly migrated farther out, to walk along the beach, to rent bicycles and go into the town, where they arranged snorkeling and parasailing excursions, to rent a sailboat with an experienced sailor to guide them, to walk the town markets and pick up handmade crafts, drinking countless tropical drinks and eating delicious food in cafés and going to bars and clubs where they danced to old French jazz and made friendly acquaintances of locals and French expatriates, whom they never saw again after that particular night.

After they'd been there a week, they awakened one afternoon (as they'd grown accustomed to doing in this land of no responsibilities and so no alarms) to the sound of a monsoon outside the bungalow. Such was the rain as to make going out not only inadvisable but actually lethal. The rain poured and the wind blew as though the earth were angry at man for inhabiting such a place or any place.

They lounged in bed, falling back into half-sleep a dozen times, and at various points Rainy was stirred by various sounds that didn't match the profile of the monsoon but then they'd never before experienced such an event, so who knew what sounds were abnormal.

But finally the sounds became too frequent, too familiar, too alien in comparison to the storm, and Rainy resolutely sat up.

"Someone's in the kitchen."

Simon groaned, didn't acknowledge the comment while Rainy remained upright, shrewdly listening.

"There, a cabinet...A drawer...Simon."

Simon groaned again, rose as some reluctant revenant from the grave.

"Is it the maid or...?"

"They're always quiet," Rainy said.

They listened more: beer bottles rattling in the fridge, the oven door opening, closing, the sink faucet running, turning off. Then they both caught the faint but distinct aroma of cooking simultaneously.

"Fuck," Simon grumbled, getting up and removing a large black metal flashlight from his suitcase.

Rainy followed him as he walked out of the main building, down a catwalk, moving in stoops through the raging rain in order to stay out of sight through one of the dining building's windows, to which building they snuck in.

Both, only in their underwear, were dripping as they approached the corner of the kitchen, hearing unmistakable proof of a third party's presence, not furtive as a thief would be but as though whomever it was considered himself an irrefutable member of the bungalow.

They came around the corner , Simon raising the flashlight—and both froze in disbelief with an undercurrent of Gothic fear.

"There you are," Emiel said, having turned around upon hearing an almost shriek-gasp from Rainy.

He stood in front of the oven, on the burners of which was a boiling pot of stew, in the oven itself something reheating on a cookie sheet, and Emiel had drunk one stout, sitting empty on the counter with the bottle opener and the cap beside it, and was halfway through a second.

He spotted the flashlight, which Simon absentmindedly lowered, nearly lost from his grip, and smiled.

"You two look like you've seen a ghost," Emiel chuckled more than the comment could ever warrant. "I've always wanted to say that."

Indeed Rainy and Simon regarded him with the same expressions they had observed the bungalow with.

It was perhaps not Emiel's appearance that so stunned them, though he was significantly skinnier than when they'd last seen him—in fact appropriately termed 'skeletal' now—and his face (shaved clean of the hideous beard and his hair, grayer, similarly tamed) was much more wrinkled (the result of a chain-smoking habit he'd developed at the hospital—the only vice permitted—so severe he smoked four packs a day) and he was damp, several sopping towels on the floor telling he'd previously been more so but he still smiled his toothy grin and his eyes were sharp and bore deep into their bodies, into their souls if such things existed.

No, it was not his appearance but perhaps it was his presence, for Rainy's and Simon's expression was like that you would give to a beloved relative having returned to you after witnessing his death.

"Am I gonna get a hug or do I have to show you a doctor's note I'm not contagious?"

Simon and Rainy glanced at each other, then Simon stepped forward and Emiel's outstretched arms wrapped around him and squeezed with affection and strength incommensurate with his frightful appearance. But after a few seconds, Simon wrapped his own arms around Emiel with the same tenderness with which he'd touched the silk bedsheets and he felt Emiel's ribs through his back, his shoulder blades almost sharp enough to pierce through Simon's hand.

Then Rainy hugged him, retracting for a second at his intense stench of cigarettes but his arms were already around her and did not allow her to pull away as far as she'd probably like.

"Now onto the next thing," Emiel said abruptly, disengaging himself from Rainy and picking up a leather satchel placed beside the stove.

Rainy and Simon continued to awe at him, speechless, unable to voice the dozens of questions on their minds.

Emiel placed the satchel on the counter, opened it, and withdrew a bundle of stapled papers.

"You're out," Simon muttered.

"Indeed I am," Emiel said. "Just in time."

He extended the paper bundle to Simon, who looked down at it as at a snake, wondering whether it was of the venomous variety.

He accepted, looked at the title of the text-heavy front page: CONFIDENTIAL – U.S. Geological Survey/Geological Survey of Norway/GeoScience Australia/ Sernageomin: Chile's 9.7-magnitude earthquake and the activation of the Bouvet volcano.

"That is a report from the American, Norwegian, Australian, and Chilean geological survey departments: Two weeks ago there was a magnitude-9.7 earthquake in Chile and several days later, an Australian research station in Antarctica picked up seismic activity coming from the northeast. They sent a drone to the vicinity and found the activity was coming from Bouvet Island, an uninhabited holding of Norway's that was once an active volcano but hadn't erupted since before its discovery in 1739. The drone picked up heat signals and small amounts of volcanic gas above the island. The geological surveys are offering us $16 million to get to the island and film its magma chamber as it fills."

They both looked at Emiel as though they expected a film crew to come out of nowhere. But Emiel's face did not break. Simon chuckled cluelessly.

Rainy looked through the packet, found signatures on the back page.

"Holy shit..."

Simon looked at her over his shoulder.

"Is this for real?" she asked.

"Doesn't get any realer," Emiel said.

"How can we do this?" Simon said. "It's suicide."

"If it were an explosive volcano but it must be effusive," Rainy said.

"Doesn't mean it can't become explosive."

"If it has enough vents," Rainy said.

"Norwegian geologists have identified 12 vents on the surface already—all filled with ice, of course, just like the crater," Emiel said.

"If the crater's frozen, how can we get to the magma chamber?" Simon asked.

"It's melting at a rate of 14 inches every hour. If we leave tomorrow, we'll get there with a full day to explore the chambers and caves in the volcano before the magma chamber opens up—the survey departments want as much footage of everything we can get."

"How's the ice melting if the chamber isn't full yet?"

"Depends on where the magma's coming from," Rainy said. "The volcano hasn't been active in more than 300 years, whatever reserves of magma there were must have solidified and cooled. The Chilean earthquake probably opened a new vein linking the volcano to a deeper reservoir...Only the core of the earth would be hot enough for steam to seep through the other layers and cause the ice in the crater to melt—how deep's the crater?"

"150 feet."

"150 feet of ice is gonna melt in five days?" Rainy asked incredulously.

"Six," Emiel corrected.

"Holy fucking shit..."

"These surveys will give us their annual budget if we ask for it," Emiel said.

"How can we do it? Isn't there poisonous smoke to worry about? Isn't the chamber gonna kill us with how hot it is?" Simon asked.

"Vacuum-deposited aluminized suits and filtered breathing apparatuses with oxygen tanks," Emiel said.

"The equipment—"

"We coat it all in the same material," Emiel said. "Everything's been thought through. I can do this by myself—I'm going to, whatever you guys decide, I'm on the first plane out in the morning—but I thought you two might like to earn the biggest payday we've ever been offered."

The other two were silent for a moment.

"Why not fly a drone inside?" Rainy asked.

"The mouth of the volcano is wide enough but the neck, the crater gets narrower—they saw it using aerial photography. It's just big enough for us but impossible for even the best drone pilot to maneuver."

"Fuck..."

All three froze.

Simon glanced at Rainy, saw her gnawing at her bottom lip.

"We need to talk it over," Simon said.

Emiel nodded, opening the stove and removing the cookie sheet with an oven mitt.

"I'm going to the airport at four a.m.," he said.

Simon and Rainy headed back out, to their bedroom in the main house.

"You wanna go," Simon said simply.

Rainy had her hands on her hips, surveying the suddenly small bedroom, through the windows of which the rain still poured mercilessly.

"There's never been any real footage of a magma chamber filling," she said. "It's all been illustrations, animations, simulations, theory. The possibilities this presents—it's unbelievable, it's..."

"Important."

"Geology, besides the boring mineralogy bullshit, is such a rudimentary science because events like this, earthquakes, tsunamis are so erratic and hard to prevent. This could help the field evolve."

"Could establish criteria for a Nobel Prize for Geology?"

She chuckled.

"Fuck, maybe. We have the opportunity, we have the skills, it's the perfect combination at the perfect fucking time."

"OK, so what are we discussing?"

Rainy thought.

"Would you go?"

Simon thought.

"I don't know how much worth I'll have...but I can't let you go by yourself."

"Why?"

"Why don't you want to go by yourself?"

Rainy looked around, shuffled her feet as though embarrassed.

"Emiel..."

Simon breathed out easily as a man does realizing he and his unexpectedly pregnant girlfriend have the same affirmative attitude toward abortion.

"Did you tell him where we were or...?" Rainy asked.

"I haven't spoken to him since Brazil."

"Has he been in that hospital this whole time?"

"I don't know."

Rainy took a deep breath.

"I don't know what to say...how to feel."

Simon was silent for a moment.

"You wanna go."

Rainy peered up at him.

"Yeah."

After regathering their wits and steeling their courage, they returned to the kitchen, where Emiel sat at the dining table eating a feast, four empty stout bottles beside his arm, a fifth in hand.

They told him they would go and had booked seats on Emiel's same flight. He was jubilant.

Then, as they sat eating together, he asked his long-unseen friends about what they'd been up to for the past year and a half.

Rainy told him about her visiting professorships, investing more than the two there'd been, and Simon caught on, told Emiel about his touring business and Emiel was surprised but congratulatory. They told him nothing about the affair (affairs, surely in Simon's mind) nor about the almost-divorce.

"What...what have you been up to?" Simon asked.

"Oh..." Emiel said. "I proved a tough mess to clean up. But it worked out."

"The hospital?"

"Yep."

"Have you...been there?" Rainy asked.

"Yep. Got out a month ago. Course you'd have known that if you'd ever tried contacting me."

He said this in a way of a remonstrative grandparent to her granddaughter but both Simon and Rainy went still as though being reprimanded by R. Lee Ermey.

Emiel chuckled.

"I'm kidding, I guessed you guys were busy. A five-minute phone call though," he chuckled again, glanced at their blank expressions. "I am kidding, it's fine. You guys forget my sense of humor along with the rest of me?"

Rainy looked to Simon with a silent plea for help.

"I'm sorry, I'm an asshole," Emiel said. "I'm fine now, I am."

Both drank of the wine on the table.

"How did you find us?" Rainy asked after taking a big gulp.

Emiel smirked again.

"I was trained as a journalist, you remember? To uncover the uncoverable."

That wasn't enough for Rainy, who kept her eyes on him with no trace of humor or letting up.

"I checked your bank account," Emiel said. "Or rather the business bank account. I saw Ulster, Nuuk, Martinique, I thought to myself, 'Did I hallucinate my year and a half in the mental institution and go on a series of strange vacations?' But I don't hallucinate anymore. Nope, I realized my friends had used my business' money to gallivant out of the country while I was locked up, pumped full of drugs, tied down, shit my pants, drooled, cried, and was forced to relive the most horrible experience of my life."

The air was made thick, suffocating by Emiel's words. Then he snickered.

"But as I said: I'm better now for it all. All that counts now is Bouvet Island."

After the lunch, which included only talk of preparation for the trip and what they all planned to do with their respective cuts of the $16 million and nothing at all of the past, Rainy retreated to the bedroom while Simon briefly continued to speak with Emiel until he said he needed to go out onto the porch to smoke.

Simon headed for the bedroom, watching Emiel take his satchel with him out the door onto the porch of the dining building.

Rainy was crying into a pillow on the bed.

Simon tried to sit beside her, put his arm around her, but she staggered to her feet.

"I need to get outta here," she said breathlessly.

Simon looked out the window: Rainy took out of the bikes they'd rented from the wooden storage house in the back of the bungalow, on the beach, and started peddling up the dunes into town through the relentless rain.

And Emiel sat on the waterfront porch of the dining building, could not see Rainy's departure as he puffed and puffed and puffed on a cigarette.

The roads of the town were flooded and the water ran violently against Rainy's progress on the bike, so she dismounted, discarded the bike, then trudged through the ankle-high water like a soldier in a Vietnamese swamp to get onto the high curb and then into a café, warm but humid to the saturated Rainy.

She ordered a beer and sat, soaking and all, at a corner booth of the dim establishment, drawing the inoculant attention of the few other patrons. She took out her cell phone from her back pocket and used it to look up 'psychiatric hospital Galveston.' Five results came up and she called each one, going through repeated lines of receptionists, nurses, assistants, and doctors, all of whom she asked if they'd treated Emiel Lane.

The last hospital answered in the affirmative but did not give any specifics and Rainy was transferred to Emiel's doctor, who didn't answer. Rainy left a message:

"My name's Rainy Midwood, I'm a friend of Emiel Lane, a former patient of yours. I guess you recently released him and I...I just need to know everything you can tell me about what happened, if he...I don't know...We're going on an expedition with him, my husband and I, for work tomorrow and...Just anything you can tell me."

The three departed from Aimé Césaire Airport at 5:30 the next morning. Simon and Rainy sat in a row several behind Emiel's, whom they did not see take a pill and chug a shooter of whiskey in the bathroom prior to going through security.

Emiel slept straight through the eight-hour flight to Paris, where they waited three hours to change planes to go to Johannesburg. Emiel went to the smoker's lounge and smoked two packs while Rainy went to the bathroom, turned on her phone, and checked her voicemail, which was empty.

Emiel slept through the 11-hour flight to Johannesburg and Rainy and Simon did too but difficultly. When they couldn't sleep, they perused the surveys' report and the articles they'd printed out about Bouvet.

They had to wake Emiel to get him off the plane and he staggered with sleep-drunkenness into the O.R. Tambor Airport, which was unexpectedly comparable to the average American airport and Simon commented on this aspect to the still sleep-drunk Emiel, who remarked most people think the conditions of the north are the same in South Africa as well.

"People are so stupid," he slurred on. "Know what else is stupid? The term 'African American.' Suck my dick, Charlize Theron is an African American, Morgan Freeman is black."

His slurring was loud and both Rainy and Simon caught the scornful looks of other soon-to-be passengers as they walked to the gate that would carry them to Cape Town.

Rainy broke away to go into the bathroom, where she checked her phone again but still it was empty of any voicemails.

Another two-hour layover. Then in Cape Town, they were met outside the terminal by a man even paler than white South Africa. He held a white card with their names scrawled on it and greeted them in a bouncy accented voice that minutely reminded you of the Minnesota/Dakota accent.

He introduced himself as their chauffeur, hired by the Norwegian Geological Survey, to drive them to the helipad they would immediately embark to Bouvet Island from.

Simon and Rainy obviously hadn't been expecting such a soon departure but said nothing, followed the chauffeur to his limo.

The city reminded you of a Depression-era photograph. The construction of buildings several stories high seemed uninspired, obligatory. The roads were poorly maintained, so the drive up north along the contrastingly beautiful and multicolored shore littered with sail- and fishing boats and brightly colored houses such as you might find along beaches in California was tumultuous.

The time was just after eight p.m. and the sky was black as though it never changed, was in fact just a void, though the city streetlamps and traffic lights and window lights mitigated this effect so that you wouldn't think about the oblivion up above unless you looked.

In the surveys' report itinerary, Simon saw they were on schedule and would land upon the island—1,600 miles away—around five a.m. the next morning.

"1,600 miles away?" he asked Emiel, who was groggy but now sober and coherent.

He nodded.

"How far away's Antarctica?"

"About 2,400 miles south."

"Is there anything else around the island?"

"Nope," Emiel said. "Right here's the closest civilization."

"Bouvet's the most remote place on the planet," Rainy said.

The helipad was located at the top of a hill from which they could see the town sprawling out below.

Theirs was the first car there and they waited, limo idling, behind the brightly lit helipad enclosed by cement barriers painted yellow. There was a dark green helicopter on the pad, not military but also not a commercial craft, maybe a search-and-rescue or medical copter.

Four more limos arrived in the next 15 minutes: One contained Dr. Heinrich Knuffsson, a geologist with the Norwegian survey, another Dr. Maddie Beson from GeoScience, another Dr. Clarivel Júarez from the Chilean survey. The fourth limo contained their pilot, a retired American airman.

After introductions were quickly made, the seven boarded the helicopter with their few half-empty bags while the limo drivers remained outside their doors and watched the takeoff.

"A quick rundown of the chain of command," Emiel said loudly over the whirl of the blades as the helicopter departed from sight of the lights of Cape Town, the only visible bastion in this womb of blackness into which they ventured deeper. "Simon here is the boss. We all have our own concerns, his is ensuring our safety. If he tells us to start climbing back up, we listen without argument."

The listeners nodded.

"I am your cameraman. I am at your disposal to film whatever your departments want. Simon?"

Simon nodded.

"We're gonna land at around five a.m. in the region of Nyrøysa, near the Norwegian Polar Institute's research station on the island's west coast. After landing we'll have two hours to get something to eat and get ready to head inland. Rainy?"

"Bouvet is 93-percent glacier, including where we're headed. The island has different regions. The crater is located in the region of Wilhelm..."

"Wilhelmplatået," said Knuffsson.

"What's that translate to, William Plateau?"

Knuffsson nodded.

"OK, the crater is located in William Plateau due east of Nyrøysa. The island is 19 square-miles, five wide, four in length, so we're gonna be walking about a mile across ice. It's gonna be tough and long. Bring energy bars and water with you. Once we reach the crater, we'll have about six hours to explore before we need to head back to the station. On the second day, we'll return wearing the suits that'll protect us from the heat and gas. Simon will lead us down the crater so we can explore the caves and pockets. Any questions?"

They had none.

From then on they all tried to sleep or rest for those whom the whirling blades did not allow to fully escape.

Rainy was one of these. Glancing over to Emiel, she saw he was fast asleep while Simon, between him and her, had his arms crossed, eyes closed, and wriggled about in the uncomfortable seat.

She took out her phone and turned off airplane mode. Dimming the brightness, a noiseless notification popped up: a new voicemail.

"Rainy, this is Dr. Brent, I treated Emiel. I...I can't tell you much...I think another trip so soon is a bad idea...I can tell you I placed him on a medication that...proved very effective when taken regularly. Make sure he takes it...Make sure he takes it, Rainy."

The research station was illuminated by several intense fluorescent lights on top of the three-building station. Electricity was provided by a huge generator that sounded like a sleeping dragon. The inside of the station was made mostly of plastic—the walls and ceiling—the floors linoleum, constantly freezing, and lit with sickly yellow lighting.

There were a dozen iron folding chairs, plastic tables of the kind you find at a barbecue, paper dishes and plastic cutlery.

One of the three buildings was the sleeping hall, the second the dining hall, and the third the research station. The sleeping hall was cramped with seven crude but oddly comfortable cots on iron-mesh bedframes.

The research station was replete with equipment in marked silicone boxes and there were various other boxes that were labeled with what the scientists would put into them: soil samples, ice samples, rock samples. There were several computers along the walls of this building, with stacks of books and papers in between them, as well as a seismographic map of the island with thumbtacks stuck strategically in it covering one whole wall.

In the dining hall, the seven made coffee and tea, ate bagels, canned fruit, cans of nuts, beef jerky, doughnuts, then they changed into their several layers and prepared to face the long walk through the severe cold. The pilot went to sleep.

At 7:01 they disembarked, all looking like Randy Parker after his mother gets him dressed for school in A Christmas Story.

Simon was the lead climber, all the others attached to him. There was enough slack in their ropes to only allow one to venture five feet away from the group before the rope went taut and prevented any further progress.

They took a path up a soil-rock hill behind the station.

No hint of the dawn was yet in the sky and against the light pollution from the station, the six explorers saw steam wafting up over the ice ridges and peaks of the inner island.

They each had walkie talkies and spare batteries. The water below on their right was moving calmly though eerily, as though it were the River Styx, the souls of the damned flailing for something or someone to grab onto.

The hill bore them up several dozen feet before ending at a cliff and a stone wall, which ascended at least 50 feet high.

Climbing stone was not the same as climbing ice. For stone Simon had brought along a battery-powered drill, which hung off his harness along with the rest of his equipment, and he took this off and slipped on an auger bit. He stood on his tip toes to reach about six feet up the wall, where he drilled into the wall as far as the auger would go, then he removed a climbing bolt with a hanger clipped behind a locknut and with a hammer from his waist, he drove the bolt in, then used a torque wrench to tighten the nut as much he could.

Then he clipped his rope's quickdraw onto the hanger, set his boots and hands into natural holds in the wall, and climbed above the first bolt to install another.

This climbing took three hours and once on top of the wall, the wind was more powerful, snow blowing in their bundled-up faces and goggled eyes.

The ground pure ice, a dozen feet deep, and had no consistent flatness but rather undulated as though it were lazily moving, changing, like a ghost sea. It would have been intraversible without the crampons they now affixed to their boots but even so, the six moved slowly, muscles soon burning under their perspiring skin.

Moving along the rising and falling ground, the snow obscuring the distance and whatever lay ahead, Simon navigated by a compass, ensuring the needle always aligned with the 'E.'

They were so layered and their faces so veiled none could discern who was who. Rainy's eyes behind her goggles flitted among the other five nervously.

Simon led them, inspecting the ground ahead with one of his snow axes, which was extendable by five feet and equipped with a snow basket at the bottom so the ground could be tested for suitability, just as a blind person would use.

They came to the first of several sheer walls of ice and they hacked their ice axes in and smashed their cramponed boot tips in and started up and once atop, they continued traversing the seemingly endless tundra, taking no breaks.

The sun dawned at 11 that morning or rather it was the suggestion of the sun, so obscured was it behind the snow and clouds.

At a little past noon, after scaling the final wall, they found a plateau extending for several hundred yards, then sloping down to an enormous crater from which the steam seen earlier in the black morning came.

One of the six ambiguous figures removed a video recorder, encased in a special case of rubber insulation, from his pocket and Rainy looked at him, took note of the figure's jacket color to always thereafter identify it as Emiel.

Emiel began recording as the group moved across the plateau and down the slope.

The crater must have been 200 feet in diameter, rimmed with ice. Simon, glancing at the steam coming out and blowing into the exposed parts of his face—warm, not scorching but enough to cause melting—detached himself from the others, whom he instructed to remain upon the gradient, then approached the rim with small steps. He investigated his planned route with the leading stick.

Emiel, Rainy stiff beside him, looking at him and the screen of his camcorder out of the corner of her eye, filmed Simon's method.

After gaining confidence the rim could support his weight, Simon crouched and looked over the edge: The walls of the crater were jagged black stone. The pit roiled with steam and no bottom was visible.

Simon looked below the ledge and saw perhaps a foot of ice on top of where the stone layer began.

Using his hammer he smashed away several inches of the ice, then took out the drill and bore through the remainder, the hollow vibrations coming up his arms being replaced with body-wracking jolts as the drill entered the stone.

Once a sufficiently deep hole had been made, he hammered in another bolt and hanger, tightened it, and belayed a 60-foot-long rope to it.

He repeated this process five more times all along one side of the rim, taking an hour.

Then he motioned for the five others to come near the crater and he lined them up at the rim, one at each bolt hanger. They threaded each of their anchor ropes through their quickdraws and clipped them to their harnesses, then took off their crampons.

Simon led the way down, demonstrating how to rappel, descending 10 feet before another started the descent.

The caves, rightly called vents, appeared about 25 feet below the rim, where the cloudy lighting coming from above was all but darkened by the steam, which the goggles protected their eyes from and which, they noticed as they delved deeper, had a vague odor of sulfur, which intensified the deeper they went.

Some stopped descending for the time being to explore these caves, Emiel among them. Turning on the camera's light, he inspected the mouths of these vent-caves, which had been formed by lava flows centuries, perhaps millennia ago.

The ground of these caves was of different material than the other dimensions of the caves: igneous rock, cooled lava, which resembled the stone of the caves but broke much too easily, exposing bits of the true stone ground below.

For several yards in these pitch-black caves, which they explored with their headlights on, the air was stagnant, warm, odoriferous. But farther on the temperature perceptibly dropped, finally to the point to allow ice to form on all the dimensions.

The soonest occurrence of this ice was in the process of melting but deeper in, the ice was as solidly frozen as on the island's surface.

Emiel did not stop until the caves became too small for any human to explore, then turned around to trek back to the mouth of the vent and rappel farther down.

When their 60-foot lengths of rope ran out, they attached quickdraws with more rope to continue rappelling.

The bottom was a sphere of ice that broke into spider-web figures when Simon even planted a boot on it. While waiting for the others to finish their exploring, Simon had been boring more bolts and hangers into the walls and lacing them with rope extensions, which would allow easy rappelling to the real bottom the next day.

After this was done and they were both as deep in the crater as they would get that day, Rainy tapped his shoulder and directed him to a nearby cave, to which they moved. Inside a little, Rainy took off her goggles, checked her walkie talkie to make sure it was off, then checked Simon's.

"What's wrong?" he asked her, his quiet voice reverberating off the sepulcherous walls of the cave.

Rainy didn't respond but to take out her phone and have Simon listen to the voicemail.

"Has he said anything to you about it?" she asked.

"No," Simon replied, unsure how to feel.

"Tonight, back at the basecamp, you need to get him to talk."

Simon thought.

"It might be nothing. Antidepressants or something."

"You heard the doctor's voice. It's not nothing."

"They wouldn't let him out if he weren't stable—the government wouldn't approach him about this if he were a risk."

Rainy looked around the cave, perhaps only then realizing the absurdity of their surroundings.

"They might if they thought he was the only person crazy enough to do this."

Simon's brow crunched.

"You heard the doctor's voice, did it sound like he wanted to release Emiel?"

Simon smirked.

"What, you think the USGS strong-armed him to?"

"I don't know. What I do know is this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I doubt the U.S. would forego being on the cutting edge because the only person crazy enough to do this was in a mental institution. Whatever the circumstances, we need to know what medicine he's taking and for what—total honesty, that's always been our policy."

Simon eventually nodded.

Rainy left the cave to start up the crater to continue her inspection.

In the six hours the six investigated the caves and walls of the crater, the ice bottom fell nine feet below where Simon had been stopped.

Simon sent out the order to leave over their walkie talkies. Laden with bottled and bagged samples, Emiel still recording—now their ascension from the abyss—they returned to the surface.

To the anchors here, Simon left the ropes whose ends were attached to the deepest hangers in the pit.

Replacing their crampons and Simon following his compass, they retraced their initial path back to basecamp and returned in shorter time than it had taken for them to get to William Plateau.

By nine that night, they were back in the small station, which, after their day in the vast openness of the island and in the crater, which gave the illusion of being expansive and open—another world—but which, they subconsciously knew, could quickly contract into even tighter quarters than they were in now, seemed even smaller and suffocating than when they'd first come in earlier that morning.

They had dinner—canned meats and fruit and powdered milk and vacuum-sealed bread—then made instant coffee or microwave-hot chocolate or tea.

The four scientists talked of the significance of what they'd found in the crater, developed a kinship such as people with the same esoteric sophisticated knowledge do, and in talking, though two were not native English speakers, the four found a common language in their technical talk and it was obvious they could go on for hours together.

Simon and Emiel were naturally though not maliciously excluded from participating in such conversation except to humbly accept credit for and thank the scientists for their praise, of Simon's exploration prowess and Emiel's availability to take footage of things most people would think of as mundane.

Emiel excused himself to go outside to smoke and Simon joined him.

"We're gonna go outside, talk tampons," Emiel said.

Rainy and Maddie Beson chuckled but Knuffsson and Júarez asked crampons? and when corrected, asked what tampons were.

Simon and Emiel garbed themselves in thick layers, though not as they had done for that day's endeavor, dressing instead as you would to ice fish. They made a thermos of coffee, then stepped out onto the iron deck, rising above the soil ground five feet, on which the station had been built.

They sat in camping chairs in a corner of shade, a space heater at their feet blasting their ankles, which warmth suffused the rest of their bodies. Emiel chain-smoked.

Simon stretched back, then forward, side to side, cracked his neck.

"God I haven't worked this hard ever, I think," he said in a strained voice as he tried to pop his back.

Emiel smiled.

"It's good to be back to it," he said, sipping coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, which steamed as though there were fire inside.

Simon studied him: Emiel sat in a way that could only be described as contentedly.

"Are you...OK?"

"Never been better," Emiel said, glancing up and smiling.

"You know full honesty has always been something we've promised each other. It's important especially for this work."

"I know. That's why I made it a policy."

He and Emiel gazed at each other with some kind of curious competition but no apparent hostility or contention.

"Did they give you medicine at the hospital?"

"Very much."

"Are you on a prescription now?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

Emiel was quiet.

"Never mind that."

"Emiel—"

"It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does."

"Why?"

Emiel's gaze changed slightly but intensely and Simon found himself silenced.

"Are you afraid of me?" Emiel asked.

Simon swallowed.

"Is Rainy?"

"We haven't seen you in almost two years—"

"Whose fault is that?"

Simon's eyes flitted down.

"We're just wondering if anything's different."

Emiel looked down into his cup, watched the coffee stir itself from the wind.

"Yeah. Everything."

Simon downed the rest of his coffee as though it were hard liquor.

"I'm...so sorry...MaryAnn..."

"Wasn't you who killed her...Know how they did it?"

Simon kept his head down, nodded. In the silence, he refilled his cup.

"We...had a memorial service for her," Simon said.

Emiel looked over.

"We woulda called you but...we figured you wouldn't be released."

Emiel nodded slowly.

"I was pretty bad. Who came?"

"I don't know, there was a...guest book."

"You don't remember anyone?"

Simon let out a breath.

"We...couldn't go."

Simon, his head down, heard nothing from Emiel, may have thought he'd dissipated like the steam from the coffee.

"Why?"

Simon squeezed the corners of his eyes, looked up, saw that same harsh expression on Emiel's face—anger, the kind that a boiling pot with a lid has in it.

"Me and Rainy..."

"Problems."

"Yeah."

He told Emiel about the first affair, the threat of divorce, the reconciliation, then the trips to Ireland and Greenland.

"So things are better now," Emiel said.

Simon let out another breath, his palpitating heart forcing him to breathe more.

"There's been two more. She doesn't know."

Emiel's eyes sharpened, unseen by Simon.

"I don't...Maybe I thought I deserved it...for all the shit she's put me through. Maybe I wanted to get back at her...be even."

"She's had affairs?"

"Back in college, maybe others, I don't know."

That burdensome silence from Emiel returned, bearing down on Simon's brain.

"Get a divorce," Emiel said simply, harshly.

Simon groaned in preparation perhaps of next saying, "It's not as simple as that," but he didn't.

"I don't want to."

"Why?"

"Because...I love her."

"You resent her."

"No—"

"Yes. You felt vindicated when you were cheating on her."

"I just...needed to get it outta my system."

"It'll happen again."

"No it won't."

"You don't trust her—this Irish student of hers. You think she's cheating on you, so you do it."

"I used to think that but not anymore, it won't happen again."

Emiel's anger seemed to become more acute but he said nothing before rising and heading back into the station.

Simon panickedly stood and hurried after him, perhaps seeing his whole life flash before his eyes, ending in a fiery crash, and weaving around the various narrow corridors of the station, he wound up in the dining area, where Emiel was presiding over the scientists.

"—anticipate the magma chamber filling?" he asked.

The scientists discussed this with one another.

"Based on the deterioration of the ice and the temperature of the steam...probably nine a.m.?" Júarez hypothesized, looking at her colleagues, who consented.

"Once the chamber fills, how long do we have to get out of the crater?" Simon asked, breathing hard.

"Because it'll be effusive, probably two or three hours," Knuffsson said.

"How long until we have to be off the island?"

"Depends on how much lava comes out. The bigger danger is the ice fracturing, which could cause the rest of the island to fracture, maybe split," Beson said.

Emiel thought and Rainy looked at Simon over his shoulder but Simon quickly averted his own eyes as though Rainy's had burned him.

"How deep's the magma chamber?" Emiel asked.

"Varies," Beson said. "Some are 500 feet, others 10 kilometers—six miles."

"And it depends on how far we can go, how much of the chamber is open," Knuffsson said.

"So we leave here at two, get back to the crater by five," Simon said. "That'll give us more or less four hours to reach the bottom of the crater, then get into the magma chamber."

"Rest up, everybody," Emiel said, leaving the dining area, heading toward the cot room.

But when the others retired to the same room, they did not find Emiel there. Simon and Rainy remained last in the dining hall, discussing what Simon had been able to drag out of Emiel, and they agreed to go into the darkened cot room with the symphony of the others' sounds of slumber and they looked around Emiel's cot, the storage cabinets, the shoe cubbies, but found no effects of his.

Rainy pulled Simon out of the room, shutting the door with neurotic care, and proceeded into the research hall but stopped short as they came around the corner: The door to the lab was open and though dark within, they saw the tips of Emiel's shoes, lightly tapping, and they heard the sound of something like a maraca shaking.

They carefully backed up the hallway to return to the cot room.

Indeed Emiel sat in the lab in a folding chair, looking out the observation window at the fluorescent-lighted foothills of the greater clouded mountains as the wind blew the snow and caused the entire station to vibrate, hum with nature's ferocity and threat to upheave their unnatural habitat. He turned his bottle of haloperidol around and around beside his ear as he stared, not blinking.

In the next early morning, after dressing in their cold-faring gear as well as their extreme heat-resistant suits, they loaded their few belongings into the helicopter and Simon told the pilot the day's plan—to be ready for takeoff around nine that morning, in the event the volcano erupted sufficiently to consume the island this far.

Despite such an alarming warning delivered with all possible seriousness, the pilot only agreed with the stoicism admired of his former profession.

Then Simon saw Emiel standing alone at the foot of the path behind the station, which led to the rock wall and their route back to the crater. Awaiting the others, Simon went down to him, interrupting his inspection of his video camera.

"Everything OK?" he asked.

"Perfect," Emiel replied curtly, decisively.

Simon tried to study his friend but found him inscrutable beneath his layers, beneath which lay the aluminized suit and the oxygen pack on his back, the filtered breathing apparatus down his front, and the goggles over his eyes.

"Take your medicine?"

Emiel paused in his inspection, glared up at Simon, the orange goggles lending his lowered eyes a piercing reptilian quality.

"No. I have to take it rectally and I'm a little squeamish, can you give me a hand?"

Simon said nothing in response while Emiel went back to his camcorder.

The second journey to the crater was naturally quicker. The wind and the snow fiercer, the light from the moon more absent, so they turned on their headlamps to survey their path.

On the plateau overlooking the crater, they saw more steam coming out of it, as though workers in a ship's furnace, threatened with firing, were now madly throwing in shovelfuls of coal.

Simon had to inspect the rim once more for stability and though each step caused the ice to fracture, he never fell through or sunk an inch, so he waved for the others to approach.

They lined up at their anchors along the rim and laced the ropes there through their quickdraws while looking over the edge: Steam swirled and exited the darkness like spirits escaping Hell.

After removing their crampons and other ice-climbing gear, their aluminized suits now fully exposed, they put on their facemasks, put their breathing apparatuses in their mouths, flipped the suits' hoods over their heads and button them at their necks, then started down, Emiel attaching his camera to his helmet for the two-handed task.

Descending, the steam became incrementally hotter, hot enough to singe flesh, they realized.

When they reached the deepest anchors, their headlamps shone down and revealed they still had farther to go, though they could not tell how far for the distortion caused by the steam.

They attached new ropes and continued.

Simon checked his watch: 4:49. Once more he had to install more anchors for new ropes to be attached.

Finally they reached the bottom of the crater. The ground was wet with the last remnants of the melted ice and proved to be more igneous rock, steam seeping out of its pores.

They spotted a cave half-hidden behind a cluster of stalagmites and untethering their ropes from the crater walls, they were led into this cave by Simon—or Emiel, who moved beside him and seemed to have unspokenly taken some portion of the leadership.

The path through the cave was narrow, the walls and ceiling and ground only above five feet apart, and the six had to hunch over to proceed, all the while crawling over stalagmites and boulders of the fragile igneous rock along the path.

Their ears popped as they felt the linear route descend, the way ahead unlightable even by the powerful LED lights on their heads.

At some undeterminable distance along the way, the lights illuminated a change to the walls' appearance: Whereas before they'd been of black stone with the consistency of hardened soap suds, now the walls were layered with slabs of orange and black rock visibly hard and reflective and on portions of these slabs were pink and brown protrusions, jagged, like icicles—lava icicles, Rainy observed for them, magma that solidified in mid-drip.

Steam continued swirling through the cave, racing for the distant open air behind and far above the explorers, who continued down the path, which became less narrow as the walls became oranger, the lava icicles longer, protruding farther off the walls.

The path flattened and in a dozen feet, they discovered what could only be called a chasm in the wall ahead of them, a wall at least 100 feet tall, made of orange stone on its lower half, black stone similar to the cavern's up top.

The way through the chasm looked wide enough for only one body to go through at a time but the six could see around the short path's corner and spotted slabs and boulders piled around the floor of a farther chamber.

They moved against the escaping steam into the chasm path, then turned into the next chamber. The ceiling of this was rounded like an oval, which shape, Júarez said, could only be achieved by a volcanic explosion in this chamber.

"But this eruption is effusive?" Simon asked with sudden strain in his voice.

"Yes, definitely. If it were explosive there'd be earthquakes we could feel right now. There are earthquakes going on right now but too weak to feel."

From the high ceiling, which looked like a set piece for several scenes in Lord of the Rings, hung countless stalactites, threatening injury and death if dislodged—which wouldn't be difficult, give they were made of and held by igneous rock.

The ground of the chamber was riddled with stalagmites and slabs and boulders that had lain together so long as to fuse together and all this debris littered the rim of the pit leading down into the magma chamber.

The mouth of this pit was 100 feet in diameter and it was pitch black within as it billowed out steam. Their headlamps could not hit upon the bottom nor could a pebble's fall tell them how deep it was.

The rim was igneous rock, which Simon deemed too weak to install anchors in, so instead he fixed new ropes to the piles of rock, which were intractable even with all six pushing on them.

When they started rappelling into the pit, it was 5:46. Their feet and hands, occasionally looking for holds in the walls of the pit, tore away the igneous rock, which was several layers thick and exposed the familiar hard black rock.

In these patches of exposed rock, Simon installed new hangers to which he attached new ropes to allow them to keep descending.

As they went deeper, the walls started booming with a noise similar to the rumbling of a teakettle before it starts to boil and shriek. The walls vibrated, not enough to endanger their grips on the wall, more like the vibrations in your car when you veer too far off the highway onto the shoulder.

"Bottom!" Simon yelled out, his voice muffled by the crescendoing rumbling, as well as his facemask.

But the others heard and turned downward, headlamps illuminating the floor of the second crater—littered with more slabs and boulders, so in fact they had to land upon these and detach themselves from the ropes.

The ground offered no flat path for them to tread upon and after gazing around this lower chamber, swirling with steam and the rumbling constant, granting the atmosphere a weight to press down upon and around the explorers, they illuminated several vents large enough to enter.

"They all lead to the same place," Beson said.

So, picking their steps carefully as you would hiking a rocky steep hill, they made for one of these vents, into which they had to crouch and crawl over and around more debris.

This vent soon slopped to nearly a 90-degree angle, so Simon attached another rope to a boulder so they could rappel down.

The vent's path fed out into a humongous chamber with yet another crater in its middle, incalculably wide but whose bottom was only a dozen feet or so deep.

Above the crater was an abscess in the roof equal to the crater's diameter—the neck shaft of the volcano, directly above which were the two craters, Rainy said.

"This entire chamber was once filled with magma," she said. "Overflowing, so it was forced out, creating all the vents and paths we just came through."

"It's gonna be brimming again pretty soon," Emiel said, surveying the chamber with the light of his camcorder.

The steam, they saw, emanated from this third crater, from under and between the treacherous stone debris within. There were vents in the sides of the crater, though too small for a human to enter. They had reached the end.

Simon checked his watch: 7:22.

"We've got about an hour window," he announced.

The others took this as permission to detach themselves from each other and start investigating. They circumvented the crater to inspect the other side, which had man-sized vents in its walls, their paths sloping steeply upward.

As they examined the walls, the ground of igneous rock, broke off samples, measured the temperature and composition of the air, the rumbling gradually intensified and following Júarez's warning to expect low-category earthquakes, the chamber tremored for several seconds a little after eight a.m.

Amid the earthquake, which only put them off balance as a ship upon a sea in a minor storm would, Simon watched the ceiling and the abscess for preludes to falling debris but only tiny pebbles and dust were disturbed.

The tremors became stronger and more frequent as time passed. By 8:34 the earthquakes were coming every minute and a half.

Simon obsessively scanned the ceiling for debris from where he remained beside the vent path with the rope anchored to its top.

The other five had migrated to the far side of the crater and Simon saw the beams of their headlamps plus an extra beam—from Emiel's camcorder.

At 8:44 there was an earthquake that didn't stop as soon as the others had, went on for a dozen seconds, a minute, two, longer.

Crouching to better keep his balance on the shivering ground, Simon took a deep breath, exhaled, registered for the first time the tension in his chest, shoulders, the shaking of his hands, the knocking of his knees.

He saw the six shafts of light on the other side of the crater—on the other side of the world—get closer to the ground, then steadily expand as the bearers inched closer to the rim. The crater was now expelling steam in concentrated oscillating currents, spitting out the steam as the earthquake continued, four-minutes long now.

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck..." Simon muttered to himself, his head spinning as when you realize you're too drunk.

He squeezed shut his eyes and started mumbling the Stones' "Start Me Up" to himself, fists clenching, one holding tight to the climbing rope.

Then at 8:49 there was the rich detailed stomach-filling sound of stone fracturing, breaking, and then the sound of heavy liquid—heavier than milk, than motor oil—splashing and Simon opened his eyes to see a yellow-orange glow shining up out of the crater, light the ceiling around the abscess.

Then came a second spurt of magma—that yellow-orange tinged with chunks of black—just peeking over the edge of the crater before tumbling back down and splashing upon the floor it had leapt out from.

The spurts, initially a few dozen seconds in between, soon became more frequent as the earthquake rumbled on, becoming more violent, and the stone of the crater's floor fractured more and Simon felt the ground beneath his boots sink in hard jerks, then the rim of the crater started splitting with tiny fractures, more dust, bigger pebbles falling out of the abscess, portions of the igneous rock on the wall splitting off the way ice on a berg does.

Simon, though frightened and frenetic he should have been and somewhere in his mind was, was captivated and remained crouched in place, watching the spurts of magma, which seemed to be making the effort of pole-vaulters to get on top of the rim, failing—for now. He watched the surreal incandescent material continue to peek over the rim, then fall back down, collecting in the crater to create a growing pool of light—or perhaps more like creating a new sun within the crater.

He watched for who knew how long. When he worked up the courage and the capability to inch up to the rim, he saw all the debris-strewn ground of the crater was filled with magma, like a skillet filled with battered eggs to make an omelet. It boiled, bubbles bursting as though the earth were belching.

Over the rumble of the continued earthquake, the ruckus of the stone breaking, and the gurgling, belching, spurting, and splattering of the magma, Simon just barely heard the crackle of his walkie talkie on his harness.

He took it off and held it up to his hooded ear:

"I wish MaryAnn were here to see this," Emiel said over the line.

"She would have been...fascinated."

Simon, in another case, might have glanced up to the other side of the crater to count the explorers by their light beams but he didn't, continued to gaze down into the crater, which, he then realized, was filling rapidly, nearly half up the 18-foot-deep crater.

He felt jerks in the ground that rocked his body as it would be onboard a small ship in fierce water—wavelike—and these waves were always followed by the pool of magma hurling up most of its contents to the rim. Simon jumped back, tripping over a cluster of boulders and losing hold of his walkie talkie.

The magma fell back with a great belly-flop sound, immediately started boiling again, started shaking its earthen cauldron from the strengthening earthquake, now filling the crater a half foot every 30 seconds.

Simon, still on the ground, heard his walkie crackle again.

"But she's not," Emiel said as Simon picked it up.

After a moment, when the magma became visible on the far side of the crater, Simon blinked, opened the line:

"We need to head out."

An open frequency to which all of the six walkies were tuned, Simon expected the others to ascent. But the line was quiet.

He held the line again, glancing up at the other side—still six light beams, all stationary, close to the ground—as he let the frequency crackle for a second:

"Let's head out!" he said louder.

After a moment, the line crackled:

"You can't know what really happened to her," Emiel said. "Not all of it."

Simon kept his eyes on the far side, saw no movement of the six lights.

"Emiel, get the others moving!"

"She was dismembered...cooked...and eaten."

Simon hurried around the crater, suddenly saw two of the lights—rendered all but invisible by the light from the crater—go out and he stopped, his heavy breathing louder in his facemask than the fury of the chamber.

"Emiel—"

"She was cannibalized. My wife."

Simon's wide eyes scanned the rim of the crater to try to discern the figure of Emiel but couldn't—should have but the light was too bright and the material of their suits too dark and light-absorbing. He continued around, moving faster.

"And I watched every second of it," Emiel said, which Simon only peripherally heard from the walkie, in his hand but it wasn't near his ear. "Can you imagine?"

Now on the other side, Simon could see behind the four headlamps still one—they had been removed from the heads of the four explorers and propped upon their chests as they lay unmoving on their backs.

Simon dropped beside one—Beson—saw through her facemask blood pooling in the back of her hood. He rolled up her sleeve and peeled down her glove to feel for a pulse—and felt one.

He moved to the other three, found them all still alive but unconscious.

"It happened to us," Emiel said over the line, his voice buzzing out of all four of their walkies.

Simon remained beside Rainy, shaking her while repeatedly scanning the chamber for any sign of anthropod movement but the tremoring and the light from the crater, quickly becoming blinding, made discernment impossible.

"And we were good," Emiel said. "She was a good wife, I was a good husband, we had a good marriage. But it happened to us."

Simon looked behind him with a snap of his head, sensing movement, but it was only the crumbling of the thin pliable layer of a wall.

"Bad things happen to good people."

Simon shook Rainy more but her eyes did not flutter a bit beneath her lids.

Emiel came around the corner of one of the steep unexplored vents—right behind Simon. In his hand he held a fat circular black rock. In his other hand, he lifted the walkie to his mouth:

"So, to keep things balanced, the good must turn bad and do bad things to bad people."

Simon heard the voice on all the walkies falter behind Emiel's actual voice and he spun around and bolted up but wasn't fast enough to avoid Emiel's rock bashing into his face and knocking him out.

Simon was stirred out of black oblivion by his entire body rocking side to side on the ground, which was fracturing more, deeper, from the worsening earthquake.

When he opened his eyes, he briefly saw Júarez crouched over him, screaming his name into his face so that he might hear her over the chamber's deafening tumult. But then he had to shut his eyes as his nostrils and mouth inhaled the volcanic fumes through his shattered facemask. The fumes stung his throat in such a way to put you in mind of what having your throat slit must feel like.

As he staggered up, though his eyes were watering from the fumes, his jaw dropped upon seeing the crater brimming with magma, nearly overflowing, and he looked around at the others—Rainy was missing.

"He has her," he muttered, bolting around the crater and yelling for the others to follow him.

When they got to the vent sloping steeply so they'd had to rappel down it, Simon saw the climbing rope lying coiled like a slumbering snake on the ground.

He cursed, took off the power drill, bolts, hammer, and hangers and started fixing a quick path up the slope.

Emiel had carried Rainy unconscious out of the chamber, up the slope, through the vent and had just reached the opening of the second pit leading up to the bottom of the crater feeding out to the open air when Rainy came back alive, softly at first, then realized her predicament as she lay over Emiel's shoulder.

She shrieked and slammed her fists into his back and he growled, dropped her upon a pile of rocks, which knocked the breath out of her and rattled her brain.

Emiel stood above her, heaving breath behind his facemask as he glowered down at her. He'd bound her wrists and ankles with quickdraws.

She writhed helplessly among the rocks, gasping, soon crying, and he crouched beside her, observed her with fierce bloodshot eyes as she futilely tried to wriggle away from him.

"What the fuck are you doing, Emiel?"

Emiel snarled, seized her neck, pressed her down into the rocks, the sharp points of the igneous floor piercing her suit and gouging her flesh. She gagged, trying to suck in air, but his hands were clenched too tightly, veins bulging out of his forehead, teeth barred, as he seemed intent on killing her right then.

Grunting, wet gurgling, face turning blue, suddenly Emiel's walkie crackled and Simon's voice screamed across the line:

"Emiel! Emiel, please don't do this—"

Emiel snatched it off his hip:

"You want her, Simon? You ready to die for her? For this marriage of liars and cheating and suffering? For this whore whom you chose over your best friend in the worst time of his life? You'd better fucking hurry!"

He hurled the walkie down the vent he'd trudged up, then turned back to Rainy, shooting her feet, trying to get leverage to stand, but Emiel grabbed her ankles, pulled her between his legs, then hoisted her by the waist onto her feet and started fixing her ropes to his.

"Emiel, we didn't abandon MaryAnn—"

He bashed her facemask with his own, cracking both and sending her onto her stomach, where she sniffled, wept.

"I don't wanna hear her name come out of your whore mouth."

He latched a quickdraw to her harness, removed the ropes from her wrists and ankles, then slung a noose he'd fixed in one of his ropes over her neck and dragged her along as he began climbing up the second pit.

The magma spilled over the rim of the crater while Simon and the others were half up the slope, nearly to where it leveled off.

The climbing was tedious but Simon worked faster and sloppier than he ever had, drilling the holes not as deep as they should have been, the faster to hammer in the bolts and hangers, which he didn't bother tightening before hooking a rope in and allowing them to climb faster.

The magma continued to be hurled up by the contracting earth beneath the ground, so by the time they all reached the plateau of the path, the magma was halfway up the wall they'd just climbed, having flooded the rest of the chamber in a sea of orange and yellowed that burned so brightly, it filled the vent they were in with blinding light.

The fumes raged nonstop attacks against Simon's eyes, though his lungs were spared thanks to the breathing apparatus still operating, so he'd done most of the routemaking work with his eyes closed and upon the plateau, he ordered them to start running upward, the magma quickly rising as though in direct response to their attempts at escape.

Emiel led the way up the pit. No doubt having no other choice, Rainy climbed below him of her volition, her fetters temporarily removed.

She said not a word as they climbed, only whimpered and sniffled, and when Emiel mounted the rim in the oval-roofed chamber, he hoisted her up like a bucket of water in a well the rest of the way by the rope she climbed on.

Emiel's jerking of her rope made her lose hold on the wall and she screamed as she became separated from the only solid ground and briefly imagined herself falling. But then she felt herself rising like a cow in a helicopter sling and she groped upward for the rim, scrambled onto the firm flat ground when she could, scattering away dust and pebbles.

While she lay on her stomach collecting her thoughts and nerves, Emiel went to each of the embedded boulders to which Simon had anchored ropes and untied them, as he had down in the steep vent below. These ropes unwound, slinked across the ground, then whipped down into the crater.

While he was thus occupied, Rainy picked up a solid pointed rock and came up behind him, his back to her and the crater. She struck the back of his head but underestimated the strength needed to knock someone unconscious and instead only made him growl, zip around, and strike her across the face with the back of his hand.

She stumbled backward, toward the rim and the igneous rock there, weakened by the unceasing earthquake, broke away and initiated her fall back into the pit—untethered.

Emiel caught her with ease but didn't pull her in, let her upper body hover over the void, instilling her with the full understanding that if he let her go, she'd pitch irretrievably into the steam and to her death.

He ripped her away from the rim, threw her back onto her stomach atop the rocks, then proceeded to refit her makeshift bindings and when she struggled—kicking and punching—he slammed his boot into the side of her head, stunning her long enough to do his work without resistance.

Then, pulling her again by her rope noose, he dragged her out of the chamber, into the chasm, then into the vent leading to the topmost crater.

The four other explorers reached the bottom of the second pit long after Emiel and Rainy had ascended it and Simon noticed the detached ropes lying at the bottom with horror.

This held his attention for only a second, then he went to one wall and started the hanger-installation process. There were hangers already in the walls but none near enough for him to hook onto just yet. The higher he climbed, he soon came upon these older hangers but he couldn't remember the path he'd installed them on and he didn't take the time to search for them, installed new ones when he had to, and in 10 minutes all four were on the climb—and the magma was just creeping into the chamber they'd previously stood in.

It crawled along the ground at first, running into rock obstructions and seeping around them. But in another five minutes, waves started pouring in like beach tide, overturning loose debris and being compelled against the walls, so subsequent stronger waves forced the magma to rise.

Júarez, below Simon, audibly prayed in Spanish as she climbed, straining to control the emotion in her voice, which tried autonomously to gasp and hyperventilate.

"C'mon, you motherfucker, c'mon!" Simon berated himself as his hands shook, threatening his hold on the drill, on the bolt, the hanger, the hammer, his burning watery eyes straining to focus on hooking the quickdraws and carabiners.

Again unbound Rainy climbed beneath Emiel up the walls of the final crater, soon reaching high enough to feel the collision between the subterranean heat and the high ground's arctic chill.

Upon reaching the top, the wind and snow were familiarly blistering the trembling of the ground augmented the wind's efforts at toppling them.

Before unshackling Rainy to order her to put on her crampons, Emiel detached the ropes from the hangers along the rim, then picked up two of the ice axes from the pile of ice-climbing gear the six had left on the surface.

Once outfitted, though not donning any of their cold-weather clothing, Emiel ordered Rainy to lead the way up to the plateau, not permitting her to pick up any of the axes. He still held her by the neck rope, having reapplied her bindings, and when they came to the first of a dozen cliffs they would have to descend, he attached a rope to her waist and lowered her to the bottom as horse hay from a barn. She closed her eyes as she was slowly dropped, lest she be lost hold of or abandoned and see the ground race up to meet her and kill her nearly horizontal body.

Then Emiel hacked the axes into the ice and lowered himself. Rainy probably thought about yanking on the rope connecting the two but then would she be strong enough to actually pull him off the wall, kill him, paralyze him? Or would her tampering with his descent only anger him and cause him to harm her when he dismounted?

She didn't try anything as Emiel climbed down.

When they inevitably came to walls they had to climb, Emiel went first, allowing Rainy's limbs brief freedom to carry herself up, then reimprisoned her at the top, forcing her to take the lead again.

Upon reaching the top of the pit, Simon and the others were exhausted, burning hot, out of breath, and the magma was more than three quarters to the top of the pit.

Carried by the endless supply of adrenaline the body has in such situations, they hurried through the chasm, up the vent, and made it to the bottom of the final crater.

Simon, with less horror, found their ropes lying at the bottom but there were more hangers in these walls, closer to hand and visible paths thanks to the arctic white light coming down to them from the crater's mouth.

The walls of this chamber broke open and out of the gaping fissures came steam, followed by magma, pouring out and pooling like some extraterrestrial liquid preparing to materialize into a humanoid figure.

This reignited their terror and Simon latched onto a nearby hanger and led the way up.

Their muscles went numb not a quarter of the way up, stabbing them with fear momentarily felt by someone on a weight bench upon realizing he has not the strength to lift the weight bar back into its holding place but then relieved of this fear by a spotter. But the four had no spotter—in fact only more weight was coming to them, fast, the magma was climbing faster than they were—they couldn't bear to glance down, didn't have to in order to know they were losing the advantage of distance, could feel it.

Willing his atrophied hands to close upon holds, hook his quickdraw to the hangers, his burning arms to reach always higher, Simon continued to guide the way to the top.

Their climbing peeled away igneous rock, which fell away into the magma pool below, and the proximity of the hissing and burning alarmed them and looking down, they saw the magma was only a few feet below them—they could feel the heat in their boots, melting the soles to the wall if they were stationary too long, so they had to rip their boots off the wall in order to keep climbing.

Simon reached the rim and put his forearms over it like a man latching onto a pier after nearly drowning in a lake and he hurried out, then turned to start pulling out the others by hand, watching the magma rise a foot every second.

Once all were out, they gathered their left-behind gear in their arms and started running up to the plateau overlooking the crater.

Once on the plateau, they had a view of the island surrounding the ridge above the crater and they saw smaller craters—vents—whose interior ice had melted so they now revealed themselves and already some were spewing out the magma—now lava—not in jetties through the air but in amorphous masses on the ground, expanding and coalescing with other streams.

The lava meeting new snow and ice created hissing like the screaming of non-Catholics being burned to death during the Spanish Inquisition and the ice layer lying atop the stone of the island could be heard and felt groaning, splitting.

In the time they observed all this, the lava in the main crater reached the top and spilled out, attacking the ice, horrible, sizzling.

The four put on their crampons and other ice-climbing gear, then started running up the path away from the overflowing crater.

Emiel pulled Rainy down the earthen path that fed out to the steps of the research station. Ahead, on a flat patch of ground near the cliffs, they saw the helicopter sitting motionless.

This reminded Rainy of the pilot and she instantly started screaming to him for help.

Emiel yanked the rope noose and pulled her onto the ground, where her face smacked the hard-packed earth, but after dizzily recovering, she started screaming again and Emiel did nothing to stop her, held fast to the rope as he watched the door of the research station.

After a moment the door opened and as though predicting what was coming out, Emiel kicked Rainy's head again, then disappeared among the shadows under the deck holding up the research station.

For out of the door came first the muzzle of a 9 mm, then the pilot, holding the weapon expertly with both hands. He scanned the land below the deck of the station, saw the contrast of the brown earth and Rainy's silver suit, saw the fluorescent-red climbing rope around her neck, abandoned on the ground.

He hurried down the metal steps like a roll of thunder and Rainy picked up her head to see him just as he stepped foot on the ground.

"Who is that? Rainy?"

"I don't know where he is—Emiel, he's gone crazy!"

The pilot looked up the path behind her, then behind him to the helicopter, then—the area clear, he thought—he hurried beside Rainy and helped her to her feet.

Emiel came running without a sound from under the research station and smashed the butt of an ice axe into the back of the pilot's head. The pilot splayed out and collapsed on his stomach, the gun falling to Rainy's feet, and even with her wrists bound, she snatched it and tried to turn it on Emiel but he leapt at her and tackled her to the ground before she could get a finger on the trigger.

Underneath him she tried to hammer at his face with her coupled fists but he grabbed her wrists, overpowered her, pinned her arms over her head.

He peeled off his facemask and threw off his hood, then did the same to her as she screamed and cried, face red and wet.

"Emiel, I'm sorry, we never meant to—"

"She was your best friend and you fucking abandoned her!"

"No I didn't!"

"After all we did for you two—all the fucking counseling sessions saying you two were so good together, you should work it out—you couldn't even go to her fucking memorial service! Who was there—students and former professors and acquaintances, fucking strangers—you fucking abandoned her!"

He seized a handful of her hair and pulled her to her feet, picking up the gun along the way. He leveled it at her, then ordered her to head up the stairs into the research station.

He marched her into the dining hall, sat her in one of the folding chairs, then used ropes and carabiners to trap her in the seat.

He put the gun in a pocket and proceeded out of the dining hall while Rainy miserably wept.

From a closet in the observation room, Emiel took out two of the four rubber tanks of diesel fuel and headed outside with them.

As he stepped out onto the deck, the pilot rammed into him, coming around a corner of the station, and the gas tanks tumbled to the wooden floor, spilling some diesel, while the pilot crouched atop Emiel, punched him, then again, but Emiel was not fazed enough to be unresponsive.

He grabbed the pilot's throat and with a burst of energy, hurled him off, then rolled atop the pilot, punched harder than the pilot had, then rolled the stunned man onto his side to tie his hands together, then his ankles. After this was done, he took out the gun and held the muzzle in between the pilot's eyes, which widened and his whole body started shivering.

"You have the misfortune of being part of something that doesn't involve you," Emiel said. "I don't wanna kill you but I will if you get in my way."

He turned the safety back on, put the gun in his pocket, then picked up the overturned but mostly still full diesel tanks and went on his way down the steps. He headed for the helicopter, some 100 yards away from the station.

He emptied one tank inside the helicopter, then emptied the other around the outside of the craft. He took out a book of matches, lit one, then the whole book, and tossed the torch inside the copter.

He hurried away from the copter and dragged the pilot into the station, by which time the helicopter and the ground around and underneath it had been completely consumed by the fire.

Back inside the pilot lay impotent beside Rainy bound to the folding chair in the dining hall. The pilot struggled against his fetters while Rainy had long given up struggling as futile and as she cried, she yelled out to Emiel as he headed into the cot room:

"Emiel! Please, you haven't taken your medicine! Just take it and everything will be OK, we can forget all about this. Just take your medicine!"

She was met with brief silence, then she heard heavy rapid footsteps and suddenly Emiel burst back into the dining hall, his orange pill bottle rattling in his hand.

He popped off the top, then pulled Rainy's head up and pried her mouth open, dumping all the pills into her mouth, then latched his hand over her mouth, held her nostrils shut. She spat out some of the pills but Emiel sealed his hand tighter and she screamed in her throat, tried to tear her head away but his hand held fast to her hair. She started heaving the folding chair, becoming more desperate for air.

Then, just as her face turned the color of a raspberry, he released her hair and mouth and nose, then kicked her backward. She smacked the hard linoleum floor, lay on her side still attached to the chair, as she gasped for breath, gagging and coughing up the dozens of pills.

The other four were descending a wall of ice when the helicopter exploded in the west. The shockwave jarred them, the three scientists losing hold of their axes and falling a few feet before they were caught by the rope by which they were attached to Simon, the topmost climber. He'd kept hold of his axes, glancing over his shoulder and seeing the supernova flash not too far away before the rope jerked with the fall of the other three and he grasped his axes tighter as the three flailed, trying to grab onto their axes again.

They reattached to the wall and continued descending, plumes of gray smoke rising behind them.

It took them an hour to reach the research station, by which time the flames of the helicopter had extinguished, though the blackened ruin and ground still smoked.

While the other three regarded the scene with despair and cried, Simon looked only for a second, then turned his attention to the research station.

He told the other three to remain there, then he headed up the stairs, taking light steps. He put his back to the wall beside the door, holding up one ice axe as he grasped the door handle, turned it, and let the door fall open outward.

He heard no reaction immediately within, so he slipped lightly inside. He took the first corner, peeking around it before going, then once cleared he took the corridor leading to the observation room—empty.

He stepped out, gazed down the dark hall leading to the dining hall, the entrance to the cot room halfway down.

The station was silent aside from minor trembling of the ground outside, which sent small shockwaves up the deck of the station and caused the walls and floor of the station to buzz.

He opened the cot room door, turned on the light, found it empty. He went onto the dining hall, found the pilot now tied to the fold chair, the pills scattered around his feet, Rainy nowhere to be seen.

"Where are they?" Simon asked as he undid the pilot from the chair.

"He took her outside, I don't know where. What the fuck is wrong with him?"

Simon didn't answer, couldn't.

"There a radio around here?" Simon asked.

"Observation room."

Simon called for the others to come up and then they five entered the observation room, where the pilot tuned the radio and intermittently asked for acknowledgement.

Simon anxious, running his hands through his hair, soon the radio relayed a voice that identified itself as an officer of the South African Navy.

Simon took the transmitter, identified himself, then explained the mission and recent events.

"We need help, please send a helicopter to get us out of here."

The officer handed the transmitter to a higher-ranking officer, who after introducing himself said this was an international matter, not something the South African Navy could take part in.

"We will alert the United States and the Norwegian navy, that's all we can do."

"We don't have time, there's a volcano erupting here!"

"I'm sorry, sir, that's all we can do."

Simon cursed, threw down the transmitter, then went to the map of the island on the wall, studied it: Most of the topography was shaded gray—indicating ice—and there were tiny specks of land called skerries surrounding the island. All of these were too far out in the water to reach even if one had a mind to swim. There was, however, a large partly flat piece of land called Larsøya just off the southwestern shore, which, according to the inch-to-kilometers converter on the map, was only about a quarter of a mile out. Written in the gray of this island in red pen was, "Come get her."

Simon, inhaling sharply, went to the back of the observation room, where the gear cabinets were, and upon removing a compact tent, a battery-powered space heater, a new facemask, an inflating life raft with a foldable oar, he noticed empty spaces where duplicates of some of these items had probably sat not too long ago.

Taking note of his actions, Júarez and the pilot asked him what he was doing.

"What do you think? Radio me when you hear from the navy."

"How do you think you're gonna find him?" Júareaz asked.

"He wants me to. If the lava gets this far, head out—there are extra drills and hammers in the cabinet. Otherwise stay here."

"He has my gun," the pilot said.

Simon chuckled.

"Of course he does."

Simon, putting his gear and an insulated thermos of water in a bag, which he slung over his neck, headed out of the station.

Looking at his watch and seeing it was 2:53, he navigated to the southwest with his compass and started out.

Farther in that direction, Rainy and Emiel toiled over and down walls of ice and ridges. Coming upon a high plateau, they looked to the north and could see the lava spread over a lower-lying tract of land, having spilled over from William Plateau. Lying in the middle of all the whiteness, it was such a sight never before seen, never to be forgotten.

Emiel nudged her with the gun and they moved on.

Soon they could see the shoreline, accessible only by descending the sheer cliffs above it, and out on the water was fog, which occasionally dissipated enough to reveal Larsøya in the distance, its shores mostly rocky and high but with a steep path up the Bouvet-facing side.

Once on the rock cliffs, Emiel anchored two ropes to boulders for them to rappel on and descending, they remained at an equal level with each other the whole way, the gun always pointed at Rainy.

Upon the narrow steep shore below, they looked out upon the water: The waves were constant but probably couldn't capsize a dinghy. The surface was gray and foamy and chunks of ice floated as though nature's answer to man's buoys.

"Get in the water," Emiel told her.

She glared at him in disbelief.

"We'll freeze to death, Emiel."

"You should be so lucky."

She looked back at the grim water while the wind blew whiffs of heat and sulfur around them.

Emiel put the cold metal of the gun to the back of her head where her brainstem was.

"Die now or later," he said.

She gasped several times automatically, closed her eyes, bit her lip to strangle her crying. Then she stepped slowly into the water.

As the water pierced through her suit and bit her flesh with numbing cold starting up her legs, she whimpered, her crying let loose.

Emiel kicked her back and sent her hurtling forward, falling all but once into the water, and she emerged a second later, breathless, feeling as though her lungs had been filled with needles.

Emiel came in after her, giving no acknowledgement to the cold pain if he felt any, and storing the gun in a pocket, he took hold of the rope around Rainy's neck again and pulled her along as he paddled across to the island.

It was near dusk when they reached land again, saturated and with ice in their hair, eyebrows.

Rainy crawled on hands and knees behind Emiel, who got back onto his feet as though he were some omnipotent god unaffected by such things as arctic cold. He jerked the rope to get her to move faster but only succeeded in pulling her to the ground, where she lay violently trembling from her soul and trying to get enough air to cry.

Emiel took out the gun again and held it down in her face.

She recoiled in brief fear, then lurched out with both hands, stole the gun, and kicked Emiel in the face, her crampon slicing his flesh before he fell backward.

Then they were both on their feet again and she had the gun pointed at his face, standing several feet away. He snarled at her, feeling the warmth of his blood trickling down his cheeks and brow. Then he smirked.

"Can you do it?"

Rainy gritted her teeth, tried to stave off her shivering, her face wrenching with sadness.

"I don't want to."

"But you have to. You're in an impossible situation. So you either have to do the unthinkable or have the unthinkable done to you."

He took a quick sudden step toward her and Rainy squeezed the trigger as she backed up—and the gun clicked.

Emiel himself couldn't believe the gun hadn't fired, though Rainy looked at the gun as though she'd just blow off his head. Emiel pounced on her, retrieved the gun from her grasp, then took the noose rope and ordered her to start trudging in front of him.

Simon marched through the dark, headlight beaming on the ground but unable to penetrate more than five feet ahead of him through the flurry of snow and smoke blowing down from the north.

He walked with his ice axe extended before him, tapping the ground to test its stability, and he often glanced at his compass to make sure he hadn't gone off course in the dark.

Far behind him the glow of the lava could be seen radiating into the night sky, the radius of its glow only becoming larger as the lava spread across the upper part of the island, but at that point the substance itself could not be seen.

As he checked his compass again, his other hand failed to weave the ice axe pole across the ground ahead and continuing on, his feet plunged through a bed of snow covering a large fissure in the icy ground.

The snow immediately gave way and he fell instantly into the fissure, at the last second catching himself on the ledge of the other side.

His feet dangled in the emptiness below, too dark to see how deep it went, and he tried to pull himself up but his arms were too weak after the day's torture.

He slipped off the bag containing his gear and tossed it over the ledge and as he did so, he heard and felt the ledge he held onto crack deeply.

He ripped off his second axe, the other having fallen into the chasm, and swung it high and buried it deep into the ground ahead just as the ledge broke off. Hanging onto the handle, he tried to listen for the smashing of ice down below but it never came to him.

He pulled himself onto the flat land once more and lay on his elbows and knees trying to slow his breathing made frantic by the speeding of his heart.

With a sigh of despair, he opened the bag and pulled the cord on the compact tent, which snapped alive, sucked in air, and was erect in seconds. He staked the corners into the ground, then crawled inside, zipped the flap, and turned on the space heater.

Shutting off his headlamp, the only light visible was the red dot indicating the heater was on. He huddled on the ground with the heater in his lap like a toddler. As his eyes adjusted, the glow of the lava could be seen through the fibers of the tent walls.

Emiel drove Rainy up the steep mainland and they climbed over and down ridges until Rainy collapsed, joints numbed and locked from the cold, which had frozen their soaked clothes, though Emiel, jaw chattering, marched behind her as though invincible.

As she lay on her side, hugging her body and spasming with shivers, Emiel looked around the area, which lay at the bottom of a bowled ridge, snow on top and below, the dark stone walls of the ridge marking the space in between.

He looked down at her, cocking his head as a scientist would examining specimens' behaviors. Her eyes were closed, face stiff, perhaps imagining a burning hearth or the sun back in Martinique.

"Are you cold?" Emiel asked.

She didn't respond.

Emiel leisurely took out the compact tent in his bag, pulled the cord, then he took out the space heater. He slipped inside and sat on the canvas floor and turned on the heater, which was water- and freeze-proof.

Setting it beside him, he dissembled the gun and set its pieces like oddly shaped shards of ice around the heater.

Pulling her head up, Rainy saw the open tent flap and the orange-burning core of the heater and she started crawling inside, probably not feeling her limbs move but her brain sending the orders just the same, seeing the results as she inched inside.

Emiel watched her, half-smiling, and once in, she reached weakly up to take the flap zipper but her fingers could not bend enough to clasp it. She put a finger on top of the zipper then and pushed it down.

She peeled out of her clothes so she was naked, then huddled beside the heater with her eyes shut, imagining the better warmer days, while Emiel sat straight up, gazing at the tent's zipper.

Simon was wakened by the static of his walkie relaying someone's attempt at contact. He picked it up, answered: the pilot.

"The Norwegian and American navy are on their way. They left during the night, they're about six hours away."

Simon groaned.

"Fuck, how close is the lava?"

Commotion over the line:

"It's coming from the west," Knuffsson said. "About 10 kilometers away, moving about a meter an hour."

"Can you see it on the cliffs yet?"

"No."

"How much of the island do you think it's gonna reach?"

Beson took the other end:

"If it's diverting a meter an hour to the west, it's the same in the east and it has to be going five or 10 to the south. It could envelop all the island in 24 hours. The farther it goes, the more unstable the ice sheet becomes. If the ice breaks, it could break the rock layer, collapse the island."

Simon rubbed his forehead:

"OK, you can take a life raft to one of the skerries to the west."

For the first time that morning, he looked through the walls of the tent: The cloudy sky was tinged with the dark-blue dawn and he saw the lava coming from the north, having spilled over the cliffs beyond and now approaching across the flat land, perhaps 100 yards away from his tent.

Throughout the night Emiel had remained awake while Rainy, seduced into a state of semi-relaxation by the heater, drifted in and out of slumber. She would glance at the defrosted pieces of the gun within reach of her hand and stare at them for whole minutes, thinking, throat bobbing, but she never worked up the courage to try to steal any of them.

As the dawn came on, Emiel reconstructed the gun, then rose, his clothes damp but unfrozen during the night.

Rainy in panic rolled farther away from Emiel, anticipating violence, but he only unzipped the flap and stepped outside, boots crunching the snow, a gust of cold weather blowing inside before being repelled by the cooped-up heat.

She watched Emiel stand stationary just outside the tent, his neck craning as he looked around. Then he raised the gun, rubbed the muzzle along his cheek, his temple, across his forehead, down his nose, and held it to his lips. Then he started walking.

Rainy remained on the floor of the tent, watching Emiel get smaller as he headed up the slope over the ridge and vanished over the other side.

She remained gazing out the open flap until the sun peaked with as much light as the snow and clouds and lava smoke coming up from the mainland would allow.

Then she stood and started redressing in her mostly dried clothes. She took off the rope noose and picked up one of the ice axes Emiel had brought before stepping out of the tent. She gazed around but could find no trace of Emiel.

She tried to follow his footsteps in the snow over the ridge but they ceased to exist on the other side, which was frozen unimpressionable earth.

Simon easily outpaced the lava but it continued to follow him over the flat land and cascaded over the cliffs of the ridges and walls he descended after he'd gone several hundred yards away.

By nine a.m. the land to the east flattened and Simon saw it was a field of fast-flowing lava compelled by the rushing flow over the cliffs to the north.

Simon was stopped in his tracks, gazed at the bizarre scene. The southern shore was visible over a series of terraced cliffs and the lava was racing toward the bottom-most cliff, like a gushing child running toward a pool to cannonball into.

The lava launched over the last cliff and there were a few seconds of silence, then hissing like the simultaneous branding of a thousand cattle, fiercer than the hissing of the lava and snow, followed by a mushroom cloud of thick white smoke.

Simon looked at his compass, saw he'd been heading to the south, and he turned himself to the southwest, started moving again, faster, looking back at the lava more and more as it started diverting along the cliffs after him.

Rainy ventured out beyond the bowled ridge, trying to read the same path she and Emiel had taken but that had been night and she had been on the brink of freezing to death and everything was different now in the daylight.

She held the ice axe with both hands like Jack Torrance, taking awkward steps across the ground without crampons, the snow switching to ice to earth to stone.

Coming over a hill, she came in view of the water in between Larsøya and Bouvet. She stumbled down, then sidestepped the great boulders strewn about, and she crouched behind a cluster of rock slabs, surveying the shore for any movement but all that moved was the snow in the wind.

She glanced over her shoulder at the water and Bouvet and from this vantage, she saw lava spilling over the southern shore, hitting the water and creating a massive bank of white smoke, which blew to the west and consumed all view of the mainland.

Moving blindly through the snow, Simon was forced to go slower for fear of falling into another fissure.

Looking behind him he saw the glow of the lava radiating through the steam but never seemed brighter.

But then at one point, the wall of steam to the north became tinged with the same color, gradually connecting to the light in the east.

The northern portion of the light became brighter by the second and Simon began running, fissures be damned, leaping over suddenly appearing rocks sprouting out of the snow.

When he came to cliffs to descend, he only belayed a rope to a nearby boulder and scrambled down, the fear of the lava reaching the cliffs and melting the rope, followed quickly by the lava tumbling over the cliffs onto him, running crazy in his mind.

The orange-yellow light appeared in the smoke on the cliffs minutes after Simon had gotten off the wall and the light stayed on his trail.

Over the wind and the shrieking of the lava falling into the water, Simon heard whisps of water washing aground and he slowed his pace to a paranoid walk and in just a few steps, he found the end of the ground. Below was a white void of swirling smoke but underneath it, Simon could hear the ocean.

He tried to perceive Larsøya but could spot no trace of it and doublechecking his direction with his compass, he anchored a rope to a boulder, he rushed down the cliff to the crooked shore beneath the smoke, where the waves crashed upon the land and race to engulf his boots.

He took out the inflatable life raft and unfolded the oar, pulled the tab, and the boat swelled to life upon the undulating water.

He took off his crampons and climbed in, started paddling with long heavy strokes with his entire body. Soon the shore vanished and Simon didn't look back as he steered through the smoke.

The raft hit ground before it became visible. Simon dropped the oar in the deck, then took hold of one of the raft's ropings and he jumped over the side, splashing into the shallow shore, and he pulled the raft ashore behind a boulder.

He carried an ice axe in one hand as his eyes scanned the impenetrable smoke all around.

"Rainy!" he hollered as he threw off his facemask.

The hiss of the smoke forming was far away enough to allow his voice to carry, though it received no response. He called out again, moving forward and finding the ground rising.

"Simon?" he heard gently, undoubtedly Rainy.

He spun around but couldn't locate the voice's origin.

"It's me, honey."

He turned on his headlamp and turned a complete circle.

"I see you!"

He heard rapid footsteps resounding all around him and Simon set his feet flat and held the axe at the ready, didn't breathe. But then Rainy really did appear, bursting through the smoke and throwing her arms around him. He dropped the axe and hugged her back, caressing her head and kissing her neck.

"I love you, baby, I love you so much."

She cried into his neck, trembling.

"I love you too, thank you!"

He took her hand and started to pull her back to the shore, to the life raft. He put it out in the water and started pulling it along in the water to the north by the compass' needle.

Once there he hopped over the side and took the oar and started paddling out of the shallow water.

Just as they entered the deep water, Emiel materialized out of the smoke, the gun at his side. He stood among the rocks of the shore for a moment before he was spotted by Simon and Rainy, who looked at him with wide eyes piercing across the distance.

He raised the gun and Simon and Rainy both screamed at him don't do it! but he didn't listen, pulled the trigger, and a bullet shot out and pierced the front of the life raft, deflating it in seconds.

Simon and Rainy, thinking he was aiming at them, dove out of the raft into the water before he'd fired and now resurfaced to find the raft half-submerged, drowning. They looked around them for an alternate plan, another escape route, but there was none. Simon put Rainy behind him and they swam back to shore, Emiel keeping the gun trained on them the whole time.

As they crawled back ashore, bodies numb from the freezing water, Rainy stayed on her knees while Simon slowly rose, placating hand in front of him, urging Emiel be calm, saying nothing perhaps for fear the slightest noise would trigger Emiel's finger.

"We know each other so well, don't we?" Emiel said, smirking.

Simon's expression did not lighten.

"Emiel...we have to get off the island—the volcano's erupting faster than we thought."

"How can we do that?"

"The navy's coming."

"That's disappointing, Simon. This is a private matter and you go and get the government involved."

Simon kept an arm at his side to guard Rainy.

"Emiel...This can all stop right now. You haven't done anything yet, we can make up some story, all go home, back to our normal lives."

"Yeah and I can go back on the haloperidol and the three of us can live believing nothing happened. Be happy...Or we could be honest, face reality."

Simon couldn't follow Emiel's words.

"I want you to tell her," Emiel said, cocking his head at Rainy.

Simon pulled his head up.

"Tell her what?"

"Don't play stupid, you know what."

Simon glared at Emiel, fully understanding.

"That doesn't matter right now."

"It's everything right now. And you're gonna tell her."

"Tell me what?" Rainy asked, voice tinged with dread.

Simon's lips trembled.

"What do you think MaryAnn would say if she—"

Emiel clobbered Simon across the face with the butt of the gun, broke his nose, and he fell onto the rocky shore.

"You're not gonna use her for your own benefit anymore," Emiel said. "You can't make me believe you thought about her even once in the two years I was locked in that fucking prison!"

"We did!" Rainy screamed and Emiel struck her with the gun then as well. She lay reeling, head spinning beside Simon.

"You took and took and took from us," Emiel huffed. "And when you'd sucked us dry, you forgot about us."

He took off a rope and a quickdraw from his harness and took Simon's arms to apprehend him. Simon turned over, kicked at Emiel, who smacked him with the gun again, then turned him over and did quick work in binding his wrists.

Then he went to Rainy, who slapped him away wildly. While distracted with her, Simon swung a leg to sweep Emiel's ankles and he fell onto his back and Rainy jumped atop him, groped for the gun, but Emiel grabbed her hair and wrenched her head back with the force you use to rip out stubborn weeds. She cried out but Emiel silenced her with another strike of the gun.

Simon screamed at Emiel to stop and struggled to tear his hands free as he watched Emiel bind Rainy's wrists. Then he fixed two nooses in one rope and threw them over both the prisoners' necks and jerked the rope, ordering them to their feet.

Emiel's cut face had dried black blood on it while Rainy's and Simon's were freshly bleeding. Rainy walked crookedly, bumping into Simon, as Emiel dragged them away from the shore inland.

He put them in front of him and forced them to lead, the threat of the gun always right behind them.

They didn't talk, didn't cry, as they marched, Simon trying to test the ground ahead of them but Emiel yelled at him to keep moving, jamming the muzzle in his spine, and the blood in Simon's body suddenly ran hot and he moved irreverent of the ground's stability.

There were no ridges they had to climb over that required climbing equipment. They marched for lifetimes, until they reached another tract of the northern shore, from which they saw lava cascading over the cliffs of the western shore of Bouvet, which had been completely overtaken by the lava and that which spilled into the water quickly cooled and solidified. This process slowly created ambling nature-made bridges over the water for the lava to tread—and head for Larsøya.

Emiel pulled Rainy and Simon and drove them farther west along the shore. They marched until Rainy's legs gave out and she collapsed to her knees, bent over, and cried into the hardened earth.

Simon knelt beside her and nestled into her neck, whispering into her ear.

"You ready to confess?" Emiel asked.

Simon looked up at the gun leveled between his eyes, looking up into the muzzle. Tears filled his eyes.

"Please stop this, Emiel."

"I'm trying to, my friend."

Emiel pulled Simon onto his stomach, unraveled his bindings, then pulled Rainy to her feet, held her head in his forearm as he held the gun to her temple. She cried with exhausted terror.

Simon got upon one knee, conscious of all his movements. He slowly put up his hands.

"Please let her go, Emiel."

Before Emiel could respond, the three heard Simon's walkie on his waist crackle and the voice of a Texan came over the line:

"Simon Midwood, this is Lt. Ericks, over."

Emiel gazed at the walkie, over which the announcement came again:

"I'm glad more people showed up for the party," Emiel said. "You can answer."

Still moving slowly, Simon removed the walkie:

"This is Simon Midwood, how far out are you? Over."

"We're approaching the north of the island, where are you located?"

Simon considered Emiel.

"You can tell him."

"Some of us are on Larsøya to the southwest, the others are on skerries to the west."

"Are you currently in danger?"

Simon looked back up at Emiel, who gave him no direction.

"Yes."

"Roger. Over and out."

Simon took a deep breath.

"It's over, Emiel."

"What makes you say that? There are still bullets in this gun."

"Are you gonna shoot us right before the navy gets here? You'll go to prison for life. Just let Rainy go, lose the gun, and we can fix all this."

"Until it breaks again. It's time to face the facts: Sometimes you can't fix what's been broken. And it's time you admit it."

"Emiel, just let this—"

Emiel fired off a shot into the sky.

"I'm not gonna ask again!"

Simon and rainy both felt drained of blood and bone and organs and Simon fell onto his knees and covered his face with both hands, gasped, wept.

"I cheated on you," he sobbed to Rainy. "Two others times—in Ireland and Greenland."

Rainy at first didn't understand his words, so incongruous they seemed in this environment, in these circumstances. But then she grasped them and her face twisted. She shook her head and her lungs were empty.

"Why?" Emiel demanded.

Simon shook his head but knew he couldn't answer like that.

"I wanted to get back at you."

He pulled up his head and saw Rainy crying, trapped against Emiel, the gun still at her head.

"Rainy...I'm sorry...I'm sorry."

Above the hiss of the smoke came the whirling blades of a helicopter and the smoke was disturbed, vortexing violently and dispersing to unveil the figure of the black helicopter hovering some 40 feet overhead 50 yards to the north, above the water.

"I've gotta clear shot," Simon heard on the walkie.

He turned on the line:

"Don't shoot him!"

He turned to the chopper and swung his arms like a referee to indicate a touchdown was invalid.

"Let them if they want," Emiel said.

"I don't want them to!"

"Why not?"

"Because it doesn't have to end like this!"

"Then how's it gonna end, Simon?"

Simon's fists clenched and he screamed at Emiel, screamed until he cried.

"You erased MaryAnn from your memories and you left me to rot. And for what? To try to salvage this shambles of a marriage?"

Simon held his stomach as though he would be sick.

"I'm sorry, Emiel. If I could change the past, I would stop us from going to Brazil...I'm sorry. I don't know what else I can do or say...Please don't hurt Rainy."

"You can prove it to me."

"What's going on down here?" the walkie asked.

Simon didn't respond to it.

"How?"

Emiel, after a second, turned the gun to him and Simon pulled in his chin and shut his eyes but the gun didn't discharge.

"Come here," Emiel said.

Simon opened his eyes and was trembling all over, not from the cold. Rainy's eyes were wide, discouraging.

"Get over here," Emiel said again.

Simon swallowed, put up his hands, and pushed the walkie button again:

"Don't shoot him—please."

"What's going on?" the lieutenant asked.

"I don't know, just...He doesn't deserve to die."

He let the line go as he continued forward as long as Emiel kept directing him, his steps becoming smaller as he neared the barrel of the gun, and he realized Emiel was going to make him touch it with his face and he put his quivering lips to the cold rounded rim.

Emiel's eyes, bloodshot and baggy and dilated, narrowed, his mouth hanging open but no hint of satisfaction apparent.

"Open your mouth," Emiel said.

Simon closed his eyes again and opened his mouth, teeth chattering, and he passed his lips over the muzzle up about an inch.

Emiel cocked the gun and both Rainy and Simon jumped and shrieked.

"How does it feel watching someone about to be killed?" Emiel asked, his voice lifeless, hopeless. "Now imagine that someone is the love of your life."

His ensuing silence compelled Simon to open his eyes.

"But you can't," Emiel said.

Then he pulled the gun from Simon's mouth and Emiel put the gun to his own temple and shot himself.

The scientists, the pilot, and Rainy and Simon were rescued and taken to Washington, D.C., for a debriefing and to give testimonies as to what had happened on Bouvet.

The story blew up on the news throughout the world, though all six refused interviews—at least for a while. The scientists and the pilot would in a few years collaborate on a memoir that was published and was a bestseller. The book would be optioned for film production but the producers wanted Rainy's and Simon's experiences included. They always refused and the film was never made.

They all received their money and after being recused by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the equivalent agencies in Norway, Australia, and Chile, Emiel's footage and the scientists' samples and notes were released to each country's geological survey but by that time, Rainy and the other three scientists had ceased to be involved in academia or scientific research or to even have amateur interests in geology, busy as they were with publicizing their experiences.

Bouvet and the ocean for 10 miles all around had been engulfed by lava later in the day after the rescue and two days later, Bouvet broke into four pieces and sank into the ocean.

Rainy and Simon, six months after returning to Denver, divorced on amicable terms. Rainy used her money to travel, never staying more than a year in one place.

Simon lived with his parents for a few months, then took a job with the electric-utility provider of Boston as a grid supervisor.

Emiel's namesake business was closed for good.

A year after the events on Bouvet, Emiel was released from the hospital in Orlando he'd been admitted to after being airlifted from Bouvet to Cape Town, then to Paris, then to Orlando.

The Department of Justice and the attorney generals of Norway, Chile, and Australia attempted to bring criminal charges against him, to seek death or at least life in prison, but a dozen brain scans and psychological evaluations resulted in his classification as unfit to stand trial.

Simon retained a lawyer and got Emiel released into his private care. He bought Emiel a house in Weymouth near Whitman's Pond and hired a live-in nurse.

From that year onward, Simon visited Emiel every weekend, taking him on drives along the coast and up through New England, going fishing, guiding Emiel's wheelchair along the boardwalks on the coast and the footpaths beside lakes and rivers.

