The Ten Thousand Things

## Chapter 1: Reykjavik

The plane came in low over water that was the color of wet slate, and the woman in 14C had been holding a paper cup of cold coffee for forty minutes without drinking it. Her thumb moved on the rim in a slow circle. She did not know she was doing it. I watched the circle for a while and then I watched the water and then the landing gear dropped and the cabin filled with the sound of a plane rearranging itself — hydraulics, the grind of metal repositioning — and we landed.

Keflavík airport was small and bright and smelled of cleaning solution and geothermal heating — a faint sulfur note underneath everything, like the building's plumbing remembered what it was connected to. I walked through the corridor with my bag over one shoulder. The bag was a gray duffel I had bought in Arlington three years ago when I left the facility with two boxes of clothes and a check for back pay that the restructuring committee had calculated using a formula nobody in the room was fully confident about. The duffel had outlasted everything else from that period. It had a broken zipper on the side pocket that I had never fixed because the pocket still held things if you did not overfill it. I did not overfill it.

Customs was two booths. The officer was a woman in her thirties with short dark hair and a mole below her left ear. She had stamped nine hundred passports today and would stamp nine hundred more and her face knew it. She looked at my passport. She looked at me. The passport photo was four years old and showed a version of my face that was thinner and held differently — not the features but something behind them, a tension in the jaw that I had carried for so long I had mistaken it for the shape of my face. She stamped it and handed it back and I walked through.

The taxi line was six people long. I stood in it. The light outside the terminal was coming from the wrong angle — not wrong, but lateral, arriving almost horizontally through the glass doors, and I had to adjust to it the way you adjust to a room where someone has moved the furniture. It was nine in the evening and the sun was where a mid-afternoon sun would be in New York, sitting low and steady over a landscape that was not interested in the sun's opinion of it.

The driver was a man named Kristján, or so the laminated card on the dash said. He drove without talking. The road from Keflavík to Reykjavik ran through a lava field — black basalt covered in pale green moss that had spread across the formations in slow patient sheets, not yet covering everything, not yet done. The rock underneath was sharp where it showed through. The moss was the color of nothing I had a good comparison for — not quite sage, not quite celadon, something between those that belonged to this latitude and nowhere else. Three years ago I would have spent the drive cataloging every visual detail with a kind of compulsive thoroughness, each face a document, each room a composition, the signal arriving with its full context attached and no off switch. The signal had not gotten quieter. I had gotten better at not standing in front of it.