ABSTRACT
In the afterlife of illness (for this is its long forward-trajectory, refrained in the minor key of prognosis) he began dreaming of Iceland. He had no right to these dreams, no claim upon their imagery, as his soft-pedaled connection to those far Northern Seas was limited to the usual cluster (a summer in Dublin; a year in Brighton; a handful of visits to the other Nordics). But even so, he felt somehow that he knew the geysers and rocky crags, the lava fields long ago covered in bright green. He had a sense, before he ever knew it had been built, of the enormously strange Hallgrímskirkja, a cathedral-monument to the terrible beauty of magma and heat whose clean, sparse sanctuary mapped an interiority he would recognize, when he finally sat tired and alone breathing its air, as the heart of sterility. Sterility—that non-reproductive quality that promises a reprieve from contagion. In hospital, it is practiced in the rituals of gloves, potions, and gauze; everywhere else, it masks its own fragility with the overwhelming stench of alcohol, tickling the nose with fantasies of untouchable propinquity.
