Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  “You know the kind of guy I’m talking about?” she said.

  “I think I do,” I said.

  Somebody knocked on the door and declared that a party had gotten under way on the roof. So up we went. There was quite a gathering. People were setting up tables and chairs and candles and getting ready for the spectacle of nightfall. A man smoking a joint predicted that the city would go to hell. “I think you’re completely underestimating the situation,” he told me, even though I hadn’t voiced an estimate of any kind. “Basically we’re going back to a time before artificial light. Every nut out there is going to be acting under cover of darkness. You know what cover of darkness means? Do you have any idea at all?” This fellow, who had long gray hair but otherwise looked, I swear, exactly like the sexagenarian Frank Sinatra, had read a book about the history of artificial illumination and told me that throughout human time light had been associated with optimism and progress, and with good reason. Nightfall, in the days before street lighting, marked the emergence of an untoward alternative world, a world of horrors and delights whose existence revealed all too troublingly the correspondence between luminance and codes of human behavior, a world whose occupants, removed from the scrutiny afforded by lamps and fires, engaged in conduct the moral dimension of which was as imperceptible as they themselves were. Such, he said, would be the effect of the power outage. “It’s going to be a mess,” he predicted. “Turn off the lights, people turn into wolves.”

  He was a plausible guy, as far as rooftop buttonholers go. But in fact, as everybody knows, the blackout gave rise to an outbreak of civic responsibility. From the Bronx to Staten Island, citizens appointed themselves traffic cops, gave rides to strangers, housed and fed the stranded. It also transpired that the upheaval provoked a huge number of romantic encounters, a collective surge of passion not seen, I read somewhere, since the “we’re-all-going-to-die sex” in which, apparently, everybody had indulged in the second half of September two years previously—an analysis I found a little hard to accept, since it was my understanding that all sex, indeed all human activity, fell into this category. What was certainly true was that, once the sun had sunk and the strawberry clouds blazing over the bay had disappeared, a terrific dark came upon New York. The physical elements of the city, unlit save for a very few office blocks, acted as intensifiers of the night, raising and spreading an extreme, corporeal obscurity that was only minimally disturbed by the roaming, ever less numerous automobiles. There were just a few glimmerings in the low hills of New Jersey. The sky itself looked like an imperfectly electrified settlement.

  The roof party grew more and more raucous as the entire population of the building, it seemed, rose upward to laugh in the warm night. Jennifer the auctioneer’s boyfriend finally turned up, as did, with midnight approaching, the angel, his mother in tow—literally so, for she clung to a strap that formed part of her son’s outfit. He seemed in very good spirits and wore his black wings in honor, he said, of this special occasion. We exchanged a few words before I lost sight of him. There was more drink and talk. Someone croakily sang a song. Someone else explained that the boundary between the moon’s bright and dark portions was called the terminator. A hand grabbed my arm.

  It was the angel’s mother, in a state of hysteria. Gasping, she dragged me to the south perimeter of the roof, which was bordered by a ledge only four feet high. She was screaming and sobbing now. A crowd had gathered at the parapet, on which a few candles flickered. “The angel jumped,” somebody said. I held the angel’s mother in my arms and looked down into a zone where, in daylight, one might have seen the gardens of the houses on Twenty-second Street. Now there was nothing to be seen. The angel’s mother had caught her breath and was screaming. I shouted out, “Did anybody see him?” and a futile buzz went around. I instructed the angel’s mother to follow me, but she couldn’t walk, so I picked her up and piggybacked her indoors. She moaned and weakly punched my shoulders as I steadily marched down the candlelit marble staircase, our merged shadow abhorrently stretching and shrinking on the walls. In the lobby I asked, “Did anybody see the angel leave?” and Guillermo at the front desk shook his head. Mrs. Taspinar dropped to her feet and ran out screaming, Mehmet, Mehmet, and I hurriedly followed, catching up with her in front of El Quijote restaurant. She kept screaming, Mehmet, Mehmet. At exactly this moment I heard hooves. I turned toward two stamping horses. Lights came nearer and from their sources emanated a pair of cops who slowly dismounted and began asking questions, and then we heard a voice crying out, and Mrs. Taspinar stopped screaming, and the voice called out again, and she and the flashlights went in the direction of the voice, and there, in the play of the flashlights, was the angel, waving over the crenellated gable of the synagogue that adjoined the hotel. The cops looked up. One of them yelled, “Get down, sir! Get down right now!” The angel retreated, obediently it seemed, and his mother collapsed again, as behind me the horses strained and twitched in a condition of near-matterlessness. I went back into the hotel and Guillermo told me how to get onto the roof of the synagogue. I took his flashlight and ran up several floors and made my way onto the fire escape. Below was the blackbird body, in the cleft between the hotel and the steeply pitching roof of the temple.

  “Your mother’s looking for you,” I said.

  A cigarette ember brightened his mouth. “You should come down,” he said. He was lying on his back. “It’s very comfortable.”

  I lowered a leg and very slowly transferred my body onto the synagogue roof. Taking care to leave a good distance between me and the angel, I lay down on the warm, sloping tiles with my arms and legs spread out in an X.

  “Uh, Hans,” the angel said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Could you turn off that light?”

  I pressed the flashlight’s rubber button. I was looking upward. Everything blacked out except stars and a memory of stars.

  I was twelve. I was on a summer holiday with my mother and old friends of hers—Floris and Denise Wassenaar, a married couple. We traveled along the south coast of Italy. We drove from place to place, stayed in cheap hotels, and took in sights, an itinerary banged together, from my youthful perspective, with a heavy hammer of boredom. Then, over dinner one night, Floris announced he’d organized a spearfishing expedition. “Just for the men,” he said, ganging up with me. “The women will stay on land, where it’s safe.”

  We went out on a wooden motorboat—Floris and I and a local man with dense white body hair. The two men were armed with full-sized spearguns. I was given a smaller speargun requiring only boyish strength to pull back the rubber catapult that fired the spear. For hours the boat bumbled parallel to the shore. We passed two or three headlands and came to a stretch of the coast that was mountainous and truly wild, with no roads for many miles inland. We moored in the beryl of a small bay. There was a beach with white pebbles. A pine forest grew right down to the beach. This was where we would fish and spend the night.

  I had never snorkeled before. It was astounding to discover how a simple glass mask made clear and magnified a blue-green water world and its frightening inhabitants: when a ray glided toward me, I scrambled ashore, flippers and all. Snorkeling was hard. Gianni, the Italian, and pale and enormous Floris seemed to be able to hold their breath forever—you needed to, to find the big fish; the big fish lurked in shadows beneath rocks and had to be staked out—but with my small lungs I could only dive for a short while, and shallowly. It hurt my ears to go down deep. As the day wore on, however, a predatory boldness overtook me. A whippersnapper Neptune, I lorded it over the grassy, glistening inlet, sending my matte iron thunderbolt through startled groups of small silver and brown fishes. I grew fierce and began to hunt with intent. Stalking one particular fish, I followed the rocks out of the little bay. The fish twisted into a crevice, and I dived down after it. Then I became aware that the water had become cold and dark.

  I was swimming at the foot of a mountain. From thousands of feet in the air the mount
ain plunged directly into the water and sank into an endless dimness beneath me.

  Like a chump in a horror movie, I slowly turned around. Confronting me was the vast green gloom of the open sea.

  In a panic I bolted back to the cove.

  “Catch anything?” Floris asked. I shook my head shamefully. “No problem, jongen,” Floris said. “Gianni and I got lucky.”

  The killed fish was cooked over a campfire and seasoned with thyme growing wild in the pine forest. Afterward it was time to sleep. The men lay down under the pines. The most comfortable sleeping berth, in the boat, was reserved for me.

  What happened next, on the little wooden boat, was what came back to me on the synagogue roof—and what I once told Rachel about, with the result that she fell in love with me.

  She revealed this in the week after Jake was born. We were up in the middle of the night. Jake was having trouble falling asleep. I held him in my arms.

  “Do you want to know exactly when I fell in love with you?” Rachel said.

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted to know about the moment my wife fell in love with me.

  “In that hotel in Cornwall. The Something Inn.”

  “The Shipwrecker’s Arms,” I said. I could not forget the name and what it called before the imagination: treacherous lights on the land, the salvage of goods at the expense of the drowned.

  My wife, on the point of sleep, murmured, “Remember when you told me about being in that boat at night, when you were little? That’s when I fell in love with you. When you told me that story. At that exact moment.”

  A small anchor fixed the boat to the bed of the cove. I lay on my side and closed my eyes. The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really seen the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.

  I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

  The angel was gone. Discounting the moon, discounting the Milky Way, I was alone. My hands searched out the surface of the roof. Rachel, I said to myself. I cried out softly, Rachel!

  I did not see Mehmet Taspinar again. He left in the morning with his mother. His vacated room was cleaned up and rented out that very day to two rich girls freshly enrolled at NYU.

  In my last American August one thunderstorm followed another: I can still picture a suddenly green, almost undersea atmosphere, and hailstones hopping like dice on asphalt, and streams crisscrossing Chelsea, and huge photographical flashes visiting my apartment. It’s hard to believe, from my Englander’s perspective, in those subtropical weeks, when the humid air could be so blurred with reverberated light as to leave me with a mild case of color blindness. Everyone scurried in the shadowed fraction of the city. Few things were more wonderful than hopping into a cold summer cab.

  With all that rain and heat, Brooklyn almost returned to the wild. Pools welled up in basements; weeds overran planted things. Mosquitoes, fizzing and ravenous and bearing the West Nile virus, emptied the gardens and porches at twilight. A block over from the Ramkissoon home, on Marlborough Road, a tree knocked down by lightning flattened an old lady, killing her.

  And the grass on Chuck’s cricket field kept on growing. Chuck reported this fact to me a week or so after my return from England. “Mowing time,” he said.

  I wasn’t in the mood. Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for: I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy. I was obsessed, needless to say, with Rachel’s lover—Martin Casey, the chef. A definite article is appropriate because Martin Casey was sufficiently well known that Vinay, whom I rang in LA in the hope of some inside information, immediately said, “Sure, Martin Casey.”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  I’d Googled the name and found out that it belonged to the proprietor-chef of a gastropub, the Hungry Dog, in Clerkenwell, which was around the corner from Rachel’s office (and where, I surmised, they’d met). But I had not been able to get a clear picture of his standing.

  “The guy specializes in boiled potatoes and turnips and beetroots,” Vinay told me. “Old English vegetable ingredients. Very interesting.” He said pompously, “I’d classify him as a cook, not a chef.”

  No doubt, I thought, he was also an expert in reviving Anglo-Saxon erotic traditions. A sensualist who embodied a classic yet contemporary approach to carnal pleasure.

  I told Vinay the score.

  “Oh, fuck that,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Jesus. Martin Casey.”

  “Yep,” I said, feeling brave.

  Vinay, excited, said, “The dude’s short. He’s a fucking dwarf, Hans. You’re going to blow him out of the fucking water.”

  It was good of Vinay to say this, but Vinay, in spite of his own six feet, had a terrible record with women and was, I knew for a fact, a bonehead about anything he couldn’t eat or drink. Moreover there was nothing dwarfish about the Casey I’d uncovered online, a healthily tubby, attractive man in his forties with ruffled black hair and, in one photograph, a crew of fantastically good-and talented-looking sous-chefs who stood ranged behind him like merry pirates.

  I told Chuck I couldn’t make it. “I’ve got stuff to take care of,” I said.

  “OK,” he said with a surprising readiness.

  The following Sunday morning, at eleven o’clock, the house phone rang. It was you-know-who, calling up from the lobby.

  “I told you, I can’t do this,” I said. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “What time?”

  “Five,” I said reluctantly.

  “No problem. I’ve canceled the mowing—too wet. I’ve got a special program. You’ll be home by two, at the latest.”

  “Listen, Chuck, I don’t want to,” I said.

  “I’m parked outside,” he said. “Get down here.”

  This time Chuck drove. It was a fine day. The East River from the Brooklyn Bridge was a pure stroke of blue.

  I thought of my mother, whom I thought of whenever I crossed that bridge.

  Two weeks after Jake was born, she made her first and last visit to America. It had taken a number of carefully suggestive calls on my part to persuade her to make the trip, which loomed, as it did for many of her generation, as a voyage of terrific proportions. From the moment she arrived, she seemed downcast and preoccupied in a way that struck me as uncharacteristic, although I could not be sure, since I had not seen my mother in three years. To divert her, I proposed a bicycle ride; and once mounted on a rented bicycle she rode strongly enough, certainly for a woman of sixty-six. We rode to Brooklyn. We admired the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights (“If I lived here, this is where I would live,” said my mother), and after eating a bagel with smoked salmon (“So this is the famous bagel”) we set off on the return journey. It was a cloudy morning in late September. A slight wind was in our faces as we crept up the incline of Brooklyn Bridge. A third of the way across, we stopped. We stood next to each other, bicycles at our side, and somewhat formally observed the sights. A mist had thickened over New York Bay. I explained to my mother that the island directly ahead was Governors Island, and that beyond it, lost in silver murk, was Staten Island. My mother asked about the docking facilities that were just visible in the distance, and I identified New Jersey for her.

  My mother said, “And there you have the…” Annoyed, she searched for the name. “The Statue of Liberty,” I said. “We can go there, if you like.” My mother nodded. “Yes,” she said. “We must do that.” After a moment or two, she said, “Let’s go on,” and we climbed back on our bicycles and continued up the bridge. We went forward side by side. My mother pushed the p
edals steadily. She was tall and big and white-haired. Her skin wore a raw, slightly meaty flush. She was dressed in that combination of dark blue raincoat and college scarf and leather loafers that is, in my mind, the immemorial uniform of the bourgeoises of The Hague. Beyond the crest of the bridge we started the downhill glide into Manhattan. From the deck beneath us came the rhythmic chuckling of car tires. At the foot of the bridge, by City Hall, we entered the traffic; my mother followed me cautiously, a sweat of concentration gathering on her face. On Broadway she abruptly pulled over and stepped off her ride, and when I asked her if she was all right, she merely nodded her head and walked on, pushing her bicycle alongside her. This was exactly how she’d accompanied me when, as a fourteen-year-old, I delivered the NRC Handelsblad in the Boom-and Bloemenbuurt—the Tree and Flower District. On my first day on the job, she escorted me through the opening section of my round, going with me to Aronskelkweg, Arabislaan, and Margrietstraat until she was satisfied that I knew what I was doing. The challenge was to not get lost: I carried a piece of paper on which were sequentially set out the addresses of the drops, the sequence prescribing a route that, if transcribed onto a map, would resemble one of those densely marked puzzle mazes that penciling small children produce. Mama led the way. “I’m going back now,” she said after an hour. “Can you finish on your own?” I could, although it must be said that I was an unsystematic paperboy who generated many complaints. My overseer, a semiretiree who took great pleasure in handing over my weekly envelope of cash, was forced to take me aside and explain that these complaints—klachten—were no joke and that I had to take my work seriously. “Have you ever read the newspaper?” he asked me. I gave no answer. “You should. You’d learn a lot, and you’d understand why people get upset if they don’t receive it.” On Saturdays, when sports commitments prevented me from working, my mother substituted for me. She would cycle down to the newspaper depot, load up the heavy black saddlebag, and set off. I took this for granted, of course. My assumption was that it was the job of parents to do such things and that my mother was secretly overjoyed to fill in for me, even though this could require her to wander in the rain and cold for over two hours and certainly to humbly accept a lower station in life.