Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  Chuck said, “Hans, you remember Mike.”

  Abelsky remarked, “Would you believe this mess? Look at it.”

  A toilet flushed, and moments later the flusher, a man in his thirties, came in. He had splashed water on his face, but there were traces of soil around his ears and in his hair, which was of the pale, almost colorless, Russian variety. His blue shirt was filthy.

  “You got NutraSweet?” Abelsky repeated.

  The man said nothing.

  Abelsky took a mouthful of coffee then spat it back into the cup. “Without NutraSweet, it tastes like shit,” he said. He put the coffee down on the leather desktop. “That OK there? I don’t wanna make a ring.”

  The man wiped a hand across his mouth.

  Abelsky said fussily, “You’re the director here. You should respect your office, make an example.”

  The baseball bat was resting against a wall. It was stained with dirt.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. I walked out and walked down the street for all of fifty yards, at which point I realized I didn’t have the strength to continue.

  Thus, on that cool and beautiful August day, I crossed the street and sat down in the green light of a phantasmal little park at the junction of Metropolitan and Orient. The shadows in this little park were just like the shadows I’d been seeing all day, otherworldly in their clearness. A very old, very small man, sitting like a gnome in the green light, regarded me from a nearby bench. A furious bird screeched in the trees.

  I slapped at my ankle. A red smudge took the place of a mosquito.

  The furious bird screeched again. The sound came from a different place. Maybe there were two birds, I thought stupidly, two birds answering each other with these screeches.

  Now the meaning of what I’d seen—Chuck and Abelsky had terrorized some unfortunate, smashed up his office, shoved his face in the dirt of a flowerpot, threatened him with worse for all I knew—arrived as a pure nauseant. I almost threw up then and there, at the feet of the gnome. I dropped my head between my knees, sucking in air. It took an effort of will to get up and go onward to a subway stop. Violence produces reactions of this kind, apparently.

  Back at the hotel, I took a shower, packed a bag, and got into a car to LaGuardia. I woke up in a hotel room in Scottsdale, Arizona.

  My work, that morning, went passably—I was a panelist in a conference discussion with the could-mean-anything title “Oil Consumption: The Shifting Paradigm”—and, better still, finished well ahead of schedule. But when three hedge-fund guys from Milwaukee discovered I had a few hours to kill before going home, they insisted to my stupefaction that we all drive out to a nearby casino and hit the tables and maybe even get a little fucked up.

  “Great idea,” I said, and somebody slapped me on the back.

  And so I went into a cactus-filled desert with three baldheaded buddies who each wore a complimentary conference baseball cap. On our way out we passed through downtown Phoenix. It was seemingly an uninhabited place given over to multilevel garages that, with their stacked lateral voids, almost duplicated the office blocks and their bands of tinted glass. The general vacancy was relieved by the slow and for some reason distinctly sinister movement of automobiles from street to street, as if these machines’ careful, orderly roaming was a charade whose purpose was to obscure the fact that the city had been forsaken; and all the while the radio ceaselessly reported crashes and emergencies in the streets around us. It was one of those occasions on which the disunion between one’s interior and external states reaches almost absolute proportions, and even as I smiled and nodded and knocked my can of Bud Light against another’s, I had fallen into the most horrible misery. I escaped into sleep.

  “Lunchtime,” a voice announced.

  We had pulled over onto dirt. Nearby, two white-haired Indian women tended a barbecue pit beneath an awning that raggedly extended from a breezeblock hut. (“What are these guys? Apaches? I bet you they’re Apaches,” the fellow next to me said.) One of my hosts, Schulz, presented me with a Diet Coke and two slices of bread filled with chunks of fatty meat. “They’re calling it mutton,” Schulz said.

  The eatery abutted a ridge. On the far side of the ridge lay a flat sea of dust and rock. In the sky above it, a single cavaliering cloud trailed a tattered blue cloak of rain. Highlands showed in the extreme distance. Closer by, black heaps of volcanic rock protruded from the reddish waste. A ubiquitous gray-blue scrub gave everything a pixelated finish, as if this land were a vast malfunctioning television. “The Wild West,” Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other compañeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers. It was undoubtedly a moment of reckoning, a rare and altogether golden opportunity for a Milwaukeean or Hollander of conscience to consider certain awesome drifts of history and geology and philosophy, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel lessened by the immensity of the undertaking and by the poverty of the associations one brought to bear on the instant, which in my case included recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy who often rode among buttes and drew a pistol faster than his own shadow. It briefly entranced me, that remembered seminal image, on the back cover of all the Lucky Luke books, of the yellow-shirted, white-hatted cowboy plugging a hole in the belly of his dark counterpart. To gun down one’s shadow…The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn’t an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood, offered me sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie’s holy space, was I to find it?

  We went back to the air-conditioned car, and soon afterward the casino appeared ahead of us in clear light. It assumed the form, as we drew nearer, of a gigantic adobelike structure vaguely evocative of the great edifices of native civilizations. The interior of this spurious pueblo, accessible only via a series of ramps helpful to gamblers in wheelchairs, was given over to a trashy iconography of ice cream, coronets, and slot machine personalities: the Frog Prince, Austin Powers, Wild Thing, Evel Knievel, Sphinx, and others, entities whose baroque electronic vigor served only to accentuate the limpness and solitude of the figures expressionlessly tending to them. While each of my friends ventured forth with hundreds of dollars in chips, I accepted a drink from a waitress and sat at a table in that specifically bloodless clamor of piped music and quarters jingling down chutes and bleeping and burping machines of chance. For the sake of appearances I summoned the will to approach a roulette table.

  I stood with the onlookers and followed the play for a few spins of the wheel. I began wishing luck on a friendly-looking mustachioed man in a Hawaiian shirt. He was losing; and whom should I recognize in this man’s expression but Jeroen, who wore exactly the same hopeful, slightly perspiring face as he slid chips onto the baize of the roulette table and watched the leaping ball fasten to a niche in the wheel: there it coasted, in giddy circles, until the number slowed into terminal focus. Likewise here, where the croupier, a tiny bow-tied woman, coolly raked the scattered hopes of the gamblers into a single horrible hillock. Jeroen, in the days when he was in the picture, would drop by on St. Nicholas Day with a cash gift for me, gaily colored guilder bills that no longer circulate, and after the holiday dinner he would always ask me, a young teenager, to accompany him to the casino at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He made no bones about his need, as he put it, to play; nor did he hide his desperation for company of any sort. So I would head out with him in his cigarette-strewn Peugeot 504, where he would offer up anecdotes about his early childhood in Java. Jeroen seemed always to lose. Pech, he’d say as we stepped out into Scheveningen’s salty air hundreds of guilders poorer—rotten luck. He’d light a Marlboro and give a rich, glamorous cough. In those da
ys Jeroen had sought out my company. Now I sought out his.

  I think it’s customary, in the kind of narrative to which this segment of my life appears to lend itself, to invoke the proverb of rock bottom—the profundity of woe, the depth of shit, from which the sufferer can go nowhere but to higher, more sweetly scented places. In terms of objective calamities, of course, The Adversity of Hans van den Broek, as such a tale might be called, amounts to not very much. But it’s also true that the casino floor felt to me like an ocean bottom. In my blackness I wasn’t to know that I lay only, and exactly, one fathom below the surface, one fathom, I’ve heard it said, being the reach of a pair of outstretched arms.

  Then and there, among the blushing slots, I underwent a swerve in orientation—as though I’d been affected by the abrupt consensus of movement that redirects flocking birds. I decided to move back to London.

  At our very first meeting, Juliet Schwarz turned to Rachel and asked if she loved me and, if yes, what it was about me that she loved. Objection! I felt like shouting to this rotten, risky, terrifying interrogation.

  “‘Love,’” Rachel desperately replied, “is such an omnibus word.”

  Here was an irony of our continental separation (undertaken, remember, in the hope of clarification): it had made things less clear than ever. By and large, we separators succeeded only in separating our feelings from any meaning we could give them. That was my experience, if you want to talk about experience. I had no way of knowing if what I felt, brooding in New York City, was love’s abstract or love’s miserable leftover. The idea of love was itself separated from meaning. Love? Rachel had gotten it right. Love was an omnibus thronged by a rabble.

  And yet we again climbed aboard, she and I.

  What happened—what set us on the road to Dr. Schwarz and, by means of said bus, the place we are now—was that she and Jake suddenly moved out of Martin Casey’s Farringdon loft, where they’d lived only four months.

  This was November 2004. I’d been back in England for exactly a year—had, as a matter of fact, just rented a place in the Angel so as to be within strolling distance of my son.

  “You’ve left him?” I said.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” Rachel said.

  A few days later, she called me again. Martin would not be joining her and Jake on their Christmas trip to India; accordingly there was a vacancy, accordingly Rachel wondered if I could fill in. There was no question of canceling the holiday. Jake had already packed his bag and notified Father Christmas of his Indian whereabouts by postcard to the North Pole. “I can’t disappoint him,” Rachel said.

  I bought a ticket within the hour.

  We flew to Colombo and thence, as travelers used to say, to the Keralan city of Trivandrum, which on a map can be found almost at the very tip of India. I was worried about Jake catching a strange Indian disease; however, once we were established in a simple family hotel colonized by darting caramel lizards and surrounded by coconut trees filled, incongruously to my mind, with crows, I was quite content. This was at a seaside place. There was a lot to look at. Women wrapped in bright lengths of cloth walked up and down the beach balancing bunched red bananas on their heads and offering coconuts and mangoes and papayas. Tug-of-war teams of fishermen tugged fishing nets onto the beach. Tourists from northern parts of India ambled along the margin of the sea. Foreigners lounged on sunbeds, magnanimously ignoring the sand-colored dogs dozing beneath them. Lifeguards, tiny slender men in blue shirts and blue shorts, attentively inspected the Arabian Sea and from time to time blew on whistles and waved swimmers away from dangerous waters; and indeed on one occasion an Italian yoga instructor, a long-limbed male, became stuck in a web of currents and had to be rescued by a lifeguard who skimmed over the water like an insect flying to the rescue of a spider.

  And there was Rachel to look at—in particular, Rachel’s back, which I’d forgotten was spotted with unusually large, lovely freckles, as if she were part Dalmation. Most afternoons we relocated by motor rickshaw to the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, and as we zipped through the coconut groves that covered the entire coastal region and gave one the false impression of a jungle, I’d peek over at my wife, think about offering a rupee for her thoughts, and think again. Very often during those rickshaw rides her eyes would be closed. She slept indiscriminately: on the beach, by the pool, in her room. It seemed as if she were trying to sleep her way through the holiday—even through Christmas morning, with Jake tearing open the gifts Father Christmas had left for him on my balcony. On somebody’s recommendation, I went with my son to a nearby fishing village for a Church of India Christmas service. The church, by far the proudest building in the locality, sat on the top of a hill. It had a tall creamy tower and a cavelike interior painted in pinks and blues. Other than the floor, there was nowhere to sit. From time to time a crow flapped in to join the congregation, perched on a ceiling beam, and flapped out again. All proceedings were spoken in Malayalam, a chattering language filled with buzzing and drilling sounds—until, at the conclusion of the service, the children’s choir suddenly struck up a rendition of “Jingle Bells” and the words “snow” and “sleigh” flew up into the heat.

  I wanted to tell Rachel all about it; but when we returned, at noon, she was still in bed.

  Occasionally she was communicative. The poverty troubled her, she said—as did her perception that I, by contrast, was not at all troubled. When I haggled, pro forma, with a lungi salesman, she broke in, “Oh, for God’s sake, just pay him what he’s asking for.” It was I who had to deal with the fruit hawkers, because Rachel could not bear to look into their mouths, abounding in rotted black teeth, or their eyes, abounding in unthinkable need. She half apologized one evening. “I’m sorry. I just find it oppressive being an economy. The nanny”—we’d hired an English-speaking Assamese woman to babysit for Jake for a few hours every morning—“the drivers, the waiters, the deck chair boys, all these people selling stuff on the beach…I mean, every stupid spending decision we make has a huge impact on their lives.” We were sharing a nightcap bottle of Kingfisher on the balcony of her hotel room. Jake was asleep in my room. Before us, at eye level, were palm fronds. Between the fronds, on the sky-black sea, fishing boats lined up dozens of lights. Rachel swallowed directly from the huge bottle. “You don’t seem at all bothered,” she said. “You’re just happy splashing in the water.”

  That much was true. I was very taken by the waves, which had a sweet, sickening taste and were ideal for bodysurfing, an activity I’d never even known existed: you waited in waist-deep water for the large benign breaker that might carry you, coasting on your torso, all the way to frothing shallows. It’s fair to say that I became a little obsessed. At lunch, invariably taken on the second floor of a restaurant overlooking the water, I’d interrupt Rachel’s reading in order to say, Look, that’s a great wave there.

  Rachel said, funnily, “You’re becoming something of a wave bore, did you know that?”

  One afternoon I approached the sea and saw that seaweed was washing ashore, and also that the sand was littered with triangles of purple matter which I took a moment to identify as fish. I walked on, into the sea. All kinds of things were floating in the water—coconut shells, a comb, a rotting flip-flop. A storm had done this. Seeing a white plastic bag ahead of me, I resolved to pick it up and throw it out onto the beach. It was not a plastic bag. It was a dog—a sizable puppy, turning to pulp, drifting with its four legs dangling plumb. I withdrew to the land.

  The next day, women wearing glum municipal jackets over their saris swept up the sand and disposed of the storm trash. The sea cleared up. When I reentered the water in the afternoon, Rachel, as tiny and pale and skinny as I’ve seen her, came with me. “All right,” she said, frowning and smiling at once, “show me how it’s done.”

  “There’s nothing to it,” I said. Along came a slightly menacing wave, perfect for surfing. “Here we go,” I said. “You just push…”

  I raised my arms, put my h
ead down, and caught the wave. I surfaced twenty yards away, exhilarated.

  Rachel hadn’t moved. Rejoining her, I said, “You’ll catch the next one.”

  “I think I’ll swim for a while,” she said, and she floated away from me on her back and closed her eyes. She slept even in the ocean.

  On the first day of 2005, I set off with the boy to the mountains. The driver of our mock Jeep took us through rice fields and thereafter, climbing up, up, up, successively through shadowy forests of rubber trees, and tea farms, and spice gardens. Jake sat between me and the driver, thrilled and talkative at first but eventually falling into silence and car sickness. The journey was slow, bumpy. It was evening by the time we’d checked into an old colonial hunting lodge.

  That night, as my son slept among his new toys—these toys peopled his somnolent mutterings, as did dinosaurs and monkeys—I sat on the veranda and thought about his mother. “No messages,” the hotel manager had volunteered before our departure earlier in the day. “Messages?” I said, puzzled. Laughing, he replied, “Your wife is always asking if I have received a message for her.” “Have we?” “Not yet,” the manager said. “But if it comes, I will let you know immediately.”

  In this way I received confirmation of my suspicion, which was that Martin had jilted Rachel.

  I’d met him only once, on a damnably sunny day six months earlier. The encounter was a trap, because—and this had been my only sticking point in our parental cooperation—I’d refused to have any contact with him. Without prior consultation (Rachel said, “You’d only have got yourself into a tizzy”), I found myself attending a barbecue held in the back garden of Grandma and Grandpa Bolton. While I skulked around, desperately prolonging my interactions with food and drink and pressing Charles Bolton for his views on the new rugby season, my rival made himself at home at the grill, making only the most modest, self-effacing, family-friendly fare. Jake appointed himself his sidekick and, wearing an apron that came down to his feet, waited for the word to turn a sausage. The gift I’d brought—one of the most prestigiously obscure, hard-to-find members of the Thomas the Tank Engine clan—lay unattended on the patio. I was conscious for the first time of a cuckold’s prickling pair of horns.