by Jim Shepard
Her cousins had also died then, Cato told me. If somebody even just mentioned the year 2015, her aunt still went to pieces. She didn’t let go of my hands, so I went on, and told her that, being an outsider as a little boy, I’d noticed something was screwed up with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. I probably wasn’t as baffled by it as I sounded, but it was still more than I’d ever told anyone else.
She’d grown up right off the Boompjes; I’d been way out in Pernis, looking at the Caltex refinery through the haze. The little fishing village was still there then, huddled in the center of the petrochemical sprawl. My sister loved the lights of the complex at night and the fires that went hundreds of feet into the air like solar flares when the waste gases burned off. Kids from other neighborhoods never failed to notice the smell on our skin. The light was that golden sodium vapor light, and my father liked to say it was always Christmas in Pernis. At night I was able to read with my bedroom lamp off. While we got ready for school in the mornings, the dredging platforms with their twin pillars would disappear up into the fog like Gothic cathedrals.
A week after I told her all that, I introduced Cato to Kees. “I’ve never seen him like this,” he told her. We were both on track for one of the technology universities, maybe Eindhoven, and he hadn’t failed Dutch. “Well, I’m a pretty amazing woman,” she explained to him.
Kees and I both went on to study physical geography and got into the water sector. Cato became the media liaison for the program director for Rotterdam Climate Proof. We got married after our third International Knowledge for Climate Research conference. Kees asked us recently which anniversary we had coming up, and I said eleventh and Cato said it was the one hundredth.
It didn’t take a crystal ball to realize we were in a growth industry. Gravity and thermal measurements by GRACE satellites had already flagged the partial shutdown of the Atlantic circulation system. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, saddled with having to release one glum piece of news after another, had just that year reported that the Pyrenees, Africa, and the Rockies were all glacier-free. The Americans had just confirmed the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Once-in-a-century floods in England were now occurring every two years. Bangladesh was almost entirely a bay and that whole area a war zone because of the displacement issues.
It’s the catastrophe for which the Dutch have been planning for fifty years. Or, really, for as long as we’ve existed. We had cooperative water management before we had a state. The one created the other; either we pulled together as a collective or got swept away as individuals. The real old-timers had a saying for when things fucked up: “Well, the Netherlands lives with water.” What they meant was that their land flooded twice a day.
Bishop Prudentius of Troyes wrote in his annals that in the ninth century the whole of the country was devoured by the sea; all the settlements disappeared, and the water was higher than the dunes. In the Saint Felix Flood, North Beveland was completely swept away. In the All Saints’ Flood, the entire coast was inundated between Flanders and Germany. In 1717 a dike collapse killed fourteen thousand on Christmas night.
“You like going on like this, don’t you?” Cato sometimes asks.
“I like the way it focuses your attention,” I told her once.
“Do you like the way it scares our son?” she demanded in return.
“It doesn’t scare me,” Henk told us.
“It does scare you,” she told him. “And your father doesn’t seem to register that.”
For the last few years, when I’ve announced that the sky is falling she’s answered that our son doesn’t need to hear it. And that I always bring it up when there’s something else that should be discussed. I always concede her point, but that doesn’t get me off the hook. “For instance, I’m still waiting to hear how your mother’s making out,” she complains during a dinner when we can’t tear Henk’s attention away from the Feyenoord celebrations. If its team wins the Cup, the whole town gets drunk. If it loses, the whole town gets drunk.
My mother’s now at the point that no one can deny is dementia. She’s still in the little house on Polluxstraat, even though the Pernis she knew seems to have evaporated around her. Cato finds it unconscionable that I’ve allowed her to stay there on her own, without help. “Let me guess,” she says whenever she brings it up. “You don’t want to talk about it.”
She doesn’t know the half of it. The day after my father’s funeral, my mother brought me into their bedroom and showed me the paperwork on what she called their Rainy Day Account, a staggering amount. Where had they gotten so much? “Your father,” she told me unhelpfully. When I went home that night and Cato asked what was new, I told her about my mother’s regime of short walks.
At each stage in the transfer of assets, financial advisors or bank officers have asked if my wife’s name would be on the account as well. She still has no idea it exists. It means that I now have a secret net worth more than triple my family’s. What am I up to? Your guess is as good as mine.
“Have you talked to anyone about the live-in position?” Cato now asks. I’d raised the idea with my mother, who’d started shouting that she never should have told me about the money. Since then I’d been less bullish about bringing Cato and Henk around to see her.
I tell her things are progressing just as we’d hope.
“Just as we’d hope?” she repeats.
“That’s it in a nutshell,” I tell her, a little playfully, but her expression makes it clear she’s waiting for a real explanation.
“Don’t you have homework?” I ask Henk, and he and his mother exchange a look. I’ve always believed that I’m a master at hiding my feelings, but I seem to be alone in that regard.
Cato’s been through this before in various iterations. When my mother was first diagnosed, I hashed through the whole thing with Kees, who’d been in my office when the call came in. And then later that night I told Cato there’d been no change, so as not to have to trudge through the whole story again. But the doctor had called the next day, when I was out, to see how I was taking the news, and she got it all from him.
Henk looks at me like he’s using my face to attempt some long division.
Cato eats without saying anything until she finally loses her temper with the cutlery. “I told you before that if you don’t want to do this, I can,” she says.
“There’s nothing that needs doing,” I tell her.
“There’s plenty that needs doing,” she says. She pulls the remote from Henk and switches off the news. “Look at him,” she complains to Henk. “He’s always got his eyes somewhere else. Does he even know that he shakes his head when he listens?”
Pneumatic hammers pick up where they left off outside our window. There’s always construction somewhere. Why not rip up the streets? The Germans did such a good job of it in 1940 that it’s as if we’ve been competing with them ever since. Rotterdam: a deep hole in the pavement with a sign telling you to approach at your own risk. Our whole lives, walking through the city has meant muddy shoes.
As we’re undressing that night she asks how I’d rate my recent performance as a husband.
I don’t know; maybe not so good, not so bad, I tell her.
She answers that if I were a minister, I’d resign.
“What area are we talking about here,” I wonder aloud, “in terms of performance?”
“Go to sleep,” she tells me, and turns off the lamp.
If climate change is a hammer to the Dutch, the head’s coming down more or less where we live. Rotterdam sits astride a plain that absorbs the Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine outflows, and what we’re facing is a troika of rising sea level, peak river discharges, and extreme weather events. We’ve got the jewel of our water defenses—the staggeringly massive water barriers at Maeslant and Dordrecht, and the rest of the Delta Works—ready to shut off the North Sea during the next cataclysmic storm, but what are we to do when that coincides with the peak river discharges? Sea levels are leaping u
p, our ground is subsiding, it’s raining harder and more often, and our program of managed flooding—Make Room for the Rivers—was overwhelmed long ago. The dunes and dikes at eleven locations from Ter Heijde to Westkapelle no longer meet what we decided would be the minimum safety standards. Temporary emergency measures are starting to be known to the public as Hans Brinkers.
And this winter’s been a festival of bad news. Kees’s team has measured increased snowmelt in the Alps to go along with prolonged rainfall across Northern Europe and steadily increasing windspeeds during gales, all of which lead to increasingly ominous winter flows, especially in the Rhine. He and I—known around the office as the Pessimists—forecasted this winter’s discharge at eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. It’s now up to twenty-one. What are those of us in charge of dealing with that supposed to do? A megastorm at this point would swamp the barriers from both sides and inundate Rotterdam and its surroundings—three million people—within twenty-four hours.
Which is quite the challenge for someone in media relations. “Remember, the Netherlands will always be here,” Cato likes to say when signing off with one of the news agencies. “Though probably under three meters of water,” she’ll add after she hangs up.
Before this most recent emergency, my area of expertise had to do with the strength and loading of the Water Defense structures, especially in terms of the Scheldt estuary. We’d been integrating forecasting and security software for high-risk areas and trying to get Arcadis to understand that it needed to share almost everything with IBM and vice versa. I’d even been lent out to work on the Venice, London, and Saint Petersburg surge barriers. But now all of us were back home and thrown into the Weak Links Project, an overeducated fire brigade formed to address new vulnerabilities the minute they emerged.
Our faces are turned helplessly to the Alps. There’s been a series of cloudbursts on the eastern slopes: thirty-five centimeters of rain in the last two weeks. The Germans have long since raised their river dikes to funnel the water right past them and into the Netherlands. Some of that water will be taken up in the soil, some in lakes and ponds and catchment basins, and some in polders and farmland that we’ve set aside for flooding emergencies. Some in water plazas and water gardens and specially designed underground parking garages and reservoirs. The rest will keep moving downriver to Rotterdam and the closed surge barriers.
“Well, ‘Change is the soul of Rotterdam,’ ” Kees joked when we first looked at the numbers on the meteorological disaster ahead. We were given private notification that there would be vertical evacuation if the warning time for an untenable situation was under two hours, and horizontal evacuation if it was over two.
“What am I supposed to do,” Cato demanded to know when I told her, “tell the helicopter that we have to pop over to Henk’s school?” He now has an agreed-upon code; when it appears on his iFuze, he’s to leave school immediately and head to her office.
But in the meantime we operate as though it won’t come to that. We think we’ll come up with something, as we always have. Where would New Orleans or the Mekong Delta be without Dutch hydraulics and Dutch water management? And where would the U.S. and Europe be if we hadn’t led them out of the financial panic and depression, just by being ourselves? EU dominoes from Iceland to Ireland to Italy came down around our ears but there we sat, having been protected by our own Dutchness. What was the joke about us, after all? That we didn’t go to the banks to take money out; we went to put money in. Who was going to be the first, as economy after economy capsized, to pony up the political courage to nationalize their banks and work cooperatively? Well, who took the public good more seriously than the Dutch? Who was more in love with rules? Who tells anyone who’ll listen that we’re providing the rest of the world with a glimpse of what the future will be?
After a third straight sleepless night—“Oh, who gets any sleep in the water sector?” Kees answered irritably the morning I complained about it—I leave the office early and ride a water taxi to Pernis. In Nieuwe Maas the shipping is so thick that it’s like kayaking through canyons, and the taxi captain charges extra for what he calls a piloting fee. We tip and tumble on the backswells while four tugs nudge a supertanker sideways into its berth like puppies snuffling at the base of a cliff. The tanker’s hull is so high that we can’t see any superstructure above it.
I hike from the dock to Polluxstraat, the traffic on the A4 above rolling like surf. “Look who’s here,” my mother says, instead of hello, and goes about her tea-making as though I dropped in unannounced every afternoon. We sit in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Before she settles in, she reverses the pillow embroidered “Good Night” so that it now reads “Good Morning.”
“How’s Henk?” she asks, and I tell her he’s got some kind of chest thing. “As long as he’s healthy,” she replies. I don’t see any reason to quibble.
The bottom shelves of her refrigerator are puddled with liquid from deliquescing vegetables and something spilled. The bristles of her bottle scraper on the counter are coated with dried mayonnaise. The front of her nightgown is an archipelago of stains.
“How’s Cato?” she asks.
“Cato wants to know if we’re going to get you some help,” I tell her.
“I just talked with her,” my mother says irritably. “She didn’t say anything like that.”
“You talked with her? What’d you talk about?” I ask. But she waves me off. “Did you talk to her or not?”
“That girl from up north you brought here to meet me, I couldn’t even understand her,” she tells me. She talks about regional differences as though her country’s the size of China.
“We thought she seemed very efficient,” I reply. “What else did Cato talk with you about?”
But she’s already shifted her interest to the window. Years ago she had a traffic mirror mounted outside on the frame to let her spy on the street unobserved. She uses a finger to widen the gap in the lace curtains.
What else should she do all day long? She never goes out. The street’s her revival house, always showing the same movie.
The holes in her winter stockings are patched with a carnival array of colored thread. We always lived by the maxim that things last longer mended than new. My whole life, I heard that with thrift and hard work I could build a mansion. My father had a typewritten note tacked to the wall in his office at home: Let those with abundance remember that they are surrounded by thorns.
“Who said that?” Cato asked when we were going through his belongings.
“Calvin,” I told her.
“Well, you would know,” she said.
He hadn’t been so much a conservative as a man whose life philosophy had boiled down to the principle of no nonsense. I’d noticed even as a tiny boy that whenever he liked a business associate, or anyone else, that’s what he said about them.
My mother’s got her nose to the glass at this point. “You think you’re the only one with secrets,” she remarks.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, but she acts as though she’s not going to dignify that with a response. Follow-up questions don’t get anywhere, either. I sit with her a while longer. We watch a Chinese game show. I soak her bread in milk, walk her to the toilet, and tell her we have to at least think about moving her bed downstairs somewhere. The steps to her second floor are vertiginous even by Dutch standards, and the risers accommodate less than half your foot. She makes an effort to follow what I’m saying, puzzled that she needs to puzzle something out. But then her expression dissipates and she complains she spent half the night looking for the coffee grinder.
“Why were you looking for the coffee grinder?” I ask, a question I have to repeat. Then I stop, for fear of frightening her.
Henk’s class is viewing a presentation at the Climate campus—“Water: Precious Resource and Deadly Companion”—so we have the dinner table to ourselves. Since Cato’s day was even longer than mine, I prepared the meal, two cans of pea soup with pigs
’ knuckles and some Belgian beer, but she’s too tired to complain. She’s dealing with both the Americans, who are always hectoring for clarification on the changing risk factors for our projects in Miami and New Orleans, and the Germans, who’ve publicly dug in their heels on the issue of accepting any spillover from the Rhine in order to take some of the pressure off the situation downstream.
It’s the usual debate, as far as the latter argument’s concerned. We take the high road—it’s only through cooperation that we can face such monumental challenges, etc.—while other countries scoff at our aspirations toward ever more comprehensive safety measures. The German foreign minister last year accused us on a simulcast of acting like old women.
“Maybe he’s right,” Cato says wearily. “Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live in a country where you don’t need a license to build a fence around your garden.”
Exasperated, we indulge in a little Dutch bashing. No one complains about themselves as well as the Dutch. Cato asks if I remember that story about the manufacturers having to certify that each of the chocolate letters handed out by Santa Claus contained an equal amount of chocolate. I remind her about the number-one download of the year turning out to have been of fireworks sound effects, for those New Year’s revelers who found real fireworks too worrisome.
After we stop, she looks at me, her mouth a little slack. “Why does this sort of thing make us horny?” she wonders.
“Maybe it’s the pea soup,” I tell her in the shower. She’s examining little crescents of fingernail marks where she held me when she came. Then she turns off the water and we wrap ourselves in the bedsheet-sized towel she had made in Surinam. Cocooned on the floor in the tiny, steamy bathroom we discuss Kees’s love life. He now shops at a singles’ supermarket, the kind where you use a blue basket if you’re taken and a yellow if you’re available. When I asked how his latest fling was working out, he said, “Well, I’m back to the yellow basket.”
