You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  Cato thinks this is hilarious.

  “How’d we get to be so lucky?” I ask her. We’re spooning and she does a minimal grind that allows me to grow inside her.

  “The other day someone from BBC1 asked my boss that same question about how he ended up where he did,” she says. She turns her cheek so I can kiss it.

  “What’d he say?” I ask when I’ve moved from her cheek to her neck. She’s not a big fan of her boss.

  She shrugs comfortably, her shoulder blades against my chest. I wrap my arms tighter so the fit is even more perfect. The gist of his answer, she tells me, was mostly by not asking too many questions.

  My mother always had memory problems and even before my sister died my father said that he didn’t blame her; she’d seen her own brothers swept away in the 1953 flood and had been a wreck for years afterward. On January 31, the night after her sixth birthday, a storm field that covered the entire North Sea swept down out of the northwest with winds that registered gale force 11 and combined with a spring tide to raise the sea six meters over NAP. The breakers overtopped the dikes in eighty-nine locations over a 170-kilometer stretch and hollowed them out on their land sides so that the surges that followed broke them. My mother remembered eating her soup alongside her two brothers listening to the wind increase in volume until her father went out to check on the barn and the draft from the opened door blew their board game off the table. Her mother’s Bible pages flapped in her hands like panicked birds. Water was seeping through the window casing, and her brother touched it and held out his finger for her to taste. She remembered his look when she realized that it was salty: not rain but spray from the sea.

  Her father returned and said they all had to leave, now. They held hands in a chain and he went first and she went second, and once the door was open, the wind staggered him and blew her off her feet. He managed to retrieve her but by then they couldn’t find the others in the dark and the rain. She was soaked in ice and the water was already up to her thighs and in the distance she could see breakers where the dike had been. They headed inland and found refuge inside a neighbor’s brick home and discovered that the back half of the house had already been torn away by the water. He led her up the stairs to the third floor and through a trapdoor onto the roof. Their neighbors were already there, and her mother, huddling against the wind and the cold. The house west of them imploded but its roof held together and was pushed upright in front of theirs, diverting the main force of the flood around them like a breakwater. She remembered holding her father’s hand so their bodies would be found in the same place. Her mother shrieked and pointed and she saw her brothers beside a woman with a baby on the roof of the house beyond them to the east. Each wave that broke against the front drenched her brothers and the woman with spray, and the woman kept turning her torso to shield the baby. And then the front of the house caved in and they all became bobbing heads in the water that were swept around the collapsing walls and away.

  She remembered the wind finally dying down by mid-morning, a heavy mist in the gray sky, and a fishing smack off to the north coasting between the rooftops and bringing people on board. She remembered a dog lowered on a rope, its paws flailing as it turned.

  After their rescue, she remembered a telegraph pole slanted over, its wires tugged by the current. She remembered the water smelling of gasoline and mud, treetops uncovered by the waves, and a clog between two steep roofs filled with floating branches and dead cattle. She remembered a vast plain of wreckage on the water and the smell of dead fish traveling on the wind. She remembered two older boys sitting beside her and examining the silt driven inside an unopened bottle of soda by the force of the waves. She remembered her mother’s animal sounds and the length of time it took to get to dry land, and her father’s chin on her mother’s bent back, his head bumping and wobbling whenever they crossed the wakes of other boats.

  We always knew this was coming. Years ago the city fathers thought it was our big opportunity. Rotterdam no longer would be just the ugly port, or Amsterdam without the attractions. The bad news was going to impact us first and foremost, so we put out the word that we were looking for people with the nerve to put into practice what was barely possible anywhere else. The result was Waterplan 4 Rotterdam, with brand-new approaches to storage and safety: water plazas, super cisterns, water balloons, green roofs, and even traffic tunnels that doubled as immense drainage systems would all siphon off danger. It roped in Kees and Cato and me and by the end of the first week had set Cato against us. Her mandate was to showcase Dutch ingenuity, so the last thing she needed was the Pessimists clamoring for more funding because nothing anyone had come up with yet was going to work. As far as she was concerned, our country was the testing ground for all high-profile adaptive measures and practically oriented knowledge and prototype projects that would attract worldwide attention and become a sluice-gate for high-tech exports. She spent her days in the international marketplace hawking the notion that we were safe here because we had the knowledge and were using it to find creative solutions. We were all assuming that a secure population was a collective social good for which the government and private sector alike would remain responsible, a notion, we soon realized, not universally embraced by other countries.

  Sea-facing barriers are inspected both by hand and by laser imaging. Smart dikes schedule their own maintenance based on sensors that detect seepage or changes in pressure and stability. Satellites track ocean currents and water-mass volumes. The areas most at risk have been divided into dike-ring compartments in an attempt to make the country a system of watertight doors. Our road and infrastructure networks now function independently of the ground layer. Nine entire neighborhoods have been made amphibious, built on hollow platforms that will rise with the water but remain anchored to submerged foundations. And besides the giant storm barriers, atop our dikes we’ve mounted titanium-braced walls that unfold from concrete channels, leviathan-like inflatable rubber dams, and special grasses grown on plastic-mat revetments to anchor the inner walls.

  “Is it all enough?” Henk will ask, whenever there’s a day of unremitting rain. “Oh, honey, it’s more than enough,” Cato will tell him, and then quiz him on our emergency code.

  “It’s funny how this kind of work has been good for me,” Cato says. She’s asked me to go for a walk, an activity she knows I’ll find nostalgically stirring. We tramped all over the city before and after lovemaking when we first got together. “All of this end-of-the-world stuff apparently cheers me up,” she remarks. “I guess it’s the same thing I used to get at home. All those glum faces, and I had to do the song-and-dance that explained why they got out of bed in the morning.”

  “The heavy lifting,” I tell her.

  “Exactly,” she says with a faux mournfulness. “The heavy lifting. We’re on for another simulcast tomorrow and it’ll be three Germans with long faces and Cato the Optimist.”

  We negotiate a herd of bicycles on a plaza and she veers ahead of me toward the harbor. When we cross the skylights of the traffic tunnels, giant container haulers shudder by beneath our feet. She has a beautiful back, accentuated by the military cut of her overcoat.

  “Except that the people you’re dealing with now want to be fooled,” I tell her.

  “It’s not that they want to be fooled,” she answers. “It’s just that they’re not convinced they need to go around glum all the time.”

  “How’d that philosophy work with your parents?” I ask.

  “Not so well,” she says sadly.

  We turn on Boompjes, which is sure to add to her melancholy. A seven-story construction crane with legs curving inward perches like a spider over the river.

  “Your mother called about the coffee grinder,” she remarks. “I couldn’t pin down what she was talking about.”

  Boys in bathing suits are pitching themselves off the high dock by the Strand, though it seems much too cold for that, and the river too dirty. Even in the chill I can smell tar and rope and,
strangely, fresh bread.

  “She called you or you called her?” I ask.

  “I just told you,” Cato says.

  “It seems odd that she’d call you,” I tell her.

  “What was she talking about?” Cato wants to know.

  “I assume she was having trouble working the coffee grinder,” I tell her.

  “Working it or finding it?” she asks.

  “Working it, I think,” I suggest. “She called you?”

  “Oh my God,” Cato says.

  “I’m just asking,” I tell her after a minute.

  All of Maashaven is blocked from view by a giant suction dredger that’s being barged out to Maasvlakte 2. Preceded by six tugs, it looks like a small city going by. The thing uses dragheads connected to tubes the size of railway tunnels and harvests sand down to a depth of twenty meters. It’ll be deepening the docking areas out at Yangtzehaven, Europahaven, and Mississippihaven. There’s been some worry that all of this dredging has been undermining the water defenses on the other side of the channel, which is the last thing we need. Kees has been dealing with their horseshit for a few weeks now.

  We rest on a bench in front of some law offices. Over the front entrance, cameras have been installed to monitor the surveillance cameras, which have been vandalized. Once the dredger has passed, we can see a family of day campers on the opposite bank who’ve pitched their tent on a berm overlooking the channel.

  “Isn’t it too cold for camping?” I ask her.

  “Wasn’t it too cold for swimming?” she responds, reminding me of the boys we’d passed.

  She says Henk keeps replaying the same footage on his iFuze of Feyenoord’s MVP being lowered into the stadium beneath the team flag by a V/STOL. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” she continues, as if that led directly to her next thought. She mentions a conservatory in Berlin, fantastically expensive, that has a chamber-music program. She’d like to send Henk there during his winter break, and maybe longer.

  This seems to me to be mostly about his safety, though I don’t acknowledge that. He’s a gifted cellist, but hardly seems devoted to the instrument.

  With her pitchman’s good cheer she repeats the amount it will cost, which to me sounds like enough for a week in a five-star hotel. But she says money can always be found for a good idea, and if it can’t, then it wasn’t a good idea. Finally she adds that as a hydraulic engineer, I’m the equivalent of an atomic physicist in technological prestige.

  Atomic physicists don’t make a whole lot of money, either, I remind her. And our argument proceeds from there. I can see her disappointment expanding as we speak, and even as my inner organs start to contract I sit on the information of my hidden nest egg and allow all of the unhappiness to unfold. This takes forever. The word in our country for the decision-making process is the same as the one we use for what we pour over pancakes. Our national mindset pivots around the word “but”: as in “This, yes, but that, too.” Cato puts her fingers to her temples and sheaths her cheeks with her palms. Her arguments run aground on my tolerance, which has been elsewhere described as a refusal to listen. Passion in Dutch meetings is punished by being ignored. The idea is that the argument itself matters, not the intensity with which it’s presented. Outright rejections of a position are rare; what you get instead are suggestions for improvement that if followed would annihilate the original intent. And then everyone checks their agendas to schedule the next meeting.

  Just like that, we’re walking back. We’re single-file again, and it’s gotten colder.

  From our earliest years, we’re taught not to burden others with our emotions. A young Amsterdammer in the Climate campus is known as the Thespian because he sobbed in public at a co-worker’s funeral. “You don’t need to eliminate your emotions,” Kees reminded him when the Amsterdammer complained about the way he’d been treated. “You just need to be a little more economical with them.”

  Another thing I never told Cato: my sister and I the week before she caught the flu had been jumping into the river in the winter as well. That was my idea. When she came out, her feet and lips were blue and she sneezed all the way home. “Do you think I’ll catch a cold?” she asked that night. “Go to sleep,” I answered.

  We take a shortcut through the sunken pedestrian mall they call the Shopping Gutter. By the time we reach our street it’s dark, raining again, and the muddy pavement’s shining in the lights of the cafes. Along the new athletic complex in the distance, sapphire-blue searchlights are lancing up into the rain at even intervals, like meteorological harp strings. “I don’t know if you know what this does to me, or you don’t,” Cato says at our doorstep, once she’s stopped and turned. Her thick brown hair is beaded with moisture where it’s not soaked. “But either way, it’s just so miserable.”

  I actually have the solution to our problem, I’m reminded as I follow her up the stairs. The thought makes me feel rehabilitated, as though I’ve told her instead of only myself.

  Cato always maintained that when it came to their marriage, her parents practiced a sort of apocalyptic utilitarianism: on the one hand they were sure everything was going to hell in a handbasket, while on the other they continued to operate as if things could be turned around with a few practical measures.

  But there’s always that moment in a country’s history when it becomes obvious the earth is less manageable than previously thought. Ten years ago we needed to conduct comprehensive assessments of the flood defenses every five years. Now safety margins are adjusted every six months to take new revelations into account. For the last year and a half we’ve been told to build into our designs for whatever we’re working on features that restrict the damaging effects after an inevitable inundation. There won’t be any retreating back to the hinterlands, either, because given the numbers we’re facing there won’t be any hinterlands. It’s gotten to the point that pedestrians are banned from many of the sea-facing dikes in the far west even on calm days. At the entrance to the Haringvlietdam they’ve erected an immense yellow caution sign that shows two tiny stick figures with their arms raised in alarm at a black wave three times their size that’s curling over them.

  I watched Kees’s face during a recent simulation as one of his new configurations for a smart dike was overwhelmed in half the time he would have predicted. It had always been the Dutch assumption that we would resolve the problems facing us from a position of strength. But we passed that station long ago. At this point each of us understands privately that we’re operating under the banner of lost control.

  The next morning we’re crammed together into Rotterdam Climate Proof’s Smartvan and heading west on N211, still not speaking. Cato’s driving. At 140 km/hr the rain fans across the windshield energetically, racing the wipers. Gray clouds seem to be rushing in from the sea in the distance. We cross some polders that are already flooded, and there’s a rocking buoyancy when we traverse that part of the road that’s floating. Trucks sweep by backwards and recede behind us in the spray.

  The only sounds are those of tires and wipers and rain. Exploring the radio is like visiting the Tower of Babel: Turks, Berbers, Cape Verdeans, Antilleans, Angolans, Portuguese, Croatians, Brazilians, Chinese. Cato managed to relocate her simulcast with her three long-faced Germans to the Hoek van Holland; she told them she wanted the Maeslant barrier as a backdrop, but what she really intends is to surprise them, live, with the state of the water levels already. Out near the barrier it’s pretty dramatic. Cato the Optimist with indisputable visual evidence that the sky is falling: can the German position remain unshaken in the face of that? Will her grandstanding work? It’s hard to say. It’s pretty clear that nothing else will.

  “Want me to talk about Gravenzande?” I ask her. “That’s the sort of thing that will really jolt the boys from the Reich.”

  “That’s just what I need,” she answers. “You starting a panic about something that might not even be true.”

  Gravenzande’s where she’s going to drop me, a few ki
lometers away. Three days ago geologists there turned up crushed shell deposits seven meters higher on the dune lines inland than anyone believed floods had ever reached, deposits that look to be only about ten thousand years old. If this ends up confirmed, it’s seriously bad news, given what it clarifies about how cataclysmic things could get even before the climate’s more recent turn for the worse.

  It’s Saturday, and we’ll probably put in twelve hours. Henk’s getting more comfortable with his weekend nanny than with us. As Cato likes to tell him when she’s trying to induce him to do his chores: “Around here, you work.” By which she means that old joke that when you buy a shirt in Rotterdam, it comes with the sleeves already rolled up.

  We pass poplars lining the canals in neat rows, a canary-yellow smudge of a house submerged to its second-floor windows and, beyond a roundabout, a pair of decrepit rugby goalposts.

  “You’re really going to announce that if the Germans pull their weight, everything’s going to be fine?” I ask. But she ignores me.

  She needs a decision, she tells me a few minutes later, as though tired of asking. Henk’s winter break is coming up. I venture that I thought it wasn’t until the twelfth, and she reminds me with exasperation that it’s the fifth, the schools now staggering vacation times to avoid overloading the transportation systems.

  We pass the curved sod roofs of factories. The secret account’s not a problem but a solution, I decide, and as I model to myself ways of implementing it as such, Cato finally asserts—as though she’s waited too long already—that she’s found the answer: she could take that Royal Dutch Shell offer to reconfigure their regional media relations, they could set her up in Wannsee, and Henk could commute. They could stay out there and get a bump in income besides. Henk could enroll in the conservatory.