You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  We exit N211 northwest on an even smaller access road to the coast, and within a kilometer it ends in a turnabout next to the dunes. She pulls the car around so it’s pointed back toward her simulcast, turns off the engine, and sits there beside me with her hands in her lap.

  “How long has this been in the works?” I ask. She wants to know what I mean, and I tell her that it doesn’t seem like so obscure a question; she said no to Shell years ago, so where did this new offer come from?

  She shrugs, as if I’d asked if they were paying her moving expenses. “They called. I told them I’d listen to what they had to say.”

  “They called you,” I tell her.

  “They called me,” she repeats.

  She’s only trying to hedge her bets, I tell myself to combat the panic. Our country’s all about spreading risk around. “Do people just walk into this conservatory?” I ask. “Or do you have to apply?”

  She doesn’t answer, which I take to mean that she and Henk already have applied and he’s been accepted. “How did Henk feel about this good news?” I ask.

  “He wanted to tell you,” Cato answers.

  “And we’d see each other every other weekend? Once a month?” I’m attempting a version of steely neutrality but can feel the terror worming its way forward.

  “This is just one option of many,” she reminds me. “We need to talk about all of them.” She adds that she has to go. And that I should see all this as being primarily about Henk, not us. I answer that the Netherlands will always be here, and she smiles and starts the van.

  “You sure there’s nothing else you want to talk to me about?” she asks.

  “Like what?” I say. “I want to talk to you about everything.”

  She jiggles the gear shift lightly, considering me. “You’re going to let me drive away,” she says, “with your having left it at that.”

  “I don’t want you to drive away at all,” I tell her.

  “Well, there is that,” she concedes bitterly. She waits another full minute, then a curtain comes down on her expression and she puts the car in gear. She honks when she’s pulling out.

  At the top of the dune I watch surfers in wetsuits wading into the breakers in the rain. The rain picks up and sets the sea’s surface in a constant agitation. Even the surfers keep low, to stay out of it. The wet sand’s like brown sugar in my shoes.

  Five hundred thousand years ago it was possible to walk from where I live to England. At that point the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine. Even during the Romans’ occupation, the Zuider Zee was dry. But by the sixth century B.C. we were building artificial hills out of marsh grass mixed with manure and our own refuse to keep our feet out of the water. And then in the seventeenth century Hulsebosch invented the Archimedes screw, and water wheels could raise a flow four meters higher than where it began, and we started to make real progress at keeping what the old people called “the Waterwolf” from the door.

  In the fifteenth century Philip the Good ordered the sand dike that constituted the original Hondsbossche Seawall to be restored, and another built behind it as a backup. He named the latter the Sleeper Dike. For extra security he had another constructed behind that, calling that one the Dreamer Dike. Ever since, schoolchildren have learned, as one of their first geography sentences, that “Between Camperduinen and Petten lie three dikes: the Watcher, the Sleeper, and the Dreamer.”

  We’re raised with the double message that we have to address our worst fears but that nonetheless they’ll also somehow domesticate themselves. Fifteen years ago Rotterdam Climate Proof revived “The Netherlands lives with water” as a slogan, the accompanying poster featuring a two-panel cartoon in which a towering wave in the first panel is breaking before its crest over a terrified little boy, and in the second it separates into immense foamy fingers so he can relievedly shake its hand.

  When Cato told me about that first offer from Shell, I could see her flash of feral excitement about what she was turning down. Royal Dutch Shell! She would’ve been fronting for one of the biggest corporations in the world. We conceived Henk a few nights later. There was a lot of urgent talk about getting deeper and closer and I remember striving once she’d guided me inside her to have my penis reach the back of her throat. Periodically we slowed into the barest sort of movement, just to further take stock of what was happening, and at one point we paused in our tremoring and I put my lips to her ear and reminded her of what she’d passed up. After winning them over, she could have picked her city: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Rio. The notion caused a momentary lack of focus in her eyes. Then as a response she started moving along a contraction, and Shell and other options including speech evanesced away.

  If she were to leave me, where would I be? It’s as if she was put here to force my interaction with humans. And still I don’t pull it off. It’s like that story we were told as children, of Jesus telling the rich young man to go and sell all he has and give it to the poor, but instead the rich man chose to keep what he had, and went away sorrowful. When we talked about it, Kees said he always assumed the guy had settled in Holland.

  That Monday, more bad news: warm air and heavy rain has ventured many meters above established snowlines in the western Alps, and Kees holds up before me with both hands GRACE’s latest printouts about a storm cell whose potential numbers we keep rechecking because they seem so extravagant. He spends the rest of the morning on the phone trying to stress that we’ve hit another type of threshold here; that these are calamity-level numbers. It seems to him that everyone’s saying they recognize the urgency of the new situation but that no one’s acting like it. During lunch a call comes in about the hinge-and-socket joint, itself five stories high, of one of the Maeslant doors. In order to allow the doors to roll with the waves, the joints are designed to operate like a human shoulder, swinging along both horizontal and vertical axes and transferring the unimaginable stresses to the joint’s foundation. The maintenance engineers are reporting that the foundation block—all 52,000 tons of it—is moving.

  Finally Kees flicks off his phone receptor and squeezes his eyes shut in despair. “Maybe our history’s just the history of picking up after disasters like this,” he tells me. “The Italians do pasta sauce and we do body retrieval.”

  After waiting a few minutes for updated numbers, I call Cato and fail to get through and then try my mother, who says she’s soaking her corns. I can picture the enamel basin with the legend “Contented Feet” around the rim. The image seems to confirm that we’re all naked in the world, so I tell her to get some things together, that I’m sending someone out for her, that she needs to leave town for a little while.

  It’s amazing I’m able to keep trying Cato’s numbers, given what’s broken loose at every level of water management nationwide. Everyone’s shouting into headpieces and clattering away at laptops at the same time. At the Delta stations the situation has already triggered the automatic emergency procedures with their checklists and hour-by-hour protocols. Outside my office window the canal is lined with barges of cows, of all things, awaiting their river pilot to transport them to safety. The road in front of them is a gypsy caravan of traffic piled high with suitcases and furniture and roped-down plastic bags. The occasional dog hangs from a car window. Those roads that can float should allow vehicular evacuation for six or seven hours longer than the other roads will. The civil defense teams at roundabouts and intersections are doing what they can to dispense biopacs and aquacells. Through the glass everyone seems to be behaving well, though with a maximum of commotion.

  I’ve got the mayor of Ter Heijde on one line saying he’s up to his ass in ice water and demanding to know where the fabled Weak Links Project has gone when Cato’s voice finally breaks in on the other.

  “Where are you?” I shout, and the mayor shouts back “Where do you think?” I kill his line and ask again, and Cato answers, “What?” In just her one-word inflection, I can tell she heard what I said. “Is Henk with you?” I shout, and Kees and some of the
others around the office look up despite the pandemic of shouting. I ask again and she says that he is. When I ask if she’s awaiting evacuation, she answers that she’s already in Berlin.

  I’m shouting other questions when Kees cups a palm over my receptor and says, “Here’s an idea. Why don’t you sort out all of your personal problems now?”

  After Cato’s line goes dead I can’t raise her again, or she won’t answer. We’re engaged in such a blizzard of calls that it almost doesn’t matter. “Whoa,” Kees says, his hands dropping to his desk, and a number of our co-workers go silent as well, because the windows facing west are now rattling and black with rain. I look out mine, and bags and other debris are tearing free of the traffic caravan and sailing east. The rain curtain hits the cows in their barges and their ears flatten like mules and their eyes squint shut at the gale’s power.

  “Our ride is here,” Kees calls, shaking my shoulder, and I realize that everyone’s hurriedly collecting laptops and flash drives. There’s a tumult heading up the stairs to the roof and the roar of the wind every time the door’s opened, and the scrabbling sounds of people dragging something outside before the door slams shut. And then, with surprising abruptness, it’s quiet.

  My window continues to shake as though it’s not double pane but cellophane. Now that our land has subsided as much as it has, when the water does come, it will come like a wall, and each dike that stops it will force it to turn, and in its churning it will begin to spiral and bore into the earth, eroding away the dike walls, until the pressure builds and that dike collapses and it’s on to the next one, with more pressure piling up behind, and so on and so on until every last barrier falls and the water thunders forward like a hand sweeping everything from the table.

  The lights go off, and then on and off again, before the halogen emergency lights in the corridors engage, with their irritated buzzing.

  It’s easier to see out with the interior lights gone. Along the line of cars a man carrying a framed painting staggers at an angle, like a sailboat tacking. He passes a woman in a van with her head against the headrest and her mouth open in an Oh of fatigue.

  I’m imagining the helicopter crew’s negotiations with my mother, and their fireman’s carry once those negotiations have fallen through. She told me once that she often recalled how long they drifted in the flood of 1953 through the darkness without the sky getting any lighter. When the sun finally rose they watched the navy drop food and blankets and rubber boats and bottles of cooking gas to people on roofs or isolated high spots, and when their boat passed a small body lying across an eave with its arms in the water, her father told her that it was resting. She remembered later that morning telling her mother, who’d grown calmer, that it was a good sign they saw so few people floating, and before her father could stop her she answered that the drowned didn’t float straightaway but took a few days to come up.

  And she talked with fondness about how tenderly her father had tended to her later, after she’d been blinded by some windblown grit, by suggesting she rub one eye to make the other weep, like farmers did when bothered by chaff. And she remembered, too, the strangeness of one of the prayers her village priest recited once they were back in their old church, the masonry buttressed with steel beams and planking to keep the walls from sagging outwards any further: I sink into deep mire, where there is no standing; I come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

  The window’s immense pane shudders and flexes before me from the force of what’s pouring out of the North Sea. Water’s beginning to run its fingers under the seal on the sash. Cato will send me wry and brisk and newsy text updates whether she receives answers or not, and Henk will author a few as well. Everyone in Berlin will track the developments on the monitors above them while they shop or travel or work, the teaser heading reading something like The Netherlands Under Siege. Some of the more sober will think, That could have been us. Some of the more perceptive will consider that it soon might well be.

  My finger’s on the Cato icon on the screen without exerting the additional pressure that would initiate another call. What sort of person ends up with someone like me? What sort of person finds that acceptable, year to year? We went on vacations and fielded each other’s calls and took turns reading Henk to sleep and let slip away the miracle that was there between us when we first came together. We hunkered down before the wind picked up. We modeled risk management for our son when instead we could have embraced the freefall of that astonishing Here, this is yours to hold. We told each other I think I know when we should’ve said Lead me farther through your amazing, astonishing interior.

  Cato was moved by my mother’s flood memories, but brought to tears only by the one my mother cherished from that year: the Queen’s address to the nation afterwards, her celebration of what the crucible of the disaster had produced, and the return, at long last, of the unity the country had displayed during the war. My mother had years ago purchased a vinyl record of the speech, and later had a neighbor transfer it to a digital format. She played it once while we were visiting, and Henk knelt at the window spying on whoever was hurrying by. And my mother held the weeping Cato’s hand and she held mine and Henk gave us fair warning of anything of interest on the street, while the Queen’s warm and smooth voice thanked us all for working together in that one great cause, soldiering on without a thought for care, or grief, or inner divisions, and without even realizing what we were denying ourselves.

  Happy with Crocodiles

  Her envelope had hearts where the o’s in my name should have been and I tore it open and read her letter right there in the sun. The V-Mail was like onionskin and in the humidity you spent all your time peeling sheets apart and flapping them dry. Two guys who’d been waiting behind me for their mail passed out and fell over. Our CO had orders to keep everyone under some sort of shade until further notice. That was it in terms of his responsibilities for the day. But the mail hadn’t caught up to us since Port Moresby so even this one load pulled most of us out around the truck.

  The guy next to me spat on the back fender just to watch it sizzle. As far as we could tell, we were the only four companies not getting any beach breezes, and we’d been sitting through this for two weeks and were pretty much wiped out to a man. Guys just lay in the bush with their feet sticking out onto the trail. The Bren gun carrier already looked like a planter, it was so overgrown. Almost nothing was running because the lubricating oils ran off or evaporated. We’d lost half our water when the heat dissolved the jerry cans’ enamel lining. Two unshaded shells farther down the trail had exploded. The tents accumulated heat like furnaces. The midday sun raised blisters on an arm in ten minutes. One of the medics timed it. Everybody lost so much fluid and salt that we had ice-pick headaches or down-on-all-fours dry heaves and cramping. Turning your head wasn’t worth the effort. Pickets got confused and shot at anything. A few facing the afternoon sun on the water went snowblind from the glare and didn’t bother to report it until relieved.

  At least the Japs were lying low, too. I had a palm-frond bush hat but even through that the sun beat on my head like a mallet.

  The first paragraph was all about how good it was to hear I was okay. It made her whole day easier, apparently. The second said “To answer your question, no, I didn’t see your brother when he was home on leave.” But he’d already written that she had. And then he’d left it at that.

  “Get out of the sun, Foss,” the CO called.

  One of the guys who’d passed out came to and staggered back to his tent. The other guy just lay there. The guy behind me got handed a Christmas package, but whatever was in it was smashed flat and melted besides. He picked over it standing in the truck cab’s shadow.

  The PFC dishing out the mail was clearly hacked off that he had to do it right there on the trail. There was one good patch of shade from a clump of coconut palms and no one was budging out of it to let him park his truck. He called a name and if someone didn’t answer right away he pitched the
letter or package over the side and went on to the next one. He was wearing a bush helmet and on the back of it someone had drawn a woman with her legs spread and written “Your Mother Says Hi” across the brim.

  The third paragraph went on to something else as though that was the end of it. So-and-so said such-and-such about a friend of hers, could I believe that?

  “What do you need, a road map?” my friend Leo said when I asked him about it.

  “What?” I asked, like I already knew. “What do you think you think is going on?”

  “What do I think I think is going on?” he asked, and the rest of Dog Company, a little ways farther off the trail, laughed. We’d heard that Baker and Fox Companies had been bombed with daisy cutters the night before, so we were working on two-man slit trenches, and in the close quarters entrenching tools kept whipping by people’s ears. “I think the two of them spend a lot of time agreeing on what a great guy you are. I think it makes them sad for you and they cry together in their beer. And then I think he’s sticking his dick in her.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” our staff sergeant asked Leo while we redug our slit trenches the next morning. As if everybody else was the picture of contentment. If it rained at all during the night we lost like a foot and a half of depth to the mud.

  “He’s jealous of his brother,” Leo told him.

  “His brother better-lookin’ than him?” the staff sergeant asked, amused.

  “I’ve seen knotholes better-lookin’ than him,” Leo told him.

  “Why would he think it was about looks?” I asked him later.

  “Why wouldn’t he think I was jealous of something else?”