You Think That's Bad (6 page)

Would you imagine that when he confronted his loved ones' sadnesses, his vanity knew no bounds? Would you imagine that he thought his problems would solve themselves? Would you imagine that he fancied himself the prey when he was really the apologetic predator? Would you imagine that he'd last very long, much less get through this alive? Would you imagine that his kind should die out once and for all? Would you imagine that even now he was telling you the truth?

A long time ago a man had a dog that went down to the shoreline every day and howled. When she returned the man would look at her blankly. Eventually the dog got exasperated. “Hey,” the dog said. “There's a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way.” “Please. I'm busy,” the man said. “Hey,” the dog said the next day, and told him the same thing. This went on for a week. Finally the man said, “If you say that once more I'm going to take you out to sea and dump you overboard.” The next morning the dog went down to the shoreline again, and the man followed. “Hey,” the dog said, after a minute. “Yeah?” the man said. “Oh, I think you know,” she told him.

“Or here's another one,” Cato says to me. “Adam goes to God, ‘Why'd you make Eve so beautiful?' And God says, ‘So you would love her.' And Adam says, ‘Well, why'd you make her so stupid?' And God says, ‘So she would love you.' ”

Henk laughs.

“Well, he thinks it's funny,” Cato says.

“He's eleven years old,” I tell her.

“And very precocious,” she reminds me. Henk makes an overly jovial face and holds two thumbs up. His mother takes her napkin and wipes some egg from his chin.

We met in the same pre-university track. I was a year older but hadn't passed Dutch, so I took it again with her.

“You failed Dutch?” she whispered from her seat behind me.
She'd seen me gaping at her when I came in. The teacher had already announced that's what those of us who were older were doing there.

“It's your own language,” she told me later that week. She was holding my penis upright so she could run the edge of her lip along the shaft. I felt like I was about to touch the ceiling.

“You're not very articulate,” she remarked later, on the subject of the sounds I'd produced.

She acted as though I were a spot of sun in an otherwise rainy month. We always met at her house, a short bicycle ride away, and her parents seemed to be perpetually asleep or dead. In three months I saw her father only once, from behind. She explained that she'd been raised by depressives who'd made her one of those girls who'd sit on the playground with the tools of happiness all around her and refuse to play. Her last boyfriend had walked out the week before we'd met. His diagnosis had been that she imposed on everyone else the gloom her family had taught her to expect.

“Do I sadden you?” she'd ask me late at night before taking me in her mouth.

“Will you have children with me?” I started asking her back.

And she was flattered and seemed pleased without being particularly fooled. “I've been thinking about how hard it is to pull information out of you,” she told me one night when we'd pitched our clothes out from under her comforter. I asked what she wanted to know, and she said that was the kind of thing she was talking about. While she was speaking I watched her front teeth, glazed from our kissing. When she had a cold and her nose was blocked up, she looked a little dazed in profile.

“I ask a question and you ask another one,” she complained. “If I ask what your old girlfriend was like, you ask what anyone's old girlfriend is like.”

“So ask what you want to ask,” I told her.

“Do you think,” she said, “that someone like you and someone like me should be together?”

“Because we're so different?” I asked.

“Do you think that someone like you and someone like me should be together?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I told her.

“That's helpful. Thanks,” she responded. And then she wouldn't see me for a week. When I felt I'd waited long enough, I intercepted her outside her home and asked, “Was the right answer no?” And she smiled and kissed me as though hunting up some compensation for diminished expectations. After that it was as if we'd agreed to give ourselves over to what we had. When I put my mouth on her, her hands would bend back at the wrists as if miming helplessness. I disappeared for minutes at a time from my classes, envisioning the trancelike way her lips would part after so much kissing.

The next time she asked me to tell her something about myself I had some candidates lined up. She held my hands away from her, which tented the comforter and provided some cooling air. I told her I still remembered how my older sister always replaced her indigo hair bow with an orange one on royal birthdays. And how I followed her everywhere, chanting that she was a pig, which I was always unjustly punished for. How I fed her staggeringly complicated lies that went on for weeks and ended in disaster with my parents or teachers. How I slept in her bed the last three nights before she died of the flu epidemic.

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 up, 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.