After that I switched the television off. Increasingly, my main contact with reality was room service, which I ordered up only in the blackest pre-dawn hours when the delivery boys were slow and sleepy. “No, I’d like Dutch papers, please,” I said (in English) to the Dutch-speaking bellhop
who brought up the
International Herald Tribune
with my Dutch rolls and coffee, my ham and eggs and chef’s assortment of Dutch cheeses. But since he kept turning up with the
Tribune
anyway, I went down the back stairs before sunrise for the local papers, which were conveniently fanned on a table just off the staircase where I didn’t have to pass the front desk.
Bloedend. Moord. The sun didn’t seem to rise until about nine in the morning and even then it was hazed and gloomy, casting a low, weak, purgatorial light like a stage effect in some German opera. Apparently the toothpaste I’d used on the lapel of my coat had contained peroxide or some other bleaching agent since the scrubbed spot had faded to a white halo the size of my hand, chalky at the outer edges, ringing the just-visible ghost of Frits’s cranial plasma. At about three thirty in the afternoon the light began to go; by five p.m. it was black out. Then, if there weren’t too many people on the street, I turned up the lapels of my coat and tied my scarf tight at the neck and—taking care to keep my head down—ducked out in the dark to a tiny, Asian-run market a few hundred yards from the hotel where with my remaining euros I bought pre-wrapped sandwiches, apples, a new toothbrush, cough drops and aspirin and beer.
Is alles?
said the old lady in broken-sounding Dutch. Counting my coins with infuriating slowness. Click, click, click. Though I had credit cards I was determined not to use them—another arbitrary rule in the game I’d devised for myself, a completely irrational precaution because who was I kidding? what did it matter, a couple of sandwiches at a convenience shop, when they already had my card at the hotel?
It was partly fear and partly illness that clouded my judgment, since whatever cold or chill I’d caught wasn’t going away. With every hour, it seemed, my cough got deeper and my lungs hurt more. It was true about the Dutch and cleanliness, Dutch cleaning products: the market had a bewildering selection of never-before-seen items and I returned to the room with a bottle featuring a snow white swan against a snow-topped mountain and a skull-and-crossbones label on the back. But though it was strong enough to leach the stripes out of my shirt it wasn’t strong enough to lift the stains at the collar, which had faded from liver-dark blobs to sinister, overlapping outlines like bracket fungi. For the fourth or fifth time I rinsed it, eyes streaming, then wrapped it and tied it in plastic bags and pushed it to the back of a high cupboard. Without something to weigh it down, I knew it would float if I dropped it in the canal and I was afraid
to take it to the street and shove it in a rubbish bin—someone would see me, I’d be caught, this was how it would happen, I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.
A little while. What was a little while? Three days tops, Boris had said at Anne de Larmessin’s. But then he hadn’t factored in Frits and Martin.
Bells and garlands, Advent stars in the shop windows, ribbons and gilded walnuts. At night I slept with socks, stained overcoat, polo-neck sweater in addition to coverlet since the counterclockwise turn of radiator knob as advertised in the leather-bound hotel booklet didn’t warm the room enough to help my fever aches and chills. White goosedown, white swans. The room reeked of bleach like a cheap Jacuzzi. Could the chambermaids smell it in the hall? They wouldn’t give you more than ten years for art theft but with Martin I’d crossed the border into a different country—one way, no return.
Yet somehow I’d developed a workable way of thinking about Martin’s death, or thinking around it, rather. The act—the eternity of it—had thrown me into such a different world that to all practical purposes I was already dead. There was a sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from an ice floe drifted out to sea. What was done could never be undone. I was gone.
And that was fine. I didn’t matter much in the scheme of things and Martin didn’t either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come—for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water—the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.
An act of God:
that was what the insurance companies called it, catastrophe so random or arcane that there was otherwise no taking the measure of it. Probability was one thing, but some events fell so far outside the actuarial tables that even insurance underwriters were compelled to haul in the supernatural in order to explain them—
rotten luck,
as my father had said mournfully one night out by the pool, dusk falling hard, smoking Viceroy after Viceroy to keep the mosquitoes away, one of the few times
he’d tried to talk to me about my mother’s death, why do bad things happen, why me, why her, wrong place wrong time, just a fluke kid, one in a million, not an evasion or cop-out in any way but—I recognized, coming from him—a profession of faith and the best answer he had to give me, on a par with Allah Has Written It or It’s the Lord’s Will, a sincere bowing of the head to Fortune, the greatest god he knew.
If he were in my shoes. It almost made me laugh. I could imagine him holed up and pacing all too clearly, trapped and prowling, relishing the drama of the predicament, a framed cop in a jail cell as portrayed by Farley Granger. But I could imagine just as well his second-hand fascination at my plight, its turns and reversals as random as any turn of the cards, could imagine only too well his woeful shake of the head.
Bad planets. There’s a shape to this thing, a larger pattern. If we’re just talking story, kid, you got it.
He’d be doing his numerology or whatever, looking at his Scorpio book, flipping coins, consulting the stars. Whatever you said about my dad, you couldn’t say he didn’t have a cohesive world view.
The hotel was filling up for the holidays. Couples. American servicemen talking in the halls with a military flatness, rank and authority audible in their voices. In bed, in my opiated fevers, I dreamed of snowy mountains, pure and terrifying, alpine vistas from newsreel films of Berchtesgaden, great winds that crossfaded and blew with the windwhipped seas in the oil painting above my desk: tiny tossed sailboat, alone in dark waters.
My father: Put down that remote control when I’m talking to you.
My father: Well, I won’t say disaster, but failure.
My father: Does he have to eat with us, Audrey? Does he have to sit at the table with us every fucking night? Can’t you make Alameda feed him before I get home?
Uno, Battleship, Etch-A-Sketch, Connect Four. Some green army figures and creepy-crawly rubber insects I’d got in my Christmas stocking.
Mr. Barbour: Two flag signal. Victor: Require Assistance. Echo: I am altering my course to starboard.
The apartment on Seventh Avenue. Rainy-day gray. Many hours spent blowing in and out monotonously on a toy harmonica, in and out, in and out.
On Monday, or maybe it was Tuesday, when I finally worked up the nerve to pull up the blackout shade, so late in the afternoon that the light was going, there was a television crew on the street outside my hotel waylaying
Christmas tourists. English voices, American voices. Christmas concerts at Sint Nicolaaskerk and seasonal stalls selling oliebollen. “Almost got hit by a bicycle but apart from that it’s been a fun time.” My chest hurt. I drew the blackouts again and stood in a hot shower with the water beating down until my skin was sore. The whole neighborhood sparkled with fairy-lit restaurants, beautiful shops displaying cashmere topcoats and heavy, hand-knit sweaters and all the warm clothes I’d neglected to pack. But I didn’t even dare phone down for a pot of coffee thanks to the Dutch-language newspapers I’d been thrashing through since well before sunrise that morning, one featuring a front page photo of the parking garage with police tape across the exit.
The papers were spread on the floor on the far side of my bed, like a map to some horrible place I didn’t want to go. Repeatedly, unable to help myself, in between drowsing off and falling into feverish conversations I wasn’t having, with people I wasn’t having them with, I went back and scoured them over and over for Dutch-English cognates which were few and far between.
Amerikaan dood aangetroffen.
Heroïne, cocaïne.
Moord:
mortality, mordant, morbid, murder.
Drugsgerelateerde criminaliteit:
Frits Aaltink afkomstig uit Amsterdam en Mackay Fiedler Martin uit Los Angeles.
Bloedig:
bloody.
Schotenwisseling:
who could say, although,
schoten:
could that mean shots?
Deze moorden kwamen als en schok voor
—what?
Boris. I walked to the window and stood, and then walked back again. Even in the confusion on the bridge I remembered him instructing me not to call, he’d been very firm on the point though we’d parted in such haste I wasn’t sure he’d explained why I was supposed to wait for him to contact me, and in any case I wasn’t sure it mattered any more. He’d also been very firm on the point that he wasn’t hurt, or so I kept reminding myself, though in the swamp of unwanted memories that bombarded me from that evening I kept seeing the burnt hole in the arm of his coat, sticky black wool in the roll of the sodium lamps. For all I knew, the traffic police had caught him on the bridge and hauled him in for driving without a license: an admittedly shitty break, if indeed the case, but a lot better than some of the other possibilities I could think of.
Twee doden bij bloedige…
It didn’t stop. There was more. The next day, and the next, along with my Traditional Dutch Breakfast, there was more about the killings on the Overtoom: smaller column inches but
denser information.
Twee dodelijke slachtoffers. Nog een of meer betrokkenen. Wapengeweld in Nederland.
Frits’s photograph, along with the photos of some other guys with Dutch names and a longish article I had no hope of reading.
Dodelijke schietpartij nog onopgehelderd
… It worried me that they’d stopped talking about drugs—Boris’s red herring—and had moved on to other angles. I’d set this thing loose, it was out in the world, people were reading about it all over the city, talking about it in a language that wasn’t mine.
Huge Tiffany ad in the
Herald Tribune.
Timeless Beauty and Craftsmanship. Happy Holidays from Tiffany & Co.
Chance plays tricks, my dad had liked to say. Systems, spread breakdowns.
Where was Boris? In my fever haze I tried, unsuccessfully, to amuse or at least divert myself with thoughts of how very likely he was to show up at just the moment you didn’t expect him. Cracking his knuckles, making the girls jump. Turning up half an hour after our state issued Proficiency Exam had begun, widespread classroom laughter at his puzzled face through the wire reinforced glass of the locked door:
hah, our bright future,
he’d said scornfully when on the way home I’d tried to explain to him about standardized tests.
In my dreams I couldn’t get to where I needed to be. There was always something keeping me from where I needed to go.
He had texted me his number before we left the States, and though I was afraid to text him back (not knowing his circumstances, or if the text could be traced to me somehow), I reminded myself continually that I could reach him, if I had to. He knew where I was. Yet, hours into the night, I lay awake arguing with myself: relentless tedium, back and forth, what if, what if, what harm could it do? At last, at some disoriented point—night light burning, half-dreaming, out of it—I broke down and reached for the phone on the nightstand and texted him anyway before I had the chance to think better of it: Where are you?
Over the next two or three hours I lay awake in a state of barely controlled anxiety, lying with my forearm over my face to keep the light out even though there wasn’t any light. Unfortunately, when I woke from my sweat-soaked sleep, somewhere around dawn, the phone was stone dead because I’d forgotten to switch it off, and—reluctant to negotiate the
front desk, to ask if they had chargers for loan—I hesitated for hours until finally, mid-afternoon, I broke down.
“Certainly, sir,” said the desk clerk, hardly looking at me. “United States?”
Thank God, I thought, trying not to hurry too much as I walked upstairs. The phone was old, and slow, and after I plugged it in and stood for a while, I got tired of waiting for the Apple logo to come up and went to the minibar and got myself a drink and came back and stared at it a bit more until at last the lock screen came up, old school photo I’d scanned in as a joke, never had I been so glad to see a picture, ten year old Kitsey flying midair at the penalty kick. But just as I was about to type in the pass code, the home screen popped off, then fizzed for about ten seconds, bands of black and gray that shifted and broke into particles before the sad face came on and clicked with a queasy down-whir to black.
Four-fifteen p.m. The sky was turning ultramarine over the bell gables across the canal. I was sitting on the carpet with my back against the bed and the charger cord in my hand, having methodically, twice, tried all the sockets in the room—I’d switched the phone on and off a hundred times, held it to the lamp to see if maybe it was on and the display had just gone dark, tried to re-set it, but the phone was fried: nothing happening, cold black screen, dead as a doornail. Clearly I’d short-circuited it; the night of the garage it had gotten wet—drops of water on the screen when I took it from my pocket—but though I’d had a bad minute or two waiting for it to come on, it had seemed to be working just fine, right up until the moment I tried to put a charge in it. Everything was backed up on my laptop at home, apart from the only thing I needed: Boris’s number, which he’d texted me in the car on the way to the airport.