Loosed Upon the World Read online

  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 St. 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 were under two hours, and horizontal evacuation if it were 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 US 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. N
o 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’ 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.”

  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 eleven 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 midmorning, a heavy mist in the grey 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.