Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  From next door: “Fuck you! Fuck you, you fucking bitch!”

  Chuck picked up his coat. “Why don’t I drop you home? It’s on my way.”

  We fled toward the elevator. The door of another office was open, and standing at the entry was the woman I’d seen with Chuck on the ferry—his mistress, I now understood.

  She looked up and said, “Honey, do you—,” and then she recognized me. We traded polite smiles. Chuck said, “Hans, I believe you’ve met Eliza. My dear, we were just on our way out.”

  “Okey-dokey,” Eliza said, still with the same smile. “Have fun.”

  As we walked out of the building into the cold, Chuck said very gravely, “Eliza is extremely talented. She composes photo albums. There’s quite a market for this service. People take all these pictures and they don’t know what to do with them.”

  We made our way through animated hordes of men. At a certain point, Chuck grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s cross now,” and he trotted quickly across the avenue as a surge of traffic came roaring up. He had, I realized, waited for a moment when the pedestrian light showed the fierce red hand, and then taken his chance. Evidently he felt this gave him an edge—and it did, because it meant that, walking on down Sixth Avenue, he and I were signaled forward at every cross street by the purposeful white-glowing pedestrian whose missionary stride was plainly conceived as an example to all (and whom I cannot help contrasting with his London counterpart, a green gentleman undoubtedly rambling with an unseen golden retriever).

  I followed Chuck into an open-air lot. He drove a 1996 Cadillac, a patriotic automobile aflutter and aglitter with banners and stickers of the Stars and Stripes and yellow ribbons in support of the troops. Papers, candy wrappers, and coffee cups were strewn over the front passenger seat. Chuck scrabbled all of it into his arms and dropped it into the junk-filled rear passenger area, where a pair of field glasses, a laptop, brochures, and brown banana peels rested on sheets of old newsprint.

  We pulled up across the street from the Chelsea Hotel. I was opening my door when Chuck said, “Do you have some time? There’s something I want to show you. But it’s in Brooklyn.”

  I hesitated. The truth was, I was done for the day, the Cadillac was warm, and I had a dread of returning to my apartment. Also, as Rachel would be the first to say, I’m easily dragged around.

  “We still have an hour of daylight,” Chuck said. “Come on. You’ll find it interesting, I promise.”

  “What the hell,” I said, slamming the door shut.

  Chuck cackled as he drove off. “I knew it. You’re a fun guy underneath it all.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll find out. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  This was acceptable. When was the last time I’d been promised a surprise?

  On the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of Houston, the car paused in traffic. Chuck, looking out of the window, leaned forward and exclaimed, “My God! Look at that. Do you see that, Hans? The ice?”

  I did see. Ice was spread out over the breadth of the Hudson like a plot of cloud. The whitest and largest fragments were flat polygons, and surrounding these was a mass of slushy, messy ice, as if the remains of a zillion cocktails had been dumped there. By the bank, where the rotting stumps of an old pier projected like a species of mangrove, the ice was shoddy, papery rubble, and immobile; farther out, floes moved quickly towards the bay.

  Indeed much of what I was looking at, Chuck informed me as we inched along, was brash ice, the fragments of disintegrating floes that had traveled down from upper parts of the Hudson. Such drifting fields of screeching and groaning ice, as Chuck dramatically put it, were great places to bird bald eagles, which came downriver in search of open water and collected fewer than fifty miles north in order to eat fish. Chuck’s fascination with this phenomenon—his interest in naturalism, birds especially, went back to his youth in Trinidad—was, I later came to understand, heightened by the knowledge gained from his enthusiastic and successful studies for the U.S. citizenship exams. He told me that in 1782, after years of argument and indecision, Congress concluded that the bald eagle would make an appropriate symbol of national power and authority, and so it was decided that the bird, depicted with its wings outspread, its talons grasping an olive branch, etcetera, should be adopted as the emblem for the great seal of the United States. Chuck dug into his pocket and tossed me a quarter to remind me what the eagle looked like. Not everybody agreed with the decision, Chuck reported. He took back the coin. Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey a better choice and considered the bald eagle—a plunderer and a scavenger of dead fish rather than a hunter, and timid if mobbed by much smaller birds—an animal of bad moral character and in fact a coward. “I love the national bird,” Chuck clarified. “The noble bald eagle represents the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.”

  I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.

  As he talked, my thoughts went from the ice on the Hudson, which struck me as a kind of filth, to the pure canal ice of The Hague. Unless I am dreaming, during most winters in the seventies the standing waters of The Hague froze over and for a few days or weeks were the scene of the playful communal activities so familiar from paintings of Dutch life through the centuries. As I sat half-listening to Chuck, what struck me most strongly about these remembered glacial shenanigans—the ice hockey, the pirouetting of a crazed dancing soloist, the hand-in-hand maneuvers of lovers, the tender pairings of tots and parents, the rich residual silence off which the shouts and laughs and clacks of sticks seemed to bounce—was their peculiar Dutchness. I was gripped by a rare homesickness. There, by the Hudson, I had what I can only describe as a flashback. What came to me was a water-filled ditch near my childhood home covered in new ice, which is black. The ditch—a sloot, as we called it—was a few blocks from home and ran between the white grass of football pitches and, on the opposite bank, the wooded dunes that held back the always-thundering North Sea. I was skating. I should have been at school, learning Greek, but like countless thirteen-year-old schoolboys before me I’d been lured by the freeze into truancy. Nobody else was around. Save for the scraping of my blades, all was noiseless. Forward I skated, past sinking alder trees, past the netless goals in the fields, past whatever else was contained in the world. I spent an hour or two like this. As my ankles grew sore and my mind turned to the inventing of excuses for my absence from school, a figure approached on the ice. For a moment I was terrified. Then I saw that this approaching skater was a woman, a woman who as she drew nearer became my mother. How she’d guessed she would find me in this lonely place is something I still cannot explain. But she had guessed, and here she came now, methodically thrusting sideways and moving with the sweet excess of physical efficiency that is the first and last bliss of ice-skating. I was busted; I thought for a moment about sprinting off. When my mother caught up with me, however, she simply said, “Would you find it terrible if I skated with you?” She and I glided side by side along the edge of the fields of white grass, our hands clasped behind our backs. We pushed in harmony, the one occasionally dropping behind the other where branches leaned into our way or when a cracking sound betrayed a stretch of thin ice. My mother, a large woman and somewhat plodding in shoes, was graceful on runners. It was she who presided over my first wobbling, upright motions on frozen water, who first placed bladed little boots on my feet and, with gentle tugs, pulled tight their crisscrossing white laces.

  “OK,” Chuck said. “See that? That’s where I got my cricket idea.”

  We had reached Pier 40, a brick, hulking, boxlike old shipping terminal that jutted out into the river.

  “After the attacks,” Chuck said, “this was where the Humane Society of New York started up an emergency triage, practically from day one.” We quickened away. “My God, what a scene. Cats, dogs, guinea pigs, rabbits, pigs, lizards, you name it, they were all here. Cockat
oos. Monkeys. I saw a lemur with a corneal inflammation.” Chuck volunteered his services and was put to work “re-homing” the pets. “It was a wonderful experience,” Chuck said. “I made friends with people from Idaho, Wisconsin, New Jersey, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa. People from out of state came for a couple of days and ended up spending weeks here. Tourists that were vets, even regular tourists, gave up their holidays to help out. And we weren’t just looking after the animals. Right over there, you had a feeding area for the rescue personnel, and food and clothing: men would work for days without stopping and their boots and coats would be destroyed.” Chuck said simply, “I think for many of us it was one of the happiest times of our life.”

  I believed him. The catastrophe had instilled in many—though not in me—a state of elation. From the beginning, for example, I’d suspected that, beneath all the tears and the misery, Rachel’s leaving had basically been a function of euphoria.

  Now we were passing the great downtown vacancy, lit up like a stadium by the faint glow of construction floodlights, and the doomed Deutsche Bank Building on Liberty Street, which, with its mournful, poetical drape of black netting, was the object on which the eye helplessly rested.

  “Anyhow,” Chuck continued, “inside the pier is a giant courtyard with two artificial soccer fields. When I found out the whole place was slated for total redevelopment, I had an idea. Why not, I thought, why not—”

  He paused and adjusted his Yankees cap. “I have a question for you.”

  “Fire away,” I said.

  “How many West Indians would you say lived in the New York area? English-speaking West Indians, now: I’m not talking about Haitians and Dominicans and what have you.”

  I told him that I had no idea.

  “Well, let me enlighten you,” Chuck said, waving to the frozen cop who guarded the Battery Tunnel turnoff. “According to the 2000 census, five hundred thousand. You can safely add fifty percent: so we’re talking about seven hundred and fifty thousand, maybe even a million, and growing. We had sixty percent growth in the 1990s alone. And by the way, West Indians have a better socioeconomic profile than Hispanics, and a way better one than African Americans. But that’s not the exciting part. The Indian”—he banged a hand against the wheel—“population in NYC has grown by eighty-one percent in the last ten years. The Pakistani”—another bang—“numbers have gone up by one hundred and fifty percent, and the Bangladeshis, wait for it, five hundred percent. In New Jersey they’re overrun with South Asians. Fort Lee, Jersey City, Hoboken, Secaucus, Hackensack, Englewood: Navratri celebrations in these towns can bring out twenty thousand people. It’s the same in New Brunswick, Edison, Metuchen. I’m telling you, I’ve done the research. I’ve got all the numbers. And if you think they’re coming to mop floors and drive taxis, you’re wrong. They’re coming to make real money—high tech, pharmaceuticals, electronics, health care. There’s almost half a million South Asians in New York alone. Have you ever visited the Newcomers School in Astoria? All the kids are from Pakistan. You know what they do in their spare time, these kids? They play cricket. They play at Dutch Kills playground, over by P.S. 112, they play in vacant lots, they play in schoolyards up and down Queens and Brooklyn. Just down the block from me, at P.S. 139, you’ll see boys and girls with cricket bats, even in the snow. If I took you there now, I could show you the wicket they’ve drawn on the wall.” He grinned. “You see where I’m going with this.”

  “You want to build a cricket stadium,” I said. I made no attempt to hide my amusement.

  “That’s right,” Chuck said. “But not at Pier 40. That was my first decision. There’s no way they’re going to let a bunch of black guys take over prime Manhattan real estate. Hate the word ‘stadium,’ by the way,” Chuck said importantly. We were exiting the yellow gloom of the Battery Tunnel, whose old tiled walls invariably put me in mind of a urinal. “Stadium spells trouble. Just ask Mike Bloomberg. I’m talking about an arena. A sports arena for the greatest cricket teams in the world. Twelve exhibition matches every summer, watched by eight thousand spectators at fifty dollars a pop. I’m talking about advertising, I’m talking about year-round consumption of food and drink in the bar-restaurant. You’re going to have a clubhouse. Two thousand members at one thousand dollars a year plus initiation fee. Tennis, squash, ten-pin bowling, indoor facilities, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a sports bar: something for everyone. But at the center of it, cricket. The only true cricket club in the country. The New York Cricket Club.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  Chuck burst out laughing. “I know what you’re thinking: I’m out of my mind. But you haven’t heard the kicker.” He looked at me. “Ready? Global TV rights. A game between India and Pakistan in New York City? In a state-of-the-art arena with Liberty Tower in the background? Can you imagine the panning shots?” Chuck said almost furiously, “We’re thinking a TV and Internet viewership of seventy million in India alone. Seventy million. Do you have any idea how much money this would bring in? Coca-Cola, Nike, they’re all desperate to get at the South Asian market. We figure we’d break even in three, at most four years. And after that…” High on the Gowanus Expressway now, he waved an arm at the cold bright bay and the mainland beyond. Lights had started shining in Elizabeth and in the Bayonne heights. “It’s an impossible idea, right? But I’m convinced it will work. Totally convinced. You know what my motto is?”

  “I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore,” I said.

  “Think fantastic,” Chuck said. “My motto is, Think fantastic.”

  We swung onto the Belt Parkway and for ten minutes followed its semicircle past Bensonhurst and Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, the night now descending over the Rockaways and a blinking jet plane going low over the dismal wetlands of Jamaica Bay.

  “Where are you taking me?” I said. “Queens?”

  “We’re nearly there,” he said.

  We turned south onto the southernmost, quasi-rural section of Flatbush Avenue, where the road was lined only by barren trees. Half a mile or so down, Chuck swung left through a wide gateway onto a concrete private road. This led to a no-man’s-land of frozen bushes and scrubland. Another turn, leftward, led to an immense white emptiness. The snow had not been plowed from this portion of the road, and like a wagoner Chuck steered and bumped us along in the hardened ruts of old tracks. A desolate complex of buildings—warehouses, a tower—was now in view on the left. The sky, aswirl with fleet, darkening clouds, was magnified by the flat null steppe that lay to the east. If a troupe of Mongolian horsemen had appeared in the distance I would not have been shocked.

  “Jesus,” I said, “where are we?”

  Chuck, both hands on the wheel, spurted the Cadillac forward. “Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn,” he said.

  As he spoke, the tower assumed a familiar outline. This had once been an airfield, I realized. We were on an old taxiway.

  Chuck drove past the brick control tower and a pair of hangars. There were no tire tracks here. We came to a stop. An indeterminate snowfield, broken only by a few stands of dwarfish trees, filled three-quarters of the vista. We stepped out into wind and an extraordinary cold.

  Chuck said, “This is it. This is where it’s going to be.” He made a gesture at the void in front of us. It was bounded on one side by a vague growth of shrubbery and, glistening behind a row of trees, the streaky lights of Flatbush Avenue. The remaining three sides were bounded by nothing. I thought of a Dutch polder, and then of the Westland, the flat, greenhouse-filled region between The Hague and the Hook of Holland where I played football games on bleakly open fields, in gales, against tough teenagers from Naaldwijk and Poeldijk who specialized, for some reason, in offside traps. Westland included the village of Monster. For six weeks, during my incarnation as a seventeen-year-old in need of money, I cycled to Monster at five in the morning in order to work eight hours at a pallet factory. For some reason it bewildered me to think back to him, that boy on the
Monsterseweg making his way along the edge of the dunes.

  “I have the land, I have the lease, I have the backing,” Chuck said.

  I got to hear the story of the property acquisition at a later date, a story involving a grant of a lease by the National Park Service in the 1980s for sporting purposes; a failure to develop the land as envisaged; and, in 2002, a subgrant of the lease to Chuck, at a price he described as “minimal,” for the purpose of putting the field to use as a cricket field. Chuck had no permission to place any permanent construction upon the land. But he figured that if he built New York’s first real cricket ground and installed some removable bleachers, the great India and West Indies teams would be lining up to play here; and once that happened, he reasoned, his application to the Park Service for permission to (1) transform the hangars into a clubhouse and an indoor sports center, and (2) build grandstands for eight thousand spectators, would have every reason to succeed; and once that happened, the television companies would pile in; and once that happened…

  But all that was for another occasion. On this occasion, he told me another story.

  His first thought had been to call the field Corrigan Field. “After ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan,” Chuck said happily. Corrigan, Chuck related, was a “legendary aviator” who in 1938 flew out of this very airfield to Ireland in an airplane of his own construction. He’d been flatly denied permission to make the crossing but went ahead anyway, afterward explaining that, confused by fog and a misreading of his compass, he’d erroneously believed himself to be en route to California. “When he came back, they held a tickertape parade for him on Broadway,” Chuck said. But Chuck decided, in the end, to name it—“Take a guess. We were just talking about it”—Bald Eagle Field. “Bald Eagle Field is perfect,” Chuck said. “It’s got scale. It makes it American.” Also, he said, he wanted to pay homage to the eagles and other birds—hummingbirds, herons—that habitually used the nature preserve located in this strange parkland, and homage also to the hundreds of migrant species traveling through here on the Atlantic flyway.