Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  All of which brings me to the second, and last, New York winter I endured on my own, when I wondered what exactly had happened to the unanswerable, conspiratorial place I’d found years earlier, and the desirer who’d walked its streets.

  That was a very white winter. A blizzard on Presidents’ Day 2003 brought one of the heaviest snows in the city’s history. For a day or two, outdoor motions seemed a kind of mummery and the newspapers broke up the Iraq stories with photos of children tobogganing on Sheep’s Meadow. I passed the morning of the holiday in an armchair in my hotel apartment, mesmerized by a snowdrift on the wrought-iron balcony that grew and deepened and monstrously settled against the glass door, not completely melting until mid-March. It says something about my empty-headedness that I followed this monthlong thaw with something like tension. At least twice a day I peered through the French windows and inspected the dirty, faintly glowing accumulation of ice. I was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction. Random mental commotions of this kind constantly agitated me during this period, when I was in the habit, among other strange habits, of lying on the floor of my living room and staring into the space under my brown armchair, a letter-box-shaped crevice out of which, I may have hoped, an important communication would come. I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face. My assumption was that all around me, in the lustrous boxes thickly checkering the night, countless New Yorkers lay stretched out on the floor, felled by similar feelings; or, if not actually poleaxed, stood at their windows, as I often did, to observe the winter clouds rubbing out—so, from my vantage point, it appeared—the skyscrapers in the middle distance. The magnitude of the vanishing was wonderful, even to a spirit such as my own, perhaps because it preluded the seemingly miraculous reemergence from the clouds of towers dashed from within with light. On Presidents’ Day, however, the vaporous, enormously disappearing city provoked a different response. Tiring of my snowdrift vigil, I hauled myself out of the armchair and traveled to my bedroom and, in search of a fresh point of view, wandered to the window there. Snowflakes like coffee grinds blackened the insect screen. Powdered ice, blown up from the window trough, had gained on the sill and now crept up the glass. I was, it will be understood, afflicted by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights, so that when I peered out into the flurry and saw no sign of the Empire State Building, I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance—everything of so-called concreteness—was indistinct from its unnamable opposite.

  Kicking a rock or patting a dog is, I suppose, enough to rid most people of this variety of bewilderment, which must be as ancient as our species. But I didn’t have a rock or a dog to hand. I had nothing to hand—nothing but the glass of a window under assault from a storm. It came as a reprieve to hear the infuriating cheep of my telephone.

  It was Rachel. She told me first about the huge antiwar rally that had taken place in London two days before and how Jake had carried a NOT IN MY NAME placard. Next she told me, in the tone of a person discussing a grocery list, that she had definitely decided not to return to the United States, at least not before the end of the Bush administration or any successor administration similarly intent on a military and economic domination of the world. It was no longer a question of physical security, she said, although that of course remained a factor. It was a question, rather, of not exposing Jake to an upbringing in an “ideologically diseased” country, as she put it, a “mentally ill, sick, unreal” country whose masses and leaders suffered from extraordinary and self-righteous delusions about the United States, the world, and indeed, thanks to the influence of the fanatical evangelical Christian movement, the universe, delusions that had the effect of exempting the United States from the very rules of civilized and lawful and rational behavior it so mercilessly sought to enforce on others. She stated, growing more and more upset, that we were at a crossroads, that a great power had “drifted into wrongdoing,” that her conscience permitted no other conclusion.

  Ordinarily, I would have said nothing; but it seemed to me that my dealings with my son were at stake. So I said, “Rach, please let’s try to keep things in perspective.”

  “Perspective? And what perspective would that be? The perspective of the free press of America? Is that where you get your perspective, Hans?” She made a harsh sound of mirth. “From TV networks funded by conservative advertisers? From the Wall Street Journal? From the Times, that establishment stooge? Why not Ari Fleischer, while you’re at it?”

  Not for the first time, I was finding it hard to believe this was the woman I’d married—a corporate litigator, let’s not forget, radicalized only in the service of her client and with not the smallest bone to pick about money and its doings.

  “You want Jake to grow up with an American perspective? Is that it? You want him to not be able to point to Britain on a map? You want him to believe that Saddam Hussein sent those planes into the Towers?”

  Specks of snow, small and dark as flies, swarmed before me. I said, “Of course he wouldn’t grow up in ignorance. We wouldn’t allow it.”

  She said, “Bush wants to attack Iraq as part of a right-wing plan to destroy international law and order as we know it and replace it with the global rule of American force. Tell me which part of that sentence is wrong, and why.”

  As usual, she was too quick for me. I said, “I don’t want to get into an argument about this. You’re pinning views on me that I don’t have.”

  Rachel seemed to laugh. “See? It’s pointless having this discussion. It’s like playing tennis with someone who insists on playing gin rummy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re constantly flailing around and changing the subject and making emotive statements. It’s the classic conservative tactic. Instead of answering the point, you sabotage the discussion.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Repeat the point. And stop calling me a conservative.”

  “You are a conservative,” Rachel said. “What’s so sad is you don’t even know it.”

  “If your point is that the U.S. should not attack Iraq,” I managed, “I’m not going to disagree with that. But if your point is…” I trailed off, at a substantive loss. I was distracted, too—by a memory of Rachel and me flying to Hong Kong for our honeymoon, and how in the dimmed cabin I looked out of my window and saw lights, in small glimmering webs, on the placeless darkness miles below. I pointed them out to Rachel. I wanted to say something about these creaturely cosmical glows, which made me feel, I wanted to say, as if we had been removed by translation into another world. Rachel leaned across me and looked down to the earth. “It’s Iraq,” she said.

  She said, “I’m saying the U.S. has no moral or legal authority to wage this war. The fact that Saddam is horrible and should be shot dead today is not the issue. The bad character of the enemy does not make the war good. Think politically, for once. Stalin was a monster. He killed millions of people. Millions. Does that mean we should have supported Hitler in his invasion of Russia? We should have stood shoulder to shoulder with Hitler because he was proposing to rid the world of a mass murderer?”

  I should have concurred. I knew better than to argue with Rachel about such things. But I was ashamed and wanted to redeem myself. “You’re saying Bush is like Hitler,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m not comparing Bush to Hitler!” Rachel almost pleaded. “Hitler is just an extreme example. You use extreme examples to test a proposition. It’s called reasoning. That’s how you reason. You make a proposition and you follow it to its logical conclusion. Hans, you’re supposed to be the great rationalist.”

  As I’ve said, I never laid claim to this trait. I merely saw myself as cautious about my pronouncements. The idea that I was a rationalist was one Rachel had nurtured—albeit, I must admit, with my complicity. Who has the courage
to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

  “This isn’t reasoning,” I said. “This is just aggression.”

  “Aggression? Hans, can’t you understand? Can’t you see this isn’t about personal relations? Politeness, niceness, you, me—it’s all irrelevant. This is about a life-and-death struggle for the future of the world. Our personal feelings don’t come into the picture. There are forces out there. The United States is now the strongest military power in the world. It can and will do anything it wants. It has to be stopped. Your feelings and my feelings”—she was sobbing now—“are not on the agenda.”

  Once again I stared out of my window. The snowfall had come to an end. A cold toga draped the city.

  “It’s been snowing here,” I said. “Jake could build a snowman on Twenty-third Street.”

  Rachel sniffled. “Well, I’m not moving him over there so he can build a snowman. By that logic we should all head for the North Pole. What’s left of it.”

  I laughed, but I knew Rachel well enough to take seriously everything she had said. However, I had no idea how to respond effectively. The difficulty was not merely that I couldn’t think of an alternative to the program of traveling to London once or twice a month. No, my difficulty was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love.

  Naturally, I reproached myself. I should have not allowed this transatlantic standoff, which had now lasted for more than a year, to persist. I should have moved to London in defiance of my wife’s firm but indistinctly explained preference for separateness. More particularly, I should have seen Rachel’s telephonic outburst coming, not least because the imminent invasion of Iraq had stimulated an impressive and impassioned opinion in practically everybody I knew. For those under the age of forty-five it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment—or, if they hadn’t, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer’s arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out. I could take a guess at the oil production capacity of an American-occupied Iraq and in fact was pressed at work about this issue daily, and stupidly. (“What are you saying, two and a half million barrels or three million? Which one is it?”) But I found myself unable to contribute to conversations about the value of international law or the feasibility of producing a dirty bomb or the constitutional rights of imprisoned enemies or the efficacy of duct tape as a window sealant or the merits of vaccinating the American masses against smallpox or the complexity of weaponizing deadly bacteria or the menace of the neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration, or indeed any of the debates, each apparently vital, that raged everywhere—raged, because the debaters speedily grew heated and angry and contemptuous. In this ever-shifting, all-enveloping discussion, my orientation was poor. I could not tell where I stood. If pressed to state my position, I would confess the truth: that I had not succeeded in arriving at a position. I lacked necessary powers of perception and certainty and, above all, foresight. The future retained the impenetrable character I had always attributed to it. Would American security be improved or worsened by taking over Iraq? I did not know, because I had no information about the future purposes and capacities of terrorists or, for that matter, American administrations; and even if I were to have such information, I could still not hope to know how things would turn out. Did I know if the death and pain caused by a war in Iraq would or would not exceed the miseries that might likely flow from leaving Saddam Hussein in power? No. Could I say whether the right to autonomy of the Iraqi people—a problematic national entity, by all accounts—would be enhanced or diminished by an American regime change? I could not. Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little interest. I didn’t really care.

  In short, I was a political-ethical idiot. Normally, this deficiency might have been inconsequential, but these were abnormal times. If New Yorkers were not already jumpy enough from the constant reminders of the code orange level of terrorist threat, there was another peril to concern us: the fires underfoot. The extraordinary quantities of snow and street salt were combining, apparently, to eat away at the municipal electrical system, with the result that, all winter and into the spring, underground wires caught light and flames spreading under the streets blew up thousands of manholes on sidewalks from Long Island City to Jamaica to the East Village, the detonations shooting cast-iron manhole covers fifty feet into the air. It was Chuck Ramkissoon who alerted me to this danger. After our January outing he’d placed me on his electronic mailing list, and two or three times a week I was one of around a dozen—“Dear friends,” he called us—to receive messages about whatever was on his mind: cricket, American history, birding, sales of Brooklyn real estate, meteorological phenomena, interesting economic data, resonant business stories (there was an item, perhaps for my special benefit, about Arctic gas), and eye-catching miscellanea such as the business of the electrical inferno. He signed them all,

  CHUCK RAMKISSOON

  President, New York Cricket Club

  Chuck Cricket Corp. had been replaced by a grander entity.

  Often Chuck’s e-mails simply provided links to Web sites he found interesting, but when the message was concerned with his cricket undertaking he might give us the benefit of his own musings. One such memorandum was headed NOT AN IMMIGRANT SPORT. Its text—still preserved in my electronic filing cabinet—was as follows:

  Cricket was the first modern team sport in America. It came before baseball and football. Cricket has been played in New York since the 1770s. The first international team sports fixtures anywhere were cricket matches between the USA and Canada in the 1840s and 1850s. In those days cricket matches in New York were watched by thousands of fans. It was a professional sport reported in all the newspapers. There were clubs all over the country, in Newark, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, San Francisco, Boston, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Baltimore and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia alone there were dozens of clubs and the magnificent facilities of Philadelphia Cricket Club, Merion Cricket Club and Germantown Cricket Club are still standing today. (The fields are mostly used for lawn tennis.) It was not until the First World War that the sport went into sharp decline for complicated reasons.

  So it is wrong to see cricket in America as most people see it i.e. an immigrant sport. It is a bona fide American pastime and should be regarded as such. All those who have attempted to “introduce” cricket to the American public have failed to understand this. Cricket is already in the American DNA. With proper promotion, marketing, government support etc awareness of the game could easily be reawakened. American kids could once again play their country’s oldest team sport!

  One recipient of this missive copied his reply to all of Chuck’s addressees:

  Whoever

  Could you please stop sending me crazy junk mail?!

  Although I glanced at them, I didn’t respond to Chuck’s communications. My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness. I was wondering, for example, when he was going to ask me for money for his cricket scheme. But I was also drawn to Chuck. I had him down as a lover of contingencies and hypotheses, a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood. The business world is densely margined by dreamers, men, almost invariably, whose longing selves willingly submit to the enchantment of projections and pie charts and crisply totted numbers, who toy and toy for years, like novelists, with the same sheaf of documents, who slip
out of bed in the middle of the night to pitch to a pajama’d reflection in a windowpane. I’ve never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I’m an analyst—a bystander. I lack entrepreneurial wistfulness. In other respects, of course, I’m as faraway as they come. That winter, for example, when the cricket World Cup was being played in southern Africa and several old teammates of mine played for the Netherlands against the great Indians and Australians, I imagined that events long ago had taken a different turn and that in my youth I’d discovered the great secret of batting—something to do with the position of the head, maybe, or the preliminary movement of the feet, or a special dedication of memory—with the result (I imagined further on those black mornings when I woke early to follow the Dutch matches on cricinfo.com’s live scoreboard) that I was now one of those orange-clad Hollanders stationed on the pale lawns of Paarl and Potchefstroom, and that when Brett Lee, say, took twenty sprinted strides towards me, and leaped, and hurled the white one-day ball at my toes, the ninety-two-mile-per-hour blur came into focus and hung before me like a Christmas bauble, and with a simple push of my long-handled bat I sent the ball gliding to the boundary’s white rope. How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn’t known, a little shamefully, the joys they bring? I suspect that what keeps us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual, but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary otherworldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion farfetched sense of the world and our place in it. It’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble—that, one might argue, brought Chuck Ramkissoon the worst trouble of all. His head wasn’t sufficiently in the clouds. He had a clear enough view of the gap between where he stood and where he wished to be, and he was determined to find a way across.