But on my way back, I go straight past the ship anyway.
It’s smoother going in the opposite direction. The current works in my favor. Before long, the ship behind me fades into its cloak. My arms and back get used to the movement. I dial my mind to zero. I push on, on, on. No world exists beyond the area lit up by the raft’s lightstrips. I pass overturned cars. My paddle hits submerged objects I can’t identify, and sometimes I’m forced to maneuver around debris.
Sweat trickles down my ribs. At least my daily training is paying off.
On.
A small, upside-down boat.
On.
Bikes trapped in the branches of floating trees.
On.
Between a cluster of buildings, cracked and broken.
On.
Past uneven chunks of asphalt and dirt barely clearing the water. A dike. Entire parts of it are gone. Something lies draped over one jutted-out piece of the bike path. Water laps at clothes pulled taut, pulls at floating locks of hair.
On.
Traffic signs. Solar panels.
Trees come into view—floating, or cracked and blown down but still rooted—and with a start I realize I’ve reached the Amsterdam Forest. I’ve cleared three kilometers—no, more, for certain more—but I’m not even halfway to home.
Now that I pause for a minute, the ache in my back sets in. It threads into my arms and knuckles. I stretch. It’s easier going in this direction, but not easy: the current and wind pull me this way and that, and debris keeps smacking into me. I’ve almost been capsized three times already.
Even if I turn now, I’ll be late for work with Els. It’s my second day. I was going to prove I deserve my spot on the ship.
But if I turn, I’d only have to come back tomorrow. I’ll have gone this far for nothing but aching arms and blisters on my palms.
The Amsterdam Forest is impenetrable. Wild branches hook together and block my way. Trees upon trees upon trees. Farther on lies a chunk of road ten or twenty meters long, torn off on both sides. It rests on its side against the treetops. White road markers are still visible on the part that protrudes above the water’s surface.
I take the long way around. I’m late now. I’m never late. I shove aside that sting of a reminder. Trees are floating with the current into Amstelveen—the suburb I’ll need to pass through to get back into my neighborhood, which is this exclave of Amsterdam floating just southeast to the rest of the city—but the trees here are farther apart than in the Amsterdam Forest, easier to avoid. I save my strength, giving occasional firm pushes but riding the current for the most part.
And I look.
The Way Station is in Amstelveen. I know this place. Its residents were well-off, working nearby in Amsterdam or at Schiphol—or they had before, and had liked the Amstelveen malls and backyards enough to stay even when they became gray-haired and retired. At least half the buildings were new. The schools had small classes. The malls had floating carts.
Now my lights strike carcasses rather than houses. The malls have collapsed into debris. Junk drifts through the streets: A doghouse. Plants. Pillows. Dead birds, rats, hedgehogs, rabbits. A refrigerator is lodged in the teeth of a building. A body slaps fruitlessly against the side of a car. Bald, tall. Not Mirjam.
My paddle pushes aside wreckage and an occasional softer something that I tell myself must be sheets or chunks of earth because I don’t want to consider the alternative. Navigating is trickier amid the streets. The buildings and debris mess up the current, forming sudden whirlpools and rapids. The wind slams into me every time I clear a corner.
I pass through town. I’ve gone ten kilometers.
I can’t do this again on the way back, I think.
I go on, because it’s all I can do. I’ve always been good at pushing through pain. This is what I’ve trained for daily these past months. No time for weakness.
After another three kilometers, the map on my tab tells me I’m home; I need it to tell me, because even after seeing the ravage of Amstelveen, I don’t believe this is home.
My neighborhood is one of contradiction. The Bijlmer is art and festivals. The Bijlmer is concert venues and cinemas, office buildings and students, hospitals and trendy parks. The Bijlmer is brand-new, wealthy residents in renovated areas, artsy and green.
And then there’s us in the Bijlmer: tall apartment buildings discolored with age and still standing only because we can’t afford anywhere else, because people like Iris protest and shout and organize, and because the city thinks it’s cheaper to have us here—clashing and neglected—than to move us somewhere with modern heating and uncracked walls.
There’s us in the Bijlmer, who arrange our own festivals and clean our own parks because the city cares only about those with fountains and amphitheaters.
Iris told me all this, passion in her voice.
Iris isn’t here to see what became of it.
I can’t tell it apart from Amstelveen.
I float through, the paddle nearly forgotten. This was the new bank headquarters. That’s the remains of the metro line. Every meter cleared lights up something else I don’t want to see. I turn off my flashlight, relying only on the raft’s fainter lightstrips. I’m almost home, so close, and suddenly I’m not sure I want to do this still. I don’t want to see my destroyed apartment with no sign of Iris having returned, or search for Mom’s safe only to find it missing, losing all hope of getting Mom the food we tucked away for later—for now.
Something is humming.
No, buzzing. I sit upright. The sound bounces off faraway walls, making it impossible to pinpoint. I push forward warily. The Bijlmer is a couple meters below sea level, but there’s enough rubble in the water to make it more efficient to push off the ground than to paddle the way I did in the fields I passed through.
In front of me is an old apartment building, surprisingly intact. I shrink into myself as I pass. Some kids from school lived here. Iris used to play soccer with them on the field nearby—I had a huge crush on one of the boys, even though we’d never spoken—but they slowly stopped inviting her after she asked to be called Iris. I haven’t thought about them in years, but now I look up at this building and its memories and wonder if they’re on a generation ship somewhere, or underground, or being dragged along by the current.
The hum grows stronger. There—a fast-moving beam of light on the water. I turn on my flashlight, swing it left. It catches on a wide-eyed face.
Something slams into me.
Then the world goes cold and wet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE WATER SHOVES ME INTO THE DARK.
A mess of water goes down my throat. Ice-cold. I try to cough, spit, but it only gets worse. Salt and dirt burn my eyes. I kick. If there’s a bottom, I can push to the surface, just like at the Noordwijk beach in summertime. The current spins me away, upside down and gone. I thrash for a foothold. Something stabs my arm. I scream, spit out bubbles and valuable air. I try to yank my arm away. The movement only makes me cry out a second time. My arm is—I’m stuck. Stone pushes into my back. Every kick makes the pain worse. Cold spreads through me. My lungs are hurting. They’re craving. They’re bursting.
Warm water billows by my side. Blood, I think.
I don’t know how long I’m trapped; maybe it’s only seconds before the water lights up. A beam here. A flash there. Closer. The light catches a branch, stark black against mud brown. The outlines of rubble. Something round and bright blue, meters away.
Movement. Hands around my arm. I grip with my free hand, try to pull the person closer or push away—I don’t even know—all I know is there’s someone here, someone warm, someone who’ll get me out.
A tug. Pain lances through my arm. The person slips from my grasp and I scream and reach and—I can reach. I’m no longer stuck.
Fingers hook under my arms. I scratch at the water, trying to hold on to anything, anything at all, and then there’s air, and then I’m gasping, I’m spitting and c
oughing and sucking in as much as I can and loving the dead sky like I’ve never loved anything.
“Get the towels!” a voice shouts.
Wind rushes against my cheeks, sending more chills through me. I’m dragged away and remember vaguely to try to swim, to move and help. New pain makes me scream. I hold my arm limp by my side.
“Can you climb on here?”
A beam of light indicates a pile of rubble and an almost horizontal slab of wall. The water is shallow enough for me to walk. I do, shivering, unsteady. Rocks wobble under my foot.
“Careful,” the voice says. A woman. She steadies me with one hand against my back. “Careful. You’re almost there.”
I gag suddenly, tilt forward, and spit out a stream of water.
“Good. Get it out.” She thumps my back. I want to tell her to stop, but a second gag-cough doubles me over again.
Behind us, a scooter buzzes, water sloshes. A male voice says, “Here. I got—Is she OK? Shit, Samira, is she OK?”
We reach the fallen wall. The woman—Samira?—helps me sit. “I don’t think the metal hit any major arteries. But we need to get dry.”
My knees knock into each other, drawn high. My breath comes irregularly. I’m cold. I’m wet. I’m breathing, but not well, whether because of the water I swallowed or the thick dust in the air. I’ve lost my filter. I cough again, then gather the courage to look at my arm. Samira has clicked her flashlight off, but the lightstrip around her arm reveals the torn sleeve of my coat. The exposed fluff burns red.
“Let me take off your coat,” Samira says. Wet black locks of hair crisscross her face. “It’s freezing, and you’re soaked. We need to take a better look at your arm.”
“Arm.” My voice shivers as much as the rest of me. “Arm. What happened?”
“Your coat first.” She leans forward, hands at the ready, but waits until I nod to gently pull off my gloves and reach for my zipper. I fight the urge to draw away.
“What can I—?” the male voice asks.
“Grab the other scooter before it drifts away. Towel off. And get the spare filters!” As Samira talks, she pushes my coat down my shoulders along with the straps to my backpack. “This may hurt. Just focus on my voice: I’m Samira. My fiancé is Nordin. My water scooter hit you and you fell into the water.”
I’m too focused on the heavy coat sliding off me to respond beyond a grunt.
“What’s your name? Do you know what happened with your arm?”
“Hurt. Stuck. I was—” My voice croaks in a way I don’t recognize. “I was stuck somehow. I’m Denise.”
“A shard of rebar went through your arm. All the way through.” Samira pulls the sleeve down off my good arm and crouches by my left side. Dark, serious eyes try to meet mine. “Can you lift your arm?”
I try. I scream. Blackness dots my vision.
“OK, OK,” she says soothingly. “We’ll do that later. Here, I’ll just, I’ll push it down to your wrist, and you won’t have to lift your arm. This is enough to help you get dry.”
I whimper but hold still as she pushes the coat down. My sweater has gone from warm gray to soaked and dark. The sleeve has a ragged hole the size of a coin.
“You have to dry off, too,” Nordin says to Samira. “Your teeth are chattering.”
“Her first,” Samira says.
I hadn’t noticed her shivering. Only then does it hit me: it’s February 2, and we spent God knows how long in icy North Sea water. It can’t be more than a degree or two above freezing.
Nordin hands me a filter. I press the translucent plastic to my face and let it mold. “Let me . . . ,” I say, gasping in clean air. “I want to dry myself.”
Samira caves, dropping a towel in my lap. I go slow, first rubbing my face dry, then my torso, my shoulders. Every movement sends arrows of pain through my left arm and beyond, until it feels like half of me is pulsing—like the pain keeps expanding, pushing up against the rest of me.
The towel soaks in every drop it touches. Hyper-absorbent. The Nassau gave Mom the same kind of towel to dry the soaked office couch with. I’ve seen them on TV. Police and firefighters use them for exactly these situations: to quickly dry and warm people at the same time. The fabric can suck up at least a liter of water, and friction warms the material in seconds.
The scarf I’d wrapped my hair in got tangled around my hood. I automatically try to adjust it, but at this point, there’s no salvaging my hair. Loose locks are stretching and tangling down my back. Exhaustion falls over me like a cloak, thick and heavy. I can barely hold the towel up.
Samira sits maybe two meters away. There’s her, the edge of the rubble we sit on, the outline of the building by our side, and rippled slices of light where debris slips into the water. Five meters away, ten, there’s the glow of lightstrips from Nordin and the water scooters as he maneuvers the scooters toward us.
That’s it. Nothing else. The dark surrounding us isn’t the dark of midnight on the highway, not the dark of waking up at three in the morning and seeing formless shadows across the room.
It’s the dark of nothing. The black comes at us from all sides. Our small islands of light feel like candles, ready to be snuffed out with a breath.
“I have to go.”
“Where to? Are you with a shelter?”
I start to nod, then remember we’re meant to keep the Nassau quiet. “It’s just me and my mother. She’ll be worried.”
It’s not a lie. She might be, once she hears how long I’ve been gone. Of course, when Iris was gone, Mom barely seemed to care until the final hours before evacuation.
Maybe it’ll be the same for me: Denise will be fine. Oh, she’ll be back.
It makes me want to laugh when I realize how wrong I am. Of course it won’t be the same. I’m not Iris. It’ll be: Denise? Denise is gone? Oh, God, no. How long for? She can’t be out there by herself. She might’ve gotten lost. She’s—then, confidentially, with that look of hers—she’s autistic. What if she . . .
“My arm doesn’t feel good.” It doesn’t matter what Mom would think. I need the ship’s med bay. “It—God, that’s an understatement. I have to go.”
“That wound needs to be cleaned first. Do you have disinfectant where you’re staying?” I’m on the verge of saying yes so that she’ll let me go, when she continues. “We’ll take you back. Our scooters are faster than your raft. I don’t even know where it went.”
Where would I let them drop me off? At the ship, so the captain can loathe me for bringing him even more mouths to feed? The airport itself, where I won’t have any way of reaching the ship, and where Samira and Nordin might insist on seeing the promised disinfectant?
I look up at the black sky. I wish I was out there already, far from this place of dust and death. My arm fixed, Iris on board, only stars around us.
“I’m a medical student,” Samira says. “We could explore the AMC, see if anything’s left?”
“Hey, raiding a hospital instead of houses. We’ve moving up.” Nordin climbs up next to us. He’s roped both scooters together, the cord in his hands. He smiles, but his face is tense. “The AMC isn’t far.”
“I know,” I say. “I live here. I wanted to find my apartment.”
“Let’s at least flush out your arm with fresh water. Some of the dirt will be lodged too deeply, but . . . better than nothing.”
My vision goes woozy at the thought. I’m a minute away from my apartment. That’s the stupid thing. Even if I knew where to leave to, I don’t want to now that I’m so close.
“Nor, the water is in your bag, right?” Samira says.
“I have alcohol,” I say. My arm throbs. “If that’s better.”
“In your backpack?” Samira is already reaching for it.
“At home. In a safe. It’s the building behind this one.”
“Then we’re wrapping your arm and going. Now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SAMIRA DOESN’T LIKE ME EXERTING MYSELF in this state but brings me
along anyway: I’m the only one with a chance of recognizing my apartment amid all the debris.
I almost pass out from pain when they help me onto one of the scooters. I grab Samira with my good arm, too aware of her body in front of mine as I give directions.
The apartment building is still standing. The wind cuts into me like ice as I stare up, seeking out our balcony in a puzzle of missing walls and crumbling edges.
“There.” I point.
“Where’s the entrance?”
My gaze drops.
“Oh,” Samira says.
We can ride right in. The portico is open to the air. The wall where the doorbells and mailboxes used to be is gone. Nordin and Samira clumsily steer their way around a corner, past the crumpled elevator doors, until we reach the stairs leading up. The first set of stairs is a mess of rubble, piled up thick enough that we can climb across. The second set of stairs looks like someone punched a fist through it. Only an area extending half a meter from the wall is still vaguely stair-shaped. We creep along it, Nordin aiming a flashlight at the zigzag line between solid ground and the drop into the dark.
“Right here.” My voice echoes off the wall. “We’re on this floor.”
This building can’t be my home. Where are the sickly-sweet landscape paintings in these shared halls? Where’s the tile floor I walked across only four days ago? It’s all mud. All glass and dirt. All dead rats lying along the wall.
Four days. January 29 came and went so damn fast. Just a few weeks ago, I could’ve gone to an amateur music show in the nearby theater. Just a few months ago, I could’ve ordered roti from the restaurant nearby, where they knew I wanted my roti and its contents separate rather than together. I’d have waited inside, snug in my bathrobe, knowing Iris would answer the door so I wouldn’t have to. The delivery person would’ve walked across this same hallway, scanning these same walls for the right apartment number . . .
My front door hangs from its hinges.
I jolt my arm, letting the pain draw me back to the present. The note we left for Iris is gone. I look down, studying the footprints we left in the dirt. They’re the only ones I can make out.
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