Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  We rest on a bench in front of some law offices. Over the front entrance, cameras have been installed to monitor the surveillance cameras, which have been vandalized. Once the dredger has passed, we can see a family of day campers on the opposite bank who’ve pitched their tent on a berm overlooking the channel.

  “Isn’t it too cold for camping?” I ask her.

  “Wasn’t it too cold for swimming?” she responds, reminding me of the boys we’d passed.

  She says Henk keeps replaying the same footage on his iFuze of Feyenoord’s MVP being lowered into the stadium beneath the team flag by a VSTOL. “So, here’s what I’m thinking,” she continues, as if that led directly to her next thought. She mentions a conservatory in Berlin, fantastically expensive, that has a chamber music program. She’d like to send Henk there during his winter break and maybe longer.

  This seems to me to be mostly about his safety, though I don’t acknowledge that. He’s a gifted cellist but hardly seems devoted to the instrument.

  With her pitchman’s good cheer, she repeats the amount it will cost, which to me sounds like enough for a week in a five-star hotel. But she says money can always be found for a good idea, and if it can’t, then it wasn’t a good idea. Finally, she adds that as a hydraulic engineer, I’m the equivalent of an atomic physicist in technological prestige.

  Atomic physicists don’t make a whole lot of money either, I remind her. And our argument proceeds from there. I can see her disappointment expanding as we speak, and even as my inner organs start to contract, I sit on the information of my hidden nest egg and allow all of the unhappiness to unfold. This takes forever. The word in our country for the decision-making process is the same as the one we use for what we pour over pancakes. Our national mindset pivots around the word but as in This, yes, but that, too. Cato puts her fingers to her temples and sheathes her cheeks with her palms. Her arguments run aground on my tolerance, which has been elsewhere described as a refusal to listen. Passion in Dutch meetings is punished by being ignored. The idea is that the argument itself matters, not the intensity with which it’s presented. Outright rejections of a position are rare; what you get instead are suggestions for improvement that, if followed, would annihilate the original intent. And then everyone checks their agendas to schedule the next meeting.

  Just like that, we’re walking back. We’re single file again, and it’s gotten colder.

  From our earliest years, we’re taught not to burden others with our emotions. A young Amsterdammer in the Climate Campus is known as the Thespian because he sobbed in public at a coworker’s funeral. “You don’t need to eliminate your emotions,” Kees reminded him when the Amsterdammer complained about the way he’d been treated. “You just need to be a little more economical with them.”

  Another thing I never told Cato: my sister and I the week before she caught the flu had been jumping into the river in the winter as well. That was my idea. When she came out, her feet and lips were blue and she sneezed all the way home. “Do you think I’ll catch a cold?” she asked that night. “Go to sleep,” I answered.

  We take a shortcut through the sunken pedestrian mall they call the Shopping Gutter. By the time we reach our street, it’s dark, raining again, and the muddy pavement’s shining in the lights of the cafes. Along the new athletic complex in the distance, sapphire blue searchlights are lancing up into the rain at even intervals, like meteorological harp strings. “I don’t know if you know what this does to me, or you don’t,” Cato says at our doorstep, once she’s stopped and turned. Her thick brown hair is beaded with moisture where it’s not soaked. “But either way, it’s just so miserable.”

  I actually have the solution to our problem, I’m reminded as I follow her up the stairs. The thought makes me feel rehabilitated, as though I’ve told her instead of only myself.

  * * * *

  Cato always maintained that when it came to their marriage, her parents practiced a sort of apocalyptic utilitarianism: on the one hand, they were sure everything was going to hell in a handbasket, while on the other, they continued to operate as if things could be turned around with a few practical measures.

  But there’s always that moment in a country’s history when it becomes obvious the earth is less manageable than previously thought. Ten years ago, we needed to conduct comprehensive assessments of the flood defenses every five years. Now safety margins are adjusted every six months to take new revelations into account. For the last year and a half, we’ve been told to build into our designs for whatever we’re working on features that restrict the damaging effects after an inevitable inundation. There won’t be any retreating back to the hinterlands, either, because given the numbers we’re facing, there won’t be any hinterlands. It’s gotten to the point that pedestrians are banned from many of the sea-facing dikes in the far west even on calm days. At the entrance to the Haringvlietdam, they’ve erected an immense yellow caution sign that shows two tiny stick figures with their arms raised in alarm at a black wave three times their size that’s curling over them.

  I watched Kees’ face during a recent simulation as one of his new configurations for a smart dike was overwhelmed in half the time he would have predicted. It had always been the Dutch assumption that we would resolve the problems facing us from a position of strength. But we passed that station long ago. At this point, each of us understands privately that we’re operating under the banner of lost control.

  * * * *

  The next morning, we’re crammed together into Rotterdam Climate Proof’s Smartvan and heading west on N211, still not speaking. Cato’s driving. At 140 km/hr, the rain fans across the windshield energetically, racing the wipers. Grey clouds seem to be rushing in from the sea in the distance. We cross some polders that are already flooded, and there’s a rocking buoyancy when we traverse that part of the road that’s floating. Trucks sweep by backward and recede behind us in the spray.

  The only sounds are those of tires and wipers and rain. Exploring the radio is like visiting the Tower of Babel: Turks, Berbers, Cape Verdeans, Antilleans, Angolans, Portuguese, Croatians, Brazilians, Chinese. Cato managed to relocate her simulcast with her three long-faced Germans to the Hoek van Holland; she told them she wanted the Maeslant Barrier as a backdrop, but what she really intends is to surprise them, live, with the state of the water levels already. Out near the Barrier, it’s pretty dramatic. Cato the Optimist with indisputable visual evidence that the sky is falling: can the German position remain unshaken in the face of that? Will her grandstanding work? It’s hard to say. It’s pretty clear that nothing else will.

  “Want me to talk about Gravenzande?” I ask her. “That’s the sort of thing that will really jolt the boys from the Reich.”

  “That’s just what I need,” she answers. “You starting a panic about something that might not even be true.”

  Gravenzande’s where she’s going to drop me, a few kilometers away. Three days ago, geologists there turned up crushed shell deposits seven meters higher on the dune lines inland than anyone believed floods had ever reached, deposits that look to be only about ten thousand years old. If this ends up confirmed, it’s seriously bad news, given what it clarifies about how cataclysmic things could get even before the climate’s more recent turn for the worse.

  It’s Saturday, and we’ll probably put in twelve hours. Henk’s getting more comfortable with his weekend nanny than with us. As Cato likes to tell him when she’s trying to induce him to do his chores: around here, you work. By which she means that old joke that when you buy a shirt in Rotterdam, it comes with the sleeves already rolled up.

  We pass poplars lining the canals in neat rows, a canary-yellow smudge of a house submerged to its second-floor windows, and beyond a roundabout, a pair of decrepit rugby goalposts.

  “You’re really going to announce that if the Germans pull their weight, everything’s going to be fine?” I ask. But she ignores me.

  She needs a decision, she tells me a few minutes later, as though
tired of asking. Henk’s winter break is coming up. I venture that I thought it wasn’t until the twelfth, and she reminds me with exasperation that it’s the fifth, the schools now staggering vacation times to avoid overloading the transportation systems.

  We pass the curved sod roofs of factories. The secret account’s not a problem but a solution, I decide, and as I model to myself ways of implementing it as such, Cato finally asserts—as though she’s waited too long already—that she’s found the answer: she could take that Royal Dutch Shell offer to reconfigure their regional media relations, they could set her up in Wannsee, and Henk could commute. They could stay out there and get a bump in income besides. Henk could enroll in the conservatory.

  We exit N211 northwest on an even smaller access road to the coast, and within a kilometer, it ends in a turnabout next to the dunes. She pulls the car around so it’s pointed back toward her simulcast, turns off the engine, and sits there beside me with her hands in her lap.

  “How long has this been in the works?” I ask. She wants to know what I mean, and I tell her that it doesn’t seem like so obscure a question; she said no to Shell years ago, so where did this new offer come from?

  She shrugs, as if I’d asked if they were paying her moving expenses. “They called. I told them I’d listen to what they had to say.”

  “They called you,” I tell her.

  “They called me,” she repeats.

  She’s only trying to hedge her bets, I tell myself to combat the panic. Our country’s all about spreading risk around. “Do people just walk into this conservatory?” I ask. “Or do you have to apply?”

  She doesn’t answer, which I take to mean that she and Henk already have applied and he’s been accepted. “How did Henk feel about this good news?” I ask.

  “He wanted to tell you,” Cato answers.

  “And we’d see each other every other weekend? Once a month?” I’m attempting a version of steely neutrality but can feel the terror worming its way forward.

  “This is just one option of many,” she reminds me. “We need to talk about all of them.” She adds that she has to go. And that I should see all this as being primarily about Henk, not us. I answer that the Netherlands will always be here, and she smiles and starts the van.

  “You sure there’s nothing else you want to talk to me about?” she asks.

  “Like what?” I say. “I want to talk to you about everything.”

  She jiggles the gear shift lightly, considering me. “You’re going to let me drive away,” she says, “with your having left it at that.”

  “I don’t want you to drive away at all,” I tell her.

  “Well, there is that,” she concedes bitterly. She waits another full minute, then a curtain comes down on her expression and she puts the car in gear. She honks when she’s pulling out.

  At the top of the dune, I watch surfers in wet suits wading into the breakers in the rain. The rain picks up and sets the sea’s surface in a constant agitation. Even the surfers keep low to stay out of it. The wet sand’s like brown sugar in my shoes.

  * * * *

  Five hundred thousand years ago, it was possible to walk from where I live to England. At that point, the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine. Even during the Romans’ occupation, the Zuider Zee was dry. But by the sixth century BC, we were building artificial hills out of marsh grass mixed with manure and our own refuse to keep our feet out of the water. And then in the seventeenth century, Hulsebos invented the Archimedes screw, and water wheels could raise a flow four meters higher than where it began, and we started to make real progress at keeping what the old people called the Waterwolf from the door.

  In the fifteenth century, Philip the Good ordered the sand dike that constituted the original Hondsbossche Seawall to be restored, and another built behind it as a backup. He named the latter the Sleeper dike. For extra security, he had another constructed behind that, calling that one the Dreamer dike. Ever since, schoolchildren have learned, as one of their first geography sentences, that Between Camperduinen and Petten lie three dikes: the Watcher, the Sleeper, and the Dreamer.

  We’re raised with the double message that we have to address our worst fears but that nonetheless they’ll also somehow domesticate themselves. Fifteen years ago, Rotterdam Climate Proof revived “The Netherlands Lives with Water” as a slogan, the accompanying poster featuring a two-panel cartoon in which a towering wave in the first panel is breaking before its crest over a terrified little boy, and in the second, it separates into immense foamy fingers so he can relievedly shake its hand.

  When Cato told me about that first offer from Shell, I could see her flash of feral excitement about what she was turning down. Royal Dutch Shell! She would’ve been fronting for one of the biggest corporations in the world. We conceived Henk a few nights later. There was a lot of urgent talk about getting deeper and closer and I remember striving once she’d guided me inside her to have my penis reach the back of her throat. Periodically, we slowed into the barest sort of movement, just to further take stock of what was happening, and at one point we paused in our tremoring, and I put my lips to her ear and reminded her of what she’d passed up. After winning them over, she could have picked her city: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Rio. The notion caused a momentary lack of focus in her eyes. Then as a response, she started moving along a contraction, and Shell and other options including speech evanesced away.

  If she were to leave me, where would I be? It’s as if she was put here to force my interaction with humans. And still I don’t pull it off. It’s like that story we were told as children, of Jesus telling the rich young man to go and sell all he has and give it to the poor, but instead, the rich man chose to keep what he had and went away sorrowful. When we talked about it, Kees said he always assumed the guy had settled in Holland.

  * * * *

  That Monday, more bad news: warm air and heavy rain have ventured many meters above established snowlines in the western Alps, and Kees holds up before me with both hands GRACE’s latest printouts about a storm cell whose potential numbers we keep rechecking because they seem so extravagant. He spends the rest of the morning on the phone trying to stress that we’ve hit another type of threshold here, that these are calamity-level numbers. It seems to him that everyone’s saying they recognize the urgency of the new situation but that no one’s acting like it. During lunch, a call comes in about the hinge and socket joint, itself five stories high, of one of the Maeslant doors. In order to allow the doors to roll with the waves, the joints are designed to operate like a human shoulder, swinging along both horizontal and vertical axes and transferring the unimaginable stresses to the joint’s foundation. The maintenance engineers are reporting that the foundation block—all fifty-two thousand tons of it—is moving.

  Finally, Kees flicks off his phone receptor and squeezes his eyes shut in despair. “Maybe our history’s just the history of picking up after disasters like this,” he tells me. “The Italians do pasta sauce and we do body retrieval.”

  After waiting a few minutes for updated numbers, I call Cato and fail to get through and then try my mother, who says she’s soaking her corns. I can picture the enamel basin with the legend CONTENTED FEET around the rim. The image seems to confirm that we’re all naked in the world, so I tell her to get some things together, that I’m sending someone out for her, that she needs to leave town for a little while.

  * * * *

  It’s amazing I’m able to keep trying Cato’s numbers, given what’s broken loose at every level of water management nationwide. Everyone’s shouting into headpieces and clattering away at laptops at the same time. At the Delta stations, the situation has already triggered the automatic emergency procedures with their checklists and hour-by-hour protocols. Outside my office window, the canal is lined with barges of cows, of all things, awaiting their river pilot to transport them to safety. The road in front of them is a gypsy caravan of traffic piled high with suitcases and furniture and roped-down plastic bags. Th
e occasional dog hangs from a car window. Those roads that can float should allow vehicular evacuation for six or seven hours longer than the other roads will. The civil defense teams at roundabouts and intersections are doing what they can to dispense biopacs and aquacells. Through the glass, everyone seems to be behaving well, though with a maximum of commotion.

  I’ve got the mayor of Ter Heijde on one line saying he’s up to his ass in ice water and demanding to know where the fabled Weak Links Project has gone when Cato’s voice finally breaks in on the other.

  “Where are you?” I shout, and the mayor shouts back “Where do you think?” I kill his line and ask again, and Cato answers, “What?” In just her one-word inflection, I can tell she heard what I said. “Is Henk with you?” I shout, and Kees and some of the others around the office look up despite the pandemic of shouting. I ask again and she says that he is. When I ask if she’s awaiting evacuation, she answers that she’s already in Berlin.

  I’m shouting other questions when Kees cups a palm over my receptor and says, “Here’s an idea. Why don’t you sort out all of your personal problems now?”

  After Cato’s line goes dead, I can’t raise her again, or she won’t answer. We’re engaged in such a blizzard of calls that it almost doesn’t matter. “Whoa,” Kees says, his hands dropping to his desk, and a number of our coworkers go silent as well, because the windows facing west are now rattling and black with rain. I look out mine, and bags and other debris are tearing free of the traffic caravan and sailing east. The rain curtain hits the cows in their barges and their ears flatten like mules and their eyes squint shut at the gale’s power.