The kid vanishes.
“And a thank you?!” rocket-girl yells after him. “Jesus, have you noticed how many beggars there are in Zagreb lately?!”
Pudding-girl is silent.
“Before it was just the gypsies. Now everyone’s got their hand out,” says rocket-girl, frowning with worry.
Taking a cigarette from the packet on the table, she lights up and lets out a long drag.
LIQUID TIMES
A BICYCLE-EYE view is a view out on the world. When you ride a bike your gaze doesn’t linger long on your surroundings, but neither does the world exactly flash by, particularly when you ride as leisurely as I do. The elevated position and nonchalant circling of the pedals allows you register things, but doesn’t give you time for empathy. Here I need to add that the view out from my bike is always of the same restricted space, of a park in my Amsterdam neighborhood.
The park has changed a lot over the past decade, it’s a long while since it was a space for urban escapism. Today, particularly on the weekends, it’s crawling with joggers, cyclists, and walkers of all ages and nationalities. Before you’d only see young men out jogging, now you see tubby middle-aged women wrapped in hijabs. People used to cruise around on their bikes. Today, little mobility scooters barrel down the bike paths, unruly old folk at the steering wheel. Sometimes you even see an entire Turkish brood heading off to do the shopping on them. Then there are the kids on Vespas, the invalids in their wheelchairs, and the increasingly wary cyclists.
My gaze settles on a small posse bounding toward me. There’s a young man chugging along pushing a twin-size baby stroller. A young woman with a boy in tow follows close behind. A girl and a dog bring up the rear. This family out for a morning jog would be fantastic material for a pro-life propaganda video, that’s if — dog and baby twins excepted — they weren’t all clenching their jaws. There isn’t the slightest trace of pleasure on their faces. They might as well have stayed home and cleaned their teeth.
Actually, no one’s cheerful anymore. Not the scowling old fellow, plastic bag in one hand, grumpily hurling clumps of dry bread into the lake with the other. Not the young couple with a child who’s watching the angry old boy, and not the teenager sauntering past totally indifferent. It’s a sunny Saturday morning, little sailboats and winsome ducks gently glide across the lake. The trees and grass exude a calming shade of green. So why the general anxiety dimming the glow of this Amsterdam park life idyll?
According to demographers and the newspapers, life on earth is getting a little crowded. The number of earthlings has just topped seven billion. India, currently with a population of around 1.2 billion is soon to overtake China as the most populous country on earth. The developed countries of today are projected to experience future depopulation, while developing countries such as Nigeria are expected to see population explosions. Some 1.5 billion earthlings live on less than a dollar a day, and huge numbers perish from hunger. People with a planetary view of the world are worriedly wondering if in the near future we’ll all be hungry, and whether there aren’t simply too many of us. Perhaps this accounts for why more and more people are asking themselves how to die. I mean, when there’s no answer to the question of how to live.
Demographers suggest that the demographic picture of little Croatia is currently in a bad way. More people are dying than being born, and Croats no longer believe in church or state. The raging procreational passion that erupted with the birth of the Croatian state has long since fizzled. These days, potential parents don’t have jobs and so live with their parents, not in any position to rent, let alone buy an apartment. And they’re a curse on the homes of their parents, who themselves are barely surviving on miserable pensions. Unofficial statistics suggest than every second Croat is a thief. This dirty little detail helps sap the procreational impulses of potential parents. It also helps explain why young Croatian women down contraceptive pills like sedatives.
But even death is an expensive solution. The price of cemetery plots has gone through the roof. With thieves, gangsters, murderers, and politicians all desperate for their deeds to outlive their mortal coils, there’s a mad scramble on for prime plots at Zagreb’s main cemetery. The Catholic Church in Croatia granted (not without a fee of course) deceased Croatian president Franjo Tuđman pole position at the very entrance, where hitherto there had only been a chapel. Today, Tuđman’s majestic grave stands almost buttressed behind the chapel, the new layout like a symbolic sentry box surveilling the entire cemetery. In this new order of things it’s immediately clear who rules the Croatian dead, present and future. Tuđman’s devotees among the living quickly started scrapping for the first row. The heirs to old graves never dreamed of selling out their great-grandmothers’ and fathers’ final resting places. But the ambitious buyers are generous to a fault, which is understandable. They’re buying a spot in the eternal gallery. And in this respect a new social order is taking form in the graveyard. Wealthy dead folk squeeze out poor dead folk.
“Resomation” or “green cremation” is a new invention in corpse management, a natural process for the speedy decomposition of the body. The deceased is fed into something called a “resomator” (which looks like an elongated washing-machine) and at high pressure exposed to a water and potassium hydroxide solution. After three hours the machine spits back out around 200 gallons of mineral-rich liquid. Dental implants, crowns, pacemakers (which don’t explode like they do during cremation!) and other remains are ground into a fine ash and given to the family, the volume of ash being much less than that remaining after cremation. Resomation also consumes eight times less energy. The deceased’s liquid remains can be used as fertilizer, or just tipped down the sink. The process even erases any DNA trace of the deceased’s identity.
Resomation is currently legal in a handful of American states and several European countries. The Scots, incidentally, have the patent on resomation. Given the lack of cemetery space in Switzerland, resomation might soon be the only available burial option. And those who care about the environment can breath easy: Resomation is eco-friendly. “We are all dust and it is to dust we shall return” could soon be: “We are all liquid and it is as liquid we shall end.” For the many people who felt their lives worthless, posthumous transformation into this truly liquid form could be of some comfort (Water the lettuce with Grandma! We’ve never had such tasty lettuce before! Spray the geraniums with Granddad!)
What happens to the soul in the process of resomation — whether our soul is hydrophobic or water-resistant; whether on hitting the water it turns into a little submarine and rides the storm, or simply dissolves; whether at high pressure it is catapulted into the air like a miniature rocket, or simply evaporates — these are questions best left to wise men of theology. One thing is certain: Zygmunt Bauman is right. We live in a liquid era.
JUMPING OFF THE BRIDGE
I WAS GLUED to reports on the recent riots in the London boroughs of Tottenham, Hackney, and Brixton, stunned by the images of seething youth smashing shop windows and making their grab for street wear and electronics. Expensive mobile phones apparently topped their consumer desires, a detail that disappointed many commentators (If only they’d stolen bread and milk we’d understand!). I became fixated on something else though: A Waterstones bookstore the kids passed by might as well have been an undertaker’s. But they didn’t miss a beat in cleaning out the backpack of another dazed and confused kid who obviously needed medical attention, leaving him bloodied and lost in the street. On our television screens, shocked, we all saw what we wanted to see. Each of us projected our own fears onto the Rorscharchian stain of the London riots.