He reached the mezzanine and jumped down the last three steps and pushed forcefully through the door into the lobby. In other cities people might have looked askance at a wild, disheveled creature bursting out of the catacombs. But Amsterdamers during Cannabis Cup season took such occurrences as matter-of-fact. He heard an elevator bell ping. The sound came from his left, which puzzled him because his inner compass told him it should be to his right. But he followed his ears. The light for floor #2 was illuminated in the bank above the elevator door, and Stein positioned himself in front of the doors that would open in a moment. But instead, the light indicating floor #3 went on. It was going up, not coming down. In a panic he spun around and saw that another elevator car had preceded him down and its passengers were dispersed into the lobby.
He had not won the race with the machine after all. There was kaleidoscopic motion all over the lobby, a universe of particles simultaneously expanding and contracting. He didn’t know what he was looking for. But amidst the sea of scents and pipe tobacco and shoe leather and artificial heat, Stein sniffed out that floating Jet Stream of aroma that had guided him. His neck swiveled until he locked in on the source. The glimpse of a woman hurrying out the front door, a trailing arm, the back of a leg.
Stein hastened across the voluminous lobby, trying not to be too conspicuous The front door opened before him. He barely noticed the frigid street air. He saw the woman scurrying across the street in the brief lull of oncoming traffic, and getting into a taxi. Her profile was framed for an instant in the passenger-side window. A jaunty fur cap and her drawn up collar covered most of her features. It wasn’t much past noon but the sun was already at a low angle and shone directly into the window. The taxi eased into the flow of traffic. Stein ran into the street and waved his arms like discouraged semaphore flags. He looked desperately for another taxi but they were all engaged.
A delivery boy of about nineteen stopped in front of the hotel and braced his bicycle into the rack. Stein grabbed him. “Do you speak English?” Stein demanded.
Yes.
“Do you want a hundred dollars?”
Yes.
A moment later Stein was pedaling the thin-wheeled bicycle in pursuit of the taxicab and the kid was putting Stein’s money into his pocket, probably wondering why somebody would pay a hundred dollars for a free city bike. Traffic was heavy and the taxi could not get far ahead. Nor could Stein quite catch up to it. Clusters of cyclists trailed behind the buses and trams like pilot fish. He ducked his head to try to avoid the wind. The moisture in his eyes was freezing over. His nostrils crackled. He pulled his flannel shirt tight around his body. Frostbite seemed inevitable but just then the cab got stopped at a red light at the next intersection. Stein pedaled madly between lines of traffic and nearly caught up. But the light turned green before he reached them, and the cab turned parallel to the frozen Herengracht Canal.
Stein’s hands and his crotch were completely numb. A cold steel ingot was expanding through his rib cage. He couldn’t feel the handlebars or his ass on the seat and was on the verge of turning back. But he caught sight of the taxi again. It was turning around and heading up the hill toward him. But its flag was up and its passenger seat was vacant. She must just have gotten out where the cab made the U-turn. Stein pedaled down the ramp into the lower roadway.
A stone staircase led to the bridge that crossed the canal. Young and old skaters were gliding across the canal’s frozen surface using the ice as a means of travel. He compared this to pampered Ange-lenos driving their cars to their expensive gyms and fighting to get the closest parking spot to save walking a few extra steps.
He saw her coat first, trailing out behind her. Her hands were clutched to the small of her back. She skated out toward the center of the canal, then folded her full-length camel coat into a square and placed it on the ice. Underneath it she was wearing a gold jacket and gold pants. She began to skate figures using the coat as the axis of her circles. Her movements were precise. Her arms maintained elongated positions; her eyes followed her fingertips. She skated backwards on one long egret leg, the elevated limb reaching straight back at ninety degrees, then arching higher as her back bowed and the blade of her skate bisected the sky.
Stein was not the only spectator mesmerized. Other skaters stopped to watch her display. Spewing flumes of shaved ice, she spun to an abrupt stop in front of her folded coat, picked it up and tucked it under her arm, and, the cadenza over, skated with sublime ease of purpose upstream.
The medicinal power of lust restored circulation to Stein’s extremities. He noticed for the first time that a saddlebag was draped across the back tire frame of his newly purchased bicycle. He unfastened the Velcro fasteners and reached inside. There was a green lightweight Israeli army jacket tucked away, which he immediately put on. A pair of gloves was in the pocket; a scarf and wool hat stuffed into the sleeve. How nice to have noticed these items before, he thought.
He set off along the narrow footpath that ran adjacent to the canal. It was frozen hard, bounded on the left by the canal and on the right by a waist-high stone wall. He ran a few strides but the air hit his lungs like spikes of liquid Freon. A trio of aldermen clad in long black coats and friars’ hats skated past. He pushed himself onward into the wind for another two hundred yards until his legs became sodden pilings and his will dissolved. The skater had long since disappeared around the bend in the canal. Stein was going so slowly that even the power of reason had caught up with him. What the hell was he doing? Chasing an apparition? Exorcising his guilt through ordeal? It wasn’t going to change anything.
He walked slowly back in the direction he had come. In the concave curve of his spine, an interpreter of body language would read defeat and resignation. The wind was at his back and the return trip seemed to take almost no time. His profound relief at finding his way was quickly replaced with the feeling indoctrinated at a young age to Jewish males: If getting back was this easy, he had not gone far enough. And what would he have said to the skater even if he had caught up? Oh hello, do you speak English, you smell good? It was absurd.
The bicycle that he had left carelessly unlocked was standing unmolested. Traffic on this side of the canal flowed one-way, and he carried his bike across a footbridge to the opposite side. There, his inner guidance system told him the road was heading in the general direction of the hotel. He pedaled over cobblestones that rattled his kidneys and sent pains up through his knees. He recognized no landmarks, but he felt he could intuit his way back through the winding concentric byways. Twenty minutes later he knew he was hopelessly lost.
He found himself at a glass front triangular building that bore an unpretentious sign reading ‘Sensi Seed Bank’. As a matter of principal, Stein avoided places that other people thought of as shrines, and The Sensi Seed Bank was one of those places. But he had to check it out, even if it was just to get directions and out of the cold for five minutes.
Like most conventional nurseries, it had a section containing fertilizers, soil enhancers, weed killers and the like, another with equipment-shovels, hoes and watering apparatus. The one minor exception was that all the seeds and plants for sale were strains of cannabis, and all the apparatus was designed specifically for its cultivation. An entire section was devoted to hydroponic cultivation. On display were low-amperage lighting fixtures, carbon dioxide fans, thermometers, pH testers, products for control of aphid, fungus and mildew. Stein recognized highly sophisticated extensions of the gadgets he and his boys had improvised thirty years ago. Amidst the proliferation of books and pamphlets on the subject, every back issue of High Times and all Ed Rosenthal’s books were on display, plus Stein’s own protean work, Smoke This Book. His opinion of them softened. He took off his gloves and warmed his hands under a grow light.