“What about your mom?”
“They’ll call me if anything changes. I’ll be quick.”
As we set out we saw Ramji coming up the driveway. It was getting dark. A cold breeze came across the meadow of the farm where we turned off the road onto a path cutting through the woods. A few pines grew in random formations among the deciduous trees that had succumbed to the fall. They were like chaperones at the orgy, life that clung to its existence in a world where everything was expiring. The earth was covered by a red and gold blanket, and aside from a lone bird answering the rustle of our footsteps, the woods were still. The setting sun cast little pools of light between the tree trunks, but it was cool and crisp in there, the sun rays cut the shadows with soft shards of light until it retreated and finally disappeared in the outskirts. It was the first time on the trip there I saw no buildings or traffic. For a moment it was as if a distant echo of the past had been blown our way, a reminder of how things had once been. Everything was exaggerated and illuminated in the dying light. I hadn’t been out in nature for months and being suddenly surrounded by it sent an electric current surging through me.
“There’s the farm,” Helena said. “I don’t want to stay. She’s a bit cuckoo and won’t stop talking if you let her invite you in. I’d much rather head back to Lowland and have a beer with you before I go back home.”
She returned the amplifier and we walked back through the darkness. We sat for a while at the bar and then she left. I went to my room and lay there staring at the ceiling, counting the gnarls in the wood until I dozed off.
Chapter 17
I woke up late and was seized by an overpowering feebleness. After a brief struggle with a bottle of pills, I called Mother, who insisted that she didn’t feel bad at all, that no living person enjoyed such luxuries as she did, and that the room service at Hotel Europa could not hold a torch to the pampering she was receiving from Helena and Duncan. Frederick would not have a flu-man near his cancer patients and was happy to agree when I suggested leaving Lowland while I got over the worst of it.
I decided to take a bus up north, let the gray landscape lull me to sleep and ease my mind. The dark gray clouds skated across the hemisphere. It was the kind of sky that could be painted any which way. As soon as the bus took off, the world became new, not Lowland, I glued my head to the window and disappeared into my thoughts. Both hemispheres of my brain displayed fireworks of long-gone cake and coffee parties, a fermented past wrapped in asparagus and ham, held up by Willy Nellyson’s carved wooden cock. All this occupied my mind. I stared out the window. In Wormer, a squirrel hung straight out from a tree with pantyhose twisted around its feet; before he managed to free himself, the wind snatched at the nylon and the squirrel flew 10–12 feet before biting the dust. It was seriously windy. I felt as if I wasn’t the only one who was at odds with reality. Outside, people were eating canned foods as if the Netherlands were the great disappointment in life, as if they’d come here from some former republic and thought that everything would be fine, but instead found a home on the side of the road. Everything was death. The phone wouldn’t stop chirping text messages telling me that Iceland was on the highway to hell, that everything was lost and gone, that there was an exodus of private jets taking off with the goods before the country went bankrupt. I had given Iceland little thought in the past weeks and couldn’t imagine that this was anything more than yet another circus act in the most pathetic play in history, starring Daniel Klambra. But the ATMs stood empty. The Bankers’ Ball was over. A small wad of Króna notes was not worth much to the currency broker in Purmerend. I was penniless in a small town under sea level in a country I knew only a small corner of. I waited for the flood. A nap in a communal garden ended in an interrogation room at the police station where my passport was handled like a filthy magazine and I was treated like I was personally responsible for the greatest financial crisis to hit the area in modern times. The chief called his boss in Haarlem, the county capital, who confirmed his suspicions; if the man was Icelandic he should be incarcerated immediately. The entire savings of Holland had disappeared into the sewers of that nation. I suggested to the chief that they have a look in a golf lodge in Bulgaria, you just never know — they might just find some of those billions on the two Icelandic barbarians practicing their swing in the company of call-girls. I was told not to sleep in the train station but got permission to take a little nap out front while I waited for Helena to come and pick me up. She was alone. She was unhappy. Eila, her Faeroese girlfriend, had left her.
“I didn’t know that you were gay,” I said.
“Neither did I, not until I met Eila. I cursed and said fuck this, carpet muncher, fuck. But you know what? It’s okay once you get used to it. The only drawback is watching the person you love shoving her tongue down someone else’s throat. She took all the noise away, all the pain, all the useless shrink appointments, and I believed in her. I thought she was different from all the other people who’ve messed with my head. You can tell yourself that there are more fish in the sea. That you’ll go on even though it seems impossible. But what if all the others won’t do? You sit there with all your needs, all your misunderstandings and mess, until someone comes and kisses you and for the first time in your life you don’t feel completely pathetic. What if you always get betrayed? What if life is nothing but one disappointment after another?”
“Then you just have a lifesaver and try to have fun.” I took her in my arms and held her while she cried. I tried to console her by telling her anecdotes from my own life, that I didn’t cry myself to sleep anymore over Zola, but that I believed that life had a paradox of endless possibilities. That one of these days maybe, in the future when your mind was clearer and you no longer limped across the surface of the earth like a stagnant form of the worst version of your dreams, then it would all come back, everything you’d lost, you’d get to love someone who smelled good, who always smelled of shampoo and who looked up every now and then from whatever she was doing and smiled if you were there. Because it just had to be, that somewhere in this sea of people wanting something completely different from what they had, there had to be someone who understood you, who understood your fragments, and I told her that I didn’t see it often any more, I saw it rarely these days because there was darkness over the world. Mother was dying and I wanted to drown in my own tears, but I did see it once in a while, the possibility would fly through my mind and I’d feel slightly better, like now — I felt slightly better now.
“Is that why we do this? Because we think we can plaster up the holes? You could have let her die in Iceland, skipped the treatment, skipped it all. But you decided to come here. To be free when she left? To make up for something you feel is your fault?”
“I came to support her and because we can’t do this sort of thing back home. I’m doing this because I have to, because it couldn’t be avoided.”
“It’s so sad,” she said. “They’re both going to die and we’ll never be able to forgive ourselves.” She drove me to the city, passing by Lowland. I still had a few euros stashed away and wanted to get them out before they disappeared too.
“Make sure not to stay too long, Trooper,” she said. “What ever you do in Amsterdam, don’t forget why you came here. Promise me?”
“Promise,” I said and gave her a little kiss on the mouth, but of course I knew I was lying.
*
My journey into the abyss started with a three-thousand euro annihilation at the post office. I took a taxi to Hotel Europa and checked into my old room, promptly emptied the minibar and rushed down to the lobby. The darkest, deepest sewers of the world were undefined dimensions awaiting me. The night was still collecting darkness. The city was overflowing with wine.