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 wetsuits 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 B.C. 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 Hulsebosch 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 has 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 52,000 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. The 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.