I
Armageddon. Marinating for time, crouching in the west.
The medium’s frontal lobe quivers for a moment, freezing her momentarily. Karen Dalton’s voice continues to slice through a progressively worsening algorithm running like an ant colony, colluding with its cousins under the surface.
The medium soaks her feet in the inflatable pool in a pre-ordained configuration; whisky cola in a can and a third joint – fourth sign of the morning – to set the daylight aside.
A matter only of how much we’re willing to accept into existence. Gravity remains anchored in the public but higher powers have taken interest.
The corpse has begun to sprout. Dreaming a train ticket landed golden in its pocket – on its way to where Julia is waiting with all the weight of the world, to numb-out its exposed nerves. There was nothing better than waking up to a thought that wasn’t really a thought.
The medium shuffles her feet in the water, gold-green, blooming in living color a more vivid image. To hatch a secondary moment in which all that came before crawls out of the pool. The only way to face it. Make of a single memory a thousand details — a garden arrested in a glance.
Against the wake, begins to shimmer – nothing at all – the detail takes on a swell past the bounds of the frame, growing substance below that was inimitable above.
In the left-hand corner of the frame: a country. In its left-hand corner: a city. Above that: a constellation. One point dangles over an apartment. Under it, a man blooms into form – Sardinehall – baggie with endless bag, slouching toward the black box. Full of things that haven´t happened. Yet.
II.
The air seemed to sip out through the slits – slight cracks in the doors – the slightest stuttering whistle from the bottom of the balcony door. Poorly closed. To speak only in the words of others, that would be freedom, in a strict sort of sense.
(Dear Julia, there’s nothing better than waking up to a thought that isn’t really a thought. Every turn it takes: to deceive itself – and be such: an aspect of itself, a fractal of itself; and yet in nature independent of the fractal.)
Amsterdam skulked about like a damp cloth outside. I’d have liked to confess some happiness to the street below but it seemed an eternity away from this moment. By now I think I’ve trained myself to not want anything too bad. Everything here becomes the same demand. I hover between wither and regalia, waiting for the first absurd gesture to jolt me. Around seven in the morning. Finally the next day. A decent place to start.
It’s a country where even the rain is incontinent – ceaseless, embarrassed, meandering. I need to unclench my jaw, my cheeks, my right hand which feels like arthritis and melt away, if only I could. Feverish, with apparitions woven together – funneling toward something stretched on the horizon. I’d made it past my belly aches and tunneled the great colon back to Amsterdam. (Dear Julia, I need a little weed and some coffee.) Opportunity is everywhere, an endless siesta – but only for a day or two before restlessness congeals into false inertia. To be changed without changing, that’s the local miracle. People come here brittle-boned, doubting we’ve managed a methodical exorcism of ourselves. And, like everything, we get back only the substance we bring to memory. I’d brought so much to my own that it oozed out like honey. This was the only way to stave off a spiritual vertigo. Maybe I was chasing revelation, one dull miracle at a time. You risked slipping out of futility and into real inertia. You could wake up one day, without any character, to the fact that you’re anybody else. What then? You were just a mammal, climbing sidewalks and needing to go to the bathroom, a small, perfect chaos with no real method to it. But here, there is a method to it; otherwise the whole thing might sink. It’s like the whole country’s whispering a pre-emptive Kaddish for itself under its breath.
All except for my eyes, my senses register the increasing density of the wooden frame hidden behind the walls, like squeezing air out of a bottle. A pressure from the Calvinist concentration of dull objects. I push the sweaty sheets back with my feet. Circe is Sissy Spacek by the window, sipping some pale tea:
‘I’m still sick.’
‘You would be, wouldn’t you.’
The house has made her permanently sick. A variety of mold that has only been recorded a handful of times and is yet to be studied.
My phone rang through the glass cabinet across the room. I was supposed to have met Sam the night before for drinks but he never showed up. He calls – intensely apologetic, faintly distressing. Could I meet him for breakfast somewhere, he needs to talk to someone.
Cutting through Erasmuspark to meet him, I think about exorcisms. The neighbors had an exorcism for their daughter last year. You’d think you’d go a little crazy and spend the rest of your life picking up marbles. Instead it was like revelation had stepped foot in their mouth. There was something right about it. As if nature were counting all the little pieces of the city, broken into alignment. A world of similitude, given in a breath, like a hook that holds us up. Maybe that’s exactly what we need for ourselves – a little exorcism for our disdain, something visceral.
Exorcism here isn’t a priest, it’s a supply chain.
Broodjes. Sam’s inside – sixty-cent coffee, smelling like a gym mat.
‘Say you’re having a great day — money in your pocket — you walk through a doorway, a slit in the air, and suddenly you’re gone. Disintegrated. Like you never existed.’
I frowned over my coffee. ‘You stayed up all night to tell me this?’
‘More or less. There’s like a one-in-a-billion-billion chance you know.`
‘You’re starting to sound like Hel.’
He half-smiles, eyes restless. ‘She told us to move to the US to conform properly. Five hundred days of Hell, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.’
‘It was a breakup.’
‘Third act, sure. She’s in Coventry now — crawled into a myriagon, counting angles, always starting over. Invited me to stay once.’
‘A what?’
‘My-ri-a-gon. Ten thousand sides. Nobody’s done the count. Good money in it.’
‘So… a box.’
‘A tower. Have some imagination.’
He shrugged and leaned back in his chair, his fingers still.
‘Well I’m four years overdue anyway. Might as well pay old Hel a visit. Cash it in. ’
`Do you have the money for that?`
`Probably not – but what´s a car? Plus I’ve been selling extra-well recently.`
`New clients?`
`New product´
He leaned forward slightly now, lowering his voice though no one seemed remotely interested in our conversation.
´Velveteen – V. Mainly pills but I´ve seen freaks crush it too. Haven’t tried it myself yet but everybody loves it.´ We call it transformation when grief learns a new song. He slid a baggie across the table – three glossy black pills. Julia would’ve reminded me about that guy who lost his sense of smell on research chems
His ex wanted to meet him on Prinsengracht to return a few things. It was still early so he wanted us to walk, ‘to encourage digestion’.
Early on in the Ukraine invasion he tried the Russian Opposition, then the Commission, political fantasy football. Law school stretched to a decade. From the first months he knew he wasn’t meant for it; still, he chewed Daddy’s pockets and subsidies, floated a step above himself, nursing a faint ambition. Mostly, he stayed high which took less time and soothed the crick in his neck quick enough for a calm relapse into contract law.
Prinsengracht moved in schools; tourists shoaled along an unstoppable walkway. Anne Frank, Amsterdam’s most famous export; looming over us in the heat, twisted into a black-box tourist’s sanctum complete with a café.
We’d been waiting thirty minutes, penitently, for his ex to show up with a box of stuff. I texted her from Sam’s phone: running late, just leave the box with the guy in the cap. She arrived on time anyway. People do, when told not to.
When she showed up she did so looking like somebody’s mother named Miruna, disgruntled, slapped-still with intent. Sam shrunk into a dull ache. It was an inevitably tepid reunion, like a state meeting. I think they were waiting to understand each other better before they saw each other again. I watched them play snapping turtles and produced a compact daze for myself; there was no longing left by summer and the heat gave virtue enough to those needing to make a sad display of themselves – moving on from something or other so that they may fly off for their holiday with minty freshness. Circe and I weren’t too far from it, living in a tired lung.
Some things remained the same all along the way,though they couldn´t be captured. We’re left feeling all there is to growing is a persistent inability to go home again as the past begins to take shape and become palpable. Denying any love for our souped-up spending culminates in the sense of a homecoming to attend. Those without shame or contrivance about not sweating over it spit mossy rocks of truth; indifferent, all-knowing the way whoever’s driving is all-knowing. There is always more road stretching out ahead; and the way remains endless. We left the still-life canals for a vague bus stop.
`Devastating this. You know most of these books aren’t mine, she just needed space. Anyway, two birds – one stone. I got a buyer for these; a crocodile of a guy. Someone with actual leverage, you know, an American! If you say something memorable, one of those things you like saying, you might get yourself involved. Could be good to meet him.’
I once heard Sam swallow a fly over the phone. In some cases this was how people lost respect for each other but he was always a little funnier and more generous than you´d expect and it made all the difference up close. Fifty seven books and a drive for cash, he generated enough energy to sustain himself in mid-air.
He said Lee held the light on Pinter and Krishnamurti, waited up for Kansas when California flickered. An insomniac like himself, but allegedly unassumed; still within the Dutch national closet of sleep deprivation and other refinements. He was like Henry Miller or somebody like that, with a real palpitating heart, somebody for us to be curious about. Sam´d even heard he´d once convinced an entire studio audience to stand and recite a made up pledge on live television. ‘A noble Humbug’, some rank. I nodded like I knew; though it wasn’t very hard to appreciate; there’s been enough sect revivals in the last decade for every second cousin and barbecue attendee to be some high ranking member of a deism or another.
Amstelveen: a feudal village trapped in an eight-story student block. Damp wood, stale ambition. Built for something grander, gave up halfway, a bunker.
Bilchik waited at the entrance, grinning – Sam’s most loyal customer; an Eastern European cowboy who materialized with the scenery.
Sam handed him a bag – likely velveteen – and left him muttering gayly to himself.
Somewhere down the corridor, I heard laughter – familiar enough to scare me a little; distant enough that I couldn’t place it.
Sam knocked on a door marked only by peeling paint and a faint outline where a number used to be. It swung open almost immediately.
Lee was seated – wiry with sharp eyes, irrecoverably attentive. He was surrounded by stacks of books, loose papers, and what looked like pieces of broken machinery scattered across the coffee table. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He glanced up at us.
‘So, you’re Sam’s friend.’
I nodded.
‘What do you do?’he leaned forward slightly.
‘I’m writing’I said quickly – too quickly. ‘A book.’bullshit, I do nothing. His eyebrows lifted just enough to suggest interest – or maybe amusement.
I told him my skills as an amalgam of my older brother’s and cousin’s lives with my own. I´d briefly spent some time assisting backstage in a circus; bars, restaurants, production studios, three theatres; and, rather than copywriting, a year assisting exorcisms in London. He seemed somehow convinced of all this and I suppose my sense of storytelling hadn’t let me down yet. I mentioned everything you’d want to be true. My book would be about all the ways in which this city affected people – drugs, efficiency, figures who wobble in the night. Locusts would jump out of the canals and we’d eat them. I told him about Circe, about the couple nights under a bridge in Lyon; I even told him about aunt Genevieve from Mile End who scrubbed her whole house with soap, possessed by some virtuous spirit, but who was rotting from the inside waiting for tomorrow. He hung on every word and when I was done and all the sludge had been poured, he began relating to us his own tales – most of them extra marital affairs he´d had over the years. He spent particular attention on a fat Opera singer he´d met in New Orleans, and only spent a night with, sparing no shameful detail.
A chef emerged from the kitchen, hat and all, like an oligarchic hallucination, nearly stumbling over his posture, with the first tulip dish :
Lee called them tulip delights, a revival of some gilded Dutch tradition pulled from a cookbook no one really bothered to write. Thirteen porcelain plates were brought out in stages – tulip bulbs swirled in delicate broths, petals infused into bitter tea sauces, and root-infused pastes smoothed over crisp breads. There was the smell of dirt in every bite; Lee closed his eyes for each one, conceivably clenching his butt-cheeks to avoid staining the upholstery. To the memory of old winters: bulbs roasted with sesame oil and Himalayan salt – woody, onion-like, with a faint smell of almonds, like a stroke; a consommé strained through tulip-pampered silk encircling a delightful whisky baked apple. All texture masquerading as ‘nuance’ – tasteless bulbs. A cultural experience for the anecdotally horny, petals crystallized in tulip-soaked sugar, bitterballen pumped full of a concoction imitating cheese that was nothing but the molten core of a tulip’s limits – capping it off, a tulip sorbet which was almost brown and came with its own Dutch coffee creation, infused with an endless chain of flower, rose, balm-like substances, instead of the usual cardamom or so for National coffee which was really Turkish.
A few drinks in, he leaned back in his chair noisily picking his teeth with his tongue.‘There’s something in Beatrixpark this week,’ he said, like an afterthought. ‘A setup for an installation – trees, lights, ropes. It needs people who aren’t afraid of heights.’
‘What kind of installation?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘The kind that makes people look up.’
Sam glanced at me, already nodding. I hesitated, but something about Lee’s tone made it impossible to say no. It felt less like an offer than an invitation to a party.
I don’t remember the precise sequence of events after that but soon enough it was evening and we were sitting on the couch back at the apartment. The house remained Mansonesque but devoid of a leader.
Wednesdays, poets who missed Yugoslavia arrived with stuffed bell peppers and potica. Thursdays, Circe’s gallery friends – pale, Persian – filled the room. Amphetamine fiends lingered all week for Sam’s serialized escapades.
It wasn’t religious, but it kept a borrowed spirit. Squads of mammals packed the apartment on Saturdays; food vanished, alcohol went to ground, and laughter, complaints, and weeping stretched until demand was satisfied. Sam kept to his skins.
.
Bilchik flailed a greasy wing from the KFC bucket, ready to motivate violence with another sterile story – this one about women debating churro orders. He hung around for a few hours, brown-nosing through every substance in reach.
‘We’ve been fed and we’ve been fathomed. Let s get the fuck outta here.’
Whatever few luminous objects moved through the house, Circe would gladly pawn over to artists that needed cameras, paint, and a whole array of unlikely materials to build their icons.
One regular was a chippie who stifled his cranium in bars of morphine and deadlight. Circe called him a ‘great big goat’ when he came in. He needed a slap on the lip and to drink a little before coming out to face a mostly sober crowd.
Incasso’s letters had begun piling up again, each another small threat. I sometimes imagined them crawling up the side of the building while I smoked. The neighbour, a rodent of a man who’d gutted his apartment, had already driven us from the kitchen. At first we lowered the music, then our voices, until finally we avoided the room altogether, as if we’d conjured something demonic in the air.
III.
Today the whole place was empty. From the first to the fifth floor hummed a multitude of dreams. I say empty, but it couldn’t be. every door wore DO NOT DISTURB.After four hours on shift, you learn the hall’s hermetic quiet from its sealed silence – the kind with something big hiding behind a door, peculiar to the Hotel. Within the soundproof seal that starts above the second floor, and likely for some other stranger reason, matter absorbs sound; certain Hotel pieces planted dead-center – usually in the apartments, sectioned off, lock noise in. The same went for warm bodies, you could sense with a kind of intensity the presence of a guest lying in bed, especially the meaty ones, like a magnet faintly pulling at the resonance in the halls.
Whatever conference was on, it dipped the Hotel in ink black seriousness. For about a month now it seems as if every single room is being occupied by the same exact guest. Not a single one of them have I heard or seen. The same grey ridged suitcase, blue leather slippers, a see through Lacoste toiletry bag and most odd, three empty pill boxes, unlabeled, and an enormous childproof organizer, opaque gold that flashed green when it caught the light.
I knew the Hotel was full. No way to confirm it. I hid in the service area on the third floor.
I heard a door shut somewhere. I rushed down the hallway. Around the corner I saw the DND sign still wagging off 421. Fuck it, guest must’ve left. I rang ‘Housekeep…’I slipped in.
It smelled of something like old spice, vaguely more expensive. The pill organizer instantly caught my eye. It had something in it. There were three sections filled out with pills; odd looking, like crumbly ecstasy.
A faint click – the internal mechanism disengages, whirring for a second. The latch retracts letting the door brush along the carpet. Still blind behind the eyes, the Brazilian butler Bugenhagen, long since sent to rot in an office, lurched into the room; stopping right where his feet touched mine. He squatted down slightly with his hands on his knees to look me in the eyes. ‘Bring the box’
We moved. The carpet padded our steps; the pills rattled, beetles in a jar. Terre-Plein is two gates and a code. Two uniforms, sprawling brick. Up the stone stair, badge beep, cart key.
Three years in, the closer I got to the Hotel standard, the stranger work became. I graduated from nobody to show-whale. The Back-of-house is its own parish: lunch processions, confessionals, inventories that breed at night and Gabriel Santos, patron saint in sequins and spreadsheets, steering the Filipino Association from a shared office on the premises. They even invited me to join; my polite silence bought me supervision in doorways.
The hall narrowed, skating us past the last stitch of carpeting. The rooms teach by inventory: CPAPs and colostomy bags; makhbaras and razors with military creases; the French and Brits who forget to flush on one-night stands with us, and Americans that were put on this earth to produce industrial amounts of trash. The box ticked plastic again, the seam catching its gold-green glint.
He gargled after every breath, giving his throat a rest. We took the last turn. His office was small and distinctly rancid. Fair for a milky eyed bat.
Tshegofatso Bugenhagen had been here longer than anyone, blinder and more hostile for it. Not safe with guests anymore. (We´re not at war but we´re at war. Cause Adam and Eve went AWOL and God went berserk. Because genitals were the first cause for excitement, we craned ourselves up like trees stretching out, interlaced in an endless Bolero of knots and twining bits.) Apparently he’d gotten a bit gropy. He hawked something up intestinally, shooting for the bin and somewhat impressively hitting the mark. I shook the pillbox at him: ‘Who the fuck are these guests?’
‘This guest’he sat filling his lungs, pumping some blood.
‘In every fucking room?’I leaned in – wormhole in his trachea pulling me in by the ears ‘What’s the story, really?’
‘Same damn story.’He hooked a thumb towards the pillbox. ‘Open it.’I did
‘A man addicted to transformation’he said, rolling a pill ‘Each one takes a stone from the same river. The trick,’he turned the pill over, squinting with eyelessness’ is the change in the current’
The pill clicked against his teeth, sliding down almost maliciously. He swallowed it like it hurt him in three different centuries. A shiver, his throat clenches, fighting it down – a ragged swallow.
‘Versions of the same story; The same man scattered through time; the same dream caught in different throats. They swallow, they sleep, they spill. We bottle what spills. We pass it along.’
Just beyond that border, the thought flickered out into the rain which wasn’t enough to drain below the city and would, for the duration of this story, form a thin layer of film across the canals.
