I

Doll Parts

Summary: Loes and Vera discuss over morning coffee. A sabbatical is recommended.

I fake it so real, I am beyond fake
And someday you will ache like I ache

“—and I told that old hag, I said, ‘Mevrouw¹ Casparij, with all due respect I have his toets² right here in front of me, and what your son drew in the margins next to the essay question has nothing to do with the causes of Rampjaar³,’ except she sits there and tells me he’s fine, that he’s ‘always been gevoelig⁴, he was probably just being creatief⁵,’ and here I’m thinking: I am the leerlingbegeleider⁶, I have been doing this for twenty-three years, I know the difference between a boy being creative and a boy who draws his ideations next to a question about a man who was torn apart by a crowd and eaten—the module is already dark, and he still found a way to make it about something else entir—"

“You are not doing this in my kitchen.”

A glare toward her. Ponytail pulling back brunette curls that did not know it was arguing. Mole on her left cheek half-buried under a foundation line stopped at the jaw, a discrepancy between it and the skin below her neck. Green coat covering a red, skimp dress, belted at a waist having done considerable work over the years—work and stuff being indistinct at certain points in such an unflattering life—the belt itself either optimistic or defiant.

“Kijk me nou⁷. I even went out of my way to stand in for my substitute because he was worried this was out of his area. You have to know the mother is a total idioot⁸. What parent does not see signs this obvious?! Her poor son apparently loves listening to some artist called Negative XP and sooner or later he migh—”

“Loes, this is not Amerika.”

Belt adjusted to a visually acceptable grip. Miniskirt revealing cellulites nobody needs to see. Ballerinas, while fitting for the autumn, not so much the soles.

“Dearest, relax. Prying ears are never present in my spaces. Nothing leaves any room I put myself in.”

“The problem is you do.”

The kitchen scanned. A vulture circling its prey. “Did you seriously not move anything?”

“Why would I move anything.”

“Sabbaticals, they make people awfully, awfully restless.”

“You’re suggesting as if rest is what I need.”

Loes pulls out concealer from the Prada.

“You should see my sons. They keep rummaging around the house during the weekends. They start rearranging! So I did my usual feng shui in my second bedroom and living room before I got here and I’ve only regretted it ever since because it will all be cluttered again.”

“Your sons might need a mother who knows how to handle them.”

“You might need sons! Your womb is basically aching for them.”

“And be a worse mother than you already are.” She sips. “I happily appreciate declining the offer.”

Her concern is more so how her children would turn out at her age. She is not opposed to child-bearing and -rearing otherwise.

“Such is parenting, dearest. But you first need to get yourself a strong, preferably young man, Persijn.”

“I’d tell you to eat something but you’ve been stuffing yourself with it for as long as our tenures suggest, de Vos.”

A singular smack from the black cup.

“So much stress, dearest! Look at me, I got here via the Intercity! Can’t you imagine how awful the connection at Den Bosch is?! I’m still quite resilient in spite of it all.” Lip balm from the bag. Exuberant application before its return. “Consider a sabbatical. Like you said, we’re both tenured, you and I. You’d really need one, leraar⁹ such as you, especially what happened then.”

“This is not the best use of our time discussing this. It’s coincidental it was almost that long ago. Doesn’t mean I’m taking one.”

Secondary teachers in the Netherlands are disincentivised from taking sabbaticals.

“Well, at this point, you might need one. I mean look at your wrinkles!”

“You have more foundation than I have wrinkles.”

Voluptuous face padded with powder. At the bottom of the bookcase are the records, and the record player with the album case next to it.

“Still Soundgarden, dear?”

“What’s it to you.”

She blinks. Smiles. “Nothing! The 90s were my jam and my life. I love this album!” A lie. “I just didn’t think I’d still be seeing it at forty-eight.” The cup laid down. “I’m so happy you’re taking consultations again. Before boarding, I told Smid, ‘Vera is opening the door again. She’s finally loosening up!’ He was very much pleased!”

“Would your pastoor¹⁰ be pleased about your current relations with him.”

“We had Confessions yesterday four-thirty. Then when it was supposedly his turn, the old crone told him he wasn’t even ‘baptised in the correct formula,’ whatever that means.”

The man is Unitarian-Universalist.

“Isn’t there a Jubilee thing going on with you papen¹⁰.”

“I still have no idea what that is, but I insisted Smid he takes us for some pilgrimages. Our parish is Sint-Janskathedraal Den Bosch, so it was natural we went there first. Then we visited Sint-Nicolaaskerk two weeks ago. He kept ranting about how he’d go to hell if Catholicism was true, Communion wafers are cannibalism, and that we ‘worship’ the Blessed Virgin.”

“Three strikes, he knows his stuff.”

“Our pastoor¹¹ was still considerate of him. Sweet old man. He was gentle with how he received my zoeteke¹².”

“I’m surprised he didn’t lash out or molest him.”

“You’re so hostile with such things, dearest, unlike Smid who, in spite of our religious differences, is all over me.”

“He has a lot to himself, then.”

Frame steps backward, the table shaking as an arm holds it and another is raised against a general, Vera-ish direction.

“You. Did. NOT.”

A singular snort from her.

Returned with a sigh. Another belt readjustment.

“You can see right now my sabbatical is obviously necessary.”

It is not baffling this woman can afford such compared to spending it this way.

“But you can only be oh, so careful for oh, so long! before the careful becomes its own problem.” She tilts her head. “How long has it been now?”

All this time, in her kitchen, all Vera has been doing is standing, mug in hand, observing her colleague’s goading.

“Six years, hè?”¹³ Gently. “You’ve handled it well. Right?”

“So you say.”

“Better than most would.” A pause. “Better than I would have.” Another lie.

“Not a high bar, Loes.”

The black cup examined.

“Well, you’re right. I suppose it isn’t.”

Mrs./Ms.: formal Dutch address for a woman

test or quiz (school assessment)

Year of Disaster: 1672, when France, England, and the German bishoprics of Münster and Cologne invaded the Dutch Republic

sensitive; emotional

creative

student welfare coordinator; school counselor

Just look at me: mild Dutch expression of exasperation. Variant ‘kijk nou!’ simply means ‘look!’

>>(You)

teacher

Catholic parish priest

papists: derogatory Dutch slang for Catholics

Belgian term of endearment for a loved one; sweet thing

right? / eh?: Dutch conversational filler

II

Long Gone Day

Summary: More shenanigans occur between the leraar and leerlingbegeleider. Loes strikes her down before she departs.

Lord, it’s a storm in my head and I fall
These sins are mine, and I done wrong…
See you all from time to time
Isn’t it so strange how far away we all are now?

The cup is refilled, another lone slurp taken from it.

“The new vierdejaars¹ are interesting. Different. They want everything explained. Everything! Pre-digested cereal by OpenAI!”

What a rancid image.

“What purpose do I have if I get substituted with language models?! With all of this AI stuff nowadays, teachers like you and I are, as the kids would say, ‘defunct.’” Loes holds her cup with diminishing propriety. “You aren’t concerned?”

“Mind your business, leerlingbegeleider.”

Vera despises AI. The hate is trendy, so she opts not to spout her opinions.

“Our beloved hoogleraar². He always said you were the one he couldn’t predict.” A blow to the coffee but does not imbibe. “He meant it. You and I both know how older men are with younger women.”

“How he meant things is irrelevant here. And those older men are dead while we don’t get any younger.”

A look.

“Between you and I, sweetie, what he had and what you had yourself is, well, ‘identical’ would be pushing it.”

“I’ve had one too many students.”

“One too many, dear.” Scanning the bookshelves, hiding a grin. “The ones you can’t predict: the best among the worst.”

“Is there a question somewhere in this.”

“Let me talk, sis,” A one-eighty. “Am I not allowed to just talk?”

“You can. That’s not what you’ve been doing.”

Whites of the teeth apparent. Someone whose beam has been caught doing exactly what was intended to be caught doing. “You look ravishing, by the way, my dear. Not every consultation has to be so formal, though. The boots are overkill!”

She has no response.

“You looked like that grumpy old man managing the museum at Dordrecht when I took the kids there.” Pacing toward the bookshelf, then back at the colleague. “I saw your shopping list, you should be grumpy.” The curls flow. The green swings. A motion. “But something’s different if you care this much. You’ve even been livelier than most mornings we’ve had.”

“It’s seven minutes to one.”

She is studied. “How’s your beauty sleep been?”

“How’s yours.”

“July, you were in 1672.”

“Paris was boring.”

“Now,” arms wide, beholding an exhibit to an unenthusiastic crowd, “you’re here.” Therein comes a gaze seen when Loes is in the guidance office actually doing her job, a swallow in its nest.

“What’s happened to you?”

“Nothing you don’t already know.”

“Mhm.” The smile, wide as the waist. “The channel.” With a tease. “I WhatsApp’d you Thursday after Mari made me watch and those glasses were unmistakable! Did you see it?”

She looks down from her window.

“Well?”

“It’s competent.”

This is considered. “I thought it was quite good. That other woman kept blabbering how he was ‘one of Persijn’s’ and that he was ‘doing great for himself.’” Concealer in Prada. “Besides proudly pointing out he has seen the Symbolica³ that many times—seriously, how could someone not get sick of—” The foundation mirror is dropped.

Grimacing.

“Sorry, my dear, but the postwar argument he proposed sounds like something close to what someone I know would raise.” Mirror in hand. “He must have had good teachers.”

“He’s had several teachers. I just happened to be one of them. In passing.”

“You call four years fleeting? Anyway he was very bright. With all of the—” A stop. Tilts the head. “Then the incursion.”

“The situation called for nothing less but the use of blunt force.”

“It surprised me the board was willing to slap you on the wrist for that.”

“You could have just handled her.”

“Her foster parents are not terrible. Still, if Soei can’t control her own brat, who am I to?”

She closes her eyes. “A referral to the administrator could have.”

“Using her own weapon against her should have been the move.” Padding on face. “Not being vindictive cost you.”

“I granted her clemency. And look what that got me.” Her eyelids rise.

“Preach, sister! You had a heart of gold, I mean, not just her, all three of them: herkansingen⁴! I would have handed them expulsions had I been in your boots. But you were so fair, fair even to the last. I admired it.”

“Would’ve been better if you hadn’t.”

“Okay. I found it slightly… what’s the word?” Chin padded six times as it is said: “Incomprehensible.” The coffee in the black cup, just there, hardly pecked. “It was just one happy incident. You are too fair if you ask me. Whether or not they were fair to you after is tea for another time.”

“We’ve had this same tea throughout the years.”

Vera is as perplexed as she is annoyed. Loes is just as perplexing as she is annoying.

“Well, have you been in touch since then?”

Her mug caught in time. A recalibration.

“He sent a message. A research consultation.” She hears herself.

“Één consultatie⁵.” The eyes widen. “Wait, he’s the client?”

“People come to the books. Look around you.”

Prada readjusted. “Right. Even though you haven’t taken any since—” Vera’s eyes, held. “And you said yes.”

“Shut up.”

Standing, smoothing her folds, nudging her colleague.

“Slayyyy!”

She shoves.

“No wonder the energy! You shouldn’t have to avoid former students because of what happened. That would be, like you keep telling me all these years, ‘letting her win.’” Said by someone who has convincingly thought about Vera’s life on her behalf. “When?”

“Today.”

“Here?”

“Does that mouth ever shut up.” Her teeth grit, wrinkles downward.

“Make me, dear.” Bag is picked up. “You have to admit, this consultatie is a step-up from grading Thirty Years’ War essays at sixes and sevens.”

“They’re satisfactory.”

“Satisfaction is mediocrity, dearest.” To the counter, black cup in the sink.

“That better be something you tell the students who end up in your office so I don’t have to mark it on their papers.”

The woman in green gives Vera a chuckle as consolation.

“You know,” hand still on the sink, “the old man always exclaimed you’d be the one who didn’t know when to stop. Especially if you were in the room. The way you go past comfortable, past where anyone else would leave it.” Turning. “It’s a quality.”

“Do you insist on calling it that.”

“In the right context.” Handbag onto the shoulder. “Just, be careful. Not because of the history. You’re worth being careful about.” A stare succeeded by a smirk, returned with what could only be described as fury beneath eyes having seen more than enough.

Tapping the mirror on her shoulder:

“It has three-hundred subs, Vera.”

“It’s much more than—.”

A jovial breath. “How couldn’t you know?” Toward the door, coffee almost to the brim left behind, Prada bidding farewell. “Anyway. Call me after. I want to hear how it goes. How it all goes. All of it!”

“Tieft de tempel uit⁶, Loes.”

“Aah, ‘k zat maar een beetje te stoken, hè.”

Glancing toward the window.

“The sky is threatening my mascara. I do have to go, my dear.” Padding the face one more time. “I called him to pick me up this time around.”

The urge to quip weighs on Vera. She doesn’t offload it.

At the doorway, the woman turns toward her colleague one last time. Grabbing the handbag in a farewell manner, “These weekends are why you’re worth the visit.”

“Charmed. I already told you to leave.”

“Don’t be such a grouch, Persijn. I’m happy for you. Too happy, I might add. I won’t be able to contain myself!” A kiss on her left once and goes. A nextdoor gesture.

The sound of Loes de Vos in the hallway, footsteps echoing toward the lift. Unhurried, the tread of someone who has nowhere to be except not here. The noon sky slate waits for no one.

It has been one o’clock for six minutes. The two mugs are taken to the sink to rinse cold. She pours out the guest’s mug, puts the moka pot back on the stove. The cups on the counter. One of them smiles back.

Of course the hog did not bother to close the door.

fourth-years

professor (university rank): used here as fondness for their late mentor

a ride from the Efteling theme park in Kaatsheuvel, NL. A trackless dark ride which opened July 1, 2017, it is known for featuring three distinct routes each with unique scenes that can only be experienced entirely if one takes the main queue

retakes; resits

a consultation, ‘één’ being the indefinite article / determiner

lit. ‘get out of the temple’: crude Rotterdam dismissal, based on the biblical account of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple. Roughly “get the hell out” or the more loaded “fuck off”

III

Mind Riot

Summary: Vera prepares new coffee for her new upcoming guest.

And I sharpened my wits on a dead man’s skull
I built an elevator from his bones

Amsterdam in October has the light of a city deciding to be beautiful for once before calling it a day.

It arrives at an angle, through moderately tall windows, through ingenious engineering defiantly embracing the ever-engulfing waters, and in Vera Persijn’s kitchen on the Omval it falls across the stack of unmarked essays on her table: Vierde Klas¹, Chapter 13, The Thirty Years’ War, Its Continental Economic Devastation, and the Buildup to Rampjaar, and makes them look, for approximately four minutes, compelling.

Unsatisfactory.

She has read a third of the essays before her guest walked in for their bi-weekly weekend coffee. No grades are given yet as the red marker sits on top of them, but these are not deserving V’s². One of them had the audacity to claim that de Ruyter was just an ‘okay admiral.’ Had Loes not barged in, nothing in her day could have topped off such unpleasance.

Hob stove on. Hot water tap, out of order.

The laptop lies beside the essays. YouTube on autoplay. Paused. A bearded man with glasses. Face suspended ranting about the structural integrity of the Joris en de Draak.

The Omval is not her home. Rotterdam is a very efficient place. Rebuilt. Avant-garde. Makes the cargo passing to and fro feel dignified to be cargo, in a city that insists itself to be a port. It knows every stone is a replacement. It cannot care. The Amstel a walk away is unlike the hipster canals found in the Jordaan. It is a river wide, grey and indifferent.

She has not poured from the moka pot slowly boiling for over seven minutes. An heirloom from her father. A drip pot sees through what the moka hides. The preference is essential.

Her mug, newly rinsed: the Nevermind Smiley, the lopsided face Cobain scratched out himself. Fisher and Jacobs claim otherwise. Vera knows he wanted the tongue drawn originally upward.

Rotterdam, 1991, the week the album came out. Thirteen she was. The mug. Not that mug. The original broke in spring break 2020. By the time the replacement arrived, only then did she clean up after the pieces. She has been calling it by the same name for five years. Same smiley, same size.

She is forty-eight and she is not going to call it waiting.

She agreed. She said fine, Saturday the 18th, 2pm, don’t be late and the tenure protects her formally. Formally is the kind of touching that strikes a nerve, and the buzzer will sound in forty-three minutes. The decision was made before the text, before Thursday, before Loes’ probing, and she is not going to unmake it now.

She has been living with the decision for longer than she can precisely date. She dates everything. She cannot date this.

The laptop turns off and is put away.

The October light on the Omval. The metro lines outside her apartment hum to and fro. She grabs the pot, pours over the mug, sets it down. The coffee is still scalding hot but the pouring itself requires a decision. She is spent, and the caffeine affirms her.

The almost is what has required six years. Not the word. The word was wrong, the investigation was thorough, by now twenty-five years of unassailable service and by then they had found nothing. There was nothing to find but the almost. A weapon approximately accurate is the most damaging kind. You cannot entirely dismiss it, because somewhere underneath the wrongness is the thing it got close to naming. She has been standing at the edge of almost for six years, looking into it, itself looking back.

Kanker³.

The buzzer rings.

She does not call it six years.

She heads for the record player, places the vinyl, props the needle. Let Me Drown starts humming. Music has always soothed Vera. Her audio is silence, its weight enough to flatten anyone, anything in the way.

Hmm-mmm.

Slouching by the door with now-lukewarm coffee, reached by the October light, the decision is found. There. Correct. Immutable. Underneath the correctness is something having been in this kitchen since the afternoon began, an elephant not worth the address.

The intercom substation waits by the entrance, mounted close to the frame. She puts on her coat and scarf.

Fourth Year of secondary school (middelbare) — standard designation for all school year levels in the Dutch system. In order, they are: Brugklas (the ‘bridge’ year); Tweede; Derde; Vierde; Vijfde; Zesde

V for voldoende: sufficient; passing grade

lit. “Cancer” — used here as a harsh Dutch expletive

IV

2econd 2ight 2eer

Summary: Rens rides one stop past.

Forget bored stiff, I got rigor mortis, call it morbid curiosity
How can I commit to reality,
when my third eye’s open and I like what I see?

On M53, the Gaasperplaslijn¹, left leg restless to prevent himself from dozing off while a woman across the carriage sleeps with her newborn child, Rens Kamerman focuses on the passing polders and buildings as Laplace’s Angel (Hurt People? Hurt People!) plays in his earbuds. Dangling on his bag is a Pardoes keychain.

Van der Madeweg Metro. The woman across him wakes.

“Jonge², are we at Gaasperplas already?”

His eyes on the floor. His voice low.

“This is it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Madam, this is van der Madeweg. You are still six stops away.”

Cooing the baby. “Dank u wel.”

Boarding off, he waves the carriage bound for the terminus goodbye.

The next train does not come for a while. At the moment he is surrounded by hostile architecture, hints of litter, fumes from background factories, and he sights a homeless man sleeping by one of the columns. He heads on over and drops a fifty-cent Euro next to him, walking back to the spot where he landed, inches from the yellow line.

He has twelve questions in the notebook, three printed articles, and a recording device he will ask permission before using. He has meticulousness, a maintenance-schedule approach and the structural logic of queue systems, forty-seven viewings of Symbolica, and roughly no infrastructure for whatever this afternoon will be. The body sometimes needs extra time to catch up with what the mind settled long before it would admit to settling anything.

If at all.

Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam is a renowned institution for Behavioural Sciences. His mother believed he could do better. Six videos, 12 167 views across all of them and three-hundred and forty-seven subscribers in, mevrouw Kamerman refers to his channel as ‘something pent up blowing up at the wrong time.’

He calls it his ‘verifiable causation.’ The afternoon itself is filed under:

Onvoldoende categorieën.

Insufficient categories.

He sports white long sleeves overlaid by a merlot sweater and denim pants, functionally identical to his apparel back in Vierde Klas, bar the logo of his alma mater on the left breast. His loafers are the more remarkable aspect of his outfit. Shoeshine taupe.

Black-framed glasses, absurdly thick even for a grown adult man, the same model he found at fourteen. When something happened that made him look at himself in the mirror at Blincq Optiek on the Haarlemmerdijk 75 he understood this was the version of his face to be asked to do things. He found the frames because any other would not fit his face, as most frames could not fall short of the wanting.

Fine. Saturday. 2PM. Don’t be late.

He had stared at it for a long time. As well as the other text exchanges between them beforehand. What he felt was neither relief nor anxiety but something structural, a door opening that had been closed so long the hinges were theoretical.

Then the universe decided to oil those hinges.

He rolls with it.

“Well, if it isn’t the bastard in red.”

At a distance. Squints, that unmistakable ginger. He puts his earbuds back in their charging case.

“Why are you in this part of town, Sjef?”

Wiping grime off his vest, “I should be asking you the same thing.”

Metro line M53 Red in Amsterdam, running southeast from Centraal to Gaasperplas terminus. One of five: M50 Ring line [Isolatorweg - Gein] | M51 Westwijk line [Centraal - Isolatorweg] | M52 Noord/Zuidlijn | M54 Geinlijn [Centraal - Gein]

Kid; boy in this instance — Dutch informal address, lit. “youngster”

V

Cotard's Solution (Anatta, Dukkha, Anicca)

Summary: Sjef and Rens catch up while at the metro. Koos indulges himself as it happens.

What if the wind caught up with me, started to change when I did?
Would I blow out like a light? Or like a kite fly away?
What if the fear of darkness gave way to the fear of color?
Would you live in black and white? Or rest your eyes through the day?

The Bandholz.

An odd thing to grow after being kicked out of the will. Orange hair, same bowl he has worn since Derde Klas, grown out enough to signal a prevailing laxity. Blue shirt, white trousers on a Saturday afternoon in October. Tod’s dress shoes, calfskin nubuck. The argyle vest whose prestige precedes its owner—the Universiteit van Amsterdam initials at the back doing more work than everything else.

“Rijke jongen¹ in the projects. Did you get roped into Koos’ shenanigans again?”

“Don’t give that junkie any credit. Every function I attend is my initiative.”

“Well, I haven’t seen you since you dragged me on a trip to Paramaribo with the others back in July.”

“Yeah, that was a bad idea.”

“You just had to go to the jungle.”

“The fort was boring.”

“Being bored to death kills slower.”

The sling bag is new. The disposable newer. Not in the sense that it was not always there, it was.

Such is Sjef Donker Curtius.

“Oh, come check this. I recently got one of those state-of-the-art skin tests from Bilthoven because mother was paranoid my six-month regimen wasn’t enough.” Unrolling right sleeve. “Kijk nou!”

Rens takes off his glasses to get a closer look. A small, circular puncture.

“You should rethink your summer destinations.” Bag for his glasses case, the cloth wiping the soot off having accumulated from the metro’s dirtiness and putting them back on. “You really wanna ruin the rest of your life at twenty-two, it seems.”

“See, this is the problem with you, brah. You’re way too uptight about everything, probably because Erasmus really did a number on you.” Patting him, “We’re linking up with Goof² and Yfke³ who’s touching down from Harlingen at Gaasperplas. We bunch up, we connect back for Centraal, maybe grab some grub along the way, then we’re heading for Leiden for some fun.”

“The gang’s all back for one more, eh. Why are you all touching down at Gaasperplas?”

“Hey, I value my buddies to know where they live.”

“Creepy.”

“Goof is waiting at the terminus. He lives close there. I’m waiting for Koos here.” More grime-wiping from his argyle. “You’re not coming with? My former frat is hosting a consti⁴ tonight.”

“For someone with the means, you sure do love squandering every end. And no, I’ve my own places to be right now.”

Disposable from his pocket. “You really need to relax sometimes. That eftluencer thing you’ve got going on isn’t the cash money gig you think it is.”

“It’s what I like. All you ever do is party.”

“It’s fall. What makes you think seizing the day isn’t what I like?”

“That’s not even a good reason, let alone a good season. Couldn’t you at least wait till the holidays, dude?”

“It’s Saturday, bro.”

The returning train is not scheduled for another fifteen minutes. Sjef inhales the toxic fumes.

Wrapping a free arm around Rens’ shoulder. “I’m still my own man in spite of my old man.” A hit. “Nothing squandered here, buddy.”

“Could you at least not blow cancer into my face? You know those pens have a more concentrated form of nicotine.”

“Fuckin’ nerd.” Copping a feel. “Wait, what the hell? You on ‘roids or something?”

“Dude, shut up, man.”

“I was no jock, but I didn’t expect you’d go full-on chud.”

He exasperates a breath. “Clearly, I’m not overcompensating like you, man.”

“I got a contract with Arcadis. No help from father this time. Overcompensate that.” Nicotine pen in mouth, “Do I ever tell you how naturally brilliant I am? I mean I’m natty myself and all but I’m rawdogging this shit.”

“You couldn’t be any more gross?”

“That’s how Ilse⁵ likes it.” Grinning, “You know we did it in the attic once. She actually found it hella kinky.”

“You really need to get keel-hauled.” Ilse was his crush. “Wasn’t the jungle enough?! But seriously.” He tidies up his merlot. “I know you’re way more capable than you look.”

“You don’t have to rub it in you mog me, Potter.”

“I meant squandering. Remember high school? You failed history because you said Karel Doorman died at Coral Sea.”

“It’s so dumb she failed me over tha—” Chuckling, “Are you seriously still rooting for that old bitch?”

He strikes his palm. “Don’t call her that.” Sjef retracts his hand.

“Aww, Exhibit R’s still mad he was taken away from his owner?” Fists below his eyes, circling them. “You really haven’t grown out of being a teacher’s pet, have you?”

“I really can’t live that down, can I?”

“Neither could Miss Attributed with hers.”

Sharp his head turns. “That’s what you guys call her?”

“You should’ve seen the look on her face on Zoom when Goof kept spamming it in the chatbox.” Puff. “Oh wait, you literally couldn’t.”

Approaching the two of them in the downtrodden metro is a skinhead in a green track suit, piercings where they are and shouldn’t be, a tattoo at the back of his neck resembling a window, sneakers that have seen better days, corroding bling-bling, and holding a satchel filled with questionable paraphernalia. A grave unease for bystanders, a nuisance for whom he drags himself toward.

“Koos⁶, my roadman!”

“Davai, kakker⁷.”

“Can it, gopnik brokie.”

With the disposition of a man who has nothing to lose and everything to give: “I did not mishear. I heard you loud and clear yet I pursued you irregardless without fear.”

“Bruh, what.”

“You do not understand, mang. It drives me ANGRY you get to do shit like this, mang. With ME, MANG. You’re killing me with KINDNESS, mang.” A long snort from the satchel. “Why is the cosmos telling me there are seven heavens and EIGHT HELLS? Bourgeoisie pigs feasting on proletarian flesh, the lot of you shall suffer the INDICTMENT of the masses.” Nose again buried in the sack, then rising from it, right arm extended, “ALL MY NIGGAS NAZIS, NIGGA, HEIL HITLER.” Hovering the bag to his face, “Rens, you look TERRIFIC. Did I ever tell you my theory about Geert being on the island?”

“Stop talking, I really mean it.” Readjusting his glasses and pushing away the satchel, “And get that thing away from me, you speedfreak.”

Onlookers whisper among themselves at the commotion ongoing with these three stooges.

“Melanation is a sign of injury, but I am spiritually a negro.”

Flinging the sling. “It’s one-oh-six in the afternoon and you’re already stoned. It’s also turned you racist and conspiratorial. Jezus Christus, brah.” Catching the bag mid-air. “Then again, you should see the Law department at UvA.” Disposable in hand. “Well, now that you’re here anyway.”

“Barin⁸, is everything all set?”

“Hell yeah, the consti’s gonna be lit. Goof’s got the bong.”

“Why are you guys like this?” His palm on his glasses.

The subsequent train bound for Gaasperplas arrives. The returning carriage is not for another two minutes.

“Oh would you look at that?” Sling bag over the shoulder. “Well, it was great catching up, four-eyes.”

“If you’re inviting me for another trip again, I’ll join.” His bag opens, a notebook is pulled out. “Can’t miss out on good money, which pains me to say.”

“We’re thinking Keulen. Just hit a text, hell a video call. Ilse would love to say hi.”

Writing it down. “I’m not so sure how to feel about that.”

Koos boards, stumbling by the entrance and hitting his head on the carriage’s door frames. “Ahh, yebat’⁹.”

Sjef lags behind for a little bit. “Oh yeah.” His reflection on the glasses. “Bound for Kaatsheuvel again?”

“You could say that.”

rich kid

Headcanon name: Goof Meulenbelt

Headcanon name: Yfke Groen

shorthand for ‘constitutieborrel.’ Other shorthand is ‘cobo.’ A constitution party is a traditional student gathering held to celebrate the inauguration of a new association board. During this party, other associations congratulate the new board, which is often accompanied by the presentation of a gift, plenty of drinks, and old association traditions. Sjef holding one is patting himself on the back

Headcanon name: Ilse Smalhout

Headcanon name: Koos Kutznezov

Russian for ‘let’s’; Dutch for someone posh

Russian historical term for ‘baron’

Russian exclamation of ‘fuck!’

VI

Chemical Overreaction / Compound Fracture

Summary: Rens is at the building. Yfke sees her old friend. She, too, is bound for Gaasperplas. After more stalling, he finally arrives at Vera's doorstep.

I might be a saint worth steeples
I might be the brain of evil

Spaklerweg Metro.

On the ground, three taps on the right Repeat Audio bud as he perambulates the district. It is surrounded by roadwork and parked bikes. A busy intersection, rife in the parts of Amsterdam where foot and pedal are inseparable.

The buildings on the Omval do not lean contrary to other districts in Amsterdam. He sees where he needs to be right in front of him. He decides to stroll for a bit.

The Noord’s deliberate, repurposed warehouses are nothing like the working class architecture here at the Amstelkwartier, organically industrial. He borrows a bicycle from a young man who recognises his unbelonging. Darting for the Omvalbrug, he looks at the pylons littered with graffiti, then the water below, careening with boats, his left motioning the skippers below a friendly greeting.

He detours for the young man and returns his bike.

Earbuds off, he crosses a pedestrian lane, accompanying an old man carrying an issue of the latest newspaper opened in a column on fashion jewelry.

Her unit is in The Cohesion Lofts. The text exchange after the consultation inquiry was brief. ‘Big ugly brick @ Spaklerweg’ and her unit number as a response.

In front of him. Right there. Atrocious. Ugh.

Compact with 212 units of eyesore in place. Brick, concrete and glass. Eight disgusting storeys, the ground floor modern in contrast to its pseudo-vintage upper segments. Every brick a discolouration, every sheet of glass a farce, theatrics without the stars, bureaucracy with all the fluff, a cubic turd with glass panels. Within its block and by the corner of the Amstelbeststraat is attached another complex: grey, about twenty-three storeys above ground level, and each side showing a facet more different than the rest. Against the stunted Cohesion that dares calls itself the Lofts, the asymmetry so vile, classifying it as anything but repulsive would be a mistake. The city block is a mismatch made in hell.

Teachers are very, very underpaid.

The intercom panel is flush with the wall. Brushed steel, backlit, touchscreen.

‘Ask, and it shall be given you.’ Nee. ‘Take what you can, give nothing back.’ Not that either. ‘Hand me my shovel, I’m going in.’ There.

Tapping him. “Renssss.”

He turns. “Yfke?”

Pink topcoat. Hair undone, recalling her headband from middelbare¹ taken off after Paramaribo, a blaze of pink at the tips. Purple puffer jacket. Stockings. Frisian stockings. Crocodile boots, both the texture and the colour. Her eyes too red for any semblance of cognitive function.

She towers over him. With a rather peculiar hat.

“Hey, wassup, my bro. Man, I shoulda not taken a hit after I got off the metro.” Besides her luggage is signage she’s carrying that says: ‘Er gebeuren leuke dingen met mij.²’

“Why are you here bro?”

“Hey, that’s my question, dude!”

They laugh.

“I thought you were touching down at Gaasperplas with the bunch.” Looks up. “Explains the cowboy hat. Wait, that would make you a cowgirl. With a cowgirl hat.”

“Ahh, dude.” She sneezes. “The cobo, yeah, yeah. I’m actually here right now because I got the munchies. It’s okay though, they always wait for me.” She looks at the directory. “Hey, I know this place.”

“You do?”

“I’ve taken consultations with mevrouw Persijn here when I wanted to learn more about the Canal Ring, dude. It was for a test I couldn’t afford to flunk. My grade was in the gutter.” She takes a bunt from her bag. “You know after the lockdowns were lifted and we graduated, she was so quiet. I was worried, dude.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I’m gonna go grab something to eat, brah. See ya.”

“Hold on.”

“Hm?”

“Take it easy. I know it helps you but you know better than I do how it affects you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind bro.” She smiles. “Thanks for looking out for me.”

She walks southward to a nearby coffee shop. On the streets, like the klutz she is.

He watches her depart, then shifts his eyes on the Hikivision. He swipes the touch-input directory and taps a unit number. A rumble in his stomach. There is a McDonald’s further south. He contemplates going but thinks of it silly and staves the starving.

It was not the number. A gruff male voice on the receiving end.

The number was 48.

He presses another.

“Ja.”

One syllable. Not a question. She never questions. Her questions are demands for an answer.

“It’s Rens Kamerman.” It comes out a tad too formal than it should have and he knows it. She last heard it in the homeroom, and, identically, he last uttered it to her around that year.

“Mevrouw?”

Twelve seconds of silence.

He should turn back now. This is a fool’s errand.

The door opens.

“Welp.”

The foyer through The Fizz, notable for its trendy coffee bar and the second Z being mirrored. People slightly older than him. Hipsters with paper-cup coffee and Bosch bollen at hand. One of the women approaches.

“Hoi! What brings you here?”

The bag being grasped. “I’m from the IJplein. I’m here for a consult.”

“Ferry boy! I hate the ferry, it makes me seasick.”

“You mean ‘river-sick?’”

“OMG you’re so funny!” With her paper cup: “Wanna grab coffee? I won’t Tikkie³ you for it. No promises, though.”

“No, thanks. I don’t drink coffee. Not my cup of tea.”

The woman giggles.

“Where are you going?”

“Up.”

“O, jee.⁴ Please don’t jump!”

“I gotta go.” He waves her goodbye. He really has to.

“Wait, a consult?” Holding her paper cup in a direction, “Are you going to that teacher upstairs? Everybody in this building basically hates her—that smoke detector of hers!” She drinks. “The building itself has its own fire alarm system. Management probably talked to her about it.” A bite out of her pastry. “I swear, every time I take the lift with that woman, so broody.”

He stops his tracks. “I see.”

He continues.

He comes across a lift.

He takes the stairs.

The strides wide, the ceiling low enough to register. At the top. The interior corridor plaster and red carpet, irony notwithstanding.

Seven floors above ground level. One-hundred-nineteen steps, steep as Low Country building code permits for such-and-such buildings. He arrives winded in a way that is purely architectural. He has to insist a flight of stairs that trivial has worn him down. He later realises it really does.

She stands at the end of the hall with the door open, sipping and phone in hand.

high school

‘Good things happen to me’

Dutch mobile payment app — comparable to Venmo

Oh no / oh dear!: Dutch exclamation of mild alarm

VII

Evidence

Summary: She can only call him by his surname.

Anything you say, we know you’re guilty
Hands above your head, and you won’t even feel me
You won’t feel me

“You look more ridiculous than what I saw from the video feed.”

“Goedemiddag¹ mevrouw Persijn.”

“Seriously, you need to fix your hair. Dressing up like that isn’t enough if you can’t even comb.”

“Was I—Is this an occasion?” On edge, pulling on the straps of the bag, finger-combing the chocolate strands.

Testing a smirk. “It’s fine, Kamerman. You’re an adult now. Dress up anyhow you want.”

He is broader than she saw in the intercom. The shoulders, the ruddy complexion: both the product of something she reads from the merlot sweater worn over the shirt’s collar, embarrassing. The layering is deliberate management, a variable she had expected as the passage of time. Just not to this extent.

She leads him in.

She knows what he will notice first: the records, Hobsbawm minus one, the absence of photographs. Since Thursday, since the channel, since the considered argument about postwar mythology delivered in that careful, earnest voice that is unmistakably identical in cadence to the one he used at sixteen when he had something worth saying. Which was the thing she has never said to anyone, that it was not often, and she counted.

“You’ve got lots of grunge lying around. You’ve got good taste. Sonic Youth?”

“Tell me about it.”

“Age of Extremes is missing.”

“It’s a surprise tool that will help you later.”

Scanning. “Not even a family member hung on a wall.”

“Mam is not worth remembering.” Sipping.

“Sheesh, mevrouw.”

Ik heb het².

The small satisfaction of the prediction confirmed is something she sets down and steps away from. She has been correct about him since the week he walked into her classroom and sat at the back, and has found it faintly ridiculous that a student paid stern attention to what she wrote on the board as if he already belonged there, even if what he said had nothing to do with what she was teaching, notwithstanding his distance from her whiteboard. She finds it now, the same thing she has always found it as:

Not entirely ridiculous.

After the bookshelf, next to it he sights a Thorens TD 101 A placed on a round table. An album record of Superunknown leans onto it. The turntable’s volume is low enough to only register for sharp ears. His eyes shift.

The lavender hair. Falling across the left side of her face. Its presence does something to the afternoon he will not name: makes her her in the way you recognise something you were not sure still was. Her right hand, indigo fingernails, clipped at the index and middle. Grey eyes with the shadows and bags beneath them the colour of old ink. A mouth bare of any gloss, its pink complementing her soft, pale skin whose affinity is the overcast Dutch skies. The trench coat indoors: long, cornflower blue, dark grey buttons done to the collar, salt dress shirt underneath—the chest overlaid by the thin fabric: flat, showing hints of black, her bra—no, lingerie?!—crimson scarf wrapped twice at the throat. Cotton leggings, thin canary lines parallel to the thicker royal ruby, the coat narrowing below it and then, at the hip, an unusual breadth, an arithmetic that cannot belong to an older sociology this apartment describes. Angled, sharp knees gently protruding from boots of a dark and uncomplicated appeal, maroon accents complementing his sweater. This is the demeanour of a woman demure having witnessed everything and the kitchen sink a classroom has ever thrown at her, and absolutely nothing could surprise her.

Except that one time with the presentation on Ancient Japan.

She catches his eyes already past the pleasantries.

“Ik zei twee uur. Not twenty minutes past it.”

He pouts.

He’s very late.

“Did you seriously take the stairs. Why. No surprise you look like a boef.³”

Further inspection.

“You’re not in voorbereidend⁴, I’m not gonna scold you.”

“A bit late for that.”

A short breath. “Lekker hoor.⁵”

She recalls he was never late in any of her classes.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, mevrouw Persijn.”

“It’s been a while, Kamerman.”

“Rens.”

“Let’s be professional.”

The coat. The scarf. The outfit of a woman who is defined by an afterthought.

“That overcoat. You’ve been wearing it since Brugklas⁶.”

A silence.

“It’s not that cold today.”

“I know what I’m wearing.”

The apartment is what she is. Small, tight, open-plan, overcrowded. The walls with colours that you are not meant to notice. Beiges and browns, off-whites and greyscales. Fluorescent lights to shine on the eggshell ground. He takes it in systematically, left to right. Into the lounge proper he is greeted by a bookshelf organised in a system that is neither alphabetical nor chronological. A rug over the laminate, the kind that was once fuschia pink now a mauve memory of it.

He must have seen this room six years ago. He could not have imagined it now. Thirty-two square metres of space. The living and dining room are one. His bag taut against his shoulder blades.

Research consultation.

By the window and to the left of the kitchen island is a dark walnut table, essays, red marker angled as if it were to grade said essays. His eyes shift toward the bookcase. The bottom row: Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, Faith No More, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Soundgarden. A gap among the records. Courtney Love, most likely. Then above it, history.

Multiple volumes from Blom, Schama, and Kershaw. Oddly, Tully and Parshall’s Shattered Sword. Hooft’s Nederlandsche Historiën. A reluctantly mandatory placement of The Diary of a Young Girl. De Jong’s De Bezetting, na 50 jaar. The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire. A space. A Bible. More orange spines, old and revised editions. DE GESCHIEDKUNDIGE VERHANDELINGEN VAN PROFESSOR C. FLABBERGAST, spine faded, the geriatric author’s self-satisfied portrait front and centre, elucidating both magnanimity and hubris, with a hint of something he cannot immediately place.

The third row is a bunch of random books having no particular genre, not that he can see since the spines are on the other side. One sticky note in the upper left section of the row, stuck to two textblocks.

Eiren

Spek

Melk

Koffie??

Wijn

Wijn

Wijn

On top the radiator, decor not so: Rembrandt’s 1660 self portrait but his eyes are crossed out with red ink, framed in plain black, small enough that, whether or not intended to be risible, exists entirely in proportion.

Where the television would have been is a 39-disc Blu-ray set for House MD. There is a light PS5 controller on a coffee table, but the console is nowhere to be found. The room smells of something floral and old. Almost every difficult thing here has been given a frame and a shelf and a scale it can be visited at and left by anyone who wants to know if a middle-aged woman lives in this particular unit.

He had imagined the photographs. To Vera, the lack of photographs are what full notes are to Rens. She watches him adjust to a recalibration that in no way helps him.

Into the kitchen half he notices a small box strategically placed behind the framed Master of Light and Shadow. His head turns to Vera, coffee in hand, her back against his front.

Arriving there, he takes some time to parse the surroundings.

Utensils. Pots and pans. Island. Cabinet-fridge riddled with stickers of grunge bands and, unconvincingly, one that says ‘Gateway to Europe.’ Cupboards you can’t grab onto. Hob stove. Hanging by it is an apron with sublimation: ‘You don’t understand who they thought I was supposed to be.’ A tap indicated by a sign saying the hot setting is inoperable. At the far side of the sink, empty Heineken cans. On the island: A jar full of purple lollipops with cigarette-themed sticks conveniently placed by an empty ash tray. Another jar, mayonnaise among other condiments and an unfinished to-go-box of Indian, perhaps curry. Stroopwafels in a sachet, and by the peripherals what appears to be champagne.

Then her.

She appears taller than the last time he saw her.

Which is not true.

“I’ll make coffee.”

“You have coffee.” At the Smiley mug, a panting glee.

“Oh, op die fiets⁷. Do you have to point.”

“How long ago? I like pointing out things.”

“Long enough. Lukewarm coffee is awful.” She goes to the stove, mug just emptied. “Tell me what points you have in mind that aren’t my coffee cup.” Lays the mug aside.

“Bet.”

“Ga zitten⁸, Kamerman.”

The wall clock in the kitchen has the short hand past two, the long hand just beyond five.

He arraigns himself. Moves the unmarked essays carefully to one side without reading them. The impulse is there, he is constitutionally inclined toward documents, and he suppresses it, for reading someone’s essays without their informed consent is a violation of something he cannot precisely name but can exactly feel. There are also three books in front, closed till further notice, and he does not bother petitioning why-them-being-there has to be so.

Vera pulls out a bag of coffee grounds from inside her shirt, emerging out her scarf.

Between the goods.

There is no conceivable reason why she has a bag of coffee grounds within her person.

Disassembling the moka pot to fill its brewing basket to the brim, she lays it on the stove. He sets down some of his own resources, the three articles scribbled with academic rigmarole.

“You’re humble-bragging at this point.” The E extends to the far left before curving upward. Signature of the man himself. Being spotted on the articles is one thing, the articles of clothing is another story. Varying degrees of unimpressed and curious invade her composed lips.

“After vwo, I had to try something else.” He stacks the papers. “Behavioural Sciences. Practical.”

“Not a passion.”

“Passion is doing what you love no matter how you attain it, mevrouw Persijn.”

“I’m sure Erasmus is proud of having bred eftluencers from its Behavioral Sciences programme.”

“YouTube is a legitimate career nowadays.”

“Oké, dan. That’s really dumb.”

Her mug laid on the table. His long face.

The Flabbergast spine and cover. The hint he could not place: among the flags on the faded cover is what is always mistaken to be Austria-Hungary’s.

Kamerman knows another video essayist who disputes the existence of such a thing: it was either the black and yellow or the crown of Saint Stephen with the crooked cross, never that incorrigible red, white, and green unequally distributed, an ensign mistaken for representing a nation neither Austrian, Hungarian, let alone an empire, and vexillologists argue this consensus. Some domkop⁹ decided to make it such a stifling phantom, it has infected even his former teacher’s resources.

He notes this, from petulant grumbling about his former teacher calling his career choice inadequate to outward befuddlement. The book in particular was what she taught her class that year, that October. The woman’s sentimentality does not suggest this, so instead she probably knows about the error. A sicker joke to keep it in her catalogue.

Recording device taken from the bag. Held firm by his left close to his chest. A look.

One head-shake.

“I need the authenticity and ambiance for the upcoming video. Commentary. Flavour. Credentials.” He taps on the table with his fingers. “A necessary disclaimer that this is purely human input.”

“I’m not keen on being recorded. Even if it’s niche.”

He puts it back sheepishly.

She seems disappointed.

“All this research for three-hundred and forty-seven subscribers. Really.”

“Oh, God.”

His hands on his face. A passing awkwardness. An immediate footing.

Notebook leaves unlocked, twelve rows of scribbles. She watches him find his place in it the way she has watched students find their place: the shuffle, the orientation, the small performance of readiness. His readiness demonstrates. His hands go to the table and stay there. She watches the hands.

She has seen this before. Enough times to catalogue. Any amount is worth cataloguing. That year, the same. The directness which looks like confidence but is something else underneath—she had named it then, in the private shorthand she keeps for students who require categorisation:

Onafgemaakte zekerheid.

Unfinished certainty.

She had been briefly sorry for him, the way one is briefly sorry for very sacred things before the world reaches them.

Lighter from her coat pocket, then a cigarette. It is lit.

He raises a thin brow through thick lenses. Such familiarity is unusual.

“I forget you smoked in class even if the leerplichtambtenaar¹⁰ walked in to check things out.”

“Being functional comes with its wanton prerequisites.” She gets up. He watches.

“Won’t the fire alarms—”

“There’s a reason I can do this freely.”

She never replaced the batteries.

The coffee roiling in the moka pot with her back to him, and the downtime this produces is of a room deciding what it is. Caffeine and nicotine permeate the room’s linoleum scent.

There was an instance of the leerplichtambtenaar walking into her class where a girl in stripes is debating another girl in orange about piracy and the VOC. It had not got violent yet but he knew at any point her intervention was inevitable.

She teaches history. She is trained to look at evidence without flinching, to sit with primary sources that are uncomfortable, to remain present in the archive when the archive is difficult. Behind her are two decades and a half of teaching, endless hours before the marker, countless thoughtless essays, and her school’s investigation and its three-syllable verdict.

He fills the room in a way she did not model from the channel, the six videos, the professional and apparently legitimate pretext of a video essay on whatever he has planned. She expected serious. She had the evidence for serious, three hundred and forty-seven subscribers and a considered passion about postwar mythology and a message that, without context, would come off as arrogant. She had not modelled the specific way he sits at her kitchen table, the way he moved his and her papers without reading them. He does not look around the apartment with the restless curiosity of a visitor managing a wait. He arrived, he is here, and between those two things is a chasm collapsing in on itself.

She is somewhat annoyed.

She knows exactly how young he is. How old she is. She cross-references this against the year they first shared a classroom: he was twelve. The distance between them on the timeline is not the issue. The issue is the other distance. The one she measured that year and has been measuring, on and off, ever since.

Moka pot. Blue flame underneath, hissing steam from the exhaust, a scent of nutty earth.

His hands are on the table behind her. The ink mark at the base of the left index finger. Sinistral, the same hand as the ink, the same hand holding the pen to the notebook. She noted this during Vierde Klas.

The coffee is done. The pot with her.

Good afternoon

I’ve got it; I knew it; in this context, ‘eureka!’

rascal; scoundrel. Mild Dutch insult

preparatory — shorthand for Voorbereidend wetenschappelijk onderwijs (VWO), a prestigious, pre-university program of the Dutch secondary education system

Nice one. Often used sarcastically; lit. “tasty, right”

bridge year. See voorbereidend

Literally “on that bike”; to express one’s understanding following a previous (explanatory) statement

Sit down

blockhead; dunce

school attendance officer: a municipal officer who enforces Compulsory Education Act in NL. Quoting from rijksoverheid.nl in the case of a student’s unauthorised school absenteeism (truancy) and the notification in case of absence: “Removability is if the parents do nothing or not enough to stop the absenteeism. In the event of culpability, the parents or caregivers are legally punishable. A student aged twelve or older can also be punishable himself.” What the fuck?

VIII

Garden

Summary: Former teacher and student discuss the Efteling theme park, stroopwafels, and a heated argument on towboats.

I don’t question
Our existence
I just question
Our modern needs

She sets a cup in front of him.

Black. No sugar. He does not reach for the handle.

“Bakkie pleur¹.” Dark liquid flowing into his cup, steaming. “Explain yourself, Kamerman.” Then hers.

She pulls her chair in position, across the full width of the table, not beside him, across, an outward glance toward his notebook. The tension in the heat.

“A video essay.” He clears his throat.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, ‘Of course it is.’” She pours on her mug and arranges her clipboard.

“Mevrouw, it’s a cup of Joe, not a cup of John. And today is St Luke’s day.”

His parish, Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk, for whatever reason, is not celebrating the memorial feast. He has been up since six o’clock in the morning till he misremembered that said parish only says the vigil Masses during Saturdays. He has no choice but to attend instead the 6 o’clock vigil for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time after the consultation.

“Oké, dan, altar boy.” Her eyes closed, lips succulent on the coffee. “I don’t find honouring dead evangelists meaningful.”

His eyes avert. “Don’t disparage me for being faithful.”

“Heidelberg has the requirement of fifty-two Lord’s Days to know everything there is to know about the faith. Praying to the dead is close to satanic doctrine.”

“Well, now that we’re debating the history of our religions, might as well have gloves off.”

“With gusto.”

A growl from his abdomen.

“Surely you can’t be that hangry.”

“Sorry. I haven’t eaten.”

Right index finger to the island. “I’ve got snacks. Help yourself.”

“Lollipops?”

“I take it you like sweets, Kamerman.”

“My mom tells me I need to watch my sugar.”

She goes to the island, grabs a lollipop with the ashtray, and fits one into her mouth, tasting the sweetness, “I have stroopwafels.”

“I’d love to but not now.”

“Sounds like the words of a man who would have a more refined palate.” She grabs two from the packet and hands one to him. The other she places on top her coffee.

“It’s not that, mevrouw.” He takes it, asks for a plate, lays it there. “I just eat anything. I’m craving for a cheeseburger actually.”

“Cheese.” Pulling her seat back, lollipop exiting her lips. “When most people hear cheese, they think of places. Amerika. Parma and Reggio Emilia. Zwitserland. Gouda.” She spins the lollipop stick. “Syrup waffles are out of the picture for outsiders who hear of Gouda in particular. 1810, 1837, 1840, 1853. Whatever the dates are, Gerard Kamphuisen is the one name constant when you hear of the pastry’s origins.”

The lollipop makes its way back into her mouth, and so do his eyes, before it comes out again.

“Well, some want to stretch it to 1784. I highly doubt it.”

Nothing comes out of his mouth.

“This baker from Gouda mixed dough scraps with a syrup of his own making. His recipe was sealed in an unopened envelope by his bakery, though by the Springtime of the Peoples, the recipe was already known. With these peasant uprisings, you’d have people needing to sustain themselves on whatever was at hand, and a syrupwafel borne from scraps had got them a crude nickname because of the people who ate them, armenkoeken—the poor man’s cookie.”

“Reminds me of ship biscuits.”

“Precisely. But the wafel, unlike hardtack, managed to make it out of its periphery and became sensational. Whereas the ship biscuit was the sustenance of the naval tradition—it got as far as the trenches we never trudged in, but only just—” Pinching her fingers, “Stroopwafels were truly made for the masses.” Palm wide open.

“Am I really listening to you talking about the history of a waffle?”

“Then I’ll stop.”

His left fist on his lips, his cheeks a slight bright hue. “No, please continue.”

“The Industrial Revolution happened, that one bakery in Gouda got enough gas to sustain a commercial enterprise, an industrial behemoth of its own kind, and by the Franco-Prussian War was also the first time the wafel made it out of its hometown in meaningful ways. Ninety years after the skirmish, Gouda is now the stroopwafel hub it is today, at that time having seventeen factories dedicated to that pastry alone.”

“It also happens to make good cheese.”

The confectionery’s circular shape fits exactly the ashtray. “You already know September 30th.”

“A day entirely dedicated to stroopwafels, why?” His surveillance on the moist sweetmeat on the tray.

“Twenty-two million packets per annum is truly worth celebrating. But what we Dutchmen can’t resist doing is a sense of reclamation. We do it against the sea, hence the provinces that are entirely polders. And we did it with a pastry whose tradition it was derived from is distinctly continental.”

“Well, the Belgians do have their waffles.”

“And the Belgians owe their tradition to the French. The first waffle guild—and do not think of it as something silly, Kamerman—was by the Parisian oubliers in 1270, over half a millennium before Kamphuisen’s first scraps, though one can argue the oublies they made are precursors to waffles than actual waffles. And a comprehensive cookbook Le Ménagier de Paris, dating from 1393, already laid out the backbone of what waffles would become. We tried to be different by using caramel syrup instead of cheese, and putting the wafel over our coffee before the first bite, the heat a part of the process, the waiting itself a ritual.” Cigarette on her right, its turn to making it for her mouth.

He cannot stop looking as she then devours the entire wafel in one sitting.

“So waffles are continental, but I don’t see the issue here, mevrouw.”

“The revolutionary aspect of the stroopwafel was that it was a snack made for commoners by a commoner. It has largely achieved that.” She takes a drink. “If it is quintessentially Dutch next to windmills, polders, dikes, tulips, clogs and bicycles, the same can be said for a sack of rice from Soerabaja, or cigarettes from Aruba.” She takes a hit. “And people nowadays only see why things are there but not why they were put there. Not, ‘Why is that there.’ It’s just there, and the objects are unable to not compel them otherwise.”

“Why do you say that, mevrouw?”

“People don’t know how to think, but instead they only know how to react to certain stimuli.”

The kitchen is quiet for a little bit.

He takes off his glasses. “Well, I think I’m hungry.”

“Again, help yourself.”

“I can’t.” He puts them back on. “Eucharistic fast.”

“Now that’s just ridiculous. Have you at least eaten breakfast.” She takes the plate and puts it by the sink.

She spots him wiping his mouth with his sleeve. This was a reading she took after sighting him at the stairwell. Experience tells her it should not take more than three minutes to get from ground level to her unit on foot. She knows the lift is operational. Having spotted him on the crosswalk exactly two minutes before the buzzer, she instead was devastated by the fifteen-minutes-and-change between it and his presence in the hallway.

Sighting the cup.

“You’re also not touching your coffee. I assume your reasoning is just as sound.”

“Weak heart.”

Her pen in hand against her left cheek.

“Didn’t know.”

Grabbing his bag. “You don’t have to apologise, mevrouw.” Pulling out his notebook.

“Am I.”

Notebook split open to the blanks beyond the scribbles.

Mug in hand. “I forgot we were doing this.”

“I need to know what you have to say about the founding of the Efteling. Brass tacks. The context it came from.”

“I’m not that kind of teacher.” A pause. “Go on.”

She has not seen it happen this fast, this completely: a student engaging her without pretence. From him in particular, since that year when he sat with that serious face and simply began.

The cigarette has run out, its foam ends up on the floor. The mug, only a quarter full.

He talks. The Hongerwinter², the psychological infrastructure, Anton Pieck’s visual vocabulary. He uses the phrase conscious darkness, Erasmus doing its work. She looks toward him over the red marker. He supersedes it before she can:

“Not a theme park. What you build so the darkness has somewhere to live.”

Uitmuntend³. What do you even need me for.”

“The discussion proper, duh. I’d like your input on ‘fear.’”

“Fear.”

“The engine that drove the Efteling’s inspiration, not directly but surely.”

“And.”

“Like FDR said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘We have nothing to fear but it.’”

“Inaugural address, 1933. The Great Humanitarian was replaced with little to no personal input from The Squire from Hyde Park. Then he ended up delivering a speech that would cement his legacy for the next twelve years, from his Fireside chats to the day that which lived ‘in infamy,’ to dying on his chair serving his fourth term for five months as Berlin was being bombarded vengefully by Katyusha rockets.”

“...Okay?”

“This is your texture.”

“You’re giving a lecture!”

“On the same address he did say ‘only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.’”

“Really?” Jotting down. “Well, the dark realities of the moment can be channeled elsewhere. Like a theme park.”

“Of course you say this.”

“Convenient for you and I that he said that.”

“It was 1933 when he said that, Kamerman.” Sipping. “It couldn’t have been any more depressing whether it was across the pond or nextdoor.”

“Speaking of which.” He puts his left index over his lip as he raises his right. “We have no desire to fight for ourselves but only for Ger—”

“You’re pathetic.”

“Hè, you were reaching for it too!”

“Blijf je gedoe doen en je bent de deur uit, Kamerman.”

Clearing his throat, his hands immediately fall back on his notes. The fountain pen tip quickly swings on his hands, loudly scratching against the pad. She tolerates this, she does not want him out the door. Not at all. He just needed to stop.

“There.”

“Diligent of you to write everything ad verbatim. You’re no stenographer.”

“Primary sources are best sourced fresh.” He adjusts his collar. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Pardoes. Start there.”

She squints. “The jester mascot. Not ‘Who founded the Efteling.’ The mascot certainly is not brass tacks.”

“The face of the park is the first thing you see.”

“The jester is not the first thing that came from the park.”

“He’s not just a jester. A Symbolican! Don’t you know the lore?”

Her hair set aside for a better look. “Let’s see, 1989, Knoet’s creative license.”

“So left of field, no origin story, just out of the blue, its own IP. The Efteling’s own invention, no source material, not even a fairy tale behind him but himself. He materialises and he belongs. Nobody bothers to ask: ‘Why, even?’”

“The world he arrived into made enough sense for him to match.”

“So he belongs to it without being welcomed. Who does he think he is?”

Pen, its thrust on the table. “Pieck spent forty years building a visual language consistent enough that something new could walk into it and be naturalised. Having been an esteemed fairytale illustrator for children’s books helps.”

“So the whimsy is built into the system.”

“On top of all that, he was teaching at the lyceum in Overveen the same time he was designing the park, that tells you a great deal.”

“I’d love to know what you’d think he’d think if he sees the Symbolica now.”

“I assume he’d think the mascot is a lovely thing.”

“I have onride footage on my fourth video showing this, but you’re underselling it, mevrouw.” On his notes. “Well, I guess you can say that. Imagine a jester cutting the stairs you’re walking on in half. The forced perspective itself is a great feat.”

“Terrifying.”

“Yes, it is supposed to be. But consider this.” Hands slamming on the walnut.

“YOU MEAN TO TELL ME YOU ENTER THE WHIMSY BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM, GREETED BY A CONCRETE SLAB?”

“So loud. You should be a Calm-erman for a bit.”

Letting out air. “It’s under-themed, mevrouw! The solar panels on the rooftop garden have at least a brutalist aesthetic that makes sense. BUT PARDOES GREETS YOU AT A CONCRETE SLAB.”

Her voice, reminiscent of the classroom. “Calm down, Kamerman.”

“Sorry.” Rubbing his face.

Such a cute boy.

“I never—I have few people to share my thoughts with regarding such things. The Koningszaal is a great show scene. It’s what I always come back to. It’s what makes me being part of the throughput and my E-ticket worthwhile.”

“You are so upset about this ride, yet to have seen it forty-seven times.”

“Because I am enamoured by how its ‘weirdness’ captures.”

“Forty-seven times, Kamerman.”

“You have three separate routes whenever you enter the Symbolica. If you want the whimsical aspect that is also educational, the Botanicum is there for the kids. Plants and animals, a whale, a greenhouse. Or if you want to be one of those dumbasses who prefer Prolle over Pardoes, you can visit the Provisie.”

“Took note of one of the plants displayed at the entrance when my colleague with her kid took me there with her. It is named after Reijnders.”

“Yeah, a man with an ego so big, a theme park with seventy-two hectares was not enough for it.”

“I felt something else besides the weirdness.”

“Oh?”

“At the Botanicum.”

“Is it something you’re willing to share?”

“I do not take you for een oorblazer, Kamerman.”

“Well let’s hear it.”

A taste of the nicotine. “I felt my singlehood threatening to bite me as I saw parents with their children by the panels as they play pretend the whale is after them. Seeing one of the children flail as the whale hits the glass and a crack streaks through, and a mother jumping in to coo her was just. Annoying.”

“Huh.”

“My colleague is a very probing woman. She brought me with her boyfriend and two of her sons there as a gesture of charity.”

“She’s very generous.”

“If you consider that I can no longer bear children at my age without risking myself and my child, sure.”

He looks at her. “Did you always want a family of your own?”

“I met him back in Rotterdam.” Her eyes on the clipboard. “He looked exotic. My guess was one of the constituent countries, the Antillen. Then he told me, ‘former colony out southwest.”

Suriname.

“He took me to his flat and showed me his collection. He was old-school. Very. Snijders. Davis. Kassav’. He was a big fan of Marley too, prompting me to oppose his other habits.” She smokes. “I never then expected he would share my enthusiasm when he played Slaves and Bulldozers on his Fender Mustang. I was in-love. But I could not imagine a family with him at the time.”

“Not even a creative collaboration?”

“I tried seeing him again. Someone else got to him. He took that Balinese slet¹³ to his flat.”

“I see.”

“You wouldn’t have assumed this is what I felt when I was there.”

“Well, that wasn’t my point.” He takes off his glasses. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a cred or a tourist from Czechia or a resentful woman who was roped in something she had no say in.”

“Social economy when you’re older is a lot more different. You’ll understand soon enough.”

“You still chose to go.”

“Stretching one’s legs is more than enough sometimes, Kamerman.”

“Everyone reacts to the park in a particular way that lifts me up likewise. Whatever their individual reactions are, the people themselves act as a sort of exhibit too. And how they react to it is also telling of where they were from or what reason they had in being there. Using the Czechia example, he told me he was from there because the Droomvlucht reminded him of Prague.” He puts them on.

“Didn’t think fairies would remind anyone the spires of Bohemia.”

“Much more than that, mevrouw. He was reminded because his father used to tell him about what his father told him about the grim reality of occupation. How the stories he was told as a jonge was also the dad’s dad telling on himself out loud. Apparently the guy I met at the park also bragged about how he could probably trace his grandpa being one of the guys who murked Reinhard Heydrich.”

“Sounds like something I must verify.” Sipping. “So you go for the rides and how the people react to them.”

“Well, the rides are why the people are there, no?”

The opening of her mouth curls not to his perception. “Such an odd way to put yourself in a place only to read people.”

Hypocrite.

“Well, no, not necessarily. The reading itself is a byproduct, a part of the experience.”

“With this much data, I can’t help but think you consider me to be the woman for this.”

A pause. “I was talking to a fellow eftluencer the other day. Let him know I was taking a consult.”

“And.”

“He laughed at me. He told me the GP is not worth dissecting for feedback.”

“GP.”

“General public.” Tapping his fingers on the notebook. “You are way more refined than that, so I figured: Ask a professional for the history, I myself deliver my texture, and we get good stamppot out of it.”

Stamppot is a traditional Dutch dish, a combination of potatoes mashed with one or several vegetables typically garnished with sausages.

Her red marker’s tip on the clipboard. He sees this.

“You aren’t grading me, are you?”

She writes whatever loaded terms she has to. The teacher herself never stops learning.

“Founding the park with Reijnders and his expertise on filmmaking and direction was a great enhancement for his mosaics. He was the man for the job.” She turns the pen. “Regarding what you’re arguing for, the judgment is correct.”

“This Reijnders guy’s filmmaking is apparent on how there is a cinematic feel to everything. It’s a moving picture: the theme park. Everyone gets to be their own character alongside the animatronics and the mascots.”

“All that gezelligheid¹⁴. You’d never see that in Rotterdam.”

“Rotterdam.”

“Everything there is contrived, crooked.”

He watches her handle the moka pot for another refill, pen now behind her ear.

“Rotterdam is very efficient. You can thank the Germans for a great job done leveling the place.”

Obscured by avenue elm and not-so-skyscrapers facing north of the Lofts, the Amstel, the pewter of it almost visible had only the revolting slab been any taller, the specific grey of a city built on function and not on the thing above function. Cranes here and there, the bridge careening with decongestion and two-wheelers.

“Is that why you left?”

“Rotterdam. Very efficient.”

“I’ve never been.”

“You’re not missing out much.” She furls a brow. Such proximity, yet not a single visit.

Her eyes on her coffee. His fountain pen hitting the pad.

“When did the Sprookjesbos open exactly?”

“1952. The thirty-first of May.”

What is written, is written.

“The Spookslot.”

“One of the firsts after the Sprookjesbos. Van de Ven, not Pieck’s. Confrontational mythology. Something van de Ven had to experiment with since he was also working on thrill rides at the time.”

“Really?”

“The man responsible for the Gondoletta was behind Halve Maene, Fata Morgana and the Piraña. Strange priorities, indeed.”

“Thrills alongside the spills and all that.”

“The generation old enough by then was wanting the darkness without the softening. The amber interiors were for the parents, the Spookslot their children.”

“And Danse Macabre the grandchildren.” On his notes. “Closing date.”

“Closed down 2022. Forty-four years. You know this already.”

“Just because I love the show scene doesn’t mean I can fully grasp the numbers behind it.” His writing stops. “I remember habitually pulling on the doorknobs even though I knew what was coming. The statues weren’t entirely scary, Pepper’s Ghost¹⁶ did occasionally catch me off guard. Then the clock strikes twelve⁴.” He smiles. “Danse Macabre would play from the haunted violin. Classic practicals. SFX. I love Merkelbach’s interpretation.” The pen turns slowly.

She notices him twirling the strap of his bag, then continues. “The entire six-minute ride would be replaced.” Sips. “The replacement would carry that song’s name a couple years later. Named in honour of Saint-Saëns. A stage that spins and lifts. The Spookslot asked you to face the dark. Danse Macabre makes the dark move you through itself. Same need. Different instrument.”

4th of July starts.

“Since we’re talking replacements: the Bobbaan. The bobsled track. I loved it. Also gone.”

“2019. Max en Moritz now.”

“I still remember being able to ride it one last time before they took it down that September. Sjef and I would pretend to scream as we went down the railing, but there was a time the brake malfunctioned and he was actually almost thrown off-carriage.”

“My colleague and her two sons and I waited an hour and a half only for it to reverse randomly before maintenance had to jump in. She forked her husband to pay for me once I got there.”

“Very generous of her still.”

“Always be wary of Brabantians.”

“Okay, that’s not really nice, mevrouw. Especially since Kaatsheuvel is like my second home.”

“Die jongen van het Noord, obsessed with Brabant.”

“The IJ is hostile to such things, sadly.”

Her curiosity gets the best of her.

“Tell me what’s Sjef been up to.”

He does not respond immediately. “Ah, a silver spoon in your mouth paves the red carpet for you. He’s under contract for Arcadis now.”

“Hij heb ‘m een end uit z’n broek hangen¹⁵.”

Pinching his chin. “He didn’t really care you failed him. Compensatie acquired through other marks by Zesde Klas, because he thinks ‘humanities is a waste.’”

How unpleasant.

“Their replacements are inarguably better, I must admit.” He redirects. “Sjef told me he hates it whenever I’m at Max and he’s at Moritz, or vice-versa.”

“Two coasters, same footprint.” She drinks. “They kept the space, upped the ante, but changed the story by making them run opposite one another.” She picks the pen back up. “That’s the Efteling. It doesn’t demolish. It translates.”

“Re-themes.”

“Quaint. That over what I had in mind, ‘reconstruction.’”

“It’s what we’ve just talked about, mevrouw. The Bobbaan turning into Max and Moritz is a re-theme. Like you said about the need being the same, just the mode being different, is all.”

Vera sips. The moka pot is in his field of vision. He looks at his cup but does not intend to taste any coffee from it at all. What kind of guest refuses his hostess’ courtesy yet stays for her input?

“So he also called your vocation garbage.” Mug on the walnut.

“Yeah. He’s too busy partying now. His lifestyle will eventually kill him if he keeps this up.”

“Then you’ve reached out to him.”

He does not answer.

Below, the street holds the worst of the afternoon’s grey. She had grown up with it.

Offshore, the water barely visible from her lofty unit reflects the particular dreariness of a city deciding to be nothing but functional. Those containers, those cranes. With the horizontal city, the rebuilt city, the city that had decided the answer was forward with pretentious glass, steel, and the rush for capital, neither residue, whimsy, nor any place to put the living dark. Or remind people of it.

She had left as soon as the leaving was available, when efficiency could no longer justify everything else not running on time. She ended up at the Omval anyway, economy and culture catching up with her. Different place, different time.

“The boat ride,” he says. “Gondoletta. Circumnavigating the park. Sightseeing the other attractions. Itself, just—water. Gondolas. Trees. Ducks.” He flails his palm back and forth. “Pretty much. You go around the lake and come back. History isn’t a circle. This isn’t Heraclitus, this is the postmodern world where people can’t even tell what really happened a week ago.”

Her mug is devoid again. She starts pouring. “Is that what you took from it.”

“Well,” a spin of his pen, “the Fata Morgana itself is very much tied to the Gondoletta actually.”

“Two boat rides coincidentally being the same thing. Shocker.”

“You don’t get it, mevrouw. What I don’t understand is why they chose to make two different things instead of sticking it up to one gimmick.”

“Van de Ven took inspiration from Pirates of the Caribbean when he made his thrill water-rides.”

“Okay, how do you know this?”

“A magician never reveals her secrets.”

She was with Loes in Disneyland Paris a few months prior.

“Speaking of said gimmicks, among us goons we have two versions regarding the Gondoletta and Fata Morgana being distinct.”

“Goons.”

“You know. Theme ride enthusiasts.”

“Surely.” A sip, the bitterness required to cleanse her tongue.

During a Derde Klas period, she had the misfortune of encountering the word as she confiscated the phone of a student off his hands and saw gibberish from X (formerly Twitter). Learning from Loes later that afternoon that the youth have appropriated such a stupid word has driven Vera to consider leaning on less leniency. She constantly wishes it stayed to being tangential to The Godfather or The Sopranos.

“Said gimmicks, Kamerman.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” He grabs his phone. “I have in my notes app several points I’d like discussing with you because that stupid ride always baffled me. The fact that van de Ven made Fata Morgana too is what irks me. But I didn’t know that.”

“How could you not have known this beforehand. Calling you an enthusiast would be a stretch.”

“Look, mevrouw, I really do just love the stimuli.” Fist to his lips. “I was more focused on what they did to people rather than why they do such things. There are other eftluencers with their own foci.”

“Disappointing.” Annoyingly so.

Still on his notes app. “Could I at least tell you what I had in mind?”

“You don’t have to be a pushover. Stop being such a child.” Coffee. “Maar ja, dat mag¹⁷. Niet lullen maar poetsen¹⁸.”

He breathes in. Out. “I think it’s bullshit that the Gondoletta and Fata Morgana are the same thing. They clearly don’t have the same name.”

“Such a practical observation, Meneer Voor de Hand Liggend.” Cigarette. “Also language. You don’t have to be crass just beca—”

“Listen.” His eyes a conflagrating hazel. “Intamin towboats. Nothing like the KumbaKs of De Vliegende Hollander. That dark ride itself is its own thematic monstrosity because it makes waiting in line itself part of the experience.”

“It is one of the best rides in Europe for a reason.”

“The ghost ship had a bad debut. The first used a gigantic projector curtain that was unreliable as shit.”

“Kamerman.”

“Then they replaced it with a physical shipwreck. It was easier that way. Splish-splash without actually getting wet. That’s the spills! But the thrills? Semi-dark ride. Yeah, I fucking said it.”

“Kamerman.”

One of the best, one of mine.

The turntable finally stops playing.

“I mean, you must have ridden it at least once.”

“You said you had a weak heart.”

“There are pills for that. The delayed gratification is worth it.”

If said gratification is a heart attack, Vera would be hypertensive now. She is, quite. The smile. He cannot see it. He should not see it.

“I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is—Fata Morgana and De Hollander are thrill rides. One based on Arabian Nights, the other on our famed mythology.” Tapping on the table. “The Gondoletta is just that, whatever it is. Its towboats were originally Fata Morgana’s but the cognitive dissonance is so deafening, a circumnavigation around the park’s waters compared to an indoor island with an ending where you get your booty—but it’s a monkey’s paw because a djinn¹⁹ waits for you there. They are nothing alike. As much as I love the park, with these asspulls, no wonder it loses to Europa Park.”

“The monkey’s paw being.”

“It ends.”

“You give the impression you’d rather it doesn’t.”

“It’ll make sense in a bit.”

“If I recall, it used to be Fata Medina. Explains the djinn.”

He puts his phone in his pocket. “That’s version one of the ride’s origins, by the way. The other one is that the Gondoletta was a prototype for Fata Morgana before it became its own thing. Whatever is true, the tonal whiplash is really bugging me.”

“Someone must have witnessed you being such a domkop because you thought at one point the rides don’t make sense.”

“Sometimes they don’t!” He tilts. “Wait did you just call me—”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if someone witnessed you melting down while you are on your dumb rides. You already do that on video.”

He went on a nervous breakdown as to why it lags three times behind Paris and is somehow behind Germany’s Europa Park.

“Well, I did take someone to the park. Thought she shouldn’t have to see my enthusiasm, or so I thought.”

“For a geek like you, you shouldn’t have moxie, especially that which fancies.”

Surely this consultation is not enough evidence?

“This was before the lockdowns. Not necessarily my initiative; it was happenstance. She was with family.” He stares at the ceiling. “Coco… Potgieter? I forget. I think she has a second surname. Or it’s her second?”

His uncertainty is her unease. His fountain pen down for a moment. Shifting his sight toward his bag. The keychain.

“You remember Coco.”

“I’d hate to.”

“Y’know, the girl with the tentacle hentai presentation.”

She turns her head toward him in disbelief as she overpours her coffee refill and her pen falls off her ear.

A sound from him. She acknowledges this.

“We went in February. During the break, before the world decided, ‘Krijg de corona⁵.’” He smiles once more. “She wore a pink shirt and had her hair up.”

“Is this essential information.”

“I’m meticulous. She was lightly dressed. In February.”

He takes his glasses off and starts nibbling on the temple tips.

“We did the Gondoletta and she didn’t say anything the entire circuit, which I found either romantic or ominous and couldn’t find out which. Then she led me to the punching machine.”

“The punching machine.”

“Near the entrance. One of those Carnival things, you deck the bag, it scores your strength. She got max points.”

Vera looks at him.

“Max,” he gesticulates. “Clean. First try. Ziek⁶. Then: BOOM. It spontaneously combusted.”

Her mouth furrows. “What.”

“Then she looked at me and said: ‘That was wonderful! Hark, Rens! It is now your opportunity to partake inflicting blows against the punching device!’”

But it just blew up?

His glasses back on.

“I told her I thought the Symbolica queue was moving.” A reroute. “It wasn’t but I assure you, I’d rather be on the ETF²⁰ than anywhere near her then since I was more concerned if she would beat the crap out of me because I thought I was boring her. At the time she played rugby, and I was not in a rush engaging with her by any physical means.”

Her pen picked up. “How,” she hems, “long did that relationship last.”

“We weren’t a thing.”

“Oké, dan.”

Tering heej.

“She’s really nice.”

Rens is reliving the fond memory. This vexes her.

“By the time we got there, I felt that she shared my enthusiasm. Every visit always brings a different experience. It couldn’t have been more different without her.”

Staring, chin resting at the back of her clasping palms.

“She would go on how one of her sisters, and I quote, ‘finds the rides rather quaint and dull and desires only to be back at home on her computer to dally with the fourth installment of The Simulations™,’ and thought it generous to invite me to ride the Fantasievaarder in her stead. Then Coco and I rode it and she looked at me and her eyes were just—they were so wide open that I could see her eye floaties despite my prescription.”

Fokking wat??

“She kept smiling without blinking. I think the family who was behind us noticed. I mean she looked at them and they visibly got upset, or perhaps straight-out scared I was sitting next to a ‘creature’ outside their understanding. Her smile is something I can’t classify and it already is superfluous I even tried to. I swear on my mother’s life that being on that carriage with her was scarier than anything else the Efteling had to offer.”

“Was she ever like this in my class?” she asks for the first time this afternoon.

The notebook is pulled out.

“She rendezvoused with the rest of her sisters and I found reasons not to be rude while needing to be elsewhere.” He looks up. “After high school, I have no idea what she’s studying now. IT, maybe. Coco’s deadass terrible with computers, though. Very strange lady.”

A CRT monitor falling from the sky and right in front of the schoolyard occupies Vera’s mind. Somehow that is such a Coco thing to happen.

“Anyway. How many visitors during the first year of the Efteling?” Back at it.

Having heard all what seemed like nonsense: “Two hundred and forty thousand, approximately. More than they had built for. It was 1952, a number big for its time.” She closes her eyes. “Too big, in fact. I think it was actually less. I don’t have the actual number with me so don’t quote me on it.” Opens them.

Noted.

“You know, you really should have just gone to the Museum for all of this.”

He doesn’t look at her. “They don’t have everything there. And what little that exists to explain doesn’t say much. I’ve read the Eftepedia way too many times already.”

“They have an actual propaganda film by one of the founders.”

“But I prefer my histories in person rather than in exhibitions.”

“Eftepedia.” Mug in mouth.

“You are living history.”

“Equating me to a living fossil, maybe.”

Giggling. Looking at his notes. “But the Gondoletta though.” Tapping his pen on his forehead. “That’s the one I keep coming back to. No story. No darkness contained. Just the water, the trees, being in it for the ride. As if the Efteling needs to just—”

“It knows when not to explain itself.”

A page flips. He looks at the blank leaf. Her mug down.

“Van de Ven, a student of the school of Industrial Design in Eindhoven, masterminded the Gondoletta. Under Pieck’s employ by 1965 he gave him a great deal of legroom, and he learnt quickly to adjust to his vision. By Pieck’s retirement in 1974, van de Ven had the reins on how the park ought to look like.”

Rens, a straight eye upwards.

Fingers on the handle. “He understood what Pieck had built well enough to know when the infrastructure didn’t need to carry the dark. For the Gondoletta in particular, it’s just the boat on the water. Just the ‘being there.’” Caffeine between her lips. “He’d earned the nothing. What it was, who it was for.”

He writes for a long time. She lets him, already more than she expects.

“Thus it domesticates the terror.”

“I guess it does, mevrouw.” He looks at her nails.

“That’s not a new reading.”

“I know. I’ve argued about the postwar argument of the Efteling’s existence in some of my trip reports.”

A hesitation. Across the table.

“That you’ve watched.”

“You already have what you need, of zo⁷.”

“What I meant is further texture. The thing underneath the peddled texts. What it actually felt like. What you needed from language. What you were trying to put down.”

She keeps her expression exactly where it is. “You haven’t changed.”

She lights another cigarette.

“You were perfectly capable at sixteen.”

“What?”

She hears what he does not say. The same unsaid thing since the second question, since he stopped consulting the notebook, since the recording device stayed in his bag and the conversation became something neither of them is formally recording. She hears it, she files it, and she places it in the correct drawer, the drawer that has the clarity she reserves for primary sources, material evidence, and logical reconstructed conclusions, the specific shape of a problem she was not going to have.

She had been correct about that. She had not had the problem.

Except it is right in front of her now. It is sitting across her kitchen table meant to host exactly two people, an ink mark on the left index finger and the gullibility that he initiated this.

“Mevrouw Persijn?”

“It’s the third most visited theme park in Europe.

“Should be higher.”

“The Hongerwinter children are now grandparents. Their grandchildren queue for Symbolica. Fly through Droomvlucht. Race Joris en de Draak and drop into a mine shaft on Baron 1898 just under half the speed of freefall and have no framework for what the park was built to pass on.” The pen on the table. “The mythology still works as intended. Strolling through the forest feels rather eerie than fun because something in it is heavier than it should be.”

“So you’re saying: What it replaced.”

“The silence that was left behind, Kamerman.”

A buzz, brief, from the entrance. Someone working through the numbers. It stops.

A lengthy sip from her mug.

“The Dutch commemorate differently. The Arnhem Airborne March is one thing, but we’ll get to that. The English host concerts even at Buckingham palace; the French president lays a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. If you even have to ask how the Germans do it. No grand public reckoning.”

Another taste. “Why should they, they’re the losers. Toch⁸.”

He looks. Just looks.

“After the war we still had verzuiling⁹ which absorbed the ruins—the Catholics into your Church, Protestants and fellow Reformed ours, the Socialists, and the liberals and so on under their general zuil. This four-part pillarisation processed the Occupation privately, apropos great privation, and hid it away. The March is the formal commemoration, an institutional ceremony. The Efteling is what happened when the private processing needed public understanding.” This time, the pen. “Pieck didn’t know he was doing that. That’s the only way it could have worked. It’s the only way he could reconstruct.” Figures in the air. “The only way he could have made it legible.”

“Legible.” He yawns.

“What each generation needed.” She draws more invisible mathematics in the air. “A controlled exposure to the thing feared.”

“It could be infrastructure. The Nazis are long gone, and yet what they built—rather, what they destroyed—remains. You need somewhere to put it where it has shape. Scale. One you can visit. An exhibition of trauma coped through surrealism.”

Her pen in hand, stops.

“I’ve got tea if you need it.”

“No, thank you, mevrouw. Although I never took you for a tea person.”

“You were just as sleepy in my class.”

“Well, yeah, when anyone else would be at front.”

Holding it precisely, with the unconscious authority of someone for whom this instrument is continuous with the thinking. Differently each time: once demonstrating the air-geometry; now still, grasping. The difference in the holding is in what she is doing, and the knowing in said doing.

Perusing the notebook. “So you’re saying the Efteling is a placebo for the darkness that really was.”

“That’s what theme parks usually do.”

“Disneyland is not the Efteling.”

“They’re both tourist destinations. Recreational settings. Not much makes them different from one another.”

“The theme park in Paris is not grounded in actual history, mevrouw.”

“It is in acquiring more profits, Kamerman. Surely nothing else makes sense. Netting over three-hundred million Euro last year, and about thirty-seven in profits.”

“Don’t be so cynical.”

The brow raised. “Sometimes it really is all about money.”

“Money does not buy happiness.”

“Ha. Are you dense.”

He thinks about this, for quite a while.

“Kamerman, the whimsy is manufactured. People visit a theme park not necessarily for the themes. It’s a setting that is lovely for the family to enjoy in. A recess from the toils of post-capitalist dreariness plaguing the world. Bread and circus.”

“Why do you choose to see it that way?”

“The Efteling is miniature of the postmodern.” Pen again on the cheek. “It has everything to tell you it says nothing. So by that logic the Efteling is not special, either. It could just be any other historical place with more macabre.”

“So Germany.”

She chuckles.

“I forgot. Auschwitz-Birkenau is in Poland now.”

Another brief chortle, with some nicotine.

“Work sets you free so you can go to Disneyland.”

Now she just laughs out loud.

“Too soon?”

“Don’t mind me.” Mug in lip. “Goed gedaan¹⁰, Kamerman.”

A second page is filled.

“He wasn’t a Nazi.”

“Oh, defending Disney now, are we, mevrouw?”

“It’s quite more nuanced, Kamerman. He did visit Duitsland in 1938. Met with some propagandists and top brass. He also was in some dainty right-wing groups during the thirties. But keep in mind that scanty evidence exists for his sympathies for the Reich. Disney himself created propaganda cartoons against the Reich. It would disappoint me if you haven’t seen Der Führer’s Face.”

“I have. The song is very catchy.”

Propaganda for propaganda.

“It’s very well-known that Hitler himself was a fanatic of Walt’s cartoons. A B-17 flew over Germany in 1943 carrying a training bomb, dropped its payload with a letter addressed to Frau Midge.”

“Who?”

“Mildred Gillars, traitor to the Americans known as ‘Axis Sally.’ The letter itself notes of instructions for Goebbels’ propaganda lapdog. It would be unwise and discrediting for Walt—who himself still possessed prejudicial tendencies of the time—to call him a Nazi with insufficient evidence.”

“My bad then, mevrouw. For some reason, I mistook him for Henry Ford.”

Across the table she reaches for and turns the three books toward him, Blom’s Fracture: Life & Culture in the West, 1918-1938, Dekker’s Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, and Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, each open to a page she chose before he arrived. She stands beside him, pointing, knowing his eyes have been weary since morning.

“Check these. Whatever I haven’t said, it’s in any of them.”

“One of them is clearly about the Interwar period. At least Hobsbawm’s here now. But I need blueprints, not gizzards. Can't I at least have one of your Kershaws?”

“If Pieck had no idea what to build, you shouldn’t either.” Mouth to her coffee. “Gizzards.”

“I’m very hungry, I’m sorry.”

He is aware of her as a physical fact in the room. Close enough to distinguish a perfume, dark and uncomplicated; something with sandalwood, mixed with the resin stench of linoleum; something that smells of old dust and parchment from libraries; something vintage that is not trying to be anything it is not.

He files it in the category of things he should not act upon.

She has watched him use it all afternoon, the filing, the categorising, the careful maintenance-log of a young man who has decided what cannot be apprehended can at least be archived. She finds it, at this proximity, the saddest instrument she has encountered in a kitchen.

Back to her chair. He reads. She waits, the patience of a woman who has learned that not all silences are furniture. The subsequent note-taking preoccupies him, she thinks.

“So you wanted to be a rockstar.”

“Wow. Good guess. Who’d’ve thought.” She throws what remains of the stick off her shoulder.

Eyes still on the notebook as he points with the fountain pen. “The mug. The records. Mailman playing when I got in. The exotic man.”

“You have a good ear.” Her forehead wrinkles upward more than it usually does. “You remember that band Potgieter had.”

“Yeah?”

“One of her bandmates—Venetiaan¹¹ was it—reached out to me last year. Thanked me. Told me she now has multiple gigs, in the continent and offshore. Heard she last played at Bristol.” Sipping. “I told her, ‘good luck with it’. Caught lightning in a bottle. To my credit of course.”

“That’s sweet, mevrouw.” Tapping the notebook. “But everything else about you says nothing about what’s in this room.”

“Sometimes the scarf is just a scarf.”

“You know he probably never said that.”

“Of course.”

He glances. An ageing crimson, twice-wrapped at her throat like a position. “,em>Echt¹².”

“You see the records. You went for the scarf. The room screams of Total Depravity, and you bolted for the one thing that has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

“I can see why you like grunge so much, mevrouw.”

“You wear grace like a costume. Kamerman. You can always put it away once dirtied, only for some paap in robes to clean it for you.” Sips. “You conflate the divine with substance, His time with ours.”

“The Word became flesh to begin with. There shouldn’t be an issue with participating in salvation history, a history He willingly entered through His Son.”

“How do you suppose that participation occurs without diminishing His sovereignty?” Eyes on the thick frames, a black hued with bevel. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

“Is it really a problem for you that the Apostles and their successors were given the authority to absolve and retain sin?” He looks at her intently. “Or does it contradict with your purview of election?”

“Election is not meant to be prospective.” Hands on the coffee. “There are things left unsaid that were pre-ordained.”

“Such as?”

Cyclists on the streets carry on their strolls. Trains rushing into the October light going amber in the afternoon.

“I wanted to be a lot of things. A guitarist. Anywhere that wasn’t in that godforsaken port. A librarian at the Bibliotheek Den Haag. A teacher.” Drinks her coffee. “I managed to be all things. But how much I used to love teaching.” Sets it down.

“You’re a very good teacher.” He pauses. “Then again, you say all of that. But you aren’t your own.”

“Oh, Kamerman.” She focuses on his hands. “You were the best student I had till that year. The only one who was actually thinking rather than—” Then back to her coffee. “You had a real mind.”

Past tense. He notices it.

“That year.”

She is silent.

The notebook. Two questions left.

“Who is the park for?”

The pen in her hand, still.

“Us. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the first people who stepped foot onto the Sprookjesbos. Any one of us who could understand what the dark doesn’t have to be what it was while made palatable. And everyone else who will come after us, with an even lesser idea of what the park stands for, but much more of the dread-that-hides.”

He writes it down. She watches him write it. Dread-that-hides.

The station below. Another screech. The October light is almost gone.

“Did you enjoy the park?”

The coffee off her hands and on top the walnut.

“I am capable of having fun.”

The notebook is closed. No follow-up to when the last visit was. It is not a rat race yet there’s still a rush.

The mug, bare of contents.

“You know why you’re here now.”

lit. “cup of get-lost”: particularly Rotterdam slang for a strong cup of coffee

Hunger Winter: the 1944–45 Dutch famine under the German occupation

Outstanding: A grade comment in middelbare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIFxIXTcOmw&list=RDLIFxIXTcOmw&start_radio=1

Get the corona: Dutch expletive adapted from “krijg de tyfus” (get typhus); used to mean “go to hell” and was said during the pandemic

Sick: Dutch slang for impressive, awesome, cool

contraction of ‘of zoiets’ — or something

an interjection, in this case ‘Anyway’. In other contexts, it could either mean ‘isn’t it’ as well as other unrelated uses that range from being used in the middle of a Dutch sentence to confer the concluding interjection ‘after all,’ or have another totally unrelated use, ‘[ja]wel toch’ where it becomes a question. It’s the tone of voice when it is spoken that truly decides whatever the fuck it means

pillarisation — the Dutch social system of organising society along religious and political lines, each with its own institutions. From ‘Verzuiling’: A Confessional Road to Secularization. Emancipation and the Decline of Political Catholicism, 1920-1970: “The term verzuiling is widely used by sociologists and political scientists to describe the division of Dutch society and political life into vertical sections or zuilen (literally pillars). It therefore seems legitimate to adopt the term in this essay and so acquaint the reader with a key concept in Dutch sociology. The Dutch cosmos is commonly considered to have been supported for more than fifty years by four zuilen, each representing a particular denominational or political group. As these have together preserved the precarious social equilibrium, verzuiling is widely credited with having brought stability to a society which is otherwise divided by contradictions and antagonisms. In all there are four pillars: three of these - the orthodox Calvinist, the Roman Catholic and Socialist zuilen - have a definite confessional or political character, but the remaining zuil, usually referred to as the ‘general’ or ‘liberal’ zuil, should be regarded as an omnium gatherum, which owes its existence to the presence of the others.”

Well done

Canon name: Cleo Venetiaan

n. Real. Here, adv., really

slut; whore

the Dutch concept of coziness, warmth, and the pleasure of good company in a shared space. Untranslatable in the way that matters. Distinguished from mere comfort by its social dimension:

He has it hanging quite a bit out of his pants: he’s living large. Rotterdam expression about the upper classes

gezelligheid requires presence, not just atmosphere. Its absence is called ongezellig

an illusion technique named after scientist John Henry Pepper, who popularised it in 1862. A sheet of glass or half-silvered mirror is angled to reflect the image of an object or performer positioned offstage, projecting a translucent, ghostly apparition into the visible scene. Still in use in theatrical and dark ride design

lit. “But yes, that’s allowed.” Dismissive Dutch concession — roughly “well, fine, if that’s what you want.” Here, invariably mild contempt: you’re wrong, I won’t stop you

No talking, but cleaning: meaning “shut up and continue working.” Rotterdam is pretty blunt even among fellow Dutchies

in Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabian tradition, a supernatural entity existing in parallel with humankind, capable of assuming human or animal form. Unlike Western demons, not inherently malevolent — simply other

ETF Ride Systems: Dutch manufacturer of the trackless Multi Mover vehicles used in Symbolica, colloquially called Fantasievaarders (Fantasy Carriages). Six-seater, battery-powered, guided by floor sensors rather than physical rails. Rens uses the manufacturer name as shorthand for the ride vehicle itself

IX

Crack Hitler

Summary: The room changes tone once the elephant is addressed.

Keep up the fight
And in the wink of an eye
Never give up
Look out

The notebook lies closed on the surface.

“I know what the rumour was. What became of it.”

She does not give a rehearsed account.

“Ongegrond.” She contemplates a third stick but lays it down by the books.

“So I heard.”

Unfounded. The word said by investigators, administrators, HR personnel, one lawyer from Utrecht, and now to a ruddy young man barely into his twenties, thick glasses, pathetically bright hazel eyes, merlot sweater covering a wide frame, sitting across her table with a notebook full of questions about a theme park and something else underneath them, something she decided before the buzzer rang that she would not pretend not to see.

Unfounded. The legal minimum. Technically edible. The students were irrational, the school body helpless, and her reputation teetering salvation¹.

“Three months of HR meetings, Kamerman. That’s what an allegation does to a room, before anything has been tested.” She stops. Her preceding tone is much more different before starting again.

“The room divides into the people who are deciding how much to believe, and the people having decided how much they believe. They all do it with their faces so you cannot refer to it, you cannot rebut it, and they give you no shape you can argue against. You can only sit in it. Wait.” Moka to her left, mug her right. “Then it comes back. Every room, a house divided.”

She takes a closer look at his eyes, myopic on the notes.

Pouring. “Well. Speak up.”

He takes his glasses off. Cleans them. The gesture he makes when he’s thinking.

She has watched him do this a few times during her lectures. The concentrated instances during his Tweede Klas, when he was getting used to his at-the-time new frames. The glasses coming off, the deliberate cleaning, the putting back on: she had registered it then as the gesture of a boy who had found, early, too early, a way to give himself the pause he needed without performing it. She is watching him do it now and what elapsed—which she has been trying not to call six years—is briefly, precisely present.

The hands. The ink. She does not address.

His glasses back on, looks across the table. “It was high school.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.” Eyes narrow. “You know that I sat next to Sjef. Sjef, he made it trivial. Jokes. Bad ones ad nauseam. Sometimes I questioned if he was even joking anymore. The kind that are really just the rumour running double time.” Glasses, wiped. “I didn’t find any of them funny. I mean, how could I—I had to sit in your class for the rest of the month. The rumour between us. At every desk. Sjef and his goons call me ‘Exhibit R.’ And I didn’t know what to do with what it made me think. Because I couldn’t put it where it makes me think.”

The bleating of the metro, but there is not one who speaks; the gust of the North Sea wind, but no air escapes their mouths; a collision below the streets, but there is no movement in conversation; and afterwards, a still small voice.

“I was sixteen, okay.”

“And what does it make you think now.”

“Pater Wies, one of the hoogleraren back at the Universiteit, would always tell me this adagé when it came to believing anything:

“Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur².”

She recognises the Scholastic motto.

“I think I’m probably sitting across you in your apartment now because I needed a teacher, and I chose you specifically because I needed to know.”

“Know what.”

His eyes straight on their target, albeit he repositions his glasses to rub them off a bit.

“Bad things happen to good people.”

She nods, once, slowly. Sets her mug down. She reads the sentence as confirmation. She has been reading him all afternoon, assigning weight and meaning, filing in the correct categories. But this. She will examine this when he is not in her kitchen with that quality of presence, waiting for the room to confirm a decision she has already authorised.

She has built the story of this decision the way she builds all primary source readings: available evidence toward the conclusion the evidence most supports.

The conclusion requires secondary source consultation.

“I see.”

She goes to the window, mug in hand. The pour threatening all afternoon arrives. Moth, cats and dogs, variable October climate which surprises no one.

Facing toward the rain, she glances at his reflection. She has been watching him all afternoon, tracking the specific way he holds his pen, the way he processes information quickly and quietly and without demonstrating the processing, and she needs, now, to watch the sky weep.

He stretches his arms, pushing the cigarette off.

“Sorry, mevrouw Persijn. I’ll come get it.”

“Don’t pick it up.”

He stands still.

“You were in the room.” To the glass.

Glasses, wiped. “What you did to her was, to say the least, an HR disaster. All things considered, even they knew it was the one way that situation could have been dealt with.”

“It was a proportionate response.” She stops. Recalibrates. “What you didn’t see was after.”

October 17th. A Thursday. Exactly six years and a day prior. Two columns, below the fold, a premeditated photograph taken from the corridor—back to the camera, the angle that turns proximity into intention. The caption did not use a name. The overcoat was the giveaway.

It described a student who had, it noted, recently received a failing grade, or something about a class election, or an endorsement, or bottles. It described a classroom. It described a quality of attention.

The staffroom. Face up on the notice board with the placement of a sore thumb. It was read once, standing, coat still on. Then folded in half.

She taught the next two periods.

The article made no accusation. It described a series of observable facts. The author made no room for subtlety and simultaneously left enough for interpretation.

SMELLS LIKE TEACHER SPIRIT

DOOR STAN ADRIAANSE

Her hand, against the window, feeling the glass as water trickles down the other side. She looks below for cyclists.

A cheap shot of the highest order.

He places his pen next to the notebook.

She had filed a complaint about the photograph—taken candidly, published impermissibly. The complaint was reviewed. Declined. Baseless, much to her chagrin.

She could track the paper’s progress through the building by the quality of silence that preceded her into rooms. The staffroom. The corridor outside the Jaarlaagcoördinator‘s³ office. The small kitchen where the photocopier was. Loes’ office, though her mutedness was conditional. Silences of different temperatures, different textures. All of them hers to walk into. Beforehand, the silences meant she was a force to be reckoned with, a woman with tenure to be respected. Now it was trepidation of an entirely unforgivable kind.

The administrator’s door was at the end of the hall. She had walked past it each morning that week and not gone in this time, because the proportionate thing—the correct thing—was to wait for the process to present itself.

It presented itself on the Monday.

“In these issues, the parent is the first go-to.” Her eyes toward the glass. “She instead went to the district administrator, who then informed the school board, de hele santemkraam⁴. She had already decided what it was going to be called that afternoon.”

“She knew which words.”

“Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” Vera’s voice has gone very controlled, firmly detached from calm. She stops.

The grey against the glass. Rens stationary across the table.

“They tried to interview me for the paper.”

“And.”

On his notes. “They tried to ask me so many questions and I didn’t answer. Stan wouldn’t quit bugging me, and she—” Stops. “Then the investigation happened. Then I was transferred to Sancta Maria in Haarlem.”

She sits. Not at the table, on the chair beside the window, facing away at an angle only the amber light could reach. When she speaks again it is quieter, the over-explaining exhausted, beneath it something bare.

“She wasn’t entirely wrong.”

The rail lines below, shadowed.

Misconduct. Inappropriate contact. Verbal abuse. All, none, a newly invented category—whatever the accusation was—unfounded was what fit. Every year since, her sobriquet ‘Miss Attributed’ was given by students she failed, students who revel in the gossip, students who know of the failings. She taught them history, their history of her is what they taught themselves.

Her hands immobile. “You were in that room. You know what she saw.”

His silence. Her confirmation.

“It doesn’t follow you. It becomes you. In everyone else’s mouth.”

She stands. Comes back to the table. Sits.

“Get on with your questions. Your subscribers are waiting.”

Vera’s wording of the contemporary phrase in regards to Rampjaar, the Disaster Year: “Het volk redeloos, de regering radeloos en het land reddeloos”

‘That which is received is received by the mode of the receiver,’ attributed to Aquinas

Year group coordinator: teacher responsible for a specific school year cohort

The whole lot; the entire circus: Dutch idiom for “the whole shebang”

X

Milk It

Summary: Loes calls and disturbs the peace. Will Vera handle this appropriately?

Her milk is my shit
Her shit is my milk

“You took your concealer with you and you know that.”

The lavender hair, ear on screen.

She is aware of this and performs nothing—which is its own performance. The composed face as deliberate act rather than natural state. She suspects he reads it as the former. At his age the distinction is still theoretical. Erasmus has taught him a great deal. He has not yet had sufficient cause to understand what it costs to hold a face in position while something important is happening behind it.

She holds her face. Listens to Loes.

WhatsApp could not be any more deafening.

He is watching with that quality of attention she noted in the first minutes—clean, systematic, generous—and she is aware, watching him watch her, that he believes he is seeing her clearly. She has been, once, in a classroom, by a sixteen-year-old who made a weapon of it. And now a young adult who has made a notebook of it. She finds figurative gunpowder and literal parchment, on balance, acceptable.

“Your mirror fell. You took it with you,” into the phone.

“—eneerke Bril dan——wa durf—gij—mijn collega toch eindeli—”

“Yes.” She listens longer.

“—nieuwe horizo——wanneer is de follow-upske——‘k had nie motte weg——mascara—”

“Nou is ‘t mooi geweest¹.”

Her face entirely composed. The face you put on when it is the only thing you can control.

“Jij vette mongool². I will call you back.”

She hangs up. Phone face-down on the table.

Twelve seconds of silence.

Research consultation.

“A colleague.”

“I gathered.”

“Asked me if she’d left something in my apartment.”

“Mevrouw de Vos? The leerlingbegeleider?” He recalls an incident where Sjef told him about a fight with Koos over a bong that was smuggled in during Vijfde Klas, and Loes was the one who took care of it.

“She told me she’d seen your channel. You know much about gossip as I do.” She puts her phone away. “She will now invite two of our coworkers for tea during primetime hours, drowning them at length that a former student was at my flat for a consult.”

“Will she?”

“She’s already made the reservations.”

Flat. Without rancour.

Weather.

The phone. Looks at it. Face-up on the island.

15:48

On the wall, the short hand three quarters into four, the long hand two digits past nine.

The mug. Something to do with her hands while her face does what it is doing. He sees the mug is not the mug anymore.

“People from this building saw me coming into your unit.”

“Uh huh.” Now she drinks.

“I even pressed the wrong unit number. I am clearly right here, right now.”

“Stop thinking about it.” She does not look. “I thought about that for three of the four hours before I bothered with your message.”

“What about the fourth?”

“It told me that if I couldn’t hold a professional consultation with a former student in my own kitchen about Dutch cultural history around a theme park, then she wins. And I stopped letting her win once she got out of my institutional sight.”

He picks his pen back up, her gaze steady toward him for a drawn, uncorroborated moment.

“You came to me for the Efteling.”

“That’s not what I just told you.”

“It’s clear when someone wants something professional from me.” She halts.

“If that is your word for it.”

Coffee lifted. “I have developed over quite some time a very specific instrument for detecting intent. It is not infallible. It is reasonably well-calibrated.” The mug descends.

The pen shuffles around his fingers. “And your instrument says?”

“That you’re here for the Efteling, Kamerman,” and the second time she says it, they both know it is not quite the same sentence as the first one.

He holds that.

She is watching him hold it, the weight of things without redistributing it. He took unfounded the same way. He sat with it the way you sit with a grandparent who keeps asking you your name until it is the only memory they possess.

“And if I’m not?”

“You are.”

“Mostly.”

Sipping. “The theme park.”

“Mostly.” Hands on his notebook.

“Stop reading too much into it.”

He looks away.

The rain hits the window in a gust. She turns for it. The moka pot idling with lukewarm coffee, adjacent to it is the clipboard with red annotations. GP. Show scene. Goons. All encircled, all defined by what she received and how she received it. From the window she turns away from it.

“There is not much you need to know besides what the themes of your rides are.”

“I told you. I needed to know about the rumour.” He pauses. “And about whether you—”

“Whether I’m what.”

“Whether you were alright.”

The golden light fading for something muted.

This question—by HR personnel, the colleague who rang from Eindhoven, even Loes, and one of her former students from Friesland who heard about the news and called in under the influence—in tones ranging from worry to relief. She answers she has tenure, she has her subject, she has the apartment and the bookshelves. The infrastructure. She has not been asked it by someone who needed to know. Or so the instrument debriefs.

“How kind of you to ask that.” Her voice has changed, fractionally, something has come out of it.

Looking back. “I just asked.”

“Of course.” She breathes. “I’m considerably more all right than most people who know what happened would expect. Twenty-five years on my subject and I have—” She gestures with her mug at the bookshelves, Rembrandt, the Blu-ray set, the controller, the stickers, the lollipops. “Infrastructure,” with a faint, dry precision.

He almost smiles. She catches it.

“You don’t have to.”

“I wasn’t gonna.”

Which is not entirely true, and both choose to defy it.

That’s quite enough now: Dutch phrase to end a conversation or situation

You fat retard. Crude, but canon

XI

Disappearer

Summary: Vera and Rens talk about Market Garden. Things that can go wrong will go wrong.

It’s been a man and gone
Now it’s a singing song
Like a western star
It’s going my way

She makes more coffee.

He does not ask her not to.

The afternoon has settled into something that can be inhabited. Rens catalogues thus: the disturbances posed by her colleague, the five, now six cups she is drinking, possibly more before his arrival, and the institutional verdict still leaving a sour taste. He does not see Vera jitter.

“Reconstruction.”

“What about it.”

“We’re already there.”

A sip. “You must be growing impatient.”

“I’ll be late for the vigil. I’ve been late here, I can’t repeat that with the Lord.”

“There’s always tomorrow. Even then, you wanted your question answered.”

He wipes his glasses. “I shouldn’t be late.”

“We have a saying. ‘Ja ken hier gewoon een pan bami uit het raam flikkeren.’

“Yeah, I have no idea. What does this have to do with Indomie?”

“You can go anytime you want. It doesn’t have to be now. Nothing stops you from doing what you feel you want because it is something you can do.”

Vera is not qualified for such diagnoses, even if she happens to be right.

“I want to go to the vigil Mass.”

“Is it really a sin to attend the Lord’s day on the day itself.”

“Can’t a man just be punctual?”

“Not much different between eating a wafer in a cathedral and throwing noodles off your flat if you think about it.”

“Okay, mevrouw, rudeness aside you’re just vagueposting at this point.”

“You have your spaces, I have mine.” Her pen on her hand before it departs, “Speaking of schedules. Tell me what happens when you attempt to cross a bridge too far.”

“Come on, mevrouw Persijn. Dat is gênant¹. You’re better than that.”

“If a student cannot even answer the most basic of questions, I’m not asking him the rest.”

An intentful survey. Then a scoff. “Market Garden. Market being the paratroopers raining from above, Garden the push towards Arnhem.”

“Drop thirty-five-thousand men into a death trap. Insist that XXX Corps can follow through with a supposed path laid down by lightly armed paratroopers. Across bitter marshes that scream ‘open fire at me,’ while vastly underestimating the significant German presence. Panzers and Generalfeldmarschall Model’s replenished units—the remnants of Army Group B after Falaise—now blocking the Nederrijn on one navigable path.”

“Highway sixty-nine. Hehe, nice.” Pen in hand. “Didn’t paratroopers literally fall close to where the German headquarters were?”

“Funny you mention that. Model ran with his pants down.”

“Figuratively, or?

“It is entertaining to believe he did. The truth of the matter is less impressive.” The mug. “The panic of seeing the sky peppering black with men you are convinced are raining down to kill you in particular will cause a stir.”

“And the undies?”

“The notion of the anxiety of running away from Hotel Tafelberg with a clumsily-closed briefcase.” Elapsing about six seconds of sipping. “Which never happened.”

“It really is bleak that even the Allies have to embellish their achievements. Then again, I can understand why they really wanted to scrape the barrel here.”

More sipping. “Since ‘Bomber’ Harris² with his Lankie and Halibag nachtbommenwerpers³ and the Americans with their Fortresses and Bockscar coffins have desensitised you and your general staff with endless barrages, be it area bombing at night or precision bombing by day, you’d think seeing men falling from the sky in broad daylight wouldn’t make a dent in you. At this point the German High Command reading the room would be chasing airs.”

“I’d rather see Tommy and G.I. Joe fall from the sky in broad daylight than be incinerated from above in the darkness, yes.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

A light chuckle. “Speaking of. Oosterbeek. A fellow eftluencer from there has told me about his experiences with the commemorative marches there. He was in awe of the Pegasus flags. I might come one day.”

“You should.” She sips. “It was not the 1st Airborne’s fault a certain Allied field marshal in charge thought that nothing could go wrong. He even got proper intel. The top brass expected everything to go smoothly as scheduled. If I recall, they had a three-day timetable and Arnhem was meant to be captured on day 3. The men at the bridge clearly saw that everything already had gone wrong because they were denied everything what their higher-ups knew.”

“So you end up with a bitter liberation.”

“It wasn’t as much that the Germans caught a lucky break—the Allies were too cocky. The government-in-exile calls for a railway strike as the operation commenced in support of it, and still took place as we occupied Dutch caught a sniff of the operation’s failure. The Reichskommissar issues an embargo to point a middle finger against the oncoming liberators as well as whom it’s oppressed, but the war ending by Christmas seems to fall on deaf ears again like the one thirty years before it. And everyone goes hungry because one’s hubris enabled it and the other’s pettiness enforced it.”

“Come spring, by the time you do get fed, you’d die of shock.”

“Starving and twenty-thousand dead leads to desperation, clawing over anything that could be edible, or simply people succumbing to their empty stomachs. Read my oma’s letters, and in one of them she says she subsisted on sawdust and her brother’s boots before the Allies got to the Randstad. My oma was detailed about her descriptions of how she received rations during Operation Manna. Then she met opa.”

Under his breath, “Allemachtig.” He composes himself. “Imagine all that time spent languishing. Must have been seeing the Fabula in real time, some as they breathe their last.”

A circular motion from her mug. “However it went, the dark grew with its audience. Oma was a starving wastrel nursed to nourishment by a gum-chewing Yankie from Jersey. They built a life from the ruins of war. What you say is bitter, I call bittersweet. That’s what good mythology does. Even if it breaks, it makes.”

“Just like the Efteling.”

“You can’t help yourself.”

He thinks for a moment. “Verzuiling was a societal practice where everyone kept to themselves.”

“So.”

“Post-war Europe was particularly devastating, but we Dutch kept on holding to the old systems after the darkness of the Occupation had us briefly unified.”

“That is a bold claim, yes.”

“But then you still had the system that contracted people to only stick in their lane. Catholics have to buy from a Catholic bakery, go to Catholic schools, probably attend gatherings with predominantly Catholic participants; Reformed likewise. Frankly, if the two of us were speaking in the 50s, we would be taken away from each other.”

Her eyes are a particular width of open.

“I had this as one of my papers. Ontzuiling⁴ coincided with secularism, or at the very least had its basis from it. By 1960, one in four Dutchmen professed no allegiance to any Church, though their faith lay elsewhere. The Efteling represents or at least tries to illustrate the unbelonging to any zuil. The theme park was an outlet for people of various pillars to share the grief that struck each and every zuil."

“Still not a new reading.”

His glasses off for a moment. “Individuality, social mobility, mass media—these all helped people cope as the rigidity of the social castes became less of a taboo and more of a hindrance we eventually overcame, even if it meant losing the pillars also meant losing our convictions. Our bulwarks. In exchange for a secularised social contract. Stability.” Back on his face.

“Wow.” She really means it.

“Well I have to draw from somewhere.” Fist by his lips, index curled.

“You must have something else in mind. I can tell.”

Eyes to the ceiling. “In regards to the Efteling itself, I can’t help but point towards the 89-11 clause.”

Mug close to her mouth. “What about it.”

He continues. “Foundation rules. Every attraction must stay to that ratio of land given to the park, seventy-two hectares. Nature gets its keep. The ducks can have fun too. The park can always translate as you say it, to which I posit that it reconstructs.” Eyes on the scribbles. “Exactly so with Danse Macabre. Max and Moritz. The Spookslot. It’s safe to say, given the circumstances, the Efteling ‘will sail into eternity.’”

One more sip. “The conscious dark is no longer mode nor function. It’s transformation.” A smile.

“The park is social cohesion. Each attraction represents the sum of all parts that verzuiling embodied. Nobody has to be alone in the processing. Everyone gets to be in the court of King Pardulfus, the monarch who despises the rigidity of laws. It’s quite stupid that he of all characters gets to say that, but what’s a theme park without the hypocrisy of what built it? An escape from the darkness using a lesser form of it?”

“Uitmuntend, Kamerman. You’ve got your stuff. Goed gedaan.”

He writes.

Refeeding syndrome averted in ways one could not have foreseen.

She spots the inscription. “The topic is apt.”

Photographs are taken of the pages of the books laid bare on the table for his requirement for ambiance. His notes show the final piece of the argument he was missing: Pieck’s refusal of full realism supplemented by Reijnders’ framing, van de Ven’s choice of the mundane alongside the extraordinary, and Knoet’s impromptu was not a limitation but a technology, a half-step from the world that created just enough distance for the emotional work to happen. Each and every one a foundation to what is on the surface a theme park, but beneath it a statement of a people who have chosen to face collective trauma in such a way.

Surfacing from the documentation and scrutinising the room, somewhat reinvigorated by the penetrating caffeinated scent dominating the table. Consequently he fills his empty stomach by filing systems he’s ingested. The amber kitchen. The bounded darkness of the bookshelves along every wall. Everything here given a home, a sequence. Every object an understatement of the overall.

A third page. Stacking, tapping, rearranging. He tears them off the spring binders.

“Miss Attributed, huh.”

She looks at him as he turns pale.

“Sjef wouldn’t shut up about it.”

She has been watching him with the attention she gives to students who are doing something she recognises. Then he does this. Suspicions of something coming, but the contents, far-reaching, were not on her itinerary.

The short hand at four, the long hand three digits past two. The quick, thin hand stalling a moment before continuing.

Off her chair. “The coffee’s got to me.”

He nods. He watches her take her overcoat off and hangs it on a towel rail as she gets into the water closet. The door closes. He is left to his thoughts.

Inside the restroom, after finishing she turns on the faucet, focusing on her fingers, ducking before the mirror. The indigo and lavender reflect on the surface. She pulls up her sleeves and washes her hands, then her face. The faucet keeps running.

Her eyes do not meet the mirror.

Exiting, she grabs her coat and heads for the table. Pulling her chair, she sees him writing some more in his notebook. It appears that way till she gets closer. He is sketching Pardoes.

“I really have to ask.”

She doesn’t respond. Opting to finish her coffee.

“You looked up my channel.” The notes are being rearranged.

“I watched it.”

“Three hundred and forty-seven subscribers since I last checked it.”

“Three hundred and forty-eight since Thursday.”

He looks up.

“You kept count.”

“I watched all six videos.” A pause. “You never let your mind vegetate but you were the waste of it, by sixteen, all that seriousness eventually directed at a theme park. We were still discussing Stille Willem⁵ in Derde Klas, and there you were singing your praises about the Symbolica while it was fairly new. I used to think it was—”

“A shame.”

“Rather juvenile,” she says. “I was wrong. It was the opposite of juvenile. You were the only person in that room who had actually decided what they cared about.”

“You told me I was the best student you had that year.”

“Of course.”

“Before the rumour, or after?”

She sets her cup down precisely. He is not filing it anywhere now. There are only so many times you can watch someone set a cup down before the category becomes the thing itself.

“The rumour didn’t change the quality of your performance. It changed how I was allowed to perceive it. And subsequently, anyone else’s.”

He is quiet.

“You were not like any other student in that room.” Mug down. “And you were no longer a student in my room.”

Quiet still. Her eyes on her coffee.

The rain against the window. A ship’s engine whimpers on the Amstel.

The lull continues with portent. Not discomfort. Weight.

The fountain pen, once on his hand, was on top of the notebook, now rolling into the walnut. It stops at the edge where he grabs it and puts it back in its place. Her coffee is half-empty, however many. She has lost count, which is unlike her.

Her coffee down. Picks it back up.

His pen is taken. Sets it back where it was.

She was stopped from seeing him when the year had not even drawn to a close. She also stopped being able to say she was seeing him. The perception was real, it had to be made invisible, the invisibility itself its own verdict.

He puts his pen aside. Her eyes shift toward him. Just that.

Commuters and cyclists below are fleeing the scene, some leaving their bicycles by bollards as they seek shelter under bus stops and establishments. The M53 Centraal makes a stop. Only four people exit, willingly trudging the streets of the Amstelkwartier under the increasing volume of precipitation, giving up in the end as they scatter back to the station. One of them holding a sign.

His eyes on the notebook. Then her. The site comes alive and speaks, the mind.

“You know.”

“What.”

He breathes in. Out.

It all comes to bear, the headspace at M53, the suffocation of having been Atlas with a planet dense with his choice, his back thrown against the axis. Either he collapses and throws the planet away, or endures the brunt of its crush. Twixt fate and free will is whether he is thinking, ‘Is he really that bad for what he is about to do?’

“You’re right. I can’t help myself.”

She doesn’t answer.

“I can’t believe I’m working with a paedophile.”

That is cringe — taking from the Pilot’s ‘jij bent gênant’

Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, 1st Baronet (1892-1984) was a native Englishman raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and was commander in chief of Royal Air Force — Bomber Command. Strategic division of labour occured between the British and Americans formally by the time of the Casablanca Directive in 1943

He was renowned for his strategic bombing idea of saturation or area bombing, wherein a stream of bombers (usually at night and ranging in the hundreds and even the thousands) would be too overwhelming to be intercepted by enemy fighter aircraft, dropping their payload over German cities to break morale. He bombed Germany indiscriminately during the night (Hamburg, Dresden, and sometimes collaterally even occupied Holland) while the Americans bombed precise strategic targets (Schweinfurt-Regensburg, Ploiești) during the day

He was seen variably within Allied circles. From begrudging respect by Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe Dwight D. Eisenhower: “The Ground Forces will ever remember with thankfulness the skill and effectiveness of his support, both strategically and tactically, to their own operations. He forged in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command one of the most potent weapons of war which brought about the total destruction of the enemy” [Eisenhower conferring the Distinguished Service Medal to Harris, Sep. 1945]; strategic rivals with his American counterpart Lieutenant General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz: “Well, my answer to [bombing winning a war] is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see” [from Warfare History Network article “Bomber” Harris and His Royal Air Force Bomber Command]; and outward inspiration when General Curtis LeMay innovated from him the strategic prowess of night bombing to be used against the Japanese by Operation Meetinghouse in March 1945 and subsequent firebombing campaigns afterwards, differentiating in execution but near-identical in scope: break morale

The morality of saturation bombing fazed the Allies in retrospect. He was betrayed by Churchill, the very man who endorsed his necessary evils by the end of the war, but never once recanted his views

night bombers

De-pillarisation

Silent William: historical figure in Dutch secondary school curricula; William of Orange, called “the Silent”

XII

Down in a Hole, Like Suicide

Summary: Vera has stricken Rens.

See my heart, I decorate it like a grave
Oh, you don’t understand who they thought I was supposed to be
―
I bit down on the bullet now
I had a taste so sour
I had to think of something sweet

A Jip en Janneke Bubbelsap idly observes from the corner of the island beside the stroopwafels.

Not really a choice for alcoholic beverages, not even alcoholic at all.

It has been there always.

This is the complete record of the interval between the word and the hand:

Nothing.

No decision, no interiority, no instrument.

Just the clock, ticking. The long hand sitting a bit past six.

The glasses flail off his face. Shards cut through his left cheek. The table shoves back violently. The Smiley falls off from her hand.

She is standing exactly where she stood. Her arm at her side. The room rings with a deafening sound only it can hear. She has heard the word, has sat with it across three months of HR and come out the other side with the word reduced to its legal minimum. The hand is there, palm open, fingers still extended from the extension.

There was no way.

There was no way she could know he was going to say it. The afternoon staked—that he came for the Efteling—did not return this. He stepped outside the model entirely, without the preliminary tells she has learned to read in students who are about to do something she has not accounted for, and the hand presaged before the investigation could be opened.

She has struck a student.

Her hand. His blood.

The palm that struck him. The fingers still, slightly curled. She looks at the hand and then away from it, toward the crack in the lens on the baseboard, the way a document whose finding you have declined to file.

I have just done what the word said I did.

He is clumsily retrieving his glasses. The stumbling here and there does not provoke in her even the faintest immediacy of compassion.

She does not know, for the first time all afternoon, what he is thinking. She did not know what he was going to say, what he thinks now. He retrieves his glasses from the baseboard with his hands, the hands she has been noting all afternoon. The ink mark, the pen, the table. Underneath the awareness is something she cannot name, a model failing. The instrument she built over years of careful distance and hard-won accuracy, overlapping within those same years, that she brought into this kitchen like a professional tool, like a red marker, like tenure: it failed to see him.

The composed face, serious, the one she has been reading since he sat across, and she does not know which version of the afternoon is sitting in it. All she sees is a young man in a room he had never been, on a Saturday in October with a notebook and twelve questions about a theme park, its face told to rupture by a palm that acted first.

Like a whisper, it comes.

“Er uit.”

Get out.

‘Mollusc love in Ancient Japan.’ As soon as she heard those words, the dismissal should have been then and there, not here, not in her office. But the video played. The class erupted in ways tentacles violating a middle schooler on a large projector destined for histories not necessarily sexual does. But within that tempest, as she turned from her desk, at the back row, she saw his glasses covered by his hands. Her indignance was quelled for a moment before her promulgation of what the institution required in such incidents took into effect.

Now there is nothing. Two silhouettes superimpose before the window as a train below sounds its horn. The loudness, however, is not on Spaklerweg.

Precognition lacks in hindsight.

He is one knee against the kitchen floor, which smells of something floral from years before him, carried in, not native to the building. He finds the glasses against the baseboard.

Blur, a fog of an object, now two. Both lenses in his hands.

The crack runs through everything the left lens sees: upper and lower, slightly misaligned. He has found, from the optician at Haarlemmerdijk 75 at fourteen and every pair since, the frame that fits the face to be asked to do things with, one of the things being bleeding.

He puts them on. The fault line runs upper-left to lower-right. The room divides along it.

He has never been slapped before. He knew what the word would do. Not as theory. As the specific weight of a thing he picked up and set down on her table anyway, between the books soaked and the red marker dropped and the HR meetings counted, he heard himself do it outside the doing, outside the queue systems, outside any unfinished certainty.

He stands.

Through the crack the room is in two plates, slightly misaligned. The bookshelves divided. The records, the orange spines, and the kitchen are their own two halves. Flabbergasted, he looks at her.

Above the fault: the wrinkles, the grey eyes, the lavender hair. Below: her mouth, her throat, her crimson. Her hand.

The hand has been trembling for a while. A modest amount. The fine, autonomic tremor the body is doing when something unauthorised occurs. He can see this from here, from behind the bloodied crack, from the new angle the floor has given him. She does not know he sees.

The fountain pen, rolled back onto the table. It was next to the bullet marker and the clipboard and the unmarked essays, now on the ground, some saturated with coffee brown, others torn asunder.

She is looking at the hand the way she looked at the mug—the awareness of what a thing actually is arriving too late to be useful. The composure is returning. He watches it return and understands for the first time that it is construction. That she builds it. That somewhere below it is a room that has nothing to do with the afternoon.

The tremor is not his to tell.

He looks around. The recording device that was in the bag, the notebook, the pen disturbed by the Coco question, the articles he brought out, the conversation becoming something neither of them formally name, the three pages of notes in his careful hand. The argument fully formed.

All of them on the floor.

He has what he came for.

He does not reach for the notebook.

The street underneath. The amber going from the walls. She has turned from the hand. He looks at her mouth. The set of it. The specific control of someone who has decided the jaw is the last position they will surrender, in a room whose biggest adversary is not its occupants but a word refusing to leave.

A true thing said for reasons he has not finished accounting for. He knows this. He sits with the knowing the way he sat with unfounded—the weight of it real, the category onvoldoende—insufficient.

She looks at his face. His left half. A bleed trails down as the path of least resistance. That is—not resisting at all.

The rain against the window. It gets louder. Louder.

Mug, by her feet, clocked it in as soon as he entered her apartment.

“The one I have is a copy.” Not to him particularly. “I’d had the original since the week Nevermind came out. Rotterdam. I was too young to be at the concert so my father gave me a souvenir.”

Nothing but rain.

“Voorjaarsvakantie.”

He looks.

“I gave it a name. After my papá. I ordered the replacement that February afternoon. Same smiley. Same size.” She looks at the mug.

A tear trickles down the left side of her face.

“It’s not the same thing.”

He looks at the mug through the fault line. At her.

The box.

He does not say: this is what that year cost her, not the colleagues, not the warmth, not the ability to acknowledge a student. A mug she can replace with an object. Not with the thing.

Saying it would be the error he made six minutes ago.

She turns from the table for the window.

He speaks.

“That keychain.” To the room. Hearing enough of it. Having heard enough. “I bought it at the Efteldingen after Coco left with her family. I had one that used to be a logo of the Efteling, an E.” Clambering the gash. “She gave me an experience I could never replace.”

The measure you give will be the measure you get back.

He looks at his notebook straddled with the papers on the floor. All the questions answered. Three pages of notes in his careful, systematic hand. The video essay fully formed, waiting. He has had what he came for for the past forty minutes, and he has also done something to the room that is sitting in it still.

Neither does he go.

The light has done what the light does. It has gone from the table to the floor to the bottom of the wall, the room amber and shadowed, the trains still running amidst the pour. A switch has not been flicked.

On the table: the moka pot tipped over, the one open book singed with coffee, the two closed ones not as much. The ashtray, lollipop stuck to it. His unasked coffee remains untouched, unmoved, lukewarm.

He picks up his phone. Looks at her.

“I should call my mom.”

Nothing comes out of her mouth.

He opens his phone. The music he last played since getting on the Amstelkwartier, currently paused. The album cover: the moon cheese-yellow taking after mouldy Gouda, a slice taken off its two o’clock resembling Swiss. Stars in the surrounding dark space, just as yellow, varying in size. Scrolling up to his messaging app. He sees, without looking for it, the text exchange. His first message. Her reply.

Fine. Saturday. 2PM. Don’t be late.

Six words that began everything, now in this room.

She watches him on his phone. The way a person watches something that has power over them they have decided not to cede.

He covers his bleed.

“You should know that I’m sorry.”

A silence.

“For being careless with you.”

Another.

He bursts out laughing. Her mouth in hand, hair in the way.

“You’re laughing.”

A brush against the bleed, then the eyes.

Then laughter louder than what preceded it.

“I swear.”

She does not read him.

“I’m really trying.”

There is nothing to read. “Why.”

His laughter stops.

“Why did you make me do this.”

There is no further recourse from the humiliation on what could have easily been foreseen by either.

“Why did you let me in?”

She answers nothing. The lingering sting of the curled fingers retains the guilt of a criminal caught in the act, its verdict logically concluding in the subsequent expulsion of lead against its prosecutor. Preferable in the now. The compulsion is set aside, replaced by the glaring decision about to leave her lips. Then she breathes in.

“You asked correctly.”

He stops. Reconfigures. Scrolls past his media player, to his messaging app.

Are you open for a research consultation?

“Not ‘would it be appropriate,’ ‘is this all right,’ not—” She stops. “None of the reluctance, nothing but commitment. You asked directly. Me. And I thought about it at length. ‘If I say no, it’s because I’d consider entertaining what people will say that they already haven’t.’ And these six years, I have only ever been trapped.” She finally calls it just that.

She grabs his lukewarm coffee. Bottom’s up, all in one go. Slams his cup on the table. He is visibly upset.

“There is so much more I can do besides cower.”

There is the silence that penetrates the corners of this room that demands nothing from its occupants yet receives everything. Waves upon waves of intrusions, from the rail, to the rain, to the stain on the pages. Its presence now desires, in vain, it had elsewhere to be.

He cleans up his sweater.

“Six years is a long time to be careful.”

She does not turn from the window.

“A half-decade hangover. You’ve been laying down in it.”

Then she turns.

“Sorry.”

“Get it together, Rens.” Her face, meeting his. “Know and do better.”

He holds his hysteria this time. Of course she knows.

She focuses back on the station through the window, he is watching and thinking about what she said to the glass:

She looked at me across a classroom and saw something anyway.

He has been carrying that sentence. She named it without the investigation’s language. Named it with her own.

It just wasn’t what she said it was.

He knows what it was since that year. And it has been sitting in the room since approximately three fifty and neither of them has bothered with it while the room has been a witness the whole time. Either pen. Either hand, ink or blood smear. The cracked lens. The mug that isn’t the mug.

The three books on the table where she put them before he arrived, spilt over by coffee and in disarray. Seeping into the parchment, the ink distorts as the liquid inscribes its nutty earth contents into the uncoated offsets of the books, the one ajar the most affected, as well as the A4s of the essays and the Erasmus articles on the ground. Once a plant, now the grounds crushed into a liquefied impression, crawl for a surface it thinks it once belonged to, only to find parchment, bookbinding, a mauve rug and linoleum. Perhaps blood too.

What you build so the darkness has somewhere to live.

Two hours and about forty-five minutes ago its utterance. The two of them sit in it.

His phone pocketed. “You thought about me.”

A steady look. “Six years. Six videos. Time that would translate what this conversation was going to be.”

Another train, bleating.

“Ja. I thought about you.”

“That narrows it down.” He clamps his face, covering the red. “But you subbed. That’s something else I can’t really pinpoint.”

“You don’t have to.” And there is something in her voice, quite wry, quite warm, both having been in the same room for twenty years and are indistinguishable from one another.

“I have to, mevrouw Persijn.”

“I’m not your teacher.”

He pauses.

“I have to, Vera. It will never make sense to me otherwise.”

Her eyes close. Just briefly. The way you close your eyes when something arrives that you were expecting and it still arrives.

She has been conducting the investigation on herself all afternoon. The primary source of this afternoon is the following established finding: there was something real, it was real then, it has been real in the interval, and it is real now, and it will have been real no matter what. And the “something real” is sitting across her kitchen table with a cracked lens and bleeding cheek and has just called her by her name for the first time.

She is not going to pretend she did not already know this. She has not pretended not to know anything all afternoon.

“You were sixteen when you last sat in my classroom.” Her voice very even. “I was the adult then. I still am your former teacher. Your peers, your former school, everyone will, by Monday, know that you were in this—my apartment.”

“Welp.”

Her eyelids raise. The moment savoured differently, slowly, more grounded.

“I saw you then. I see you now. You are exceptionally—” She stops.

He waits. “Tell me.”

“Exceptionally honest. And that is something I could not stop seeing. Your pathetic eyes. Your onderhoudsschema. A person I could appreciate beyond my classroom. Your video about De Vliegende Hollander was so mundane. I still watched. This is information not useful to either of us. This is the thing she was wrong about in the right way.”

His eyes toward her.

“She invented a specific lie and beneath it was a true thing she had no right to, that I had no right to act on, and been not-acting-on.”

“I’m not sixteen.”

“Of course not.” She hesitates. “Anymore.”

The dark. A barge in the distance, its horn a soft note.

“The nickname will stick a bit longer. Awkward silences around me again.”

“Should you let that get to you?”

“You got to me.”

He just couldn’t help himself.

“What choice have I.” A tear.

A nod. “Then I’ll go.”

He doesn’t move.

“Don’t you dare go.”

A still.

He has weighed the afternoon silences into shapes. The silences after ongegrond elbow-to-elbow.

“Before you knew what to think about what you heard. Tell me.”

His hands, moist from blood and sweat, and for a while his eyes cannot be taken away from them. The question can only be apprehended with the tone he uses toward his audience, right now just a woman in her own dwelling and every archived thing in it.

“Were it true—” He brushes his cut. “If she saw something in you, that was also seen in me—” He looks up. “I thought I understood what it was.”

Silence.

“I knew what I didn’t want it to be.” A crime. “Which it wasn’t.”

An uncomfortable stare at him. Another read. She has been doing this to him all afternoon and does not ask herself whether the reading now is accurate. The instrument claims it is—the very same instrument having sent back the exact critique before the word, before the hand, before the lens ruptured. The finding is kept regardless.

“Even vindictive children can put their finger on something real.” She steps closer. “It was real. It just wasn’t what she said it was.”

“Then what was it?”

“A recognition.” A pause. “Me looking at you across a classroom. That’s it.”

He holds that. “She turned something innocent profane.”

“It was her weapon of choice. Whether or not you were satisfied with the outcome, the investigation cleared me of what never happened. You were gone still. It said nothing about what really was in that room.”

“A person seeing you.”

“Of course. Which was that.”

XIII

Over Now... well, better than the alternative

Summary: They both settle down as the room witnesses an accounting of all the events that have occurred. There is only white noise.

When it’s all worn out
I’d rather go without
―
What’s so wrong about what’s wrong with me
I’m just trying to do what’s right by you

He picks up his notebook, deliberate, pen on top of it.

The three soaked books, one open, two shut. The legitimate reason he came here. He looks at all of it. Past it.

The room still has what was said. The silence is grating.

One minute. Two. Three. Then the fourth.

Rens, a sigh.

“Y’know, she would genuinely find this satisfying.”

He laughs—it comes out wrong.

So does she.

It continues for a fifth minute. The discomfort of their laughter penetrates the silence in needles against a fabric without seam.

Hah. Hah. Haha.

“Of course she would.”

“Same presentation like last time, probably.”

“Which I will end with whatever is at hand. No retakes this time.”

“She’d put it on TikTok. Instagram if she’s brave enough.”

“She‘d hope it won’t get taken down before it reaches any prying eyes.”

It takes a moment, the room deciding whether it can hold more of this, and it comes out of them before either has decided to let it—brief, involuntary, her hand reaching for her mouth in the reflex of someone surprised by her own unguardedness. Six years of face set down for a moment. She does not retrieve it immediately.

The mug. The red marker picked up and put down. The unlit cigarette falling off the table. The unasked coffee poured but untouched, placed at the full width of the table away from him, just having been gulped down. The station below looked at when he was the available option.

Whatever he will call it, anything but a model.

He is smiling now, and she is almost smiling, and between them is the ruin of the carefully maintained professional neutrality of the afternoon, all its scaffolding, and neither of them is doing anything about it.

Three pages of notes. Recently picked up from the floor, trickling with his blood. The argument is complete. His legs make no haste for the door.

The crack in his lens. The blood itself.

It has been on his face as the light was dampened by the rain, through the speech on the mug and the silence and all of it, the fault line running across everything he has looked at. She put it there. She struck him and the glasses hit the floor and cracked and wounded him. The alternative, not seeing, even wrongly, was worse. She is running out of reasons to maintain the discipline now that he is walking around the table toward her.

The essay is real. He will make it. That is settled.

Four steps. He comes around the end beside her by the window. The kitchen is not large.

It is quite dark.

On the wall, the shadows have crept on the clock. Hands shrouded, only ticking. The hands were last sighted past five o’ clock. Nightfall is at least a couple and a half more hours.

The face, then the hands. The bleed has tracked down the left side, the path of it precise and unaddressed. She looks at it the way she looks at primary sources that have already delivered their findings.

He cross-examines.

Up close the tremor is visible again—the hand, the fine unauthorised movement, still there, still hers, still unknown to her. He looks at her looking up at him, and what he knows about her in this moment is the most private thing in the room.

She is aware of all of it: Loes, Monday, the tenure that hardly protects, the specific damage of an afternoon gone awry already in motion. She is together with him anyway, in the darkness of her kitchen, the reverberations having nowhere to go.

The fractured, bloodied left lens, having been so for forty minutes. The right intact. His seeing has never been more honest.

Six years since she last saw him at College Hageveld. Commuting to Heemstede every day for a wage incommensurate to her effort was not something she conceived amidst all the crookedness back in Rotterdam. But she got a finding, after having not been enthused in the teaching profession for a while, that a student in her line of vision was worth seeing. This finding proved one thing: that she could see clearly his honesty. And it looks back toward her, unaware of the reading.

The station. A train. Speeding. Close.

The shape of the silences that have accrued at this point has become malleable enough for it to be beside itself.

“I’m so late.” His last inventory.

“Oké, dan.”

“You don’t get it, I have to be there at least thirty minutes before. My mom is waiting at the pews.”

“It’s raining pipe-stems. Don’t be dumb.”

He does not look away from her. She does not look away from him.

The unlit cigarette is swept off the floor. Lighter from her coat. The edge of the stick orange with ember. One long huff and puff.

“So uptight. Tomorrow is a Sunday.”

“I mean.”

“He‘s not going anywhere.”

“I know.”

“Why worry.”

“Why undermine my faith?”

She looks.

“I’m sorry.”

He embraces her. Red streaks on her cornflower blue. The nicotine, incense.

Whatever this circumstance yields, the finding will have returned: the contact, in this instance, is permissible.

“I need to clean it properly. I think a shard got in. Do you mind.”

She lets go. Footsteps toward a cupboard, back to him. Dressing in hand.

“Ga zitten, Rens.”

Swiping a fallen chair, he sits as she kneels and dresses him.

She looks at him for a long time, her hands inching toward his cheek, lifting his spectacles. The truth of the matter in the façade.

“Mevrouw.”

“Hm.”

She feels his chest as she rubs the wound with the foam. He lifts his left index.

“My bag. Please.”

“Stay here.”

Her footsteps this time head for the counter for a spare mug, filling it with water from the broken tap. The boots toward the bag, then him.

He takes out a doordrukstrip¹. Zoloft. He gulps down two with the water.

“Such a fragile thing you are.” She caresses his hair.

“It comes with the packaging. Handle with care.”

The difference between this and last time sits in the room without either of them naming it. Previously the word was wrong. The investigation was wrong. The finding was unfounded because there was nothing to find. This time the room contains what it contains and they are both quiet in it. What he said is his: chosen, weighted, down on her table knowing what it would do. What travels through Loes, the staffroom, his own circle, will be different. That word will not be entirely wrong either. This is the thing neither says in the room, which it must.

“It’ll be worse than back then this time.”

“Back then is not now, Rens.” Her voice is entirely steady brushing his wound.

“Okay.”

“Good.”

All shards are picked up by the foam. The blood chunks. With the foam she rubs alcohol on his left side with her right, her not-so-dextral hand. He visibly winces.

“Does it hurt anymore.”

“Just a bit.”

The rubbing alcohol mixes with her perfume. Vertiginous in a way he cannot let out.

“You smell so nice, mevrouw Vera.”

A subtle upturn from her lips.

He grapples onto her left. She looks at his arms.

“I am done being careful.”

The wound, clean, shard-free. A book from the third row holding up the sticky note falls over with a thud.

What she does not say: that she has been preparing to be done being careful since Thursday. Since the channel. Since six videos watched in order. That the decision to stop being careful is not the decision of this moment but the decision of this afternoon. The instrument, even now, still running, with slight miscalibrations. Almost broken, but being functional comes with its wanton prerequisites.

Her self-inquiry returns for the last time: what was in that room was real. It was real then. It has been real in the interval. It is real now. It will have been real for as long as it has. The investigation clears her of what she did not do. It says nothing about what she is about to do in this room.

She is done being careful.

His arms, not letting go of hers.

“I let you in because I needed to know.”

“Know what?”

“Why you took the stairs,” she demands.

He thinks about this for as long as it permits.

“Same reason I rode one station past your building,” he supplies. “Extra time. Thinking space. To decide.”

“And did you.”

“On the return. On the climb. Ja.”

She looks at him.

“I never kept my eyes off your building. Your block is very, very ugly.”

“And you took the stairs because you wanted cardio.”

“That, and I needed a reason to hide my heart skipping a beat.”

“Hilarious, Rens. But just the right amount.”

Something leaves her face that has been in it all afternoon, not the composure—it is quite real, she built it from scratch and it belongs to her—something underneath it. A person waiting to stop waiting. A nod.

Standing from the chair, meeting her before the window.

He leans down.

She tilts her face up.

The October light is overwhelmed. From the window, the downpour is loud enough to muffle the bogies sliding against the rail, thick enough to cover the amber. The replacement mug on the floor, the three books, one open, two shut. Everything else in the room is scattered about in the darkness of what was built, so it has somewhere to live.

“I made you look.”

“I noticed.”

A hint of nicotine meets his lips.

“Mevrouw.”

“Hush. Let this happen.”

A line makes a stop. The rain, pebbles against the window. Hipsters gather with paper-cup coffee in hand at the foyer of the building, slighted by the deluge.

**

The Friday light, orange from the east. The walnut, filled with marked essays to be submitted to her substitute, the clipboard with a document from the school board, the tenure still secure, and a file for a sabbatical. Loes still has not shut up about it. She called Tuesday exactly by the time it was filed. Mari was also in on it.

The bathroom. Wearing a Nevermind shirt, not with the Smiley, and in her socks. Towards the mirror. Then at her phone, its calendar. Her gut in unease.

Her colleagues have set their contact for her as ‘Mrs Attributed.’

“Kanker.”

At Blincq Optiek, retrieving the glasses on-site after five days since ordering it Sunday morning, the optician himself recognises the boy who once was, coming into his clinic, that very docile disposition.

Sitting at his table with his phone attached to the laptop for file import and three stained pages from that afternoon, the video essay awaited by three hundred and fifty-two subscribers, already fully formed, for him to begin.

He could not start without his signature eftluencer look. The bandage on his face just recently came off. The web camera winks at him.

The lenses arrived in a small cardboard box, wrapped in tissue, with a small card of warm words about being a regular. He opened them, put them on and stood in front of his bathroom mirror and looked at himself in the thing that fit. Black, rectangular, the prescription unchanged, the lenses now with a subtle violet glaze.

They were not the same glasses.

He wore them anyway.

He looks at his laptop, his word processing application open. The input cursor blinking, on and off.

G E S C H I E D E N I S V A N D E E F T E L I N G▌

He looks at his open notebook. He sees his sketched Pardoes.

The essay can wait. A forty-eighth viewing of Symbolica is in order. Maybe after attending the 12:15 celebration of Anthony Claret’s memorial.

Maybe after visiting her after the schoolday.

He has not been back since.

Across the capital, in a student flat on the Nieuwe Achtergracht, where she is over seven weeks into her master’s in Rechtsgeleerdheid², already certain she will be excellent at it, Mymy Schoppenboer sneezes. Her flatmate Kiki Durand-Moreau looks up from the couch, torrenting KPop Demon Hunters while ignoring a maritime law textbook for twenty-two minutes.

“Hah! Someone made fun of you!”

“It’s October. I got the flu.”

“What, you got AIDS yesterday?”

She wipes her nose and turns back to her slides. Outside the window, a leaf hits the glass and slides off.

Another a-choo!

This does not concern her at all.

push-through pack

Law, legal science