Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

"Found it all," Charlie said. "All you need in Tribeca is a handcart and some free time. I found the handcart too."

The bedroom was an open garret at the end of the room, reachable via a metal circular staircase. An old-fashioned iron bathtub stood on a platform built out of heavy packing cases. A reading lamp was bent over the tub. A TV and VCR combination was set up to provide easy viewing for the bather.

"Entertainment corner," Charlie said.

The commissaris, accompanied by Kali, walked through the room-hall, rather. "You like empty walls?"

"Walls of the soul," Charlie said.

"Beg pardon?"

"Better to keep them empty."

The commissaris looked puzzled.

"But emptiness can be frightening," Charlie said. "The restless eye, you know. Always wants something to glance at." He looked at de Gier. "Do you read Sanskrit?"

De Gier did not.

"Neither do I," Charlie said. "Maybe I should cover the walls with Arabic script, that's quite artistic, all those scribbles and loops. Sanskrit is more odd, though."

The commissaris looked bewildered.

"Arabic," Charlie said. "Texts from the Koran. I know little about Islam, the less the better. Writing in unreadable hieroglyphs is Termeer's idea, by the way."

"Ah."

"Yes," Charlie said. "It wouldn't be difficult. I photocopy some good-looking Arabic texts up at Columbia University, or the Asia Society maybe, enlarge them, then imitate the writing by hand all over that empty wall." He waved widely. "Real big. I have the space there."

"That will inspire you?" de Gier asked.

"A faded purple shade on that broken white," Charlie said. "What was that? Inspire? Sure. I should think so."

"But Sanskrit texts would inspire you too?"

"As long as I can't read them," Charlie said. "Otherwise I would get caught up in surface meaning." He looked at the commissaris worriedly. "You know what I mean?"

The commissaris scratched Kali between her furry ears. She growled, not unkindly, them pushed him gently into one of the easy chairs. "And then you will whitewash those inspiring, but, to you, in the first instance anyway, incomprehensible, texts away again?"

Charlie watched his empty wall pensively. "Yes, after a while. Could be years, in fact, but I wouldn't keep them there forever. They would get old."

"You might even learn to read them." The com-missaris laughed. "That's de Gier's problem too. How are you doing with your Spanish text, Rinus?"

De Gier had read his Alvaro Mutis novel in the subway that morning, without understanding much of what the writer was saying. Losing out on meaning he had been able to appreciate the poetry of Mutis's balanced and musical phrasing. "But when I looked at the pages again I did gain some meaning."

"Right." Charlie nodded. "I probably would top, looking at my Sanskrit texts from the bathtub. I'd get curious, go back to the library, do some studying. Reflecting." He shook his head sadly. "As I said, get caught up in their kind of, what's the word, comrnonsensical side?"

"Then what?" the commissaris asked.

De Gier looked too. "Paint it over. Books get lost. Walls get covered."

Charlie looked dreamily at his enormous blank wall.

"Would you leave the wall empty again?" the commissaris asked.

"I should," Charlie said, "but I think I'll draw future life forms." He took a sketchbook from a shelf. The pages were covered with drawings of beetles. Some insects were complete, others dissected with erect lower bodies-ready to copulate-long, gracefully bent antennae, multiple eyes, jaws with extending feelers, segments of wings.

"The future," Charlie said. "If I sit in the bath over there and watch the news then I know, like you know, like everybody knows, that we're coming to some endings."

"We humans," the commissaris said.

"We humans, sir. Can't handle our unlimited multiplication combined with destructive technology." Charlie shrugged. "No big deal." Charlie smiled. "There's always something else to follow."

Charlie predicted that a next evolution might be beetle-based. "Beetle-beings might do well for a while, until it all happens again: Intelligence improves, egotism remains, science doubles the life span so the population explodes, the beede race self-destructs, like the human race before it."

"There could be changes," de Gier objected.

Charlie's theorizing changed direction. "What if it goes differendy the next time?" he agreed. "What if beetle-beings get it together, learn to live in harmony? Does chaos tolerate contentments? Wouldn't another meteor hit the Beetle sapiens planet, wipe them out like the dinosaurs?"

"Ah," the commissaris said, not unhappily.

"You believe in an end to humanity, sir?"

The commissaris would not refuse to believe in lots of little endings to lots of little things, like humanity, for instance.

"Soon?"

There were some signs, weren't there?

Charlie was surprised. "You're not an optimist, sir? So what do you bet on? We stupidly kill each other or a meteor does it for us?"

The commissaris thought either way would be just fine, but as Charlie said just now: There's always something else to follow. Personally, he was thinking more of jellyfishlike creatures as a form of future consciousness. Considering the given fact of ice caps melting, oceans growing, lands diminishing, one might predict evolved aquatic beings.

"Looking like jellyfish?"

"Mind if I get up?" the commissaris asked the dog.

Kali stepped back.

"Why," the commissaris asked as he walked about in Charlie's gigantic space, being careful with the tip of his cane so as not to scratch the hardwood flooring, "why would future life forms develop along lines easily imaginable by our kind of minds? We think of insectlike creatures because insects, like us, have faces, eyes, arms, legs. The future creature may not need any of those."

Charlie sat on the side of his bathtub. "No?" He nodded. "I see. Yes. Perhaps."

"Surely," the commissaris said. "The jellyfish, think of it. A semifluid transparent dome. It doesn't walk, it waves. It doesn't see, it feels with tentacles. Essentially different. It functions beautifully. Why should it be like us?"

"Mhree," Charlie said thoughtfully. "Yes. Eerhtn."

"Pardon?"

"That's what Bert used to say," Charlie said. "That reality extends well beyond imagination. The weirder, the more real."

"The future could be something else entirely," the commissaris said. "Not only beyond our imagination, also beyond our memory. Our memory wouldn't be there, you see. It would have wafted away, along with ourselves."

Charlie wasn't listening. He bent toward the commissaris, arms stretched, palms up, as if to accept some worthy present. "And these jellyfishlike creatures? How would they go about perpetuating themselves?"

The commissaris was at the other side of Charlie's vast space and had to shout to bridge the distance. "Jellyfish can multiply like plants if they want," the commissaris shouted. "The creatures grow like fruits on a tree-like structure, but they also have sexual organs, which can be joined while swimming free. The future, like the present and past, will be exciting."

"Bert," Charlie shouted, "wanted you to go beyond all three of those stages."

"Bert had his penis ripped off," the commissaris shouted. "Do you know why?"

Adjutant Grijpstra received de Gier's fax, transmitted after breakfast at the Cavendish, at 5:00 P.M., just as the adjutant was ready to go home to his empty apartment. He beeped Cardozo.

Cardozo, who, together with a fearful Turkish/ Dutch interpreter, was listening to a taped shouting match between leaders of rival protection rackets operating in Amsterdam's Old West section, the new Turkish quarter- a cacophony of exotic swearing that provided no information-was glad to come over.