Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

She remembered the wind finally dying down by mid-morning, a heavy mist in the gray sky, and a fishing smack off to the north coasting between the rooftops and bringing people on board. She remembered a dog lowered on a rope, its paws flailing as it turned.

After their rescue, she remembered a telegraph pole slanted over, its wires tugged by the current. She remembered the water smelling of gasoline and mud, treetops uncovered by the waves, and a clog between two steep roofs filled with floating branches and dead cattle. She remembered a vast plain of wreckage on the water and the smell of dead fish traveling on the wind. She remembered two older boys sitting beside her and examining the silt driven inside an unopened bottle of soda by the force of the waves. She remembered her mother’s animal sounds and the length of time it took to get to dry land, and her father’s chin on her mother’s bent back, his head bumping and wobbling whenever they crossed the wakes of other boats.

We always knew this was coming. Years ago the city fathers thought it was our big opportunity. Rotterdam no longer would be just the ugly port, or Amsterdam without the attractions. The bad news was going to impact us first and foremost, so we put out the word that we were looking for people with the nerve to put into practice what was barely possible anywhere else. The result was Waterplan 4 Rotterdam, with brand-new approaches to storage and safety: water plazas, super cisterns, water balloons, green roofs, and even traffic tunnels that doubled as immense drainage systems would all siphon off danger. It roped in Kees and Cato and me and by the end of the first week had set Cato against us. Her mandate was to showcase Dutch ingenuity, so the last thing she needed was the Pessimists clamoring for more funding because nothing anyone had come up with yet was going to work. As far as she was concerned, our country was the testing ground for all high-profile adaptive measures and practically oriented knowledge and prototype projects that would attract worldwide attention and become a sluice-gate for high-tech exports. She spent her days in the international marketplace hawking the notion that we were safe here because we had the knowledge and were using it to find creative solutions. We were all assuming that a secure population was a collective social good for which the government and private sector alike would remain responsible, a notion, we soon realized, not universally embraced by other countries.

Sea-facing barriers are inspected both by hand and by laser imaging. Smart dikes schedule their own maintenance based on sensors that detect seepage or changes in pressure and stability. Satellites track ocean currents and water-mass volumes. The areas most at risk have been divided into dike-ring compartments in an attempt to make the country a system of watertight doors. Our road and infrastructure networks now function independently of the ground layer. Nine entire neighborhoods have been made amphibious, built on hollow platforms that will rise with the water but remain anchored to submerged foundations. And besides the giant storm barriers, atop our dikes we’ve mounted titanium-braced walls that unfold from concrete channels, leviathan-like inflatable rubber dams, and special grasses grown on plastic-mat revetments to anchor the inner walls.

“Is it all enough?” Henk will ask, whenever there’s a day of unremitting rain. “Oh, honey, it’s more than enough,” Cato will tell him, and then quiz him on our emergency code.

“It’s funny how this kind of work has been good for me,” Cato says. She’s asked me to go for a walk, an activity she knows I’ll find nostalgically stirring. We tramped all over the city before and after lovemaking when we first got together. “All of this end-of-the-world stuff apparently cheers me up,” she remarks. “I guess it’s the same thing I used to get at home. All those glum faces, and I had to do the song-and-dance that explained why they got out of bed in the morning.”

“The heavy lifting,” I tell her.

“Exactly,” she says with a faux mournfulness. “The heavy lifting. We’re on for another simulcast tomorrow and it’ll be three Germans with long faces and Cato the Optimist.”

We negotiate a herd of bicycles on a plaza and she veers ahead of me toward the harbor. When we cross the skylights of the traffic tunnels, giant container haulers shudder by beneath our feet. She has a beautiful back, accentuated by the military cut of her overcoat.

“Except that the people you’re dealing with now want to be fooled,” I tell her.

“It’s not that they want to be fooled,” she answers. “It’s just that they’re not convinced they need to go around glum all the time.”

“How’d that philosophy work with your parents?” I ask.

“Not so well,” she says sadly.

We turn on Boompjes, which is sure to add to her melancholy. A seven-story construction crane with legs curving inward perches like a spider over the river.

“Your mother called about the coffee grinder,” she remarks. “I couldn’t pin down what she was talking about.”

Boys in bathing suits are pitching themselves off the high dock by the Strand, though it seems much too cold for that, and the river too dirty. Even in the chill I can smell tar and rope and, strangely, fresh bread.

“She called you or you called her?” I ask.

“I just told you,” Cato says.

“It seems odd that she’d call you,” I tell her.

“What was she talking about?” Cato wants to know.

“I assume she was having trouble working the coffee grinder,” I tell her.

“Working it or finding it?” she asks.

“Working it, I think,” I suggest. “ She called you ?”

“Oh my God,” Cato says.

“I’m just asking,” I tell her after a minute.

All of Maashaven is blocked from view by a giant suction dredger that’s being barged out to Maasvlakte 2. Preceded by six tugs, it looks like a small city going by. The thing uses dragheads connected to tubes the size of railway tunnels and harvests sand down to a depth of twenty meters. It’ll be deepening the docking areas out at Yangtzehaven, Europahaven, and Mississippihaven. There’s been some worry that all of this dredging has been undermining the water defenses on the other side of the channel, which is the last thing we need. Kees has been dealing with their horseshit for a few weeks now.

We rest on a bench in front of some law offices. Over the front entrance, cameras have been installed to monitor the surveillance cameras, which have been vandalized. Once the dredger has passed, we can see a family of day campers on the opposite bank who’ve pitched their tent on a berm overlooking the channel.

“Isn’t it too cold for camping?” I ask her.

“Wasn’t it too cold for swimming?” she responds, reminding me of the boys we’d passed.

She says Henk keeps replaying the same footage on his iFuze of Feyenoord’s MVP being lowered into the stadium beneath the team flag by a V/STOL. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” she continues, as if that led directly to her next thought. She mentions a conservatory in Berlin, fantastically expensive, that has a chamber-music program. She’d like to send Henk there during his winter break, and maybe longer.

This seems to me to be mostly about his safety, though I don’t acknowledge that. He’s a gifted cellist, but hardly seems devoted to the instrument.

With her pitchman’s good cheer she repeats the amount it will cost, which to me sounds like enough for a week in a five-star hotel. But she says money can always be found for a good idea, and if it can’t, then it wasn’t a good idea. Finally she adds that as a hydraulic engineer, I’m the equivalent of an atomic physicist in technological prestige.