Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

All of which brings me to the second, and last, New York winter I endured on my own, when I wondered what exactly had happened to the unanswerable, conspiratorial place I’d found years earlier, and the desirer who’d walked its streets.

* * *

That was a very white winter. A blizzard on Presidents’ Day 2003 brought one of the heaviest snows in the city’s history. For a day or two, outdoor motions seemed a kind of mummery and the newspapers broke up the Iraq stories with photos of children tobogganing on Sheep’s Meadow. I passed the morning of the holiday in an armchair in my hotel apartment, mesmerized by a snowdrift on the wrought-iron balcony that grew and deepened and monstrously settled against the glass door, not completely melting until mid-March. It says something about my empty-headedness that I followed this monthlong thaw with something like tension. At least twice a day I peered through the French windows and inspected the dirty, faintly glowing accumulation of ice. I was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction. Random mental commotions of this kind constantly agitated me during this period, when I was in the habit, among other strange habits, of lying on the floor of my living room and staring into the space under my brown armchair, a letter-box-shaped crevice out of which, I may have hoped, an important communication would come. I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face. My assumption was that all around me, in the lustrous boxes thickly checkering the night, countless New Yorkers lay stretched out on the floor, felled by similar feelings; or, if not actually poleaxed, stood at their windows, as I often did, to observe the winter clouds rubbing out — so, from my vantage point, it appeared — the skyscrapers in the middle distance. The magnitude of the vanishing was wonderful, even to a spirit such as my own, perhaps because it preluded the seemingly miraculous reemergence from the clouds of towers dashed from within with light. On Presidents’ Day, however, the vaporous, enormously disappearing city provoked a different response. Tiring of my snowdrift vigil, I hauled myself out of the armchair and traveled to my bedroom and, in search of a fresh point of view, wandered to the window there. Snowflakes like coffee grinds blackened the insect screen. Powdered ice, blown up from the window trough, had gained on the sill and now crept up the glass. I was, it will be understood, afflicted by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights, so that when I peered out into the flurry and saw no sign of the Empire State Building, I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance — everything of so-called concreteness — was indistinct from its unnamable opposite.

Kicking a rock or patting a dog is, I suppose, enough to rid most people of this variety of bewilderment, which must be as ancient as our species. But I didn’t have a rock or a dog to hand. I had nothing to hand — nothing but the glass of a window under assault from a storm. It came as a reprieve to hear the infuriating cheep of my telephone.

It was Rachel. She told me first about the huge antiwar rally that had taken place in London two days before and how Jake had carried a NOT IN MY NAME placard. Next she told me, in the tone of a person discussing a grocery list, that she had definitely decided not to return to the United States, at least not before the end of the Bush administration or any successor administration similarly intent on a military and economic domination of the world. It was no longer a question of physical security, she said, although that of course remained a factor. It was a question, rather, of not exposing Jake to an upbringing in an “ideologically diseased” country, as she put it, a “mentally ill, sick, unreal” country whose masses and leaders suffered from extraordinary and self-righteous delusions about the United States, the world, and indeed, thanks to the influence of the fanatical evangelical Christian movement, the universe, delusions that had the effect of exempting the United States from the very rules of civilized and lawful and rational behavior it so mercilessly sought to enforce on others. She stated, growing more and more upset, that we were at a crossroads, that a great power had “drifted into wrongdoing,” that her conscience permitted no other conclusion.

Ordinarily, I would have said nothing; but it seemed to me that my dealings with my son were at stake. So I said, “Rach, please let’s try to keep things in perspective.”

“Perspective? And what perspective would that be? The perspective of the free press of America? Is that where you get your perspective, Hans?” She made a harsh sound of mirth. “From TV networks funded by conservative advertisers? From the Wall Street Journal ? From the Times, that establishment stooge? Why not Ari Fleischer, while you’re at it?”

Not for the first time, I was finding it hard to believe this was the woman I’d married — a corporate litigator, let’s not forget, radicalized only in the service of her client and with not the smallest bone to pick about money and its doings.

“You want Jake to grow up with an American perspective? Is that it? You want him to not be able to point to Britain on a map? You want him to believe that Saddam Hussein sent those planes into the Towers?”

Specks of snow, small and dark as flies, swarmed before me. I said, “Of course he wouldn’t grow up in ignorance. We wouldn’t allow it.”

She said, “Bush wants to attack Iraq as part of a right-wing plan to destroy international law and order as we know it and replace it with the global rule of American force. Tell me which part of that sentence is wrong, and why.”

As usual, she was too quick for me. I said, “I don’t want to get into an argument about this. You’re pinning views on me that I don’t have.”

Rachel seemed to laugh. “See? It’s pointless having this discussion. It’s like playing tennis with someone who insists on playing gin rummy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re constantly flailing around and changing the subject and making emotive statements. It’s the classic conservative tactic. Instead of answering the point, you sabotage the discussion.”

“Fine,” I said. “Repeat the point. And stop calling me a conservative.”

“You are a conservative,” Rachel said. “What’s so sad is you don’t even know it.”

“If your point is that the U.S. should not attack Iraq,” I managed, “I’m not going to disagree with that. But if your point is…” I trailed off, at a substantive loss. I was distracted, too — by a memory of Rachel and me flying to Hong Kong for our honeymoon, and how in the dimmed cabin I looked out of my window and saw lights, in small glimmering webs, on the placeless darkness miles below. I pointed them out to Rachel. I wanted to say something about these creaturely cosmical glows, which made me feel, I wanted to say, as if we had been removed by translation into another world. Rachel leaned across me and looked down to the earth. “It’s Iraq,” she said.

She said, “I’m saying the U.S. has no moral or legal authority to wage this war. The fact that Saddam is horrible and should be shot dead today is not the issue. The bad character of the enemy does not make the war good. Think politically, for once. Stalin was a monster. He killed millions of people. Millions. Does that mean we should have supported Hitler in his invasion of Russia? We should have stood shoulder to shoulder with Hitler because he was proposing to rid the world of a mass murderer?”