Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

There the umpire stopped, to faltering applause; and soon after, everybody headed home — to Hoboken and Passaic and Queens and Brooklyn and, in my case, to Manhattan. I took the Staten Island Ferry, which on that occasion was the John F. Kennedy; and it was on board that enormous orange tub that I ran once again into Chuck Ramkissoon. I spotted him on the foredeck, among the tourists and romantics absorbed by the famous sights of New York Bay.

I bought a beer and sat down in the saloon, where a pair of pigeons roosted on a ledge. After some intolerable minutes in the company of my thoughts, I picked up my bag and went forward to join Chuck.

I couldn’t see him. I was about to turn back when I realized he was right in front me and had been hidden by the woman he was kissing. Mortified, I tried to retreat without attracting his attention; but when you’re six feet five, certain maneuvers are not easily accomplished.

“Well, hello,” Chuck said. “Good to see you. My dear, this is—”

“Hans,” I said. “Hans van den Broek.”

“Hi,” the woman said, retreating into Chuck’s arms. She was in her early forties with blond curls and a plump chin. She wiggled a set of fingers at me.

“Let me introduce myself properly,” Chuck said. “Chuck Ramkissoon.” We shook hands. “Van den Broek,” he said, trying out the name. “South African?”

“I’m from Holland,” I said, apologizing.

“Holland? Sure, why not.” He was disappointed, naturally. He would have preferred that I’d come from the land of Barry Richards and Allan Donald and Graeme Pollock.

I said, “And you are from…?”

“Here,” Chuck affirmed. “The United States.”

His girlfriend elbowed him.

“What do you want me to say?” Chuck said.

“Trinidad,” the woman said, looking proudly at Chuck. “He’s from Trinidad.”

I awkwardly motioned with my can of beer. “Listen, I’ll leave you guys to it. I was just coming out for some fresh air.”

Chuck said, “No, no, no. You stay right here.”

His companion said to me, “Were you at the game today? He told me about what happened. Wild.”

I said, “The way he handled it was quite something. And that was some speech you gave.”

“Well, I’ve had practice,” Chuck said, smiling at his friend.

Pushing at his chest, the woman said, “Practice making speeches or practice with life-and-death situations?”

“Both,” Chuck said. They laughed together, and of course it struck me that they made an unusual couple: she, American and white and petite and fair-haired; he, a portly immigrant a decade older and very dark — like Coca-Cola, he would say. His coloring came from his mother’s family, which originated in the south of India somewhere — Madras, was Chuck’s suspicion. He was a descendant of indentured laborers and had little firm information about such things.

An event for antique sailing ships was taking place in the bay. Schooners, their canvas hardly distended in the still air, clustered around and beyond Ellis Island. “Don’t you just love this ferry ride?” Chuck’s girlfriend said. We slipped past one of the ships, a clutter of masts and ropes and sails, and she and Chuck joined other passengers in exchanging waves with its crew. Chuck said, “See that sail there? That triangular sail right at the very top? That’s the skyscraper. Unless it’s the moonsail. Moonsail or skyscraper, one of the two.”

“You’re an expert on boats, now?” his girlfriend said. “Is there anything you don’t know about? OK, smarty-pants, which one is the jolly jumper? Or the mizzen. Show me a mizzen, if you’re so smart.”

“You’re a mizzen,” Chuck said, fastening his arm around her. “You’re my mizzen.”

The ferry slowed down as we approached Manhattan. In the shade of the huddled towers, the water was the color of a plum. Passengers emerged from the ferry lounge and began to fill up the deck. Banging against the wooden bumpers of the terminal, the ship came to a stop. Everybody disembarked as a swarm into the cavernous terminal, so that I, toting my cricketer’s coffin, became separated from Chuck and his girlfriend. It was only when I’d descended the ramp leading out of the terminal that I saw them again, walking hand in hand in the direction of Battery Park.

I found a taxi and took it straight home. I was tired. As for Chuck, even though he interested me, he was older than me by almost twenty years, and my prejudices confined him, this oddball umpiring orator, to my exotic cricketing circle, which made no intersection with the circumstances of my everyday life.

Those circumstances were, I should say, unbearable. Almost a year had passed since my wife’s announcement that she was leaving New York and returning to London with Jake. This took place one October night as we lay next to each other in bed on the ninth floor of the Hotel Chelsea. We’d been holed up in there since mid-September, staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca. Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West Twenty-third Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s nighttime cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him, even though my rough face sometimes woke him and I’d have to stay with him and rub his tiny rigid back until he fell asleep once more. Afterward I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The taillights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York. Returning to bed, where Rachel lay as if asleep, I would roll onto my side and find my thoughts forcibly embroiled in preparations for a sudden flight from the city. The list of essential belongings was short — passports, a box full of photographs, my son’s toy trains, some jewelry, the laptop computer, a selection of Rachel’s favorite shoes and dresses, a manila envelope filled with official documents — and if it came down to it, even these items were dispensable. Even I was dispensable, I recognized with an odd feeling of comfort; and before long I would be caught up in a recurring dream in which, finding myself on a subway train, I threw myself over a ticking gadget and in this way sacrificed my life to save my family. When I told Rachel about my nightmare — it qualified as such, for the dreamed bomb exploded every time, waking me up — she was making some adjustment to her hair in the bathroom mirror. Ever since I’d known her, she had kept her hair short, almost like a boy’s. “Don’t even think of getting off that lightly,” she said, moving past me into the bedroom.

She had fears of her own, in particular the feeling in her bones that Times Square, where the offices of her law firm were situated, would be the site of the next attack. The Times Square subway station was a special ordeal for her. Every time I set foot in that makeshift cement underworld — it was the stop for my own office, where I usually turned up at seven in the morning, two hours before Rachel began her working day — I tasted her anxiety. Throngs endlessly climbed and descended the passages and walkways like Escher’s tramping figures. Bare high-wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signaled that around us a hidden and incalculable process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere was only heightened by the ever-present spectacle, in one of the principal caverns of that station, of a little Hispanic man dancing with a life-size dummy. Dressed entirely in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series, for all I know, of fox-trots and tangos and fandangos and paso dobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movements of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passersby stopped and gawked. There was something dire going on — something that went beyond the desperation, economic and artistic, discernible on the man’s damp features, beyond even the sexual perverseness of his routine. The puppet had something to do with it. Her hands and feet were bound to her master’s. She wore a short, lewd black skirt, and her hair was black and unruly in the manner of a cartoon Gypsy girl. Crude features had been inscribed on her face, and this gave her a blank, bottomless look. Although bodily responsive to her consort’s expert promptings — when he placed his hand on her rump, she gave a spasm of ecstasy — her countenance remained a fog. Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her…No doubt I was in an unhealthy state of mind, because the more I witnessed this performance the more troubled I grew. I reached the point where I was no longer capable of passing by the duo without a flutter of dread, and quickening on into the next chasm I’d jog up the stairs into Times Square. I straightaway felt better. Unfashionably, I liked Times Square in its newest incarnation. I had no objection to the Disney security corps or the ESPN Zone or the loitering tourists or the kids crowded outside the MTV studio. And whereas others felt mocked and diminished by the square’s storming of the senses and detected malevolence or Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapors as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons — as natural, humble sources of iridescence. (It was Chuck, on Broadway once, who pointed out to me how the rock dove’s gray mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-colored dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to purple glitter.) Perhaps as a result of my work, corporations — even those with electrified screens flaming over Times Square — strike me as vulnerable, needy creatures, entitled to their displays of vigor. Then again, as Rachel has pointed out, I’m liable to misplace my sensitivities.