Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

I didn’t immediately dwell on his final statement. I was too taken aback by the Napoleonic excess of the peroration, the dramatization as much as the content of which had disturbed me: the man had set up a graveside address, for God’s sake. He had premeditated the moment, rehearsed it in his mind, and seen fit to act it out. It was flattering, in a way, that he’d gone to such trouble; but he’d lost me, and I felt I had to speak up. I had to warn him.

I said, “Chuck, get real. People don’t operate on that level. They’re going to find it very hard to respond to that kind of thinking.”

“We’ll see,” he said, laughing and looking at his watch. “I believe they will.”

Let’s remember I was in a bad mood. I said, “There’s a difference between grandiosity and thinking big.”

I might as well have punched him on the nose, because for the only time in our acquaintance he looked at me with hurt surprise. He began to say something and decided against it.

I could see what had happened. I had knocked him off his pedestal. I had called into question his exercise of the New Yorker’s ultimate privilege: of holding yourself out in a way that, back home, would be taken as a misrepresentation.

I said, “That came out wrong. I meant to say…”

He waved me down good-naturedly. “I understand exactly. No problem.” He was smiling, of that I’m sure. “We’d better go. It’s getting hot out here.”

We left the cemetery. My strong inclination was to catch a train back to Manhattan, but Chuck drove directly onto the BQE and said something about running late and having to see quickly to a business matter. It’s clear to me, now, that he’d already decided on the form of his retribution.

After twenty minutes we came to a stop somewhere in Williamsburg.

“This shouldn’t take long,” Chuck said. He went briskly into the nearest building.

I waited in the car. After ten minutes, Chuck had not returned. I stepped outside and looked about me in that state of prepossession almost any unfamiliar New York place was capable of bringing about in me, even a place like this section of Metropolitan Avenue, where trucks gasped and groaned past commercial buildings of no note. Chuck had entered one of these, a two-story effort in brick with a signboard proclaiming the presence of the FOCUS LANGUAGE SCHOOL. The school, which seemed closed or dormant, was situated above an open warehouse. Inside the warehouse, a solitary Chinese man sat on a pile of pallets and smoked a cigarette as he contemplated cardboard boxes marked HANDLE WITH CHUTION. I passed a quarter of an hour on the roaring sidewalk. Still no Chuck. A pair of Coke-drinking cops walked by. The Chinese man rolled down the warehouse door, exposing a blaze of graffiti. I decided to buy a bottle of water in the deli across the street.

I was coming out of the deli when Abelsky, in Judaic white shirt and black trousers, waddled by. To be accurate: I saw a baseball bat first, carried in a man’s hand. Only then was I moved to recognize Abelsky. He went to the language school building and pressed the doorbell. The door opened, and Abelsky went in.

I drank from my water bottle and waited. It’s true to say, I had an uneasy feeling. After another ten minutes, I telephoned Chuck.

“Is this going to take much longer?”

He said, “No, we’re pretty much done here. Why don’t I buzz you in? We’re having coffee.”

I walked up a staircase covered by a new gray carpet. There was a landing that led into a tiny hallway lined with bulletin-boards and posters. I remember a photograph of grinning students bunched together with their thumbs up, and a classic snap of downtown Manhattan with the legend, for the benefit of the passing Martian, NEW YORK.

Abelsky’s voice came from a room at the rear of the building — DIRECTOR, the sign on the door stated. Abelsky was standing to one side of the room, pouring himself a cup of coffee from a coffee beaker. He’d shrunk further since the time I’d met him at the baths, and the effect was to make him even more shapeless.

Chuck was sitting behind the desk, rocking on a leather chair. He raised a hand in greeting.

The office, a windowless box, was more or less destroyed. A filing cabinet had been upended and its contents were strewn everywhere. A framed map of the United States lay on the floor, its glass in pieces. Somebody had smashed a potted plant against the photocopying machine.

“You got NutraSweet?” Abelsky yelled out to no one that I could see. “I gotta have NutraSweet.”

Chuck said, “Hans, you remember Mike.”

Abelsky remarked, “Would you believe this mess? Look at it.”

A toilet flushed, and moments later the flusher, a man in his thirties, came in. He had splashed water on his face, but there were traces of soil around his ears and in his hair, which was of the pale, almost colorless, Russian variety. His blue shirt was filthy.

“You got NutraSweet?” Abelsky repeated.

The man said nothing.

Abelsky took a mouthful of coffee then spat it back into the cup. “Without NutraSweet, it tastes like shit,” he said. He put the coffee down on the leather desktop. “That OK there? I don’t wanna make a ring.”

The man wiped a hand across his mouth.

Abelsky said fussily, “You’re the director here. You should respect your office, make an example.”

The baseball bat was resting against a wall. It was stained with dirt.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. I walked out and walked down the street for all of fifty yards, at which point I realized I didn’t have the strength to continue.

Thus, on that cool and beautiful August day, I crossed the street and sat down in the green light of a phantasmal little park at the junction of Metropolitan and Orient. The shadows in this little park were just like the shadows I’d been seeing all day, otherworldly in their clearness. A very old, very small man, sitting like a gnome in the green light, regarded me from a nearby bench. A furious bird screeched in the trees.

I slapped at my ankle. A red smudge took the place of a mosquito.

The furious bird screeched again. The sound came from a different place. Maybe there were two birds, I thought stupidly, two birds answering each other with these screeches.

Now the meaning of what I’d seen — Chuck and Abelsky had terrorized some unfortunate, smashed up his office, shoved his face in the dirt of a flowerpot, threatened him with worse for all I knew — arrived as a pure nauseant. I almost threw up then and there, at the feet of the gnome. I dropped my head between my knees, sucking in air. It took an effort of will to get up and go onward to a subway stop. Violence produces reactions of this kind, apparently.

Back at the hotel, I took a shower, packed a bag, and got into a car to LaGuardia. I woke up in a hotel room in Scottsdale, Arizona.

My work, that morning, went passably — I was a panelist in a conference discussion with the could-mean-anything title “Oil Consumption: The Shifting Paradigm”—and, better still, finished well ahead of schedule. But when three hedge-fund guys from Milwaukee discovered I had a few hours to kill before going home, they insisted to my stupefaction that we all drive out to a nearby casino and hit the tables and maybe even get a little fucked up.

“Great idea,” I said, and somebody slapped me on the back.

And so I went into a cactus-filled desert with three baldheaded buddies who each wore a complimentary conference baseball cap. On our way out we passed through downtown Phoenix. It was seemingly an uninhabited place given over to multilevel garages that, with their stacked lateral voids, almost duplicated the office blocks and their bands of tinted glass. The general vacancy was relieved by the slow and for some reason distinctly sinister movement of automobiles from street to street, as if these machines’ careful, orderly roaming was a charade whose purpose was to obscure the fact that the city had been forsaken; and all the while the radio ceaselessly reported crashes and emergencies in the streets around us. It was one of those occasions on which the disunion between one’s interior and external states reaches almost absolute proportions, and even as I smiled and nodded and knocked my can of Bud Light against another’s, I had fallen into the most horrible misery. I escaped into sleep.