Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“Lunchtime,” a voice announced.

We had pulled over onto dirt. Nearby, two white-haired Indian women tended a barbecue pit beneath an awning that raggedly extended from a breezeblock hut. (“What are these guys? Apaches? I bet you they’re Apaches,” the fellow next to me said.) One of my hosts, Schulz, presented me with a Diet Coke and two slices of bread filled with chunks of fatty meat. “They’re calling it mutton,” Schulz said.

The eatery abutted a ridge. On the far side of the ridge lay a flat sea of dust and rock. In the sky above it, a single cavaliering cloud trailed a tattered blue cloak of rain. Highlands showed in the extreme distance. Closer by, black heaps of volcanic rock protruded from the reddish waste. A ubiquitous gray-blue scrub gave everything a pixelated finish, as if this land were a vast malfunctioning television. “The Wild West,” Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other compañeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers. It was undoubtedly a moment of reckoning, a rare and altogether golden opportunity for a Milwaukeean or Hollander of conscience to consider certain awesome drifts of history and geology and philosophy, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel lessened by the immensity of the undertaking and by the poverty of the associations one brought to bear on the instant, which in my case included recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy who often rode among buttes and drew a pistol faster than his own shadow. It briefly entranced me, that remembered seminal image, on the back cover of all the Lucky Luke books, of the yellow-shirted, white-hatted cowboy plugging a hole in the belly of his dark counterpart. To gun down one’s shadow…The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn’t an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood, offered me sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie’s holy space, was I to find it?

We went back to the air-conditioned car, and soon afterward the casino appeared ahead of us in clear light. It assumed the form, as we drew nearer, of a gigantic adobelike structure vaguely evocative of the great edifices of native civilizations. The interior of this spurious pueblo, accessible only via a series of ramps helpful to gamblers in wheelchairs, was given over to a trashy iconography of ice cream, coronets, and slot machine personalities: the Frog Prince, Austin Powers, Wild Thing, Evel Knievel, Sphinx, and others, entities whose baroque electronic vigor served only to accentuate the limpness and solitude of the figures expressionlessly tending to them. While each of my friends ventured forth with hundreds of dollars in chips, I accepted a drink from a waitress and sat at a table in that specifically bloodless clamor of piped music and quarters jingling down chutes and bleeping and burping machines of chance. For the sake of appearances I summoned the will to approach a roulette table.

I stood with the onlookers and followed the play for a few spins of the wheel. I began wishing luck on a friendly-looking mustachioed man in a Hawaiian shirt. He was losing; and whom should I recognize in this man’s expression but Jeroen, who wore exactly the same hopeful, slightly perspiring face as he slid chips onto the baize of the roulette table and watched the leaping ball fasten to a niche in the wheel: there it coasted, in giddy circles, until the number slowed into terminal focus. Likewise here, where the croupier, a tiny bow-tied woman, coolly raked the scattered hopes of the gamblers into a single horrible hillock. Jeroen, in the days when he was in the picture, would drop by on St. Nicholas Day with a cash gift for me, gaily colored guilder bills that no longer circulate, and after the holiday dinner he would always ask me, a young teenager, to accompany him to the casino at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He made no bones about his need, as he put it, to play; nor did he hide his desperation for company of any sort. So I would head out with him in his cigarette-strewn Peugeot 504, where he would offer up anecdotes about his early childhood in Java. Jeroen seemed always to lose. Pech, he’d say as we stepped out into Scheveningen’s salty air hundreds of guilders poorer — rotten luck. He’d light a Marlboro and give a rich, glamorous cough. In those days Jeroen had sought out my company. Now I sought out his.

I think it’s customary, in the kind of narrative to which this segment of my life appears to lend itself, to invoke the proverb of rock bottom — the profundity of woe, the depth of shit, from which the sufferer can go nowhere but to higher, more sweetly scented places. In terms of objective calamities, of course, The Adversity of Hans van den Broek, as such a tale might be called, amounts to not very much. But it’s also true that the casino floor felt to me like an ocean bottom. In my blackness I wasn’t to know that I lay only, and exactly, one fathom below the surface, one fathom, I’ve heard it said, being the reach of a pair of outstretched arms.

Then and there, among the blushing slots, I underwent a swerve in orientation — as though I’d been affected by the abrupt consensus of movement that redirects flocking birds. I decided to move back to London.

At our very first meeting, Juliet Schwarz turned to Rachel and asked if she loved me and, if yes, what it was about me that she loved. Objection! I felt like shouting to this rotten, risky, terrifying interrogation.

“‘Love,’” Rachel desperately replied, “is such an omnibus word.”

Here was an irony of our continental separation (undertaken, remember, in the hope of clarification): it had made things less clear than ever. By and large, we separators succeeded only in separating our feelings from any meaning we could give them. That was my experience, if you want to talk about experience. I had no way of knowing if what I felt, brooding in New York City, was love’s abstract or love’s miserable leftover. The idea of love was itself separated from meaning. Love? Rachel had gotten it right. Love was an omnibus thronged by a rabble.

And yet we again climbed aboard, she and I.

What happened — what set us on the road to Dr. Schwarz and, by means of said bus, the place we are now — was that she and Jake suddenly moved out of Martin Casey’s Farringdon loft, where they’d lived only four months.

This was November 2004. I’d been back in England for exactly a year — had, as a matter of fact, just rented a place in the Angel so as to be within strolling distance of my son.

“You’ve left him?” I said.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” Rachel said.

A few days later, she called me again. Martin would not be joining her and Jake on their Christmas trip to India; accordingly there was a vacancy, accordingly Rachel wondered if I could fill in. There was no question of canceling the holiday. Jake had already packed his bag and notified Father Christmas of his Indian whereabouts by postcard to the North Pole. “I can’t disappoint him,” Rachel said.

I bought a ticket within the hour.

We flew to Colombo and thence, as travelers used to say, to the Keralan city of Trivandrum, which on a map can be found almost at the very tip of India. I was worried about Jake catching a strange Indian disease; however, once we were established in a simple family hotel colonized by darting caramel lizards and surrounded by coconut trees filled, incongruously to my mind, with crows, I was quite content. This was at a seaside place. There was a lot to look at. Women wrapped in bright lengths of cloth walked up and down the beach balancing bunched red bananas on their heads and offering coconuts and mangoes and papayas. Tug-of-war teams of fishermen tugged fishing nets onto the beach. Tourists from northern parts of India ambled along the margin of the sea. Foreigners lounged on sunbeds, magnanimously ignoring the sand-colored dogs dozing beneath them. Lifeguards, tiny slender men in blue shirts and blue shorts, attentively inspected the Arabian Sea and from time to time blew on whistles and waved swimmers away from dangerous waters; and indeed on one occasion an Italian yoga instructor, a long-limbed male, became stuck in a web of currents and had to be rescued by a lifeguard who skimmed over the water like an insect flying to the rescue of a spider.