Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“What do we hear from Tuaba?” Willem asked, nodding at it.

“Uncle Ed is hanging in there. Business is good even if the politics are a nightmare. Just keeping his head down, you know. Most of the younger generation are . . . like me, I guess you could say.”

“Looking for opportunities outside of Papua.”

“Yeah. Mostly in Taiwan or Oz. Me, I graduated from law school in June and I’m taking a gap year doing, I guess you could say, activism.”

“My god, how can I be that old!?” Willem exclaimed, and laughed. “Where did you go to law school? Congratulations.”

“U.T.” Beatrix seemed abashed that she’d inadvertently caused Willem to feel old.

“Austin.”

“Yes.”

Another awkward pause. They could have talked for hours now. But Hendrik was waiting. And clever noises kept emanating from Beatrix’s computer. Notifications and such.

“I want to give you a card of someone I work with in the Netherlands,” Beatrix decided; and Willem got the impression that the decision had been an important one for her. “Just in case you ever want to, I don’t know, have coffee or something. She’s in The Hague.” She shuffled through some papers on her door desk and came up with a document—a hard copy of a report, with a nice cover. A business card was clipped to it. She pulled that off and handed it to Willem.

“Oh, I’ve heard of her! Of course! And the org,” Willem said.

Idil Warsame was a Dutch woman of Somalian ancestry, daughter of refugees, a relentless campaigner for human rights in formerly colonized countries. She worked for a nonprofit that had attracted a lot of money from philanthropists in the tech world.

Willem looked up at Beatrix. The mask of course made it difficult to read her face, but the eyes were alert and intent. She very much wanted to know how Willem was going to respond to the fact that Beatrix was in cahoots with Idil Warsame. For the politics were devilish. As a Black Dutchwoman, Idil was a lightning rod for issues around immigration. Hendrik himself—awaiting Willem’s return down in the gazebo—took a dim view of letting such people settle in the Netherlands.

But it wasn’t a straight left/right thing either. Idil had been outspoken about rights violations by postcolonial governments. Her stand against female genital mutilation in East Africa had earned her twenty-four-hour police protection against possible attempts on her life by enraged traditionalists. She had no time for woke Westerners who wanted to decolonize everything.

“Way to go,” he said. “You’re doing the family proud.”

The look on her face told him that this was the right thing to say.

“Come to the Netherlands,” he suggested. “We’ll all have rijsttafel together, and talk of Papua.”

“It was good to see you, Uncle Willem!”

Backing out into the hallway, Willem found his way to the place where a pull-chain dangled from a long trapdoor in the ceiling. He reached up and drew it down, half expecting a rain of dust and bat shit to fall on his face. But it was all clean. Dutch clean. An aluminum stairway unfolded. A light came on automatically, giving him a view of the rafters and plywood that made up the underside of the roof. He ascended the stairs. The temperature shot up as his head rose clear of the attic floor. About half the space was occupied by plastic storage boxes, bug- and weatherproof, old documents and clothes dimly visible through milky polyethylene. But the area right around the trapdoor had been kept open. There was a five-gallon food-grade plastic pail of potable water; a box of military rations; a small gun safe, which presumably contained a handgun; a first-aid kit; and an axe. Not a dingy old heirloom, wood-handled and rust-patinaed, but one that looked like it had been sourced from Home Depot ten minutes ago, with a handle of bright orange plastic (of course it would be orange) and acres of safety warnings and liability disclaimers.

“I’m guessing it’s about the axe,” he said, when he had returned from that little excursion. Hendrik was done pissing and was killing time watching a Dutch soccer game on his phone.

Hendrik, clearly disgusted by the progress of the game, put the phone down and nodded. “I never told the story because I knew it would upset Bel. But the Watersnoodramp ” (by which he meant the disastrous flood of 1953) “came during the night, and by the time we were aware of it the downstairs was already awash. So we remained upstairs, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Because you expect the water to go away, or for someone to come and help you, and you just aren’t thinking straight. But then we had to get up on the beds, because it had come up that far. Then up on top of the dressers. Finally we waded to the ladder that went to the attic, and we climbed up there, thinking we were safe. But in fact we realized we had put ourselves in terrible danger because from the attic there was no escape. No windows or trapdoors. We did not fully realize it until the water came up to the level of the attic floor. And it kept rising.”

“You’re right. This would have made Mother very upset if you had told her,” said Willem who was breaking a sweat just listening to it.

“I swam for it,” Hendrik said. “Stripped off my pajamas, dove into that cold water, felt my way to a window, smashed it out, then went through and got up to the surface where I could breathe.” He held up one arm to display a scar. Of course, it had been prominent the whole time Willem had been alive, but Father had always vaguely chalked it up to his eventful youth. “I was then able to climb right up onto the roof and pry up some of the tiles to make a little hole. It didn’t make a difference because that was when the water stopped rising, but”—he shrugged—“it made the people inside feel better. And it gave me something to do.”

“So now you keep an axe in the attic.”

“Yes. Not an original idea, by the way. Many people around here do the same. Especially since Katrina.”

Willem was accustomed to his father’s roundabout way of conveying important lessons through these kinds of nonverbal signals. A brainy youngster could always argue with a parental statement, especially when the kid was a native English speaker running rings around his immigrant dad. But you couldn’t argue with an axe in the attic.

“All right,” he said agreeably, “so you do take the threat of rising water seriously.”

“As how could I not!” Hendrik scoffed. Before his father could get going on the Watersnoodramp , Willem nodded vigorously and stretched out his hands in surrender. “What are we going to do about it is the question.”

“We, as a civilization? About global climate change?”

“I know, right? Too vague! Too much diffusion of responsibility. Too much politics.”

Hendrik cursed under his breath at the mere mention of politics and inhaled as if to deliver some remarks on that topic. Willem waved him off: “Instead ask, what are Dutch people going to do specifically about rising sea level and suddenly it is simpler and clearer, no? Instead of the whole world—the United Nations and all that—it’s just the Netherlands. And instead of all the detailed ramifications of greenhouse gases and climate change, we are talking of one issue that is clear and concrete: rising sea level.” Willem again nodded toward the bayou. “No one can argue with that. And for us, obviously, it is life or death. We fix the problem or our country ceases to exist. So that makes it very clear.”

“Not so clear that the politicians can’t fuck it up,” Hendrik pointed out.

“I don’t work for a politician, as it turns out.”

“But you just finished giving me a lecture on the limits of her power. The Grondwet and all that.”