You Think That's Bad

The Netherlands Lives with Water

A long time ago a man had a dog that went down to the shoreline every day and howled. When she returned the man would look at her blankly. Eventually the dog got exasperated. “Hey,” the dog said. “There’s a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way.” “Please. I’m busy,” the man said. “Hey,” the dog said the next day, and told him the same thing. This went on for a week. Finally the man said, “If you say that once more I’m going to take you out to sea and dump you overboard.” The next morning the dog went down to the shoreline again, and the man followed. “Hey,” the dog said, after a minute. “Yeah?” the man said. “Oh, I think you know,” she told him.

“Or here’s another one,” Cato says to me. “Adam goes to God, ‘Why’d you make Eve so beautiful?’ And God says, ‘So you would love her.’ And Adam says, ‘Well, why’d you make her so stupid?’ And God says, ‘So she would love you.’ ”

Henk laughs.

“Well, he thinks it’s funny,” Cato says.

“He’s eleven years old,” I tell her.

“And very precocious,” she reminds me. Henk makes an overly jovial face and holds two thumbs up. His mother takes her napkin and wipes some egg from his chin.

We met in the same pre-university track. I was a year older but hadn’t passed Dutch, so I took it again with her.

“You failed Dutch?” she whispered from her seat behind me. She’d seen me gaping at her when I came in. The teacher had already announced that’s what those of us who were older were doing there.

“It’s your own language,” she told me later that week. She was holding my penis upright so she could run the edge of her lip along the shaft. I felt like I was about to touch the ceiling.

“You’re not very articulate,” she remarked later, on the subject of the sounds I’d produced.

She acted as though I were a spot of sun in an otherwise rainy month. We always met at her house, a short bicycle ride away, and her parents seemed to be perpetually asleep or dead. In three months I saw her father only once, from behind. She explained that she’d been raised by depressives who’d made her one of those girls who’d sit on the playground with the tools of happiness all around her and refuse to play. Her last boyfriend had walked out the week before we’d met. His diagnosis had been that she imposed on everyone else the gloom her family had taught her to expect.

“Do I sadden you?” she’d ask me late at night before taking me in her mouth.

“Will you have children with me?” I started asking her back.

And she was flattered and seemed pleased without being particularly fooled. “I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to pull information out of you,” she told me one night when we’d pitched our clothes out from under her comforter. I asked what she wanted to know, and she said that was the kind of thing she was talking about. While she was speaking I watched her front teeth, glazed from our kissing. When she had a cold and her nose was blocked up, she looked a little dazed in profile.

“I ask a question and you ask another one,” she complained. “If I ask what your old girlfriend was like, you ask what anyone’s old girlfriend is like.”

“So ask what you want to ask,” I told her.

“Do you think,” she said, “that someone like you and someone like me should be together?”

“Because we’re so different?” I asked.

“Do you think that someone like you and someone like me should be together?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I told her.

“That’s helpful. Thanks,” she responded. And then she wouldn’t see me for a week. When I felt I’d waited long enough, I intercepted her outside her home and asked, “Was the right answer no?” And she smiled and kissed me as though hunting up some compensation for diminished expectations. After that it was as if we’d agreed to give ourselves over to what we had. When I put my mouth on her, her hands would bend back at the wrists as if miming helplessness. I disappeared for minutes at a time from my classes, envisioning the trancelike way her lips would part after so much kissing.

The next time she asked me to tell her something about myself I had some candidates lined up. She held my hands away from her, which tented the comforter and provided some cooling air. I told her I still remembered how my older sister always replaced her indigo hair bow with an orange one on royal birthdays. And how I followed her everywhere, chanting that she was a pig, which I was always unjustly punished for. How I fed her staggeringly complicated lies that went on for weeks and ended in disaster with my parents or teachers. How I slept in her bed the last three nights before she died of the flu epidemic.

Her cousins had also died then, Cato told me. If somebody even just mentioned the year 2015, her aunt still went to pieces. She didn’t let go of my hands, so I went on, and told her that, being an outsider as a little boy, I’d noticed something was screwed up with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. I probably wasn’t as baffled by it as I sounded, but it was still more than I’d ever told anyone else.

She’d grown up right off the Boompjes; I’d been way out in Pernis, looking at the Caltex refinery through the haze. The little fishing village was still there then, huddled in the center of the petrochemical sprawl. My sister loved the lights of the complex at night and the fires that went hundreds of feet into the air like solar flares when the waste gases burned off. Kids from other neighborhoods never failed to notice the smell on our skin. The light was that golden sodium vapor light, and my father liked to say it was always Christmas in Pernis. At night I was able to read with my bedroom lamp off. While we got ready for school in the mornings, the dredging platforms with their twin pillars would disappear up into the fog like Gothic cathedrals.

A week after I told her all that, I introduced Cato to Kees. “I’ve never seen him like this,” he told her. We were both on track for one of the technology universities, maybe Eindhoven, and he hadn’t failed Dutch. “Well, I’m a pretty amazing woman,” she explained to him.

Kees and I both went on to study physical geography and got into the water sector. Cato became the media liaison for the program director for Rotterdam Climate Proof. We got married after our third International Knowledge for Climate Research conference. Kees asked us recently which anniversary we had coming up, and I said eleventh and Cato said it was the one hundredth.

It didn’t take a crystal ball to realize we were in a growth industry. Gravity and thermal measurements by GRACE satellites had already flagged the partial shutdown of the Atlantic circulation system. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, saddled with having to release one glum piece of news after another, had just that year reported that the Pyrenees, Africa, and the Rockies were all glacier-free. The Americans had just confirmed the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Once-in-a-century floods in England were now occurring every two years. Bangladesh was almost entirely a bay and that whole area a war zone because of the displacement issues.

It’s the catastrophe for which the Dutch have been planning for fifty years. Or, really, for as long as we’ve existed. We had cooperative water management before we had a state. The one created the other; either we pulled together as a collective or got swept away as individuals. The real old-timers had a saying for when things fucked up: “Well, the Netherlands lives with water.” What they meant was that their land flooded twice a day.

Bishop Prudentius of Troyes wrote in his annals that in the ninth century the whole of the country was devoured by the sea; all the settlements disappeared, and the water was higher than the dunes. In the Saint Felix Flood, North Beveland was completely swept away. In the All Saints’ Flood, the entire coast was inundated between Flanders and Germany. In 1717 a dike collapse killed fourteen thousand on Christmas night.

“You like going on like this, don’t you?” Cato sometimes asks.

“I like the way it focuses your attention,” I told her once.

“Do you like the way it scares our son?” she demanded in return.

“It doesn’t scare me,” Henk told us.

“It does scare you,” she told him. “And your father doesn’t seem to register that.”

For the last few years, when I’ve announced that the sky is falling she’s answered that our son doesn’t need to hear it. And that I always bring it up when there’s something else that should be discussed. I always concede her point, but that doesn’t get me off the hook. “For instance, I’m still waiting to hear how your mother’s making out,” she complains during a dinner when we can’t tear Henk’s attention away from the Feyenoord celebrations. If its team wins the Cup, the whole town gets drunk. If it loses, the whole town gets drunk.

My mother’s now at the point that no one can deny is dementia. She’s still in the little house on Polluxstraat, even though the Pernis she knew seems to have evaporated around her. Cato finds it unconscionable that I’ve allowed her to stay there on her own, without help. “Let me guess,” she says whenever she brings it up. “You don’t want to talk about it.”

She doesn’t know the half of it. The day after my father’s funeral, my mother brought me into their bedroom and showed me the paperwork on what she called their Rainy Day Account, a staggering amount. Where had they gotten so much? “Your father,” she told me unhelpfully. When I went home that night and Cato asked what was new, I told her about my mother’s regime of short walks.

At each stage in the transfer of assets, financial advisors or bank officers have asked if my wife’s name would be on the account as well. She still has no idea it exists. It means that I now have a secret net worth more than triple my family’s. What am I up to? Your guess is as good as mine.

“Have you talked to anyone about the live-in position?” Cato now asks. I’d raised the idea with my mother, who’d started shouting that she never should have told me about the money. Since then I’d been less bullish about bringing Cato and Henk around to see her.

I tell her things are progressing just as we’d hope.

“Just as we’d hope?” she repeats.

“That’s it in a nutshell,” I tell her, a little playfully, but her expression makes it clear she’s waiting for a real explanation.

“Don’t you have homework?” I ask Henk, and he and his mother exchange a look. I’ve always believed that I’m a master at hiding my feelings, but I seem to be alone in that regard.

Cato’s been through this before in various iterations. When my mother was first diagnosed, I hashed through the whole thing with Kees, who’d been in my office when the call came in. And then later that night I told Cato there’d been no change, so as not to have to trudge through the whole story again. But the doctor had called the next day, when I was out, to see how I was taking the news, and she got it all from him.

Henk looks at me like he’s using my face to attempt some long division.

Cato eats without saying anything until she finally loses her temper with the cutlery. “I told you before that if you don’t want to do this, I can,” she says.

“There’s nothing that needs doing,” I tell her.

“There’s plenty that needs doing,” she says. She pulls the remote from Henk and switches off the news. “Look at him,” she complains to Henk. “He’s always got his eyes somewhere else. Does he even know that he shakes his head when he listens?”

Pneumatic hammers pick up where they left off outside our window. There’s always construction somewhere. Why not rip up the streets? The Germans did such a good job of it in 1940 that it’s as if we’ve been competing with them ever since. Rotterdam: a deep hole in the pavement with a sign telling you to approach at your own risk. Our whole lives, walking through the city has meant muddy shoes.

As we’re undressing that night she asks how I’d rate my recent performance as a husband.

I don’t know; maybe not so good, not so bad, I tell her.

She answers that if I were a minister, I’d resign.

“What area are we talking about here,” I wonder aloud, “in terms of performance?”

“Go to sleep,” she tells me, and turns off the lamp.

If climate change is a hammer to the Dutch, the head’s coming down more or less where we live. Rotterdam sits astride a plain that absorbs the Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine outflows, and what we’re facing is a troika of rising sea level, peak river discharges, and extreme weather events. We’ve got the jewel of our water defenses — the staggeringly massive water barriers at Maeslant and Dordrecht, and the rest of the Delta Works — ready to shut off the North Sea during the next cataclysmic storm, but what are we to do when that coincides with the peak river discharges? Sea levels are leaping up, our ground is subsiding, it’s raining harder and more often, and our program of managed flooding — Make Room for the Rivers — was overwhelmed long ago. The dunes and dikes at eleven locations from Ter Heijde to Westkapelle no longer meet what we decided would be the minimum safety standards. Temporary emergency measures are starting to be known to the public as Hans Brinkers.

And this winter’s been a festival of bad news. Kees’s team has measured increased snowmelt in the Alps to go along with prolonged rainfall across Northern Europe and steadily increasing windspeeds during gales, all of which lead to increasingly ominous winter flows, especially in the Rhine. He and I — known around the office as the Pessimists — forecasted this winter’s discharge at eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. It’s now up to twenty-one. What are those of us in charge of dealing with that supposed to do? A megastorm at this point would swamp the barriers from both sides and inundate Rotterdam and its surroundings — three million people — within twenty-four hours.

Which is quite the challenge for someone in media relations. “Remember, the Netherlands will always be here,” Cato likes to say when signing off with one of the news agencies. “Though probably under three meters of water,” she’ll add after she hangs up.

Before this most recent emergency, my area of expertise had to do with the strength and loading of the Water Defense structures, especially in terms of the Scheldt estuary. We’d been integrating forecasting and security software for high-risk areas and trying to get Arcadis to understand that it needed to share almost everything with IBM and vice versa. I’d even been lent out to work on the Venice, London, and Saint Petersburg surge barriers. But now all of us were back home and thrown into the Weak Links Project, an overeducated fire brigade formed to address new vulnerabilities the minute they emerged.

Our faces are turned helplessly to the Alps. There’s been a series of cloudbursts on the eastern slopes: thirty-five centimeters of rain in the last two weeks. The Germans have long since raised their river dikes to funnel the water right past them and into the Netherlands. Some of that water will be taken up in the soil, some in lakes and ponds and catchment basins, and some in polders and farmland that we’ve set aside for flooding emergencies. Some in water plazas and water gardens and specially designed underground parking garages and reservoirs. The rest will keep moving downriver to Rotterdam and the closed surge barriers.

“Well, ‘Change is the soul of Rotterdam,’ ” Kees joked when we first looked at the numbers on the meteorological disaster ahead. We were given private notification that there would be vertical evacuation if the warning time for an untenable situation was under two hours, and horizontal evacuation if it was over two.

“What am I supposed to do,” Cato demanded to know when I told her, “tell the helicopter that we have to pop over to Henk’s school?” He now has an agreed-upon code; when it appears on his iFuze, he’s to leave school immediately and head to her office.

But in the meantime we operate as though it won’t come to that. We think we’ll come up with something, as we always have. Where would New Orleans or the Mekong Delta be without Dutch hydraulics and Dutch water management? And where would the U.S. and Europe be if we hadn’t led them out of the financial panic and depression, just by being ourselves? EU dominoes from Iceland to Ireland to Italy came down around our ears but there we sat, having been protected by our own Dutchness. What was the joke about us, after all? That we didn’t go to the banks to take money out; we went to put money in. Who was going to be the first, as economy after economy capsized, to pony up the political courage to nationalize their banks and work cooperatively? Well, who took the public good more seriously than the Dutch? Who was more in love with rules? Who tells anyone who’ll listen that we’re providing the rest of the world with a glimpse of what the future will be?

After a third straight sleepless night—“Oh, who gets any sleep in the water sector?” Kees answered irritably the morning I complained about it — I leave the office early and ride a water taxi to Pernis. In Nieuwe Maas the shipping is so thick that it’s like kayaking through canyons, and the taxi captain charges extra for what he calls a piloting fee. We tip and tumble on the backswells while four tugs nudge a supertanker sideways into its berth like puppies snuffling at the base of a cliff. The tanker’s hull is so high that we can’t see any superstructure above it.

I hike from the dock to Polluxstraat, the traffic on the A4 above rolling like surf. “Look who’s here,” my mother says, instead of hello, and goes about her tea-making as though I dropped in unannounced every afternoon. We sit in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Before she settles in, she reverses the pillow embroidered “Good Night” so that it now reads “Good Morning.”

“How’s Henk?” she asks, and I tell her he’s got some kind of chest thing. “As long as he’s healthy,” she replies. I don’t see any reason to quibble.

The bottom shelves of her refrigerator are puddled with liquid from deliquescing vegetables and something spilled. The bristles of her bottle scraper on the counter are coated with dried mayonnaise. The front of her nightgown is an archipelago of stains.

“How’s Cato?” she asks.

“Cato wants to know if we’re going to get you some help,” I tell her.

“I just talked with her,” my mother says irritably. “She didn’t say anything like that.”

“You talked with her? What’d you talk about?” I ask. But she waves me off. “Did you talk to her or not?”

“That girl from up north you brought here to meet me, I couldn’t even understand her,” she tells me. She talks about regional differences as though her country’s the size of China.

“We thought she seemed very efficient,” I reply. “What else did Cato talk with you about?”

But she’s already shifted her interest to the window. Years ago she had a traffic mirror mounted outside on the frame to let her spy on the street unobserved. She uses a finger to widen the gap in the lace curtains.

What else should she do all day long? She never goes out. The street’s her revival house, always showing the same movie.

The holes in her winter stockings are patched with a carnival array of colored thread. We always lived by the maxim that things last longer mended than new. My whole life, I heard that with thrift and hard work I could build a mansion. My father had a typewritten note tacked to the wall in his office at home: Let those with abundance remember that they are surrounded by thorns.

“Who said that?” Cato asked when we were going through his belongings.

“Calvin,” I told her.

“Well, you would know,” she said.

He hadn’t been so much a conservative as a man whose life philosophy had boiled down to the principle of no nonsense. I’d noticed even as a tiny boy that whenever he liked a business associate, or anyone else, that’s what he said about them.

My mother’s got her nose to the glass at this point. “You think you’re the only one with secrets,” she remarks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, but she acts as though she’s not going to dignify that with a response. Follow-up questions don’t get anywhere, either. I sit with her a while longer. We watch a Chinese game show. I soak her bread in milk, walk her to the toilet, and tell her we have to at least think about moving her bed downstairs somewhere. The steps to her second floor are vertiginous even by Dutch standards, and the risers accommodate less than half your foot. She makes an effort to follow what I’m saying, puzzled that she needs to puzzle something out. But then her expression dissipates and she complains she spent half the night looking for the coffee grinder.

“Why were you looking for the coffee grinder?” I ask, a question I have to repeat. Then I stop, for fear of frightening her.

Henk’s class is viewing a presentation at the Climate campus—“Water: Precious Resource and Deadly Companion”—so we have the dinner table to ourselves. Since Cato’s day was even longer than mine, I prepared the meal, two cans of pea soup with pigs’ knuckles and some Belgian beer, but she’s too tired to complain. She’s dealing with both the Americans, who are always hectoring for clarification on the changing risk factors for our projects in Miami and New Orleans, and the Germans, who’ve publicly dug in their heels on the issue of accepting any spillover from the Rhine in order to take some of the pressure off the situation downstream.

It’s the usual debate, as far as the latter argument’s concerned. We take the high road — it’s only through cooperation that we can face such monumental challenges, etc. — while other countries scoff at our aspirations toward ever more comprehensive safety measures. The German foreign minister last year accused us on a simulcast of acting like old women.

“Maybe he’s right,” Cato says wearily. “Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live in a country where you don’t need a license to build a fence around your garden.”

Exasperated, we indulge in a little Dutch bashing. No one complains about themselves as well as the Dutch. Cato asks if I remember that story about the manufacturers having to certify that each of the chocolate letters handed out by Santa Claus contained an equal amount of chocolate. I remind her about the number-one download of the year turning out to have been of fireworks sound effects, for those New Year’s revelers who found real fireworks too worrisome.

After we stop, she looks at me, her mouth a little slack. “Why does this sort of thing make us horny?” she wonders.

“Maybe it’s the pea soup,” I tell her in the shower. She’s examining little crescents of fingernail marks where she held me when she came. Then she turns off the water and we wrap ourselves in the bedsheet-sized towel she had made in Surinam. Cocooned on the floor in the tiny, steamy bathroom we discuss Kees’s love life. He now shops at a singles’ supermarket, the kind where you use a blue basket if you’re taken and a yellow if you’re available. When I asked how his latest fling was working out, he said, “Well, I’m back to the yellow basket.”

Cato thinks this is hilarious.

“How’d we get to be so lucky?” I ask her. We’re spooning and she does a minimal grind that allows me to grow inside her.

“The other day someone from BBC1 asked my boss that same question about how he ended up where he did,” she says. She turns her cheek so I can kiss it.

“What’d he say?” I ask when I’ve moved from her cheek to her neck. She’s not a big fan of her boss.

She shrugs comfortably, her shoulder blades against my chest. I wrap my arms tighter so the fit is even more perfect. The gist of his answer, she tells me, was mostly by not asking too many questions.

My mother always had memory problems and even before my sister died my father said that he didn’t blame her; she’d seen her own brothers swept away in the 1953 flood and had been a wreck for years afterward. On January 31, the night after her sixth birthday, a storm field that covered the entire North Sea swept down out of the northwest with winds that registered gale force 11 and combined with a spring tide to raise the sea six meters over NAP. The breakers overtopped the dikes in eighty-nine locations over a 170-kilometer stretch and hollowed them out on their land sides so that the surges that followed broke them. My mother remembered eating her soup alongside her two brothers listening to the wind increase in volume until her father went out to check on the barn and the draft from the opened door blew their board game off the table. Her mother’s Bible pages flapped in her hands like panicked birds. Water was seeping through the window casing, and her brother touched it and held out his finger for her to taste. She remembered his look when she realized that it was salty: not rain but spray from the sea.

Her father returned and said they all had to leave, now. They held hands in a chain and he went first and she went second, and once the door was open, the wind staggered him and blew her off her feet. He managed to retrieve her but by then they couldn’t find the others in the dark and the rain. She was soaked in ice and the water was already up to her thighs and in the distance she could see breakers where the dike had been. They headed inland and found refuge inside a neighbor’s brick home and discovered that the back half of the house had already been torn away by the water. He led her up the stairs to the third floor and through a trapdoor onto the roof. Their neighbors were already there, and her mother, huddling against the wind and the cold. The house west of them imploded but its roof held together and was pushed upright in front of theirs, diverting the main force of the flood around them like a breakwater. She remembered holding her father’s hand so their bodies would be found in the same place. Her mother shrieked and pointed and she saw her brothers beside a woman with a baby on the roof of the house beyond them to the east. Each wave that broke against the front drenched her brothers and the woman with spray, and the woman kept turning her torso to shield the baby. And then the front of the house caved in and they all became bobbing heads in the water that were swept around the collapsing walls and away.

She remembered the wind finally dying down by mid-morning, a heavy mist in the gray sky, and a fishing smack off to the north coasting between the rooftops and bringing people on board. She remembered a dog lowered on a rope, its paws flailing as it turned.

After their rescue, she remembered a telegraph pole slanted over, its wires tugged by the current. She remembered the water smelling of gasoline and mud, treetops uncovered by the waves, and a clog between two steep roofs filled with floating branches and dead cattle. She remembered a vast plain of wreckage on the water and the smell of dead fish traveling on the wind. She remembered two older boys sitting beside her and examining the silt driven inside an unopened bottle of soda by the force of the waves. She remembered her mother’s animal sounds and the length of time it took to get to dry land, and her father’s chin on her mother’s bent back, his head bumping and wobbling whenever they crossed the wakes of other boats.

We always knew this was coming. Years ago the city fathers thought it was our big opportunity. Rotterdam no longer would be just the ugly port, or Amsterdam without the attractions. The bad news was going to impact us first and foremost, so we put out the word that we were looking for people with the nerve to put into practice what was barely possible anywhere else. The result was Waterplan 4 Rotterdam, with brand-new approaches to storage and safety: water plazas, super cisterns, water balloons, green roofs, and even traffic tunnels that doubled as immense drainage systems would all siphon off danger. It roped in Kees and Cato and me and by the end of the first week had set Cato against us. Her mandate was to showcase Dutch ingenuity, so the last thing she needed was the Pessimists clamoring for more funding because nothing anyone had come up with yet was going to work. As far as she was concerned, our country was the testing ground for all high-profile adaptive measures and practically oriented knowledge and prototype projects that would attract worldwide attention and become a sluice-gate for high-tech exports. She spent her days in the international marketplace hawking the notion that we were safe here because we had the knowledge and were using it to find creative solutions. We were all assuming that a secure population was a collective social good for which the government and private sector alike would remain responsible, a notion, we soon realized, not universally embraced by other countries.

Sea-facing barriers are inspected both by hand and by laser imaging. Smart dikes schedule their own maintenance based on sensors that detect seepage or changes in pressure and stability. Satellites track ocean currents and water-mass volumes. The areas most at risk have been divided into dike-ring compartments in an attempt to make the country a system of watertight doors. Our road and infrastructure networks now function independently of the ground layer. Nine entire neighborhoods have been made amphibious, built on hollow platforms that will rise with the water but remain anchored to submerged foundations. And besides the giant storm barriers, atop our dikes we’ve mounted titanium-braced walls that unfold from concrete channels, leviathan-like inflatable rubber dams, and special grasses grown on plastic-mat revetments to anchor the inner walls.

“Is it all enough?” Henk will ask, whenever there’s a day of unremitting rain. “Oh, honey, it’s more than enough,” Cato will tell him, and then quiz him on our emergency code.

“It’s funny how this kind of work has been good for me,” Cato says. She’s asked me to go for a walk, an activity she knows I’ll find nostalgically stirring. We tramped all over the city before and after lovemaking when we first got together. “All of this end-of-the-world stuff apparently cheers me up,” she remarks. “I guess it’s the same thing I used to get at home. All those glum faces, and I had to do the song-and-dance that explained why they got out of bed in the morning.”

“The heavy lifting,” I tell her.

“Exactly,” she says with a faux mournfulness. “The heavy lifting. We’re on for another simulcast tomorrow and it’ll be three Germans with long faces and Cato the Optimist.”

We negotiate a herd of bicycles on a plaza and she veers ahead of me toward the harbor. When we cross the skylights of the traffic tunnels, giant container haulers shudder by beneath our feet. She has a beautiful back, accentuated by the military cut of her overcoat.

“Except that the people you’re dealing with now want to be fooled,” I tell her.

“It’s not that they want to be fooled,” she answers. “It’s just that they’re not convinced they need to go around glum all the time.”

“How’d that philosophy work with your parents?” I ask.

“Not so well,” she says sadly.

We turn on Boompjes, which is sure to add to her melancholy. A seven-story construction crane with legs curving inward perches like a spider over the river.

“Your mother called about the coffee grinder,” she remarks. “I couldn’t pin down what she was talking about.”

Boys in bathing suits are pitching themselves off the high dock by the Strand, though it seems much too cold for that, and the river too dirty. Even in the chill I can smell tar and rope and, strangely, fresh bread.

“She called you or you called her?” I ask.

“I just told you,” Cato says.

“It seems odd that she’d call you,” I tell her.

“What was she talking about?” Cato wants to know.

“I assume she was having trouble working the coffee grinder,” I tell her.

“Working it or finding it?” she asks.

“Working it, I think,” I suggest. “She called you?”

“Oh my God,” Cato says.

“I’m just asking,” I tell her after a minute.

All of Maashaven is blocked from view by a giant suction dredger that’s being barged out to Maasvlakte 2. Preceded by six tugs, it looks like a small city going by. The thing uses dragheads connected to tubes the size of railway tunnels and harvests sand down to a depth of twenty meters. It’ll be deepening the docking areas out at Yangtzehaven, Europahaven, and Mississippihaven. There’s been some worry that all of this dredging has been undermining the water defenses on the other side of the channel, which is the last thing we need. Kees has been dealing with their horseshit for a few weeks now.

We rest on a bench in front of some law offices. Over the front entrance, cameras have been installed to monitor the surveillance cameras, which have been vandalized. Once the dredger has passed, we can see a family of day campers on the opposite bank who’ve pitched their tent on a berm overlooking the channel.

“Isn’t it too cold for camping?” I ask her.

“Wasn’t it too cold for swimming?” she responds, reminding me of the boys we’d passed.

She says Henk keeps replaying the same footage on his iFuze of Feyenoord’s MVP being lowered into the stadium beneath the team flag by a V/STOL. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” she continues, as if that led directly to her next thought. She mentions a conservatory in Berlin, fantastically expensive, that has a chamber-music program. She’d like to send Henk there during his winter break, and maybe longer.

This seems to me to be mostly about his safety, though I don’t acknowledge that. He’s a gifted cellist, but hardly seems devoted to the instrument.

With her pitchman’s good cheer she repeats the amount it will cost, which to me sounds like enough for a week in a five-star hotel. But she says money can always be found for a good idea, and if it can’t, then it wasn’t a good idea. Finally she adds that as a hydraulic engineer, I’m the equivalent of an atomic physicist in technological prestige.

Atomic physicists don’t make a whole lot of money, either, I remind her. And our argument proceeds from there. I can see her disappointment expanding as we speak, and even as my inner organs start to contract I sit on the information of my hidden nest egg and allow all of the unhappiness to unfold. This takes forever. The word in our country for the decision-making process is the same as the one we use for what we pour over pancakes. Our national mindset pivots around the word “but”: as in “This, yes, but that, too.” Cato puts her fingers to her temples and sheaths her cheeks with her palms. Her arguments run aground on my tolerance, which has been elsewhere described as a refusal to listen. Passion in Dutch meetings is punished by being ignored. The idea is that the argument itself matters, not the intensity with which it’s presented. Outright rejections of a position are rare; what you get instead are suggestions for improvement that if followed would annihilate the original intent. And then everyone checks their agendas to schedule the next meeting.

Just like that, we’re walking back. We’re single-file again, and it’s gotten colder.

From our earliest years, we’re taught not to burden others with our emotions. A young Amsterdammer in the Climate campus is known as the Thespian because he sobbed in public at a co-worker’s funeral. “You don’t need to eliminate your emotions,” Kees reminded him when the Amsterdammer complained about the way he’d been treated. “You just need to be a little more economical with them.”

Another thing I never told Cato: my sister and I the week before she caught the flu had been jumping into the river in the winter as well. That was my idea. When she came out, her feet and lips were blue and she sneezed all the way home. “Do you think I’ll catch a cold?” she asked that night. “Go to sleep,” I answered.

We take a shortcut through the sunken pedestrian mall they call the Shopping Gutter. By the time we reach our street it’s dark, raining again, and the muddy pavement’s shining in the lights of the cafes. Along the new athletic complex in the distance, sapphire-blue searchlights are lancing up into the rain at even intervals, like meteorological harp strings. “I don’t know if you know what this does to me, or you don’t,” Cato says at our doorstep, once she’s stopped and turned. Her thick brown hair is beaded with moisture where it’s not soaked. “But either way, it’s just so miserable.”

I actually have the solution to our problem, I’m reminded as I follow her up the stairs. The thought makes me feel rehabilitated, as though I’ve told her instead of only myself.

Cato always maintained that when it came to their marriage, her parents practiced a sort of apocalyptic utilitarianism: on the one hand they were sure everything was going to hell in a handbasket, while on the other they continued to operate as if things could be turned around with a few practical measures.

But there’s always that moment in a country’s history when it becomes obvious the earth is less manageable than previously thought. Ten years ago we needed to conduct comprehensive assessments of the flood defenses every five years. Now safety margins are adjusted every six months to take new revelations into account. For the last year and a half we’ve been told to build into our designs for whatever we’re working on features that restrict the damaging effects after an inevitable inundation. There won’t be any retreating back to the hinterlands, either, because given the numbers we’re facing there won’t be any hinterlands. It’s gotten to the point that pedestrians are banned from many of the sea-facing dikes in the far west even on calm days. At the entrance to the Haringvlietdam they’ve erected an immense yellow caution sign that shows two tiny stick figures with their arms raised in alarm at a black wave three times their size that’s curling over them.

I watched Kees’s face during a recent simulation as one of his new configurations for a smart dike was overwhelmed in half the time he would have predicted. It had always been the Dutch assumption that we would resolve the problems facing us from a position of strength. But we passed that station long ago. At this point each of us understands privately that we’re operating under the banner of lost control.

The next morning we’re crammed together into Rotterdam Climate Proof’s Smartvan and heading west on N211, still not speaking. Cato’s driving. At 140 km/hr the rain fans across the windshield energetically, racing the wipers. Gray clouds seem to be rushing in from the sea in the distance. We cross some polders that are already flooded, and there’s a rocking buoyancy when we traverse that part of the road that’s floating. Trucks sweep by backwards and recede behind us in the spray.

The only sounds are those of tires and wipers and rain. Exploring the radio is like visiting the Tower of Babel: Turks, Berbers, Cape Verdeans, Antilleans, Angolans, Portuguese, Croatians, Brazilians, Chinese. Cato managed to relocate her simulcast with her three long-faced Germans to the Hoek van Holland; she told them she wanted the Maeslant barrier as a backdrop, but what she really intends is to surprise them, live, with the state of the water levels already. Out near the barrier it’s pretty dramatic. Cato the Optimist with indisputable visual evidence that the sky is falling: can the German position remain unshaken in the face of that? Will her grandstanding work? It’s hard to say. It’s pretty clear that nothing else will.

“Want me to talk about Gravenzande?” I ask her. “That’s the sort of thing that will really jolt the boys from the Reich.”

“That’s just what I need,” she answers. “You starting a panic about something that might not even be true.”

Gravenzande’s where she’s going to drop me, a few kilometers away. Three days ago geologists there turned up crushed shell deposits seven meters higher on the dune lines inland than anyone believed floods had ever reached, deposits that look to be only about ten thousand years old. If this ends up confirmed, it’s seriously bad news, given what it clarifies about how cataclysmic things could get even before the climate’s more recent turn for the worse.

It’s Saturday, and we’ll probably put in twelve hours. Henk’s getting more comfortable with his weekend nanny than with us. As Cato likes to tell him when she’s trying to induce him to do his chores: “Around here, you work.” By which she means that old joke that when you buy a shirt in Rotterdam, it comes with the sleeves already rolled up.

We pass poplars lining the canals in neat rows, a canary-yellow smudge of a house submerged to its second-floor windows and, beyond a roundabout, a pair of decrepit rugby goalposts.

“You’re really going to announce that if the Germans pull their weight, everything’s going to be fine?” I ask. But she ignores me.

She needs a decision, she tells me a few minutes later, as though tired of asking. Henk’s winter break is coming up. I venture that I thought it wasn’t until the twelfth, and she reminds me with exasperation that it’s the fifth, the schools now staggering vacation times to avoid overloading the transportation systems.

We pass the curved sod roofs of factories. The secret account’s not a problem but a solution, I decide, and as I model to myself ways of implementing it as such, Cato finally asserts — as though she’s waited too long already — that she’s found the answer: she could take that Royal Dutch Shell offer to reconfigure their regional media relations, they could set her up in Wannsee, and Henk could commute. They could stay out there and get a bump in income besides. Henk could enroll in the conservatory.

We exit N211 northwest on an even smaller access road to the coast, and within a kilometer it ends in a turnabout next to the dunes. She pulls the car around so it’s pointed back toward her simulcast, turns off the engine, and sits there beside me with her hands in her lap.

“How long has this been in the works?” I ask. She wants to know what I mean, and I tell her that it doesn’t seem like so obscure a question; she said no to Shell years ago, so where did this new offer come from?

She shrugs, as if I’d asked if they were paying her moving expenses. “They called. I told them I’d listen to what they had to say.”

“They called you,” I tell her.

“They called me,” she repeats.

She’s only trying to hedge her bets, I tell myself to combat the panic. Our country’s all about spreading risk around. “Do people just walk into this conservatory?” I ask. “Or do you have to apply?”

She doesn’t answer, which I take to mean that she and Henk already have applied and he’s been accepted. “How did Henk feel about this good news?” I ask.

“He wanted to tell you,” Cato answers.

“And we’d see each other every other weekend? Once a month?” I’m attempting a version of steely neutrality but can feel the terror worming its way forward.

“This is just one option of many,” she reminds me. “We need to talk about all of them.” She adds that she has to go. And that I should see all this as being primarily about Henk, not us. I answer that the Netherlands will always be here, and she smiles and starts the van.

“You sure there’s nothing else you want to talk to me about?” she asks.

“Like what?” I say. “I want to talk to you about everything.”

She jiggles the gear shift lightly, considering me. “You’re going to let me drive away,” she says, “with your having left it at that.”

“I don’t want you to drive away at all,” I tell her.

“Well, there is that,” she concedes bitterly. She waits another full minute, then a curtain comes down on her expression and she puts the car in gear. She honks when she’s pulling out.

At the top of the dune I watch surfers in wetsuits wading into the breakers in the rain. The rain picks up and sets the sea’s surface in a constant agitation. Even the surfers keep low, to stay out of it. The wet sand’s like brown sugar in my shoes.

Five hundred thousand years ago it was possible to walk from where I live to England. At that point the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine. Even during the Romans’ occupation, the Zuider Zee was dry. But by the sixth century B.C. we were building artificial hills out of marsh grass mixed with manure and our own refuse to keep our feet out of the water. And then in the seventeenth century Hulsebosch invented the Archimedes screw, and water wheels could raise a flow four meters higher than where it began, and we started to make real progress at keeping what the old people called “the Waterwolf” from the door.

In the fifteenth century Philip the Good ordered the sand dike that constituted the original Hondsbossche Seawall to be restored, and another built behind it as a backup. He named the latter the Sleeper Dike. For extra security he had another constructed behind that, calling that one the Dreamer Dike. Ever since, schoolchildren have learned, as one of their first geography sentences, that “Between Camperduinen and Petten lie three dikes: the Watcher, the Sleeper, and the Dreamer.”

We’re raised with the double message that we have to address our worst fears but that nonetheless they’ll also somehow domesticate themselves. Fifteen years ago Rotterdam Climate Proof revived “The Netherlands lives with water” as a slogan, the accompanying poster featuring a two-panel cartoon in which a towering wave in the first panel is breaking before its crest over a terrified little boy, and in the second it separates into immense foamy fingers so he can relievedly shake its hand.

When Cato told me about that first offer from Shell, I could see her flash of feral excitement about what she was turning down. Royal Dutch Shell! She would’ve been fronting for one of the biggest corporations in the world. We conceived Henk a few nights later. There was a lot of urgent talk about getting deeper and closer and I remember striving once she’d guided me inside her to have my penis reach the back of her throat. Periodically we slowed into the barest sort of movement, just to further take stock of what was happening, and at one point we paused in our tremoring and I put my lips to her ear and reminded her of what she’d passed up. After winning them over, she could have picked her city: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Rio. The notion caused a momentary lack of focus in her eyes. Then as a response she started moving along a contraction, and Shell and other options including speech evanesced away.

If she were to leave me, where would I be? It’s as if she was put here to force my interaction with humans. And still I don’t pull it off. It’s like that story we were told as children, of Jesus telling the rich young man to go and sell all he has and give it to the poor, but instead the rich man chose to keep what he had, and went away sorrowful. When we talked about it, Kees said he always assumed the guy had settled in Holland.

That Monday, more bad news: warm air and heavy rain has ventured many meters above established snowlines in the western Alps, and Kees holds up before me with both hands GRACE’s latest printouts about a storm cell whose potential numbers we keep rechecking because they seem so extravagant. He spends the rest of the morning on the phone trying to stress that we’ve hit another type of threshold here; that these are calamity-level numbers. It seems to him that everyone’s saying they recognize the urgency of the new situation but that no one’s acting like it. During lunch a call comes in about the hinge-and-socket joint, itself five stories high, of one of the Maeslant doors. In order to allow the doors to roll with the waves, the joints are designed to operate like a human shoulder, swinging along both horizontal and vertical axes and transferring the unimaginable stresses to the joint’s foundation. The maintenance engineers are reporting that the foundation block — all 52,000 tons of it — is moving.

Finally Kees flicks off his phone receptor and squeezes his eyes shut in despair. “Maybe our history’s just the history of picking up after disasters like this,” he tells me. “The Italians do pasta sauce and we do body retrieval.”

After waiting a few minutes for updated numbers, I call Cato and fail to get through and then try my mother, who says she’s soaking her corns. I can picture the enamel basin with the legend “Contented Feet” around the rim. The image seems to confirm that we’re all naked in the world, so I tell her to get some things together, that I’m sending someone out for her, that she needs to leave town for a little while.

It’s amazing I’m able to keep trying Cato’s numbers, given what’s broken loose at every level of water management nationwide. Everyone’s shouting into headpieces and clattering away at laptops at the same time. At the Delta stations the situation has already triggered the automatic emergency procedures with their checklists and hour-by-hour protocols. Outside my office window the canal is lined with barges of cows, of all things, awaiting their river pilot to transport them to safety. The road in front of them is a gypsy caravan of traffic piled high with suitcases and furniture and roped-down plastic bags. The occasional dog hangs from a car window. Those roads that can float should allow vehicular evacuation for six or seven hours longer than the other roads will. The civil defense teams at roundabouts and intersections are doing what they can to dispense biopacs and aquacells. Through the glass everyone seems to be behaving well, though with a maximum of commotion.

I’ve got the mayor of Ter Heijde on one line saying he’s up to his ass in ice water and demanding to know where the fabled Weak Links Project has gone when Cato’s voice finally breaks in on the other.

“Where are you?” I shout, and the mayor shouts back “Where do you think?” I kill his line and ask again, and Cato answers, “What?” In just her one-word inflection, I can tell she heard what I said. “Is Henk with you?” I shout, and Kees and some of the others around the office look up despite the pandemic of shouting. I ask again and she says that he is. When I ask if she’s awaiting evacuation, she answers that she’s already in Berlin.

I’m shouting other questions when Kees cups a palm over my receptor and says, “Here’s an idea. Why don’t you sort out all of your personal problems now?”

After Cato’s line goes dead I can’t raise her again, or she won’t answer. We’re engaged in such a blizzard of calls that it almost doesn’t matter. “Whoa,” Kees says, his hands dropping to his desk, and a number of our co-workers go silent as well, because the windows facing west are now rattling and black with rain. I look out mine, and bags and other debris are tearing free of the traffic caravan and sailing east. The rain curtain hits the cows in their barges and their ears flatten like mules and their eyes squint shut at the gale’s power.

“Our ride is here,” Kees calls, shaking my shoulder, and I realize that everyone’s hurriedly collecting laptops and flash drives. There’s a tumult heading up the stairs to the roof and the roar of the wind every time the door’s opened, and the scrabbling sounds of people dragging something outside before the door slams shut. And then, with surprising abruptness, it’s quiet.

My window continues to shake as though it’s not double pane but cellophane. Now that our land has subsided as much as it has, when the water does come, it will come like a wall, and each dike that stops it will force it to turn, and in its churning it will begin to spiral and bore into the earth, eroding away the dike walls, until the pressure builds and that dike collapses and it’s on to the next one, with more pressure piling up behind, and so on and so on until every last barrier falls and the water thunders forward like a hand sweeping everything from the table.

The lights go off, and then on and off again, before the halogen emergency lights in the corridors engage, with their irritated buzzing.

It’s easier to see out with the interior lights gone. Along the line of cars a man carrying a framed painting staggers at an angle, like a sailboat tacking. He passes a woman in a van with her head against the headrest and her mouth open in an Oh of fatigue.

I’m imagining the helicopter crew’s negotiations with my mother, and their fireman’s carry once those negotiations have fallen through. She told me once that she often recalled how long they drifted in the flood of 1953 through the darkness without the sky getting any lighter. When the sun finally rose they watched the navy drop food and blankets and rubber boats and bottles of cooking gas to people on roofs or isolated high spots, and when their boat passed a small body lying across an eave with its arms in the water, her father told her that it was resting. She remembered later that morning telling her mother, who’d grown calmer, that it was a good sign they saw so few people floating, and before her father could stop her she answered that the drowned didn’t float straightaway but took a few days to come up.

And she talked with fondness about how tenderly her father had tended to her later, after she’d been blinded by some windblown grit, by suggesting she rub one eye to make the other weep, like farmers did when bothered by chaff. And she remembered, too, the strangeness of one of the prayers her village priest recited once they were back in their old church, the masonry buttressed with steel beams and planking to keep the walls from sagging outwards any further: I sink into deep mire, where there is no standing; I come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

The window’s immense pane shudders and flexes before me from the force of what’s pouring out of the North Sea. Water’s beginning to run its fingers under the seal on the sash. Cato will send me wry and brisk and newsy text updates whether she receives answers or not, and Henk will author a few as well. Everyone in Berlin will track the developments on the monitors above them while they shop or travel or work, the teaser heading reading something like The Netherlands Under Siege. Some of the more sober will think, That could have been us. Some of the more perceptive will consider that it soon might well be.

My finger’s on the Cato icon on the screen without exerting the additional pressure that would initiate another call. What sort of person ends up with someone like me? What sort of person finds that acceptable, year to year? We went on vacations and fielded each other’s calls and took turns reading Henk to sleep and let slip away the miracle that was there between us when we first came together. We hunkered down before the wind picked up. We modeled risk management for our son when instead we could have embraced the freefall of that astonishing Here, this is yours to hold. We told each other I think I know when we should’ve said Lead me farther through your amazing, astonishing interior.

Cato was moved by my mother’s flood memories, but brought to tears only by the one my mother cherished from that year: the Queen’s address to the nation afterwards, her celebration of what the crucible of the disaster had produced, and the return, at long last, of the unity the country had displayed during the war. My mother had years ago purchased a vinyl record of the speech, and later had a neighbor transfer it to a digital format. She played it once while we were visiting, and Henk knelt at the window spying on whoever was hurrying by. And my mother held the weeping Cato’s hand and she held mine and Henk gave us fair warning of anything of interest on the street, while the Queen’s warm and smooth voice thanked us all for working together in that one great cause, soldiering on without a thought for care, or grief, or inner divisions, and without even realizing what we were denying ourselves.