Netherland (9 page)

This man was dangerous, I realized. I said, “You really want me to go down to the INS and get a new green card? That’s what you want to get out of this?”

“I don’t want you to go there,” the supervisor said. Now he was pointing at my chest. “I’m forcing you to go there.”

“What about my written test?” I said, pathetically showing him my twenty out of twenty.

He smiled. “You’re going to have to take it again.”

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon. As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square’s flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.

Corralled by the black snow ranged along the curbs, I found myself hastening, for lack of a clear alternative, to the triangular traffic island at Broadway and Thirty-second Street known as Greeley Square Park. Glowing orange Christmas lights peppered the trees. I came to a statue of one Horace Greeley, a newspaperman and politician of the nineteenth century and, the plaque at the statue’s base further asserted, the coiner of the phrase “Go West, young man, go West.” Greeley, apparently a fellow with an enormous egglike head, was seated in an armchair. Staring blindly into the void beyond his feet, he wore an expression of devastation, as if the newspaper he clutched in his right hand contained terrible news. I decided to walk homeward down Broadway. The route, unfamiliar to me, passed through the old Tin Pan Alley quarter, blocks now given over to wholesalers and street vendors and freight forwarders and import-exporters—
UNDEFEATED WEAR CORP, SPORTIQUE, DA JUMP OFF
, signs proclaimed—dealing in stuffed toys, caps, novelties, human hair, two-dollar belts, one-dollar neckties, silver, perfumes, leather goods, rhinestones, street-wear, watches. Arabs, West Africans, African Americans hung out on the sidewalks among goods trucks, dollies, pushcarts, food carts, heaped trash, boxes and boxes of merchandise. I might have been in a cold Senegal. Black-skinned buyers carrying garbage bags wandered in and out of the stores while overseers and barkers and hawkers, dressed in leather jackets, fur coats, African robes, and tracksuits, jingled keys and talked on cell phones and idly heckled passing women and shouted for custom. On Twenty-seventh Street I turned toward Fifth Avenue: the cold had gotten to me, and I’d decided to catch a taxi. As I approached Fifth my eye was drawn to a banner hanging from a second-floor window:
CHUCK CRICKET, INC
.

The names of various enterprises were taped to a signboard at the front of the building’s entrance: Peruvian Amity Society, Apparitions International, Elvis Tookey Boxing, and, at suite 203, Chuck Cricket, Inc., Chuck Import-Export, Inc., and Chuck Industries, Inc. Why not? I thought, and went in. On the second floor I entered a tiny lobby with a receptionist who sat behind a security glass next to a video monitor that colorlessly transmitted, in jerking four-second fragments, dismal images of stairs, elevator interiors, and passageways. The receptionist buzzed me in without a word. I walked down a narrow corridor covered in teal carpeting and knocked on the door of suite 203.

Chuck himself opened the door, a telephone at his ear. He tapped on the back of a chair and gestured for me to sit. He seemed wholly unsurprised to see me.

The office consisted of a room with space for a couple of desks and a few filing cabinets. Sheetrock walls were decorated with posters of Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, the greatest batsmen in the world. A strumming sound drifted through from a guitar instructor next door. Chuck winked at me as he dealt with his call. “It’s my wife,” he mouthed. He wore an open-collared shirt and neatly creased trousers that spilled generously over sneakers. I noticed for the first time a couple of large gold rings on his fingers and, running in the dark hair beneath his throat, a necklace’s gold drool.

I was startled, in the midst of these impressions, by a strange whistling sound. The whistling was followed, after a few seconds’ pause, by a fresh sequence of chirps, and then by a popping like the pop of a bouncing Ping-Pong ball.

Chuck passed over a CD case. We were listening to Disc Two of
Bird Songs of California: Olive-Sided Flycatcher through Varied Thrush.

As I waited for Chuck to finish his phone call, the muffled guitar music and the birdsong were joined by the ringing of a phone from the other adjoining office. A male voice sounded loudly: “Hello?” The voice came through again: “I’m not a mind reader. I can’t read your mind.” A pause. “Stop it. Just stop it. Would you please just stop it.” Another pause. “Fuck you, all right? Fuck you.” I lowered my eyes. Paper glue traps for mice, baited with peanut butter and bearing the words
ASSURED ENVIRONMENTS
, littered the space under the radiators.

Chuck hung up and I said, “I was just walking home from the DMV. I happened to see your sign.”

“You live nearby?”

I mentioned the block.

“Well, it’s delightful to see you,” Chuck said. He was leaning back in his chair and, my explanation notwithstanding, considering why I, an important man with better things to do, had chosen to drop by. Chuck was too astute not to have detected that somewhere behind this impromptu visit lay some need on my part—and neediness, in business as in romance, represents an opportunity. But how, as I sat before him to the background tweeting of a Townsend’s solitaire or black-tailed gnatcatcher, was he going to proceed? He knew that a cold pitch involving sales charts, cash-flow projections, and marketing studies wouldn’t work. Also, it would have been alien to him to be so uncomplicated in his methods. Chuck valued craftiness and indirection. He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at the deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate. He believed in owning the impetus of a situation, in keeping the other guy off balance, in proceeding by way of sidesteps. If he saw an opportunity to act with suddenness or take you by surprise or push you into the dark, he’d take it, almost as a matter of principle. He was a willful, clandestine man who followed his own instincts and analyses and would rarely be influenced by advice—not my advice, that’s for sure. The truth is that there was nothing, or very little, I could have done to produce a different ending for Chuck Ramkissoon.

But it was a while before any of this came to me. Because his deviousness was so transparent and because it alternated with an immigrant’s credulousness—his machinating and trusting selves seemed, like Box and Cox, never to meet—I found all of the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing. Then again, this was a time when I found solace in the patter of Jehovah’s Witnesses who stopped me in the street, a time when I was tempted to consult the fat beckoning lady psychic who sat like an Amsterdam hooker in a basement window on West Twenty-third Street. I was glad of the considerateness, however misconceived. My life had shrunk to very small proportions—too small, certainly, for New York’s pickier and more plausible agents of sympathy. To put it another way: I was, to anyone who could be bothered to pay attention, noticeably lost. Chuck paid attention and thus noticed. So, instead of immediately pouncing on me with business details, he came up with a different plan. He was going to fascinate me.

He took another call. When he was done, he said, “That was my partner, Mike Abelsky. He’s just had that stomach reduction operation. You know, they take it and they shrink it to the size of a walnut. He’s doing great. Two weeks, and he’s already lost thirty pounds.”

A loud commotion sounded on Twenty-seventh Street. We looked outside. Three men—two Arabs and an African, it looked like—were ineffectually assaulting a black man, aiming kicks and punches that bounced off the suitcase the man held up. They retreated and spontaneously attacked again with loud shouts. Then a fourth party sprinted up to the man with the suitcase and struck him repeatedly with a collapsible chair, knocking him to the ground. A police siren sounded somewhere. The attackers disappeared into a building and the man with the suitcase picked himself up and hurried away.

Chuck Ramkissoon chuckled. “I love it here. Dog eat dog. No holds barred.”

The neighbor was raising his voice again. “No, listen to me for once. Just let me say what I have to say. Would you do that for me? Would you just shut the fuck up for one time in your life and just fucking listen?”

Chuck, touching his pockets for his keys, said, “Usually I have my director of operations here, a nice kid, you’d like him.” As if I might doubt him, Chuck went over to the vacant desk and fetched a business card belonging to
MO CADRE, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
. A fresh burst of twanging came from the guitar instructor. Chuck put on a Yankees cap.

From next door: “Fuck you! Fuck you, you fucking bitch!”

Chuck picked up his coat. “Why don’t I drop you home? It’s on my way.”

We fled toward the elevator. The door of another office was open, and standing at the entry was the woman I’d seen with Chuck on the ferry—his mistress, I now understood.

She looked up and said, “Honey, do you—,” and then she recognized me. We traded polite smiles. Chuck said, “Hans, I believe you’ve met Eliza. My dear, we were just on our way out.”

“Okey-dokey,” Eliza said, still with the same smile. “Have fun.”

As we walked out of the building into the cold, Chuck said very gravely, “Eliza is extremely talented. She composes photo albums. There’s quite a market for this service. People take all these pictures and they don’t know what to do with them.”

We made our way through animated hordes of men. At a certain point, Chuck grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s cross now,” and he trotted quickly across the avenue as a surge of traffic came roaring up. He had, I realized, waited for a moment when the pedestrian light showed the fierce red hand, and then taken his chance. Evidently he felt this gave him an edge—and it did, because it meant that, walking on down Sixth Avenue, he and I were signaled forward at every cross street by the purposeful white-glowing pedestrian whose missionary stride was plainly conceived as an example to all (and whom I cannot help contrasting with his London counterpart, a green gentleman undoubtedly rambling with an unseen golden retriever).

I followed Chuck into an open-air lot. He drove a 1996 Cadillac, a patriotic automobile aflutter and aglitter with banners and stickers of the Stars and Stripes and yellow ribbons in support of the troops. Papers, candy wrappers, and coffee cups were strewn over the front passenger seat. Chuck scrabbled all of it into his arms and dropped it into the junk-filled rear passenger area, where a pair of field glasses, a laptop, brochures, and brown banana peels rested on sheets of old newsprint.

We pulled up across the street from the Chelsea Hotel. I was opening my door when Chuck said, “Do you have some time? There’s something I want to show you. But it’s in Brooklyn.”

I hesitated. The truth was, I was done for the day, the Cadillac was warm, and I had a dread of returning to my apartment. Also, as Rachel would be the first to say, I’m easily dragged around.

“We still have an hour of daylight,” Chuck said. “Come on. You’ll find it interesting, I promise.”

“What the hell,” I said, slamming the door shut.

Chuck cackled as he drove off. “I knew it. You’re a fun guy underneath it all.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll find out. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

This was acceptable. When was the last time I’d been promised a surprise?

On the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of Houston, the car paused in traffic. Chuck, looking out of the window, leaned forward and exclaimed, “My God! Look at that. Do you see that, Hans? The ice?”

I did see. Ice was spread out over the breadth of the Hudson like a plot of cloud. The whitest and largest fragments were flat polygons, and surrounding these was a mass of slushy, messy ice, as if the remains of a zillion cocktails had been dumped there. By the bank, where the rotting stumps of an old pier projected like a species of mangrove, the ice was shoddy, papery rubble, and immobile; farther out, floes moved quickly towards the bay.

Indeed much of what I was looking at, Chuck informed me as we inched along, was brash ice, the fragments of disintegrating floes that had traveled down from upper parts of the Hudson. Such drifting fields of screeching and groaning ice, as Chuck dramatically put it, were great places to bird bald eagles, which came downriver in search of open water and collected fewer than fifty miles north in order to eat fish. Chuck’s fascination with this phenomenon—his interest in naturalism, birds especially, went back to his youth in Trinidad—was, I later came to understand, heightened by the knowledge gained from his enthusiastic and successful studies for the U.S. citizenship exams. He told me that in 1782, after years of argument and indecision, Congress concluded that the bald eagle would make an appropriate symbol of national power and authority, and so it was decided that the bird, depicted with its wings outspread, its talons grasping an olive branch, etcetera, should be adopted as the emblem for the great seal of the United States. Chuck dug into his pocket and tossed me a quarter to remind me what the eagle looked like. Not everybody agreed with the decision, Chuck reported. He took back the coin. Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey a better choice and considered the bald eagle—a plunderer and a scavenger of dead fish rather than a hunter, and timid if mobbed by much smaller birds—an animal of bad moral character and in fact a coward. “I love the national bird,” Chuck clarified. “The noble bald eagle represents the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.”

I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.