“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.”
“And you responded, Father, by telling me about the non-political ways that the monarch can inspire and lead people.” Unspoken, as always—because it didn’t need to be said—was Johannes on his knees, blind, hearing the faint whistle of the descending blade.
“So the question we are here to explore,” Willem went on, “is whether a moment has arrived when the queen can play a role in leading the nation out of grave peril—without overstepping constitutional bounds.”
“It is a good question to explore, to be sure,” Hendrik said, after a little pause to consider it. “But why are you exploring it in Texas?”
“Good question,” Willem said. “The answer is, there’s a man down in Houston who had the presence of mind, a few years ago, to put an axe in the world’s attic. We are here to find out whether the moment has arrived to pick it up.”
THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA
Willem was supposed to rendezvous with the others near Houston. He could have done this directly by getting on Interstate 10 and driving due west for three hundred and fifty miles. But now that he was so close he couldn’t not go into New Orleans. It had been his first big city. Chicago had always been too far from their suburban home, so enormous and brutal and forbidding. But on the family’s vacation trips to Louisiana, teenaged Willem, bored out of his mind, had learned how to take public transit into New Orleans, how to find the French Quarter, and, in particular, how to find the gay part of it, which was ancient and well-established. On the whole his experiences there had been pretty tame, but later, when he had ventured into the night life of Amsterdam, he had been able to do so sure-footedly.
Later in life, he’d got to know people there. Very different people: ones he’d met at conferences where inhabitants of lowlying places came together to obsess about sea level. They’d be surprised if a personal representative of the Queen of the Netherlands just turned up without any advance notice. But he had a perfect alibi: he had gone to check in on his father. So before pulling out of the driveway he sent a message to Hugh St. Vincent, a department head at Tulane, announcing his presence in the area, apologizing for the late notice, and asking if there was anything new worth seeing. Hugh would understand that Willem was not asking for recommendations on where to eat beignets or listen to jazz.