The Easy Chain Read online

  Like she knew. Because Lincoln couldn’t find out. Sly Aelia didn’t speak English.

  —At least not much more than magazine English, advertising English, top model and smash. But Lincoln was not about to be stopped …

  They met on a Thursday afternoon at the Ten Kate market, just off Kinkerstraat. Fittingly, both were buying batteries, and both reached for the same package of AA cells, strewn in a sidewalk basket, at the same time. Upon first skin-spark Lincoln heard the giggle; and, he said, it was a livelier, warmer, more richly improvised sound than he had ever heard at the Bimhuis. The giggle was followed by a closed-lip grin that seemed rehearsed, but Lincoln wrote that off as cultural coding, girl-to-boy protectiveness. He was glad to give her the benefit of the doubt …

  He would have to. Because when Lincoln worked up the nerve to speak – the batteries ceded with a wave and a smile, the silence settled in – he understood that he would have to call on his Dutch. His rudimentary, unsystematic, learned-on-the-fly, nearly non-existent Dutch …

  He tried, and stumbled, several times. But from the first faltering words, more fundamental suspicions were confirmed. He needn’t have worried: his nearly non-existent Dutch got him across: there was something there. He gabbled pointlessly, but easily; she giggled and played along, then gave her telephone number, penned on the torn-off end of a shop receipt. And, parting, Aelia’s smile was noticeably, certainly less rehearsed …

  She worked in a low-level orderly’s position at OLVG Hospital, and had just entered night school, two evenings a week. She was still living at home, with four siblings who had all been born in the Netherlands, after her parents had emigrated from the region around Rabat during Treller’s now-contentious Open Season of the ’60s. She made something in his solar plexus sing …

  They would meet on wooden benches in the Spui, or walk along the coiling paths in Sarfati Park, near where she lived. Her skin was mustard-colored and hard-smooth, her mouth turned scimitarly down, more so at mid-smile. South of her headscarf, she wore clothes that were simple, unclinging, demure. But it was all a ruse. Aelia loved to cadge cigarettes from surprised guys, and to read magazines with covers that looked like ads for the airbrushing business. Soon enough, she took Lincoln to nighttimes of Music From the Maghreb at clubs on Marnixstraat, long sets of hard, churning, hand-drum propelled pop that some followers called Moroccan Roll. And you should see her dance …

  The girl was a hellion, no doubt about it. But still: Lincoln could not visit her at home. And after Lincoln’s second phone call, Aeila said it was better for him to make no more: she would do the dialing. At his place, Lincoln waited awful hours for the dead thing to bugle, thoughts too scrambling to read.

  —And like when they would meet, like when they were sitting together, it was like sometimes he just wanted to say more to her. Than he could. Because like he still really couldn’t. His Dutch was hitting its limit, he said, like his limit. And it really began to get to him …

  He told me that they developed like this game. It was fun, but it also wasn’t. They’d be wherever, you know, just like walking or sitting having tea – he told me they like tea there – and they’d kind of get to the end of what they could talk about, so like his girlfriend would pull out this pocket calculator she carried around and just enter some numbers on it, like just adding or such. And then she’d hand it to him, and, like, he’d just finish the addition. And then his girlfriend would smile, and so would he, and that’s what they would do, you know. At least it was something they could get together on, at least something was making sense. I mean, this is what he told me.

  —So he decided, finally, to learn Dutch. Lincoln told me he was surprised how much he resisted the decision, even then. But there was no longer any choice. He even came to regret that he hadn’t done it before. So he signed up for intensive classes, seven hours a day, five days a week, at a place called the Handleblad School, when a letter came from his girl that she couldn’t see him any more.

  —And it was like—

  —That was like—

  —It was her father, he said, reasserting his claim, reining his deviant daughter in. It was the re-emergence of a pre-Medieval mindset that, based on nothing, grounded in nothing, claimed to know and speak for everything. And this melded to a learned Dutch directness. There could be no appeal.

  —Lincoln said he got a collage-maker from Ruigoord to translate the letter. After an awkward opening, reminiscing about some licorice they had bought at a recent Old Side street fair, Aelia abruptly said she wouldn’t be calling Lincoln again. She also asked him not to call her, and above all not to show up. And, of course, there was no point in writing back. The letters would never get through. And then, only, I’m sorry …

  For Lincoln, it was an act of subtraction that no computer could calculate. By silent election, he dropped out of his Dutch classes exactly when his friend finished reading the note. Then, for four straight days, he slammed around the city on foot, once walking as far as the Amsterdamse Bos, on constant vigil to veer from places associated with the traitor. He listened to clangorous old-school free-jazz CDs – Gunter Hampel, Albert Ayler – standing with his ears right up to the bookshelved speakers. And he finally bought some of those coffeeshop pre-rolleds. Then rolled a few of his own.

  —The guy moved out of his parents’ house, he jammed himself into a top-floor former storeroom in a tiny squat on Westerstraat until he crashed collidingly into all squats’ primordial problem, the bathroom, so he found a legit place and moved in and told his folks five days later when he went back to pick up stuff. He said the new place was just a skanky studio with skanky furniture at the top of a tiny-narrow building, reach out your arms and touch both walls, that kind of thing, dust clouds under the bed, on a block called Anjelierstraat. Shower just a high nozzle right in the bathroom. That kind of thing.

  —Yeah, the drug thing was happening, you know how couldn’t it, right? Soft stuff, legal shit there, he could just go from place to place. Then he stopped. Said he did. Said the spliff just made him feel shittier. He also said he wasn’t about to start drinking, didn’t go for that. Whole phase lasted maybe just a few weeks, really no more to say about it.

  —At around that time, Lincoln started working for Drempels, a men’s clothing store behind a broad window on Haarlemmerdijk. It was a fairly high-end place, he said, with Dutch brands like Markart and Sissy Boy and Italian imports ranging from Trussardi to BigTime to Lui. Lincoln’s boss, sheen-haired Carl, was decent, he said, and graced with the gift of preferring to close early when business was slow. The pace of four afternoons a week was just about perfect, the customers fine training in forcing rosiness. The whole thing was a welcome distraction, and good skills were there to be learned …

  He was working at the shop for about a month when his suicide attempt occurred, and to this day he’s unsure if his parents know about it. It took place in his apartment, he said, and he believes his instinct would have been to spare them. Regardless, they never spoke about it afterward.

  —The man took a bottle of muscle-relaxant pills, he was that low. He said he got them from a drug store – a usual kind of drug store, a pharmacy, not the local version – because that was like part of the message, according to him. It was like: this isn’t something from the margins, OK? This is—

  —Yeah, Lincoln’s suicide attempt. Whew, you know, like, yeah. He said … I mean, what can you say?

  —Must have been rough. I feel sorry for him. You got to. Must have been ambulances and shit. Nights – well, one night – in the hospital, he said. And it stayed with him: he didn’t talk about it too much. Didn’t get into too much detail.

  —Apparently it was a genuinely tough time. The effects of the breakup – come on: of the abandonment – it was a rough blow. He was just drifting through his life, he said he considered suicide all the time, said it just like that, and that he didn’t have much of a support system because of the language thing. Who wouldn’t be low?

  —H
e needed some time off then, and took it. Retreated into his apartment, windowshade low, teapot ready, Miles on the Lenco. Last sale of slacks. Got real conversant with them walls. Said he started reading political magazines, Foreign Affairs, get him out of his head. English language. Bought them from the one shop in town that carried them. Not really nearby. Glad for the reason to get out, walk a bit.

  —Eventually, of course, the guilders grew slim, and the lesser they grew the less they cared about his moods. Eventually he saw a notice in a listings mag called Via Via and hooked up with a concern that had taken over a few responsibilities from the Dienst Waterbeheer en Riolering, the city’s water and sewage department. Five days a week, he said, mornings and after lunch, Lincoln coasted through the canals of Amsterdam on an eighteen-meter flatboat, raising objects that had been lost or inadvertently thrown in. By punching buttons on a rectangular panel on deck, he controlled this huge, round, 220-kilo magnet.

  —In fact, Lincoln said he was looking for something that would be calm, and helpful, and purifying, and I think the guy got lucky. The magnet was suspended from a big, heavy, articulated arm, maybe like a giant architect’s lamp, and the boat was braced and counterweighted, and Lincoln and this Walloon named Joop would spend all day fishing for metal. Someone whose bicycle had tumbled in, lost keys, lost rings, eyeglasses – you name it, if nature could take it to the bottom, it would be there. People, businesses would call the company and come to meet them at a spot along a canal. Lincoln and the Walloon guy would glide up. The people’d stand and wait, and if the item hadn’t been found in two plunges they’d start to gesture – There! Try there! – and more often than not they got their goods back. Lincoln’s company was paid for its time, not by the value of the salvage …

  Which wasn’t actually an unfortunate thing, because for every object they were looking for, the magnet would dredge up forty others. Pagers, pocket calcs, outboard motors, necklaces, other jewelry that hadn’t been called about – in addition of course to the antennas and bike fenders and forks and all the other crud that bearded the magnet. The guys made out like bandits – even after they had given enough of the detritus to their boss to keep him quiet, as they were supposed to do. With all of it …

  And Lincoln said he liked visiting this underwater world, with its weird combination of what people found expendable lying right alongside the things they would pay to recuperate. The precious met the perishable, he said. Of course this trade had its folklore, about fishing out Charles III-era two-escudo gold pieces, or a Rollex with an arm attached, but Lincoln wasn’t looking for drama, and just gliding over the waterways, and seeing what surprises could be pulled from it, and how the nontreasure could be added up to become a nice bit of treasure indeed, did him very well.

  —So he’s out there trolling one Wednesday afternoon, looking for some kid’s overboarded braces – if you can believe that – and what comes up among the scurf of a plunge is a lady’s beaded purse, its metal hasp enough to attract the magnet’s attentions. Lincoln ended up with this part of the booty, along with its unknown-at-the-time-of-the-division-of-the-spoils content, a credit slip. The guys had opened the purse, Lincoln said, and turned it upside down and shook it mightily, but the little slip of wet pink paper had clung up in its stitchy fastness.

  —Thing turned out to be an IOU from some used book store over by the Stopera, you see, some little place that Lincoln said he must have walked right past 200 times and never even seen. Seems someone must’ve brought some books to these guys, and couldn’t find anything in the whole Goddam place they wanted to exchange ’em for, y’see.

  —So what the hell, right? The next Friday after work, after Lincoln and Joop had brought the magnet boat back to its hangar behind the cruise-ship terminal, Lincoln took his bike to the shop, and it turned out to be an English-language book shop, and, on top of that, it was their late night. Open til seven, catch them going-home purchases. So Lincoln says he walks up the short stoop and goes in, and the place’s just tiered all up with dusty yellow shelving, all the way to the ceiling, all the way to the back, and just more of them in additional rooms up and down short flights of steps to the rear. Bumper-to-bumper books, right? And just piles upon piles upon the desks up front.

  —It was a classic used bookstore. Cozy, chummy, unpretentious, altogether lovely. Lincoln had come into eighteen-and-a-half florins of credit. He was hoping to pick up a few back issues of Foreign Affairs. Looking back upon past predictions, he said, was the best training for looking down upon those made in the present. He found a stack of magazines dating to the Sixties. But he got cold feet: old news, same old ideas. He decided to look for something by a Robert Coles. He had read something about Coles’ notion of entitlement. While looking, Lincoln’s coursing index finger touched the spine of a book called The Closing of the American Mind. It had a white cover, vein-blue lettering.

  —Who would’ve thought the old battleaxe had any hacks left? Lincoln had never heard of the thing, or of Allan Bloom, but he wanted to be done with his store-credit and so be it. Thus are time-hinges made. Because the book spoke to him – not so much its critique of contemporary education, or its exaltation/non-critique of wellworn Bloomsian big-soul sentiments (Freedom of mind requires not only the absence of legal constraints, but the presence of alternative thoughts; The external impediments to the free exercise of reason have been removed in democracy; Democracy presented itself as decent mediocrity, and this as preferable to the splendid corruption of the older regimes; The gray net of abstraction, used to cover the world in order to simplify and explain it, has become the world in our eyes), or even the anti-multiculti stuff. But, he said, something in Bloom’s vision seemed solid, anchored, thought-through to the point where it couldn’t just be whittled away by opportunists. And while he thought Professor B drew too hard a line in his opposition of values to truth (Is there no truth inherent in values? Aren’t values truth’s suspenders?), hey: that stuff can still rock.

  —So he read through Bloom then he read about Bloom, then he read Ravelstein and became interested in the University of Chicago. Just that simple. Got caught up in the mystique. In particular, he said, the Committee.

  —Even the title, you know: The Committee on Social Thought. As if this little school division were creating it. What a beacon! The Politburo for cerebration. Irresistible! Lincoln said he loved it even before he knew what it was. To be part of that!

  —The next day Lincoln went to Amsterdam’s Openbare library to research the Committee, and tingled when he read about the sweep of its offerings, its interdisciplinary program to study just about everything. And the names that had passed through: Arendt, Eliot, Ricoeur, Rogers – names that were significant, that cast shadows – but shadows of light, shadows of understanding. Light-shadows that could make up for his lack of schooling …

  He read on, he said, and turned a page, and found out he couldn’t be part of it. For doctoral students only, and he didn’t even have an undergrad degree. Sails out – and wind gone.

  —So he’s in there, you know, and mopey, real disappointed, and something went down, I mean, he said like some librarian steered him to something called Koster’s Guide to International Education, and that’s where he heard about undergraduate at UC – UC, same campus as the Committee. And UC undergrad, you know, is all about the Core Curriculum, and Ah.

  —Again, synapses sparked. Again a possibility that was filled with possibility. A program that began with two full years of grounding in the essentials, all of them – humanities and civilization, natural and mathematical sciences, social sciences, foreign languages. Twenty-one courses taught by full faculty in small seminars. A program refined and perfected since its hesitant beginnings as the New Plan in 1931, and now machined to deliver civilization, from the time of Pericles on up to yesterday’s news, now, somehow, made rich with significance. It was a bracing expression of Enlightenment ideals, a declaration of support for rigor and reason, perhaps a culmination of the great tradition’s ba
seline precepts, in a particularly American mode. Leo Strauss’s call to guidance by the nobility of the classical texts, Albert Wohlstetter’s ennoblement of daily life and his insistence on its deep moral purpose – all was thrilling. He would learn the substrata of politics, the canopy of theory, he would learn the full topography of the variegated lands that lay beyond the shorelines of his meager knowledge, he would learn French. He would …

  He was moved, he said, by the school’s insistence on maintaining these ideals, on their vital necessity, on UC’s recognition of a Common Core as the basis for all individual development and progress. He was grateful for the college’s passionate reminder that this unmovable, prerequisite center was the source from which understanding, even participation, flowed. This would make him a citizen of the world, a citizen of history, a bearer of the great goods …

  Nothing like this was available at Groningen or Utrecht or Halle-Wittenberg. Even the great English universities were not as rigorous. Among other schools in the US, he read, only Columbia and St. John’s offered comparable programs, had the backbone to resist the contemporary challenges. But none were as strong as UC. Highest number of Nobel laureates of any university. Birthplace of the Chicago School in economics, world-changing advocates of extending Jefferson’s Grand Principles of freedom and individuality to economic life. Highest degree of seriousness for seriousness’s sake. Strongest center to build a center that would hold.

  —So he’s reading about this, you know, and reading about it, and getting rushy and excited, and then finds out he’s too old. The program’s for kids who’re like 18! And that ain’t him. He said he blammed that guidebook closed. Wasn’t happy about that at all.

  —But, like, you know Lincoln, you know there’s no way he’s not going to see if he can smooth things over, no way he isn’t gonna apply the special sauce. Guy always says No isn’t an ending, it’s a beginning.