Stella Atlantis

Chapter 5-2

“Winter’s the best in Mundaka,” he said. “I used to live at the Hotel Mundaka. Funny little semi–hole in the wall. Kind of place where the reception’s about as big as your basic phone booth, Hotel California like, and –”

“And they’re playing,” she said, “on some old – seriously? – tinny cassette player some old Purple Rain.”

“RIP,” he said.

They were halfway up the aisle.

“What a year,” she heard herself saying, as if the two of them, having just met, were old pals having lazy coffee down the street. “Bowie, January; Prince, April. What the hell is going on?”

“Thanks, thanks very much,” he said to the captain as they got to the exit, the breezeway. Cold Amsterdam morning came into the breezeway cracks. “Bowie goes slowly, secretly, yeah? Prince, now I have to say I was pretty shocked, OD on fentanyl.”

“They say.”

“Oh Lord. What a life. I hope I’m ready when the time comes.”

They were in the Schiphol Airport. Known to Vivi Pink as Schlep-all.

“We’re never ready, nobody’s ever ready,” she said.

He smiled at her with that old-pal smile.

“Well, nice to have met you.”

Neither of them strode off. The airport prepared its delicado tortures of all the spaces between our hopes. He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a business card. She took it, put it in her pant pocket, zipped it in. She didn’t look at it.

He had mentioned Las Canteras, the surfing beach out in the Atlantic Ocean on one of the Canary Islands. He had referenced Mundaka, the world-famous left break surf spot in Spain’s Basque Country. He had, thus, said without saying that he knew who she was. That he had seen her photographs, that he had bought her book of surfers, or other books. But what about those sad dark eyes? It could be surf eye. Or war. There is a kind of postwar loneliness that is beyond the ordinary definition of lonely. It is that your daily carry is existential dread.

She had felt like a rescue creature in the pound called existence for years now. It was possible there was no real proper home for the likes of her anywhere.

They stood, two awkward adults.

He said, “Good luck.” Then walked on with his long legs, a slight stoop in his upper body. Sadness, or a spinal fracture. Carrying his small black bag into the netherworld of fluorescent light of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Yellow signage, letters of the alphabet ordering you around, arrows on the verge of a nervous breakdown pointing to ceilings and floors.

Through the low country in its dark old grey waters, the spiffy taxi sped with a driver who looked like a righteous club bouncer, muscular arms in a tailored suit, a head so shiny he must buff it like a shoeshine guy in the morning. Vivi loved the security of everything in its place, including your carefully polished skull. Male driver, female passenger, each with a bald smooth head. The taxi entered the Old South section of the city, curving into the pocket corner of Roemer Visscherstraat, the one-block-long street where the Owl Hotel sat.

The Owl, charcoal paint, high windows, amber in one window lit at 8:00 a.m. The beautiful old city of Amsterdam, so much of it already below sea level. The words Owl Hotel lit in lime green on a canopy, the street empty except for the hundreds of bicycles parked, high riders leaning back like two-wheeled horses on the street named for the poet Roemer Visscher.

She paid the well-built taxi driver who carried a suit as brilliantly as Leonard Cohen, walked down the stairs from the street to the hotel entrance at the bottom, and into the narrow lobby. The memory of past times at the Owl flooded back, visual memories. The surprise of how small the spaces were, the reception counter immediately when you entered, the eye-view down the narrow space past the four-seat bar, past the cozy public lounge, through glass doors to a beautifully calm scene: the garden wet with rain.

Iron tables, iron chairs, the welcome soothing green planting, offhand, intended, that disciplined seeming-casual ambition she loved in Amsterdam. Masterly, casual, a small hotel in the off-season.

Into the frame down the space two long legs stretched. Oh, come on, Vivi said to herself, him.

The guy from the plane who mentioned the surf spots in the Canaries and the Basque Country. In her hotel, in her lobby lounge, what are the chances? Mister Legs in the airport in Toronto, on the plane across from her across the Atlantic, now in her same Amsterdam hotel? He got up, slid open one of the glass sliding doors to the patio garden, looked back, an ibis eyeing her through glass. She took the closet-sized elevator to her room, enjoying the acid lemon-green colour of the metal curtain. She waved the key card at the electronic eye on the door to room 46.

Vivi had asked for 46 for reasons. At the Amsterdam Owl Hotel in room 46, twelve years ago, in early November she had unfolded a note from the front desk to call home urgently. On the phone in this room, she had heard that Stella had been in an accident and was in surgery. The mother, away from home, working. Her sister, Rhonda, saying, “You never cared about your own daughter. I told you something like this was bound to happen. Don’t worry, Rhonda is handling the mess you made.”

She unpacked. She unzipped the security pocket on her pants, the business card Mister Long Legs had given her was there. It read: SURF DOCTOR. Surf therapy for the wounded. There was no phone number, no address, no code. No name. She had heard of surf therapy, of course she had. She had even tried it, in fact, at Mundaka. Was this guy there then? There were a few veterans who brought the wounded to the water, damaged bodies, partial bodies, bodies whole outside partial inside like hers, put them on boards, taught them how to paddle into the waves.

At the window looking down to the patio garden, she snapped a first-look best-look. It was habit – she always took snaps of the hotel room before she inhabited it, and its surrounds. Like antemortem pics of the scenes about to happen. There he was in the garden sitting at a table, all raindrops. Mister Legs sat alone, the autumn shades of his sweater, his pants, his cordovan shoes in harmony with old leaves, terracotta pots, the garden shed in matte grey. Dress like Amsterdam in November, you’ll never be wrong. His arms open, his chest released to the Old World.

Now he goes and pulls a notebook from his leather jacket pocket, begins writing in it. He looked up. What was with this guy? Could he, like a pro cop, or a forest creature, sense the pitch of being watched from above? A man who worked in the shadows and who, thus, could hear shadows … maybe. She snapped an aerial snap from room 46. He leaned his long upper body into his notebook on the patio table below, like a man protecting food in a prison. Mister Legs a.k.a. the Surf Doctor. Self-contained. Tall, dark and therapeutic.

Her head hurt. Her body ached. She headed to the Vondelpark to see about the Netherland terror rumours she had heard from protected sources.

She walked down the one long block of Roemer Visscherstraat, the buildings all attached to each other, rust brick, cream trim, arched windows and arched entranceways, the familiar Amsterdam hooks on high to hoist furniture up to swing in through windows.

At Van Baerlestraat, a heavy stream of bicyclists rode, centimetres from her toes. To get across to the Vondelpark was a trial in waiting. Immediately off the perpetually surprisingly narrow sidewalks of the city granted to the low species on the food chain – pedestrians, in Amsterdam – that stream of steady straight-backed beautifully fit endlessly pedalling Amsterdammers on bikes allowed no purchase for a walking person. Next to that traffic stream, the slightly lighter stream of cars. Next to that, the trams going one way next to the trams going the other way next to the cars going that way next to the endless stream of bicycles. s**t.

No romance, bikes here were transportation. Where everybody gets around by bike, it’s one more traffic headache in your life, and a pedestrian could be stranded on a street named for a poet. An old memory of being here came back. A fix for the fix she was in. Of course, the stairs.

She hung a left, walked a half a block to – yeah, of course – the stone stairs on Van Baerlstraat down to that part of the Vondelpark, then you walk under the underpass and into the green, up to the big lovely building, the Filmmuseum, with its outside terrace Café Vertigo. The palette would suit a Hitchcock. Twice as many bicycles in Amsterdam as people. Hitchcock could rise from the grave, remake The Birds, call it The Bikes. Nine hundred thousand bikes, 1,800,000 wheels swarming the back of your knees. Oddly, she had never seen a single bicyclist wearing a helmet in Amsterdam. You didn’t see it. Go know.

Past stone benches, past wooden green benches with iron scrollwork depicting birds, muddy mustard reflections of dying tree leaves, empty trees, stone shadows to the large bleached imposing film museum.

A man gently rode past her on his bike, in a brown garment with a loose ecru top on it, he too with that eye-sunken ferociousness she had seen in the TO alley man yesterday morning, also in the Surf Doctor.

She felt dizzy. The willow trees were doubled in the ponds. She was sweating. No vehicles were allowed in the park; here came an unmarked white van. She didn’t like white vans, period. Unmarked creeped her out. The van drove way too close to her puffer coat. The man at the wheel had on a baseball cap, which was unusual here. She turned to look back at the Filmmuseum; she headed toward it, retracing her steps. No one sitting at the Café Vertigo, only chairs and tables, empty. Where were the people? The white van was keeping pace with her, at the speed of a fast walker. She upped the pace, walked faster. The man in the van crept his vehicle alongside her, toward tables, chairs, the stone steps to the Filmmuseum entranceway. The van kept making gear-noise adjustments to ride beside her, the man in the baseball cap staring at her, then lagging a bit behind, then right beside her again, a smirk on his face.

The van dropped back on the path, so that it was directly behind her. The engine revving, the vehicle heat on her coat, the back of her legs. The man had encased himself inside the weapon with which he was pursuing her. Steel under combustion.

She got to the bottom of the stairs up to the Filmmuseum. The van moved so that the front hood was at the bottom of the stairs, beside her. She ran up the old wide stone stairs. The van tried to mount the stairs after her, rearing back, slipping. Vivi got to the top. She tried the door. The Filmmuseum was closed. Café Vertigo’s hours didn’t start yet. Her clock was somewhere else in her body, she was in Amsterdam but where was she in time, was she too early, where were the people? What time had they landed?

At the bottom of the stairs, the van waited for her, the man smirking at the wheel, revving the engine over and over.

Vivi ran down the stairs, ran at full speed toward a path straight ahead. Oh no there was no path, she realized too late, it was an illusion of water sending her running into a pond, green full of willow, muddy.

She began to swim. She could see in her peripheral vision that the van was slowly trying to track her around the water. She dog-paddled. Her puffer coat was weighing her down.

At a wet cold corner, she came ashore. The coat was all down and sodden. She took it off, laid it down, sat there. The van wasn’t near. She leaned against a tree. When she got up, dragging the coat like an otter, she could see off in the distance by the Blue Tea House, the round spaceship-looking café in the park, the white van, its front facing her, a predatory vehicle, blinking its headlights off and on.