The day they sentenced Mat Repin, the Dutchman was also up on trial. Johannes Van Damme, an engineer, had been discovered in custody of a false-bottomed suitcase containing way
The prosecution made its case that Van Damme was a mule; that he’d agreed to transport the suitcase to Athens for a payment of US $20,000. Sniffed out by Changi smackhounds, the suitcase was pulled from the belt, and Van Damme from the transit lounge, where he may well have been watching Beaver’s dad explain the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts on a wall-mounted Sony.
The defense told a different story, though it generally made about as much sense as Mat Repin’s. Van Damme had gone to Bangkok to buy a wedding ring for his daughter, and had met a Nigerian who’d asked him, please, to take a suitcase through to Athens. “One would conclude,” the lawyer for the defense had said, “that either he was a naive person or one who can easily be made use of.” Or, hell, both. I took this to be something akin to a plea for mercy.
Johannes Van Damme, in the newspaper picture, looks as thick as two bricks.
I can’t tell you whether he’s guilty or not, and I wouldn’t want to have to, but I can definitely tell you that I have my doubts about whether Singapore should hang him, by the neck, until dead — even if he actually was involved in a scheme to shift several kilos of heroin from some back room in Bangkok to the junkies of the Plaka. It hasn’t, after all, a whole hell of a lot to do with Singapore. But remember “Zero Tolerance”? These guys have it.
And, very next day, they announced Johannes Van Damme’s death sentence. He still has at least one line of appeal, and he is still, the paper notes, “the first Caucasian” to find his ass in this particular sling.
“My ass,” I said to the mirror, “is out of here.” Put on a white shirt laundered so perfectly the cuffs could slit your wrists. Brushed my teeth, ran a last-minute check on the luggage, forgot to take the minibar’s tinned Australian Singapore Sling home for my wife.
Made it to the lobby and checked out in record time. I’d booked a cab for four a.m., even though that gave me two hours at Changi. The driver was asleep, but he woke up fast, insanely voluble, the only person in Singapore who didn’t speak much English.
He ran every red light between there and Changi, giggling. “Too early policeman…”
They were there at Changi, though, toting those big-ticket Austrian machine pistols that look like khaki plastic waterguns. And I must’ve been starting to lose it, because I saw a crumpled piece of paper on the spotless floor and started snapping pictures of it. They really didn’t like that. They gave me a stern look when they came over to pick it up and carry it away.
So I avoided eye contact, straightened my tie, and assumed the position that would eventually get me on the Cathay Pacific’s flight to Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong I’d seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I’d caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.
Traditionally the home of pork butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, the Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarrassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.
Hive of dream. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seemed to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole.
I was ready for something like that….
I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace.
Mr. Buk’s Window
Gazing into E. Buk’s window, for me, has been like gazing into the back reaches of some cave where Manhattan stores its dreams. There is no knowing what might appear there. Once, a stove-sized, florally ornate cast-iron fragment that might have been a leftover part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Once, a lovingly crafted plywood box containing exquisitely painted models of every ballistic missile in the arsenals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. at the time of its making. This last, redolent of both the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, had particularly held my attention. It was obviously a military learning aid, and I wondered what sort of lectures it had illustrated. It seemed, then, a relic from a dark and terrible time that I remembered increasingly as a dream, a very bad dream, of childhood.
But the image that kept coming to me, last week, was of the dust that must be settling on the ledge of E. Buk’s window, more or less between Houston and Canal streets. And in that dust, surely, the stuff of the atomized dead. The stuff of pyre and blasted dreams.
So many.
The fall of their dust requiring everything to be back-read in its context, and each of Buk’s chosen objects, whatever they may have been, that Tuesday: the dust a final collage element, the shadowbox made mortuary.
And that was a gift, I think, because it gave me something to start to hang my hurt on, a hurt I still scarcely understand or recognize; to adjust one of my own favorite and secret few square yards of Manhattan, of the world, to such an unthinkable fate.
They speak of certain areas in Manhattan now as “frozen zones,” and surely we all have those in our hearts today, areas of disconnect, sheer defensive dissociation, awaiting the thaw. But how soon can one expect the thaw to come, in wartime?
I have no idea.
Last year I took each of my children for a first visit to New York. I’m grateful now for them both to have seen it, for the first time, before the meaning of the text was altered, in such a way, forever. I think of my son’s delight in the aged eccentricities of a Village bagel restaurant, of my daughter’s first breathless solo walk through SoHo. I feel as though they saw London as it was before the Blitz.
New York is a great city, and as such central to the history of civilization. Great cities can and invariably do bear such wounds. They suffer their vast agonies and they go on — carrying us, and civilization, and windows like
