muddled, inducing a jagged sense of internal terror. For months we’re oblivious and inured, then our fingernail catches a chance thread, and pulling on it, reality, like a woolen jumper, unravels before our eyes. Sometimes it’s a noise that gets to us; the disarming crash of a dropped glass, the shattering of a porcelain cup ringing out like a child’s scream, the creaking of wormholes in the night, the barely audible patter of mouse paws. Sometimes it’s the routine but unforeseeable situation that unsettles us; a delayed flight, a tedious hold-up in traffic, a gaze caught unaware . . .
Who knows what pulled the thread this time? Was it the half-opened door leading from the reception of the Hotel Flanders into an adjoining room, where the melancholic face of Romy Schneider gazed out from a poster for an October 2012 film retrospective, or was it the two receptionists, little goggle-eyed gray mice, Romy’s triste counterpoints?
In late November 2012, I stood at the entrance to the Hotel Flanders in Ghent, waiting for the taxi the youthful receptionist had called for me. It was morning, the city blanketed in a fog that looked like it had every intention of hanging around until spring. Shaded by a low and murky sky, the façades of nearby buildings appeared in worse repair than they actually were. Somewhere on my left I sensed a tram I glimpsed yesterday slip by, swiftly as a blind woman, the name of its terminal station—MOSCOU—on the front. It’s entirely possible that this Moscow (yes, tram number four!), hurtling through the fog, was but a morning apparition. Yet the vertical letters to my left—SAIGON—they were no apparition; at any moment it seemed they might slide from the building’s façade and crash down onto the footpath below. Was it this moment of hostage in the fog between “Moscow” and “Saigon” that tripped the switch of my internal anxiety? Or was it yesterday’s failed attempt to pry a Ghent–Amsterdam train schedule out of the two receptionists, the pair of goggle-eyed gray mice? Online train timetables were apparently a new thing for them, and even when in a moment of final desperation I asked them to try the Deutsche Bahn site, they managed to google Deutsche Bank. Piped jazz screeched in from somewhere, and behind their mousey faces flickered the melancholic and all-empathetic smile of Romy Schneider.
Or perhaps the thread was pulled by the young conference organizer, who couldn’t give me the name of Belgium’s reigning monarch (at the time it was Albert II), soft-soaping me with the line that he wasn’t interested in European royal houses—a lame excuse for a young Anglicist specializing in Victorian literature. But on the subject of Belgium, personally he feels more German than Belgian, which naturally makes his ignorance of the Belgian monarchy all the more understandable. I look at him, hair cropped short, cleanly-shaven, hipster glasses, the chic suit and vest, the kind of polished black shoes worn to weddings and funerals—the nerd look is obviously his schtick. Above his head, like a saintly aura, an imagined PowerPoint fires up, scenes from his future professional success assembling: marriage, two children, a wife—preferably Japanese, thin as a twig—research projects, his name a toboggan run for donor money, students just like him, slimers and asskissers, ever at the ready to laugh at his every dorky joke. My gaze can’t get anywhere near his pupils. He didn’t have a handle on the King of Belgium, but he knows all about the cost of train tickets. He’ll get me the cheapest fare, one that will see me travel five hours from Ghent to Amsterdam instead of the regular two. My turn at the conference is as an unpaid keynote speaker. I’m not under the protective skirt of a university, there’s no professorly pension waiting for me, I’m of no use as a referee for this or that scholarship, this or that job—why shouldn’t he save forty euro and have me travel five hours instead of two? This is his moment. Isn’t Your time is now! the slogan for a brand of men’s luxury watches? The Twitter-bird perches on the conference program, he’s to thank for that: Yes, you can now follow a scholarly conference on the reconfiguration of authorship on Twitter. Around him other young Anglicists blather on about new phenomena: twitterature, SMS-novels, collective writing, collaborative authorship, constructions of authorship, fan fiction. Again I try to connect with his pupils. My young “executor” (oh yes, the author and authorship need to be fundamentally reconfigured!) hides behind his glasses, replacing the absence of eye contact with a smile reconfiguring his surroundings. Smiley face!
But maybe the thread was pulled by Eefje, another vernal Anglicist who joined an esteemed elderly professor and me for coffee during the break. Eefje didn’t know who I was, and didn’t care to; it was the venerable professor she wanted to talk to, whom she was out to impress.
“The creative period in every writer’s life is limited,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?” the elderly professor inquired.
“Roth should have quit ages ago! He left his I’m done way too late. Salman Rushdie’s finished, Martin Amis washed up, Margaret Atwood too, all of them, and heaps of others besides, they’re like the living dead!” Eefje wielded her invisible sword through the air.
“And what are your plans?” asked the elderly professor.
“I’ve just finished my first novel,” said Eefje briskly, vivaciously flicking her fabulous curls.
Perhaps the thread was pulled by what I saw on the train from Antwerp to Ghent, faces like they’d escaped from old oil paintings, having first changed their hairdos and clothes; faces with defects, a little deformed, mouths too big, eyes too small, jaws a little too heavyset, faces too cramped, or too long, bodies too short . . . Grayed faces, out-of-time, just like the landscape through which the train journeyed, one a passenger would swear was more Hungarian or Romanian than Belgian. And then there was the time itself, as if we’d left the present, as if it were the fifties or sixties—see that young woman on the platform, the tailored green hues of her coat, a belt accentuating her slim figure, the high heels, blood-red painted lips. The woman looks freezing and soaked to the skin, but she’s not; she gets up on her tippy-toes and passionately kisses a man who is shaved bald and otherwise utterly nondescript. The passion is from some other time, not from the present, the scene seems unreal, as if staged for a black-and-white shoot for a street fashion magazine: She’s a beauty (though she shines only today; tomorrow she’ll too have grayed, shriveled like a potato), he a pimp. The train rolls on through fields that sink into a wispy fog. Here and there horses stand motionlessly in the whiteness, as if under a spell. At every station I ask myself why Belgians enter the train and so resolutely sit themselves on the empty seat beside you, never inquiring whether it’s free. An older gentleman lowers his skinny butt onto the seat next to mine as it were a bag, though the seat opposite me is free, the seats diagonally across likewise . . .
Or perhaps the unraveling began a few days before I sat in the Ghent-bound train, when at Schiphol Airport, waiting for a flight to Vienna, I entered an airport bookstore, desperation etched on my face, and bought a third copy of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. The first time it was because I was curious, the second and now third time simply to suppress any urge to buy Fifty Shades of Grey. I grumbled to myself about the market’s restrictiveness, its lack of imagination, how besides two books—Fifty Shades of Grey on the one hand, and The Sense of an Ending on the other—airport bookstores don’t have anything else I might buy. The latter carries the symbolic imprimatur of literary quality, the former a passing literary brouhaha. Waiting for my flight I watched a girl opposite me, who, truth be told, was no different than the girl sitting next to her, or the young guy leaning up against the wall, or the guy sitting next to me, or the guy who had taken off his shoes and stretched himself out on a leather airport armchair, playing with his iPhone. They were all fiddling with their iPhones. I’m ready to bet that the more serious and sullen their faces, the more banal the content on the little screen captivating their attention. The girl sitting across from me rhythmically stroked her long, polished fingernails up and down the smooth surface of her mobile phone, as if arousing her clitoris. Was that what the faintly pornographic smirk on her face gave away? With an expression suggesting exhaustion, she then packed her mobile phone in her handbag and took out a little round mirror, beginning a thorough examination of her teeth, intermittently using the blood-red nail of her right pinky finger as a toothpick.
Or perhaps the unraveling started a couple of weeks before, kicked off by the girl with the sweet round face (one that could have just as easily been a boy’s), short boyish haircut, unmarked skin, her narrow eyes grated by silvery