“That’s right. I’m American.”
“Ha!” The proprietor darted behind a counter that offered candies in bright wrappers covered with pictures of elephants and monkeys and unfamiliar script. He rummaged out of sight, produced a stack of papers that threatened to overflow his small fist.
“See? You see? All papers must be fill out. European Community make man write whole life story, write book to get job. But you American. You no got paper, no got permit. I fill out form on you, I still go to jail!”
It got him going again. He came rushing out flapping the sheaf of Euroforms in Mark’s face like a live chicken. “Out! Out now! Orang besar yang tipis get Molucca man big trouble!”
Outside, the sun was getting low, and the light was taking on that odd, soft quality of afternoon light in an ancient town in these latitudes, like a sepia-tone print from long ago.
Night coming soon. He shivered, though the afternoon was warm and a trifle muggy and he was sweating in his sweater. He put his head down and began to walk. Quite purposefully, though he had no idea where he was going.
“Marx,” the woman said as she wrote the name on a form pinned to a clipboard. “First name?”
“Julius,” Mark said.
She wrote that down too. She stood. She was a diminutive woman in a black blouse splashed with purple and a hint of yellow. Black skirt and stockings accented rather heavy legs. Black hair cut in a modified pageboy came down in pointed wings to either side of her triangular chin. She had lavender-and-black eye shadow and a general air of shopworn prettiness.
“Please come with me, Mr. Marx,” she said.
She turned and led off from the reception desk in a foyer lit yellow by electric bulbs in sconces in the wall, down a corridor of stone that must have been horribly expensive when it was laid near Spui Square during the troubled sixteenth century. Sint Antoninus Hof had begun life as a Catholic convent. It was now a homeless hostel.
Mark fondled the coin in his pocket and felt guilty as hell. He had money, and here he was trying to jump lodging that might have gone to some homeless person. He didn’t dare go back to his flat; the tiny tag-end of Takisian loot he’d had in his pocket when he went out the window was going to have to last him a good long time. That still didn’t make it feel right.
But we were talking life-and-death here. More than the money, a hotel would require Mark to surrender his passport. That would be it for him; the police checked hotel registrations on a daily basis. Holland looked with tolerance on its own drug users, but in the face of mounting pressure from the rest of the EuroCommunity as well as Big Brother across the Atlantic they were beginning to cooperate with American drug enforcers. And it wasn’t as if Mark was merely wanted for the few grams of forbidden chemicals – mainly psychedelics, as far out of fashion in the nineties as elephant bell – she could be proven to have had possession of.
Light spilled out an open door. It had the slightly irreal offcast of fluorescent light, a blue-tinged jitter that imparted a real night-of-the-living-dead look. She led him into its full glare.
Inside was an examining room. It had an old-timey look to Mark, wood where an American room would have been gleaming metal. A young doctor in a white coat sat reading a newspaper with his legs folded. As the woman led Mark in he jumped up, looking outraged.
He sputtered something in Dutch. Dutch always sounded like gargling to Mark; the country was pretty, the people friendly, and he loved the funky old streets of Amsterdam, but the language was just plain ugly. The doctor had long blond hair. It was thin on top.
“Mr. Marx needs shelter,” the woman said pointedly in English.
“Very well, Mrs. Wiersma,” the doctor said without enthusiasm. “I’ll see to him. Here, take off your shirt.”
Mrs. Wiersma smiled and nodded encouragement. She showed no sign of going away. As Mark pulled his sweater off, he couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because the Dutch had less body modesty or because the hostel staff were used to processing the homeless on the assembly line. There wasn’t much of a crowd tonight – Mrs. Wiersma and the doctor were the only people he’d seen. But it was early evening, sun barely down and warm yet. The real crush wouldn’t happen until the nighttime North Sea wind really began to bite.
The doctor examined Mark with distracted briskness – poked here, tapped here, placed the cold ring of the stethoscope to his skin and bade him breathe. Mark did.
“Any chronic conditions or communicable diseases?”
“No.”
The doctor tapped Mark a last time on the chest. “You sound good for one of ours,” he said, frowning slightly. “You smell better than most, also.”
“Thanks, man.”
The doctor nodded and turned away. Mark sat dangling his long legs off the end of the examining table and tried not to look at Mrs. Wiersma. She was staring at him with the earnest intensity of an indulgent grownup watching an unusually untalented neighbor child perform in a school pageant: knowing the child will screw up, but trying to beat the odds by sheer positive energy.
“Hold out your arm.”
“What?”
The doctor’s bored professionalism turned chill. Mark saw he held a hypodermic. “Your arm. I must draw blood. Come along, now, it won’t take a minute.”
He reached for Mark’s arm. Mark snatched it away and held his other hand protectively over the elbow. “What’re you testing for?”
Scowling openly now, the doctor turned and said something to Mrs. Wiersma in Dutch. “Certainly he has a right to know,” she answered in English. “We are not crowded now. Come, be gentle.”
The doctor sighed. “We must test for hepatitis, HIV, and xenovirus Takis-A.”
Mark felt as if the flesh of his hairless chest and arms had turned to the marble it resembled in the otherworldly light. “Wild card virus? W-why?”
“It is the law.”
“New government regulations,” Mrs. Wiersma said hurriedly. “There was much resistance here to the idea of mandatory testing. The European Commission proposed it last fall, and the Council of Ministers passed the directive. Because it concerned health and safety, there was nothing the Netherlands could do. The European Community holds sway.”
“Your arm,” the doctor said.
“No,” Mark said. “Wait. I – can’t.”
The doctor turned away. “No test, no stay.”
“Oh, please,” Mrs. Wiersma said. “We wish to help you. We can’t if you won’t let us.”
Mark moistened his lips. He made himself breathe quickly and shallowly, as if a panic attack was coming on. It didn’t take much acting skill. “I – I’m afraid of needles. Got it real bad.”
“Perhaps if you had a few minutes to think it over, to calm yourself,” Mrs. Wiersma said. “Really, it’s for your own good.”
“I haven’t got all night,” the doctor complained. “I have other duties.”
“Just let me think about it a little,” Mark said.
The doctor had lost interest in him, returning to his chair and paper. Mark hurriedly pulled on his shirt and sweater and walked back out to the front. Mrs. Wiersma hovered beside him, cooing at him and touching him dartingly on the elbow.
“I need to go outside a minute,” Mark said. He had a catch to his voice, as if he was in danger of throwing up at any moment. He had gotten so frothed up by phony fear of needles and genuine fear of discovery that he really was about to puke.
“Certainly, certainly,” Mrs. Wiersma said, alighting behind her little wooden desk. “You poor man.”
Mark smiled wanly at her, nodded, walked out the arched front door into the evening, and away.
The naked pink neon woman bent over. The naked blue neon man leaped forward in an arc and thrust his prominently erect member into her from behind. Mark decided they were doing some pretty radical things with neon these days. A ripening of the breeze drove the rain into him where he huddled in the doorway. The rain pitted the surface of the canal with dark saucers and made the big purple, pink, and magenta oblongs of light tossed onto the water from the houses’ big front windows waver and bobble like ectoplasm. Mark shuddered, hugged himself with hands that felt inside and out like the cold wet hands of a statue.