Whats mine, p.1
What's Mine, page 1
Praise for What’s Mine
“Bette Adriaanse is my favorite Dutch writer. No one writes like she does. Her voice—frank, whimsical, philosophical, funny, gorgeously tactless—points a lens at the world that sharpens everything, then she plays with the focus, then resharpens it so the world never looks quite the same. What’s Mine is a timeless book that deserves a wide readership.”
—Caoilinn Hughes, author of Orchid & the Wasp, winner of the Collyer Bristow Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award 2021 and the O. Henry award
“Bette’s inimitable voice is always a treat to escape into. I cannot wait for this dark, absurdist tale to go out into the world.”
—Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared, selected for the British Royal Big Jubilee Read
“Bette Adriaanse is becoming a major literary novelist in the best European tradition. She has the down-and-out life experiences of the early Orwell, the desperate humor of Flann O’Brien, the prose immediacy of Beckett, and the avalanche of bureaucracy of Kafka. What’s Mine is a stellar achievement of depicting the absurdist brutality of contemporary urban capitalism where nothing but narcissism and arbitrary outcomes rule.”
—Alan N Shapiro, science fiction theorist
AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK
Copyright © 2023 by Bette Adriaanse
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com
Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.
www.unnamedpress.com
Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.
Paperback Original ISBN: 978-1-951213-87-9
EBook ISBN: 978-1-951213-88-6
LCCN: 2023939771
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design and typeset by Jaya Nicely
Manufactured in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
First Edition
What’s
Mine
a novel
Bette Adriaanse
The Unnamed Press
Los Angeles, CA
19 August
The Student Hotel, Amsterdam
Today I’ve seen my street for the first time. It’s a long, broad lane in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, with stone steps leading up to monumental oak front doors. The lane is framed by tall poplars. There is a small park between the bike lane and the road with wooden benches, just as my mother described in her letter.
I sat down on a bench in front of number 354, and for hours I looked up to the apartment on the second floor—‘my house’, as I call it in my mind.
The sun went down and lights switched on inside. And after a while I saw him appear in the window, the man who lives there now. He was lifting dumbbells in front of a mirror. There was a colour-changing lamp shining on him, creating a tacky disco effect on his skin and on the leaves of the poplar tree in front of the house.
At ten o’clock in the evening he left the house dressed in white clothes. He came down the stone steps looking about him in a nervous way. I watched him until he turned the corner: he walked fast and close to the walls.
I suspect this man is younger than me, in his early thirties.
Does he know me? Does he know about the history of the apartment? About my father?
I didn’t dare approach him yet. All the emotions that surfaced when I saw the apartment caused me to feel too unstable to take action. I did speak with the neighbour who lives directly below him, on the first floor. She came out of her apartment and asked me in that typical direct Dutch way if I planned to sleep on that park bench and whether I knew I could be fined for it. When I introduced myself, explained my reasons for being there, explained the suitcase and the plastic bags, she became a lot more friendly. She said, ‘Come back on Saturday, he will be there’.
The Possessions of Luis Sol
It was Saturday. The fridge Luis had ordered was delivered onto the sidewalk in front of his apartment on Rooseveltlaan. It was a warm and humid day, and the back of Luis’s neck was turning red. The fridge was in a cardboard box so big it could have been a house for a child, if you cut out a door and window. But Luis did not have a child. He had a one-bedroom apartment on Rooseveltlaan in Amsterdam, a job as a dishwasher at the Bagel Shop on Leidsestraat, a best friend, and a cleaning lady who came by once a week.
Luis’s hands slid over the box that held his newest possession. It was a stainless steel fridge with a dark glass door that turned transparent when you knocked on it. Luis had seen the television commercial for the fridge many times: tall green trees were reflected in the dark glass of the fridge, which was standing in a clearing in the woods. A woman in a long dress appeared, the red of her lips contrasting dramatically with the green of the leaves. As she knocked on the fridge door, it became transparent, revealing a small box with a ring in it, lying in the middle of the illuminated fridge shelf. Next to it, a heart-shaped red cake. The woman then looked over her shoulder at the camera—at Luis—and smiled.
Luis put his hands around the slippery box and tried to lift it. Even though he was strong—he could bench-press over three hundred pounds—the box moved only a few inches from the ground before it slid out of his grip. Luis walked around the box.
From the passing tram, people were looking at him and the enormous box.
Luis flexed his biceps. Ever since he moved to Amsterdam, he had worked on what his best friend, Hadi, called “city muscle.”
“It’s pointless muscle, only for appearances,” Hadi said as Luis worked the abductor machine at King’s Gym. “But city muscles signify that you are in control of you.”
The farm muscles Luis had before he came to Amsterdam, created by carrying hay bales, pushing wheelbarrows, and mucking out stables—those muscles were still there too.
His broad freckled back, his sturdy forearms: that was the old Luis.
The six-pack, the biceps, the spray tan: that was the new Luis.
Often Luis felt like he lived in the space between these two versions of him, as if he floated in a quiet sea between two countries, and he could reach neither one.
Luis shook off these thoughts. He brought his attention back to the box. Normally Hadi helped him with these kinds of things, but he was on Crete with his new girlfriend. He could call Bedas, his boss at the Bagel Shop, but Bedas preferred to keep business and personal separate. That’s what he said when Luis went to his house last Christmas to surprise him with the gift of a spa massager foot bath. The only other option was Marina, his cleaner, but her hands were too small.
Luis positioned himself in front of the box, bent his knees, and tried to tip it onto his back. That’s how he used to carry the hay bales into Raat’s barn back in his hometown of Stompetoren. But it did not work, the box was too slippery. Finally Luis stripped the cardboard from the fridge and put his arms around the appliance. Like a toddler holding his bigger brother for a funny family photo, Luis held on to the fridge and slowly walked it to the stone steps leading up to the front door of number 354.
At the door, Luis looked at the trembling muscles of his forearms and the red lines on his palms where the edges of the heavy fridge had dug into his skin.
“Everything in nature is being pulled down,” his mother always said, “and I don’t have the energy to resist it.”
Gravity was one of his mother’s biggest enemies. Luis had never met anyone else who experienced gravity so intensely. Sometimes she stayed in bed for days, complaining about gravity pulling her toward the floor. She was never under a blanket, because a blanket felt like “a house” on top of her. Her body, heavy and short, was covered only by a too-small silk nightgown, since the weight of clothes on her skin was unbearable for her too.
Luis tried to push his mother out of his head as he maneuvered the fridge into the hallway. It was only in these kinds of moments, when he was using all his energy for something, that his mother managed to slip out of the safe in his head and starting walking around his thoughts again.
“You’re not going to leave that out on the street, are you?” Luis’s downstairs neighbor, Estelle, said, coming out of her apartment. “The street looks like a garbage dump. I have people coming over.” She pointed a manicured finger, with a square salmon-colored fingernail, at the cardboard that was lying on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps.
“No, no,” Luis said, trying to wipe the sweat off his forehead with his shoulder. “I will … I was … A new fridge …” His cheeks felt warm. For as long as he could remember, Luis blushed when he talked to people. When he was younger, his face would only light up for a couple of minutes, but now that he was thirty-one, he got lasting red spots on his face that looked like maps of a red world.
“Luis is not a talker,” Hadi would tell people when he introduced Luis. “He is a visual person.” And it was true. If words were tools to express your feelings, Luis thought they were like gigantic hammers to tick the tiniest nails into the wall. The way Luis came to see it was as follows: In a person’s mind, every word is connected to other words. And when someone said a certain word, all these other words would light up. For example, if you said “house,” that word could be connected to the word “family” or “enclosed” in the other person’s mind, whic h could be linked to another word like “problems” or “secret.” So, according to Luis, the words you said told thousands of extra stories in the minds of the people you were talking to, and you had no control over them.
“This is not some disadvantaged neighborhood where you can just dump your trash on the sidewalk and nobody is bothered by it,” Estelle said, putting her hands on her hips.
Luis shook his head. Ever since their first meeting eight years ago—when Estelle called the police when she saw him appear in their shared hallway late at night, only to hang up when she saw him put his key in the lock—she talked about “disadvantaged neighborhoods” when she talked to him. There was something about him that reminded her of disadvantaged neighborhoods, and no matter how expensive his clothes got—he was now wearing an Armani sweater and Versace jeans—it did not change. Hadi said it was because she was what he called a “flat white supremacist.” Someone who drank overpriced flat white coffees and felt superior to everyone who did not look and talk like her and her friends.
Luis thought it was because she still hadn’t really gotten to know him yet.
“You know, you could get a fine for dumping trash in a public space,” Estelle said. “Article Three: Nuisance in the Public Space. It’s simply the law in this country.”
Luis positioned the fridge in his hallway and started gathering the cardboard, with Estelle looking on from behind her curtain. Estelle was a lawyer for a bank. Every weekday she drove her racing-green Mini to the office district in the South of Amsterdam, her fingers with the salmon-colored nail polish clenching the snakeskin steering wheel. Estelle reminded Luis of his iPhone. Everything about her was smooth, sleek, and shiny.
Luis waved at Estelle when he had finished bringing the cardboard inside. She did not wave back. The red spots were burning on his neck. One day, Luis would invite her up for coffee. If she saw his apartment, he thought, she could see who he really was: someone with taste, someone who had nothing to do with disadvantaged neighborhoods, someone who was not simplistic (he’d heard her call him “simplistic” once, when she was on the phone with a friend in her garden). But he had not found the right moment yet to invite her. She brushed past him when he came across her in the supermarket, and when they met in the hallway, he often just stammered hello and turned red.
It was not like Luis was scared of girls. He’d had girlfriends, and he regularly made out with girls who worked with him at the Bagel Shop. Sometimes they came into the kitchen at the end of Luis’s shift on Saturday morning, a white wine smell on their breath, and cornered him. They said they liked his strong arms around their waist, the way he could lift them up and hold them against the wall. For a boyfriend they “looked for another type.”
Luis had watched their boyfriends come to the Bagel Shop, these “other types.” Sometimes a finance guy in a suit, sometimes a poet in a hat. They were never introduced to Luis. But when those boyfriends cheated on them, the girls did remember Luis. They said, “My friend Luis will mess you up if he hears what you did to me.” But Luis did not want to mess anybody up. Despite his intimidating physique, he was not a fighter. He hated conflict and violence, and he was afraid of losing his temper. His tactic in life was to give people what they wanted, so they’d go away.
The sun was setting when Luis finally hoisted the fridge over the threshold of his apartment on the second floor. Putting a piece of cardboard under the appliance, he carefully dragged it over the beige deep-pile carpet that took on different hues as his ambient lighting changed colors. The apartment had only two rooms: a large bedroom that also served as a fitness room, and a living room that also served as the kitchen. In the living room he had introduced a stainless steel theme, combined with glass. All his appliances were stainless steel, and his kitchen table had steel legs with a glass tabletop. His OLED television was on a movable stainless steel cart that a friend of Hadi’s had welded for him. The design of the legs was based on the painting Composition No. IV with Red, Blue and Yellow, by Mondriaan, of which a print was hanging on the wall.
When Luis moved to Amsterdam, almost eight years ago, he visited a museum every day for the first month. The Rijksmuseum was one of his favorite places. He loved walking through the chambers with the high ceilings; he loved how people started whispering as they entered those spaces and looked up at paintings of aristocrats wearing big white collars. The faces of these aristocrats were often round with bright red cheeks, like Luis’s. But their faces took up only a tiny part of the painting. They posed in robes, with hats and chains, with tables full of sea animals, bowls, clocks, mirrors, and skulls. The objects that surrounded them were as much a part of their portrait as their faces. Luis often thought of these aristocrats when he woke up and saw himself in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe next to his bed. The white Gucci sweater draped over the chair, the belt with the Swarovski eagle Hadi had given him for his birthday on top of it, the white leather of his waterbed, the wake-up light, his iPhone, his Egyptian cotton sheets—all these things, Luis noticed, were part of his portrait. The too-close-together dark eyes he’d inherited from his father, the red cheeks his mother had given him—they were only a tiny part of the entire portrait of Luis Sol.
Luis positioned the fridge next to the marble kitchen counter and plugged it in. He had looked forward to the moment when he could knock on the dark glass door and it turned transparent. Luis knocked on the door. The door became transparent. The inside of the fridge became illuminated. The user manual was lying on one of the glass shelves. The blue UV light, which eliminated 99.99 percent of bacteria, shone on the paper. Slowly, the door turned dark again. Luis’s reflection looked back at him, the eyes too close together.
For a moment Luis thought of the red-lipped smiling woman in the commercial. Of course he hadn’t expected the woman to come with the purchase of the fridge. Or a ring, or a heart-shaped cake. In the bottom drawer of the fridge he found the extra items that were in fact promised with the purchase of the fridge. A double-walled ice bucket. A polished steel wine stopper. Ice tongs. Luis had read about these items when he ordered the fridge. The descriptions of these items felt like a portal to another world, with sentences like “for sensational summer parties,” “special wines for special ladies,” and “flavors never experienced before.” He took the ice bucket from the drawer. It was light and small in his hands.
Luis thought of the woman in the commercial who, in her wide smile kind of way, looked familiar. She looked like the man in the commercial for his Naturell mineral water, who looked like the people on the poster for his King’s Gym fitness subscription. These people were all different in their shapes and colors, but in their way of touching, their way of laughing, their way of agreeing with each other, they seemed the same. These were people who never cleaned their father’s puke from the floor after Christmas Eve, people who didn’t yell at their mother, people who carried no secrets.
Luis drank the mineral water, he went to the fitness center, he bought the fridge. Suddenly he wondered when he, Luis Sol, would go through the portal. When would this clean world of pleasant people open for him? In his mind Luis saw a succession of images: a father’s hand slightly squeezing a son’s shoulder, a group of friends singing in an open-top sports car, a baby giggling too early in the morning at tired parents who can’t help but smile, a wrinkled hand sitting on top of a younger one.
At that moment Luis’s doorbell rang. Startled, he bent his head.
The doorbell rang again.
Luis looked up at the clock. It was ten in the evening.
He did not expect anyone. Hadi was in Greece.
The doorbell rang again.
A long time ago, in his childhood home in Stompetoren, his father’s friends would sometimes walk into the yard unannounced, invariably carrying a plastic bag filled with cans of beer. They came up behind him when he was sweeping or cleaning the gutter and yelled, “Your dad ’ere?” to his back. Without waiting for a reply, they walked to where they knew his father was: in the shed, supposedly working on carving a wooden chess set but in reality drinking, his legs getting increasingly red from sitting too close to the gas heater. His mother hated these visitors. She hated all visitors. While the neighbors always kept their front doors open, so everyone and their dogs could walk in and out, she kept the front door locked. “Never open the door,” she used to say. “Let them write letters.”
