The last hour of my life. It's constantly on my mind now, like a film on endless rewind.
Amsterdam, warm rain on a Saturday afternoon. Denholm and I were on our way to a meeting when it started raining, and we decided to seek shelter at some fast-food restaurant. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Mac Donalds. Brands that don't exist anymore - it's the banal stuff I miss most these days. Denholm opted for Mac Donalds because they had better salads, or so he claimed. He'd been on a diet for a good two months, although it didn't show; his paunch still caused him to sway-walk. I'd never been particularly fond of him, so there's a certain irony that this man and the inanimate glare of a fast-food restaurant should be my last recollection of a life that slipped away. Yet as it is, I've come to cherish even Denholm; I'd give everything to travel back in time and end up there again, neon chill and lousy burgers included.
I wore a black suit, a white shirt, a dark grey tie. Denholm, as always for important meetings, his blue Hugo Boss, beneath which a cream shirt. It's his tie I most remember now. Red and way too broad, embellished with yellow poker dots. The dots were outrageously distracting, they kept drawing me in; I hoped he would spill some ketchup on it so we'd have to run into a local store to buy another. But one might picture Denholm as a careful, mannered wolf, chewing every bite of his Big Mac like it were his first in weeks, but never spilling a crumb. If ever he did, he would wipe the crumbs into his napkin and dispose of them in the ashtray.
"You not hungry, Larry?" he said.
"Lawrence," I said coldly.
It was Liann's joke initially. She'd call me Larry when I came in late or looking drowsy. I think Liann - our boss - had a crush on me. She would figure me to have spent the night with a lady and try to annoy me by calling me Larry, or alternatively Harry, Barry. I guess Denholm overheard, but when he popped the joke, it wasn't funny. He had a childlike sense of humor (exhausting other people's jokes being one perfect example) and a terrible timing. I'm not sure he ever realized we laughed at him more than at his jokes; he was one of those people you can make fun of in his presence and he'll laugh along, and you're never sure whether he's understood what you're actually laughing about. And then he had this manner of abbreviating all his sentences. I tried to gently bring to his attention once that what is becoming to Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger is not necessarily becoming to him. He stared at me for a long moment, and I was sure I'd hit the spot, but then he went into his Godfather imitation and barked: "What you talkin' about? You worry too much." So I gave up. I used to have visions of him practicing his one-liners in the mirror.
"Have my salad if you want," he said, shoving it forward. "Looks like it will rain another five minutes at least."
I ordered a coffee. The neon lights stung my eyes, still swollen with sleep. It was almost one o'clock. Normally we would've had the Saturday off, but someone in our company had flown down from the US and insisted on meeting that particular day. I hadn't let it interfere with my Friday night routine; my head throbbed with one Jameson too many.
Denholm had the salad himself. "Not still down about the lady, are you?" He meant my ex-wife. We had divorced six months earlier, but Denholm kept asking; it was his standard question once he ran out of subjects.
I said, "The little lady, rather."
My daughter, Cleo, had just turned six. She would play football at school, come home bruised. She would beat me at checkers. She would correct me when I tried to speak Dutch and laugh at my British accent. Lately, when staying at my place, she would insist on having dinner in absolute silence. We would rarely keep it up for the whole meal, but it was in that silence that we told each other a million things. Cleo, perched on the tip of her chair, on a couple of pillows, doing her best to eat with knife and fork at her own initiative. Sometimes dropping one or the other. I would say nothing of it, but she would grin at me, one front tooth missing, a grin with a gap. Not for having dropped the cutlery but for having broken the spell of silence. Occasionally I beat her at it, breaking the silence by doing what we both referred to as The Giggle; a high-pitched, little girl imitation, upon which she would fling her napkin at me but end up giggling along. Cleo in a nutshell. But words are cold, they never come close.
"Should get that case re-opened. It isn't fair - what's the deal again?"
"Every other weekend," I said. "I pick her up after school."
"Get yourself a woman. Makes the custody stuff a lot easier."
"Nonsense," I snapped. I stared out the window, wishing for it to stop raining so we could get going.
"She'll get to the Stage Phase soon," Denholm said.
"The what?"
"Stage Phase." He wiped a piece of lettuce into the ashtray. "You know how when you're a kid you get to this point where you look around and think, maybe this is all a plot, arranged just for me. Like you're the only real person on earth and everything is just built around you. Even your old folks, brothers, sisters, are in on it, all part of that plan. You never had that?"
I have. I must have been twelve; my parents took me to the cinema on a Friday night. When we came out, my parents lingered on the pavement, deciding whether or not to have a last drink. I looked around at the illuminated cinema neon signs, looked at the buildings, my parents, and thought: maybe this is all just a plot. Maybe my parents are only pretending to contemplate whether or not to have a drink. They know what it's going to be. The thought brought on a thousand other questions. Like who then, was I really? With what purpose was I here? Why did They all need me here? Why would I be so important? I think I got frightened; at any rate, I dismissed the thoughts, and I don't recall ever doubting their – or my own – identity again. I told myself it would be rather over the top, a whole world built just for me.
"I call it the Stage Phase," said Denholm. "Everyone gets it sooner or later."
I nodded, a little confused. I'd never have figured my cinema thought to have been a communal one, least of all Denholm's. "That's kind of reassuring," I said. "I guess it means if we all thought that at some time, we were all wrong."
"Or perhaps," Denholm said, raising an eyebrow at me and grinning, "it's still a plot. My saying this is just a trick to keep you oblivious. I'm just an actor, one of the many that surround you. I'm not who you think I am. You're our lapdog. You're our experiment. One thing I'll confess to know, however: you don't like my tie."
I looked up at him abruptly. I guess I'd been staring.
"Too late to do anything about it," Denholm shrugged. "Doesn't matter either. The whole deal we're about to get into is just part of our project. There's no chairman, he's an actor too. You getting frightened? You do look it."
A pang of dread. Trapped in the wrong building. On my way to the wrong meeting, sitting opposite the wrong man. It wasn't what he had said that frightened me; it was my own identity on the scale, just for that split second. To find myself here, at this age, trapped inside this intricate life, a very defined life that might make perfect sense, but the reasons – whatever had taken me here – for a moment did not catch up. I shuddered, and then it was gone. It must have been the hangover.
Denholm chewed the straw in his Coca-Cola cup. A strange picture, an overweight businessman chewing a straw. "And Cleo is not really your daughter," he said. "We just put her in to make things more credible."
I swigged down the last of my coffee. "Let's go, Denholm. It stopped raining."
My last vision is that of Denholm's butt doing strange wriggles as he hastened to stop that taxi. I could have overtaken him anytime, but the prior night's alcohol stirred up again, and I had a rush of nausea. For a moment, I felt as though I was running in a dream, on and on without moving. Then there was an ear-deafening honking – I hear it to this very day – deep and endlessly hollow, like the horns of Amsterdam cargo boats. I turned back and there it was: a bus, dark and monstrous metal, right up to my face. They say that mostly after accidents of this kind you don't remember the moment of impact, or even the hours before, but in my case this isn't true. Bus 96, it was, one of those absurdly insignificant details I'll never forget. It charged right at me, and this, I know now, is when I should have died.