To the Roof

Everything looks better from far away. A camera that floats over a polluted sea still brings home serene footage.

Translated from the Dutch by the author.

1.

We didn’t see the beauty of our building until we accepted how hideous it was. Dingy concrete stairs, a plain square facade, eighteen floors of sheer functionality—you would never think of our block as a beautiful place. But at night, when the city turned dark and the lights on the outside corridors switched on, the building towered above our neighborhood like a giant statue, a shimmering beacon that guided us home from wherever we had hung out until way too late.

Thinking back, I always see the building before I think of our flat on the ninth floor; I see the group as a whole before I recall individual faces. I think of our listless bodies on blankets and chairs, the barbecue on the roof. The heat seemed to mold us that summer, harden us like clay in an oven. On that roof, we thought we were perfectly happy. Or even better, we knew it—we had that smug certainty only twentysomethings possess, having gained just enough grasp on the world to believe we could single-handedly steer gravity.

2.

We partied more than we cleaned in the months before summer. The evidence festered under the kitchen counter—an ever-expanding collection of bulging cardboard boxes and shopping bags, each filled to the rim with empty glasswork. Tiny flies feasted on the final drops of wine in the sticky bottles. Come on, we finally said, let’s just do this together. It’s a shit job, but if everyone helps out, we’ll get this done. In the stairwell, we laughed about how much garbage we had amassed. The plastic bags cut into our sweaty palms; we had to support the sagging cardboard with multiple flatmates. The dead flies stuck to our fingers and the bottle bank’s clattering mouth breathed a rancid smell into the summer heat, but we persisted—isn’t it strange, we said, how postponing chores for so long can make finally doing them feel like such a real accomplishment?

Back home, in a hollow-sounding kitchen, we swept the dust bunnies into the bin, scrubbed away the alcohol residue under the counter, and let Bob put on some music. Of course, it only took half a night to fill a new bag with empty bottles. Everyone who had come over mentioned the similar stash they had in their homes. And so the circus moved around town, cleaning our collective messes, every evening resulting in a new mound of glass.

On the evening of our second bottle party (these nights of cleaning and drinking had gained a name by then), Timon discovered a small hatch that led to the roof of our building. It had long been concealed by a thick layer of white latex paint, but the edges of the hatch now started to shimmer through. It took Timon less than an hour to find a ladder and chip away the paint. We remembered the old barbecue that was tucked away in a nook in the hallway. Melanie cleaned it with an assiduous energy that we could never muster for our regular cleaning tasks. In the meantime, I stood on the roof, covering a wobbly plastic table with two layers of tinfoil—one to hide the caked dirt, one to carefully pack pieces of codfish in, garnished with lemon slices, garlic, and red onion.

The hatch stoked up an unprecedented degree of domestic vigor. We would usually have made do with a simple pasta recipe and some bottles from our beer-filled fridge, but now, aware of the palpable promise of a legendary evening, people gathered instruments they hadn’t played all semester, while one of us took on the task of preparing a month’s worth of sangria. Friends showed up. Their friends showed up. Someone none of us knew climbed out of the hatch and asked in a hushed, conspiratorial voice if this was indeed the well, you know, bottle party, as if we housed a secret society on the roof of our building.

Someone’s friend told a joke about a moth visiting a doctor’s office, managing to stretch out the story for so long that it felt like it took an hour before she arrived at its corny punch line. By then, we all lay drooped on our folding chairs, weeping with laughter, egged on by the endless supply of sangria. All of us, except for Timon. He stood on the edge of the roof, arms wide open, tipsy enough to laugh off the danger of standing there, not so drunk as to lose his carefully maintained balance.

Someone none of us knew climbed out of the hatch and asked in a hushed, conspiratorial voice if this was indeed the well, you know, bottle party, as if we housed a secret society on the roof of our building.

I think we all recalled that image last year—his grubby white sneakers on the concrete edge, his cheerful swaying, the wide grin he flashed when we ultimately dragged him back into our arms. We knew it was funny. We were safe. Somewhere, out of our sight, a crisis lurked—banks started to collapse, some of our parents saw their retirement savings evaporate—but the only critical emergency we knew came at the end of every month, when we stood in line at the supermarket, nervously gripping our debit cards, praying we would still be able to afford a bag of buns and the cheapest kind of ball-shaped, gold-wrapped sausage spread.

3.

We try not to notice that this one song we heard all summer has now resurfaced in a juice commercial. That we now all work harder and rarely even get a sliver of the feeling we had on those summer nights. That Bob, the only one of us who never really seemed to make an effort, now makes more money than the prime minister by filming himself playing video games.

I guess that’s why I mostly think back in these drone-like images. Everything looks better from far away. An amateur sports field can look like an Olympic pitch from great altitude; a camera that floats over a polluted sea still brings home serene footage.

Timon. He always had the sharpest mind, the wittiest comebacks. He was the only one who could stand swaying on the edge of an eighteen-story building without worrying anyone. We never doubted that, out of all of us, he held the most potential. Last October, he must have been unconscious for at least an hour before they found him. It must have felt warm and light and soft. In the hospital, they pumped his stomach, kept him under observation for a little while and then—I heard—offered him the treatment he needed, after which he bounced back, seemingly okay. But I’ve only heard others tell me that’s what happened.

I imagine that, during that soft, light hour, he also saw our roof, those hypothetical drone images. Not just because it’s such a great image, those high-spirited youngsters on a roof, each of them believing a rich, compelling life is just around the corner, but mainly because I hope that it was actually true, that on that roof, towering above the city in the sweltering summer heat, all of us were genuinely happy.