A New Order of the Phylum

Excerpt from The Night Watch: “As quiet as mice they hid, during Occupation, during the War... It was all there, in the pamphlet. The Anne Frank House was in the heart of Amsterdam, close to the Westerkerk. This was Titus Koninck’s first time in Europe (after an interminable Spring on a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv, teaching English and calculus in a temp-to-perm position that crapped out after he’d gotten sick with hepatitis) and his last day in Amsterdam, and after all the drugs he’d ingested in all the parks, and hashish-and-coffee shops with stoned clientele and even more stoned waitresses, and storefront window whores who took American Express and who still made him wear a condom, after all that Titus had to get to the Anne Frank House, his flight left tomorrow morning, he’d promised aunt Saskia…even a secularized Yom Kippur Jew had to see the Anne Frank House, she’d told him repeatedly when he visited her in hospital… My Aunt Rosa was her age, too, she told him, you have to promise me you’ll make the pilgrimage. And he promised her, not that she’d be alive when he got back, but still, he had promised, and he hurt all over, especially in his abdomen, felt stabbing pains in what had to be his kidneys. Titus remembered an uncle in Astoria, on the coast, across the Columbia from Washington, an uncle with kidneystones who got all sorts of goodies as compensation, even synthetic heroin. Uncle Jacob. Must call him up. He wished he could forget his aunt Saskia going on and on about how Anne Frank wrote in her diary of plastering bare walls of the room she had to share with cranky old dentist Fritz Pfeffer, plastering bare walls with pictures of stars of silver screen, photos of family. And his aunt always got really good and pissed off when he called Anne Frank a poster child, and told him to show some respect for a fifteen-year-old who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. —March of 1945, he always added. The walk from Central Station itself was twenty minutes...just as the pamphlet promised. But when he got there Titus found the Anne Frank House had just closed, and the sign right there repeated what he had ignored in the pamphlet: Opening Hours: Daily from 9 am to 5 pm from April 1st until September. He saw a guard, just inside. —Please, he shouted to the guard. — The guard had a shock of red hair, as unruly as his, and wore bellbottom pants. Fucking bellbottom, what was this retro shit, everyone compelled to upchuck three thousand years of Western Culture. The guard shrugged, turned, walked away. Titus heard music come from even further inside. Skronky and abrading harmelodic Sixties jazz, loud even from out here on the street. Listening closer, he realized that the music was that postbop klezmer techno shit he’d heard at Tel Aviv raves. He detested, loathed, and hated that the music never settled into a gentle twohundredfortybeats per minute groove or even a single musical mode for more than a few measures max, and hated the waitress who’d laughed at him: Don’t worry stick around you’ll find something else to hate in five minutes. It all made Titus think of Hebrew hiphop soundtracks to nevertobeseen monster movies. The waitress wore a Journal of the Plague Years tshirt, and, it turned out, was from Beaverton, and had gone to Catlin Gable, and her older brother had sold Titus many a bag of primo bud. When her shift ended he stayed and listened to mostly horrible music just so he could talk to her about mutual friends, and just maybe get into her panties. There was a particular band that night he really hated and detested and loathed and just did not like, and Titus then remembered the band’s name, the Anne Franks.”