#15 Sinnerman …

Altitude is safety, sure. Still, the beeping of my altimeter won’t let me relax. Perhaps it’s because the thing alternates too rapidly between beeping regularly and erratically, or perhaps—more likely—the beeping of my altimeter has nothing to do with it. Perhaps I’m not relaxed because I shouldn’t be flying here under any circumstances.

February 10, 2025. Some years, like this year, the DANA weather system stirs more intensely in Spanish Andalusia than in other years, bad weather persisting well into spring. Today, however, the sun is out. I would have loved to go out on my bike, but instead, at nine o’clock this morning, I reported to the tax office in Antequera, a town just north of the city of Málaga, where Heidi and I have been living for about six months now. An obese security guard gestured me through a metal-detector gate. After passing through the gate, I had to pass him, both his thumbs now hooked into his belt. We stood nose to nose, and true to the NATO doctrine that the attack is the best defense, I informed him that his metal-detector gate was defective.

“Qué ...?”

“Tu pórtico de seguridad está roto,” I repeated, politely.

“How do you know?”

“I still have my keys in my pocket.”

“You should have put them in the tray.”

“No es el punto that’s not the point.”

“Ese no es el punto?”

“El punto es that the work you do is un ... un trabajo falso fake work. Lo haces mal you do it badly, y eres maleducado and you’re an oaf.”

“Qué ...?”

“Vas a dar dos pasos atrás you’ll take two steps back and ask me how you can be of service.”

To my surprise, friend Fluffhead took a step back. But instead of asking how he could be of service, he asked me whether I had an appointment.

“No necesito cita aquí I don’t need an appointment here,” I replied, politely still.

“Today you do. It’s busy.”

“It’s nine o’clock, and there’s no one here,” I tried one last time, knowing I was fighting a losing battle when an equally obese colleague of friend Fluffhead stepped out of an office, one thumb hooked into his belt, one hand on the bat attached to that belt. Friend Fluffhead gave me a piece of paper and told me I could call the number on it to make an appointment.

“I know that number by heart. Calling it, I’ll get to talk to someone from South America, whose Spanish is worse than mine,”—I’m Dutch—“who refers me to the tax office’s website. Pero no necesito cita aquí but I don’t need an appointment here.”

Two hands lifted two bats slightly out of the rings from which they hung on belts.

As I explained what had happened to Heidi—my wife, also Dutch—who, with Boris the tiny terrier, was waiting on the sidewalk outside the tax office, a woman and a man entered the building. Through the glass door, I caught the words no cita and saw friend Fluffhead’s colleague escort the woman and the man out of my field of vision. I walked back into the tax office and asked friend Fluffhead whether it truly was his intention to have things come to a bronca, say, a fight. Again to my surprise, he beckoned me to follow him to a waiting room, where there was a machine as big as a refrigerator. On the screen of that machine, two options could be selected: con cita and sin cita. Friend Fluffhead tapped sin cita for me, gave me the receipt that rolled out of the machine, and pointed to a television on a wall.

Sitting on a chair in an empty waiting room, I stared at the receipt in my hand. Under the numbers 09:20, probably the time at which I would be called to a counter, #002 was printed, which probably meant that I was second in line today and that the woman and man I had followed inside had drawn the first available slot at a counter. At 09:35, a gong sounded from the television. Under the dark-gray bar on its screen, which, in white, read #001 mostrador 04, a light-gray bar had appeared, which, in black, read #002 mostrador 06.

At counter 06, a friendly woman who looked as though she had a day job maintaining her obesity informed me she could certainly check whether Heidi and I were now registered as tax residents in Spain, if only I made an appointment.

“I’ve been here twice before without an appointment,” I said, somewhat bewildered. “Checking our tax status takes twenty seconds.”

“Sí, pero sin cita no se puede hacer without an appointment, it’s impossible.”

The clock on the dashboard of our Berlingo read 10:20 as I got out at the end of a dead-end country road and said goodbye to Heidi.

“Will you be careful?” Heidi asked. If I had wanted to be careful, there would have been a book in my backpack, I almost blurted out, and I lied: “Of course I’ll be careful.”

The highest mountain around Antequera has been flirting with me for months. After we had walked home from the tax office, I had made coffee in my Stanley thermos. I had taken a backpack from under our bed and had asked Heidi to drive me to that mountain’s foot. Until I got out of the car, I had felt invincible. When I saw Heidi drive away, I felt defeated—but not unhappy. And likely because Boris—maybe five months old by now—had been standing against a side window of the car, a surprised expression on his snout, my thoughts had wandered to the time—more than fifteen years ago—when I told Heidi’s children the story of the Indian boy who asks his mother why Indians have strange names such as Half Moon and Flying Arrow. The oldest of Heidi’s children was ten, and from the kitchen, Heidi had shaken her head. Because I knew why she had shaken her head, I made the story longer than necessary, while Heidi’s protest grew louder. Tears of laughter ran down my face when, at the end of the story, the Indian boy’s mother didn’t call her son Two Fucking Dogs—as she usually does when I tell that story—but Little Pooping Dog. And logically, my thoughts had wandered to the time when Heidi’s son and I made a mixture of peanut butter and cane sugar syrup. We had smeared that mixture under his shoe before entering his grandmother’s house—he, without anyone noticing, stepping carefully on his heel. I thought I would die laughing when the little guy—seven years old—discovered the dog poop under his shoe, stuck a finger in it, and took a bite.

When I looked over my shoulder, the Berlingo was gone, and I realized that in Antequera, six kilometers behind me—once a bustling medina—there is no more laughter. The Antequerans are busy scraping together the euros needed to keep alive the illusion that no one with malicious intent can enter a government building. Man, if I were in charge of a security company, I would know what to do. I would occasionally send a screaming idiot into a government building. And would I have more scruples if I were in charge of a company manufacturing bombs?

Along a zigzagging path, I slowly made my way up the highest mountain around Antequera. Three hundred meters to the summit? Four hundred? Step by step, I climbed farther up. I grew happier but only fully shook off that feeling of defeat when I thought of The Thomas Crown Affair and heard Nina Simone stirring in my mind:

“Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?”

I felt my back straighten. Faster and faster, it went uphill.

“I got to run to the rock, please hide me, I run to the rock ...” and I ran. Not fast, but at a double, nineteen years old, bent under my gear, on my way to earning my green beret.

“What’s the matter with you, rock? Don’t you see I need you, rock?”

Higher and higher, I climbed, my legs burning.

Exhausted, I reached the summit, where I sat down in the grass. I enjoyed breathing the fresh February air, the February sun on my face. I poured coffee from my thermos into its cap and felt truly happy. Málaga lay hidden behind a mountain ridge, but far in the distance, I could see Málaga’s airport. A mild breeze from the south. I resisted the urge to drink more coffee, took my paraglider out of my backpack, laid it out on the grass, turned the backpack inside out, thus creating a harness, and buckled myself in. I attached the lines of the glider to the carabiners on the harness, attached my emergency parachute to those same carabiners, took the A-lines in my hands, and stepped forward. Behind me, the glider rose. I slowed it down by pulling the steering lines, and a second later, I was flying where I should not be flying under any circumstances ...

The beeping of my altimeter won’t let me relax. The thing alternates too rapidly between beeping regularly and erratically. Altitude is safety, sure, but nothing in the northern hemisphere makes the air as turbulent as the February sun. The air is usually still cold in February, causing the warm air above the fields below me—on which the February sun shines—to rise faster than it would later in the year. The different fields absorb the sun’s rays differently, which means that the vertical speed of the air I am flying through changes every few meters. My glider takes a beating and constantly collapses. Left side, right side, front, collapse after collapse. One wrong reaction on my part and I will end up in a stall, a spin, or worse. I know I am terrified, but constantly reacting to what the glider surprises me with makes me forget about that, and ... “Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?”

Over three hundred meters of altitude I have gained since I took off a few minutes ago. Bumping and jolting, I fly through Málaga’s Class D airspace without a radio, which ... whatever. I eh... I had convinced myself that I would be back on the ground within fifteen minutes of flying. If this continues ... “And I ran to the Devil. He was wailing, and I ran to the Devil ...”

Probably because I am now flying above the western foothills of El Torcal de Antequera—a wonderful nature reserve, which, at this moment, I don't find particularly wonderful—the air is more stable. Two kilometers, I estimate, until I fly over the ridge that forms the southern boundary of El Torcal. Twenty kilometers per hour of ground speed? Six minutes of rest? Relative rest, because my altimeter keeps beeping—fairly regularly now—and its display tells me I am meanwhile flying almost nineteen hundred meters above sea level. Man, I am so insignificant ...

The Mediterranean Sea is right in front of me, the air too humid to see Morocco. But to my right, I see the Sierra Blanca mountain ridge, behind which Marbella lies, where I lived on the Plaza de los Naranjos. I see the quarry next to the village of Coín, near which I lived on a plot of land among olive trees, and to my left, I now see Málaga, where I lived opposite the Puerto del Candado, a small harbor on the eastern side of the city. Over my right shoulder, I see the village of Álora, where I lived with Heidi, and I see the lakes of Ardales, where Heidi and I often went for a walk. Over my left shoulder, far away, I see the lake of Viñuela, where Heidi and I often walked when we lived in the village of Torre del Mar, on the coast, east of Málaga. Keeping pressure on my steering lines, I outsmart Aeolus time and again, experiencing an alertness that feels surreal while realizing that I lost my heart to Andalusia around the time Andalusia lost its heart to the EU. Something has been warning me for weeks now that Andalusia is finished. Of course, I hope I am wrong, but Heidi and I have decided to leave. We have no idea where to go next, no idea where we will still be safe from globalism, and ... “Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?”

Beep… beep… beep. For no apparent reason, I am mulling over the answer to an email I struggled with before our visit to the tax office of Antequera this morning. In that email, someone let me know that reading Immaculate Perception had set her to some existential pondering. Insignificantly floating above Andalusia, my heart pounding in my throat, my only goal left in life to prolong my existence, I realize that evoking some existential pondering sure was one of the goals I set when I wrote that book. My own existential pondering has somehow moved to the back burner since I accepted—fully accepted—that everything is knowable—everything—and that during my lifetime, I will get to know only a fraction of what is knowable. That acceptance brings peace. Then, my never-ending search for real fear taught me that existence precedes essence indeed, but it also taught me that what some existentialists call existential anxiety is a laughable phenomenon. My fate in a meaningless universe. Where is the anxiety in that? Existence, nothing more than that, es el punto, is a feast, and ... “So you really think that man serves no purpose?” a timid voice in my head interrupts my thoughts.

“Not a single purpose,” I hear myself think, “but every human being is free to set goals as long as those goals harm no one and nothing,” a premise, I realize, that puts me in conflict with the globalists, who argue—and perhaps they are right—that in the pursuit of goals, human beings may not always harm someone, but always harm something, and so, human freedom of choice must be limited.

Many existential discussions—regrettably so—revolve around the question of whether God exists. When, in those discussions, I bring forward my everything-is-knowable and I-will-never-know-more than-a-fraction argument, people hopefully call me an agnostic. Time and again, I turn that into agnostic atheist, but I only do so because, strictly speaking, I cannot know for a fact that God does not exist, and to keep those discussions alive, I usually refrain from mentioning that I do know for a fact that no wolf ever ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. I find the existence of gods or God neither plausible nor appealing, and furthermore, I genuinely believe that true belief in gods or God is a recent phenomenon. No ancient Greek would truly have believed that I am at odds with Aeolus, high above Andalusia, and no medieval peasant would truly have believed that Father, Son, or Holy Spirit influence my present situation. Gods and God smoothened talking about what we don’t know until a few people decided to misuse God in a first attempt to pave the path to globalism, a path that irrevocably leads to an existence in which forty-nine and a half percent of a soon-to-be severely curtailed world population—thumbs hooked in belts, clubs attached to those belts—ensures that another forty-nine and a half percent of the world population caters to the wishes of one percent of the world population, and that … violently, my glider tilts backward.

“Hands high!” a voice screams in my head. Just before the glider stalls, the thing dives forward, and just in time, I give both steering lines a tug. The glider settles for a moment, and I gasp for air while my altimeter beeps erratically. Over the ridge that forms the southern boundary of El Torcal, I have ended up in a turmoil of updraft and thermal activity that is no longer even vaguely enjoyable, and if I want to escape Icarus’s fate, then … then … pulling in the glider’s ears? Hopeless endeavor. Spiral flight? Impossible in this turbulence. B-stall?

As, just above my head, I stick my fingers between the B-lines of the glider, I see a tiny white car navigating a path between the fields below. Heidi has driven around El Torcal and spotted me. I take a deep breath and pull the B-lines to my shoulders. The wind on my face drops, and the erratic beeping of my altimeter turns into a mournful tone. Lifting my head, I see that nothing is left of my glider but a narrow strip of cloth, and I know I am descending at about eight meters per second. My heart is pounding harder in my throat than ever. Do I have the mental strength to keep this up for two or three minutes? As soon as I come out of the B-stall, I will have to pull in the glider’s ears to avoid ascending again. If I come out of that B-stall too slowly, then … “Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? All on that day …”

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