Nothing happens on night trains to the Netherlands, but people who ride them say they can’t help but see themselves—if only for the moment before sleep—as actors in a film. Children don’t scream, women don’t faint, and if a chase were to happen on top of the cars, the passengers—lacking scripts of any kind—would never know. The train stops every hour or so, and each time, one or two people—businessmen, mostly—get on or off. The movement of the train makes the passengers drowsy; they sleep better when it’s moving than when it’s not. The next morning, jolted from sleep thirty minutes from their destination, a country landscape transforms itself into an urban capital while they rub the sleepies from their eyes.

Two days later, the squawks of seagulls outside one passenger’s window pull him from dreams of rubber duckies, which the gulls themselves must have caused. On evenings and weekends, up and down side streets and boulevards, the city is chalk full of people being loud as an activity, so one can hardly blame the seagulls, of all things, for waking him. Without his contacts, the steady stream of tourists walking down Damrak deceives him: he thinks it’s a parade.

Across the harbor from Damrak, at the edge of the Red Light District, the hotel at which he’s staying stands on Warmoestraat, where two hundred years ago, the wealthiest merchants in Europe lived. Pulp Fiction was written a couple of blocks from there. In a place where the borders avenues provide miraculously contain a filth that overwhelms them, certain streets—hiding behind alleyways, disguising themselves with neon lights—take on the role of a receptacle, as crowds of men and women watch their step in order to avoid pools of urine, making the refuse that litters these streets their nocturnal carpet. If the city were a bathroom, Warmoestraat would be its toilet. In the week the passenger—now squatter, now tourist—spends there, the clouds never lift, because of Warmoestraat, he assumes. Every morning, you see, says the passenger, rain flushes away the smell of the night before.

Here in Amsterdam, a city surrounded by windmills, where the greatest debaucheries are committed with the least apprehension, there is a constant breeze, which empties the hands of the solicitors passing out flyers on the streets and gives a glossy finish to the cobblestones of the city’s largest square, creating a patchwork of gray, yellow, and blue out of ads for comedy shows and burlesques, almost seeming to act as unspoken approval of a man in the crowd who throws up at hardly a quarter past noon.

Across the Ij—a once great harbor, pronounced eye—just outside the city limits, in the Eastern Docklands, fishermen are addicted to coke. They work so hard that they have to do lines to stay awake. Here, our running joke that “ecstasy, cocaine” and a tap on the shoulder is the way you say hello in Amsterdam isn’t quite so funny. The one-legged man who gives B. a ride home from the pub drinks a beer while driving what one must presume to be an automatic. A week isn’t long enough to discover my Amsterdam, but I have a feeling I would find it out here, in the flatlands beyond the docks, where from here to the horizon, sheep and cattle, unchecked by hills, trees, or bushes, graze beside windmills, alongside canals, underneath power lines. With a perverse resistance to the way a metropolis is improvised into being over untold spans of years and years, the mind would like to create its own out of nothing but ideas, and I struggle to define Amsterdam—city of the flat and narrow—in terms of space, but the residents, broad-minded and unpredictable, contradict my hypothesis. In trying to invent a city out of reality, the visitor to Amsterdam only adds to what is already there, but such are the beginnings of his or her Amsterdam.