The Caption

by Abdellaouian Genetic Geography, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Leavers

The train from Amsterdam took two and a quarter hours to Groningen, and the bus from Groningen took forty more, and Remko Wierenga spent all of it looking at his own figure on other people's telephones.

It had left him on a Tuesday. He knew because he had been at his desk when Sanne from communications sent it to the institute's account with the caption he had written himself, four lines long, and he had watched it be shared eleven times in the first twenty minutes. By Wednesday it had been shared some thousands of times, and almost none of the copies had four lines under them. Most had none. Some had one. The one most often attached to it was Now you know why the north votes the way it does, which was not a sentence he had written, or a sentence his data could say.

The figure itself was a map of the Netherlands cut into its municipalities, more than three hundred small shapes, each shaded from pale sand to dark brown by the average polygenic score for educational attainment of the people sampled there. In the first version, the one he had made two years ago and never shown anyone, the whole country had shaded from north to south in a smooth gradient, and he had known at once what it was. It was ancestry. Northerners and southerners differ a little in the frequencies of a great many alleles for reasons that have nothing to do with schooling, and a score fitted in one population picks those differences up as faithfully as it picks up anything else. So he had corrected for it. He had used forty principal components, and then, because forty felt like what a referee would ask for and he did not trust what a referee would ask for, a hundred.

The gradient had gone. That was the point of the correction, and he had been glad to see it go.

What was left was smaller and stranger. It was not a gradient but a speckle: the university towns dark, the commuter belts around them dark, and here and there across the north-east a cluster of pale municipalities. One of them was the one he was riding into now, where the bus turned off the provincial road at a church on a mound and went on along a dyke between flat fields gone the colour of wet cardboard.

He had split the sample before he interpreted any of it. That was in the paper, in the second paragraph of the results, and in the caption, in the third line. People still living in the municipality where they were born. People born there and living elsewhere. People living there and born elsewhere. Stayers, leavers, incomers. The pale clusters were made of stayers. The people born in them who had gone carried scores, on average, a little higher than the national mean. The incomers were too few to say anything about, and the caption said that too.

The fourth line of the caption said that the score had been fitted to predict years of schooling, and that years of schooling had decided, in part, who was able to leave. The score was predicting the sorting it was being used to measure. He had thought that was the most important sentence in the paper. It was the first one cut.

The bus stopped at the shelter by the dorpshuis. He got off with his rucksack and a roll of heavy-duty bin bags and stood for a moment in the wind, which came straight across from the Wadden with nothing to slow it, and read the notice taped inside the shelter: the schedule of the demolitions on the Kerkweg and the Molenstraat, with the house numbers in a column and the dates beside them. Number 14 was Monday.

Stayers

Hilje had taken the door off the kitchen cupboard and was using it as a table on two trestles in the front room, because the real table had gone to the Kringloop on Wednesday. On it were a kettle, two mugs, a packet of stroopwafels and their mother's reading glasses, which nobody had been able to throw away.

"You came on the bus," she said.

"The car's in for its inspection."

"You could have said. I'd have fetched you from the station."

"I know."

She poured water onto teabags. She was forty-four, two years older than him, and she had their father's hands, broad across the knuckles, and their mother's habit of standing with one hip against a counter while the kettle boiled even when there was no counter there. She had been a doctor's assistant at the practice in Loppersum for nineteen years. She had cared for their mother through the last five of them, in this house, in the back bedroom with the crack over the window that had been the first crack.

"Jan Bolhuis has been asking for you," she said.

"Has he."

"He's got your map on his telephone. He showed it at the dorpshuis on Thursday. Everybody's seen it."

Remko took his mug and did not drink from it.

"I didn't send it to him," he said.

"I know you didn't send it to him. Somebody's grandson sent it to the village group. With a little picture of a donkey."

"A donkey."

"Under our gemeente. Where it's pale." She opened the stroopwafels. "I deleted it. It came back. Someone else's grandson."

He took his telephone out and found the paper and held it out to her, open at the figure, with the four lines underneath.

She did not take it. "I can read," she said. "I read it on Wednesday. I read the paper. All of it, Remko, with the dictionary open for the words. I understand it as well as anyone in the dorpshuis will ever let me say I understand it." She drank her tea. "It's not me you have to explain it to."

He put the telephone away.

The dorpshuis had been the school until 2009, and still had the coat pegs along the corridor at the height of a seven-year-old's shoulder. On Saturday afternoons it did coffee and a meat roll and cards. There were nine people in the room when Remko went in, and seven of them were over seventy, and he knew all of them by name, and all of them stopped talking.

Jan Bolhuis had farmed four hundred metres from the Wierenga house all his life and his father before him. He had a long face with deep vertical lines either side of the mouth, and he had been chairman of the village association when the first damage claims went in, after Huizinge in 2012, and he had been the one who walked round the village with a torch counting cracks for the list. He had the map open already. He set the telephone on the table between the cups so that Remko had to look at it upside down.

"So," Jan said. "That's us."

"That's the average score of the people in the sample who live in this gemeente," Remko said. "After the correction."

"That's us. The pale bit. The dumb bit." He said it without heat, the way he had read out the crack numbers at the association's meetings: a fact for the list. "The clever ones went to Groningen and Amsterdam and the dumb ones stayed behind to have their houses fall down. That's what it says, doesn't it. In the end. Under all your words."

"No," said Remko.

Jan waited.

Remko had been asked this question, in one form or another, by four journalists and a member of the provincial assembly since Tuesday, and he had answered it each time with the second paragraph of the results. He looked round the room at the nine people, and at the coat pegs, and at the window, where the plastic sheeting over the cracked pane was breathing in and out with the wind.

"Say it about one person," he said. "Go on. Say it about my sister. Hilje Wierenga has worse genes for schooling than I do because she stayed in Oldenwerd. Say that."

Nobody said it.

"Nobody here would say it," said Jan, "because it's rude."

"It's not rude. It's false. She and I have the same parents. Siblings differ by chance, and the chance is large. I've never looked at her genotype and I never will, and if I did it could go either way. And she didn't stay because of anything in any score. She stayed because Mam was dying in the back bedroom and somebody had to sign the forms for the inspector. And I didn't." He stopped. "The map is about the gemeente. It's about who left it over sixty years, and what happened to it that made them go. It isn't about anyone in this room. Not one of you."

"It looks like it's about us," said Annie Pool, from the card table.

"I know it does," Remko said. "That's what's wrong with it."

Jan took his telephone back. He looked at the map for a while, and then he scrolled down past it with his thumb to where the caption ought to have been, and there was nothing there but the donkey.

"You should have put the words on the picture," he said. "In the picture. Where it couldn't come off."

Incomers

There were three houses on the Kerkweg that had been bought in the last five years by people from the Randstad, because in Oldenwerd you could still have a farmhouse with a barn for less than a flat in Utrecht, cracks and all, and the state would pay for the cracks. One of them belonged to Femke and Daan Hofstede, who had come from Amersfoort with two children in 2022. Femke taught groep 7 and 8 at the school in Middelstum. She caught Remko on the road outside number 14 as he was carrying the second load of bin bags to the container.

"I wanted to say," she said, "that I think it's a disgrace."

He put the bags in the container.

"Not you," she said. "Your institute. Making maps like that of real places. You know there's a whole literature on it. It's all population stratification. You can't get genes out of social data, it's circular, the whole field is a house of cards. You know the history. I teach these children. Some of them are from families who've been here four hundred years. Do you know what it does to a ten-year-old to be told she's a pale bit on a map?"

"Nobody has told her that."

"Her uncle forwarded it to the class app."

He leaned on the edge of the container. The wind pushed at the open lid.

"The first version was stratification," he said. "It was the north-south gradient. That's ancestry, and I took it out with a hundred principal components, which is more than anyone asks for. Then I looked at what was left. Something was left. It wasn't the gradient. It was the university towns, and the places around the universities, and pale spots where people had been leaving for sixty years. If it were nothing, the correction would have wiped it. It didn't."

"So it's genetic."

"It's measured in DNA. That isn't the same thing."

She looked at him the way she probably looked at a pupil who had given the right answer to a different question.

"It's a predictor," he said. "It was trained on who got more schooling, in one population, at one time. Some of what it learned is the genes of the person. Some is the parents and the house they made. Some is who married whom. Some is ancestry I didn't get out, because I never get all of it out. Nobody knows the shares. What it isn't is nothing. If I tell you it's nothing, you'll be pleased, and then someone else will publish the uncorrected map, and it'll be the gradient, and it'll have a donkey on it too, and nobody will be able to tell the difference."

"They can't tell the difference now."

"No," he said.

Her son came out of the Hofstedes' gate on a bicycle too big for him and went wobbling off along the dyke road towards the church. She watched him go.

"We came here because it was cheap," she said, "and because the children could be outside. Is that in your map? People like us?"

"You're in the third bin," he said. "Incomers. There weren't enough of you in the sample to say anything."

"That's something."

"It's in the caption."

She laughed once, without much in it, and went in.

Residue

They worked until dark. Hilje did the bedrooms and Remko did the kitchen, which was mostly a matter of unscrewing things, because the inspectors' firm had told them that whatever was fixed to the walls on Monday would go into the crusher with the walls. He took down the spice rack their father had made, and the clock, and the calendar from the bakery in Usquert with its photograph of a windmill for October, and the barometer that had not worked since he was a child and that their mother had tapped every morning anyway.

Behind the barometer, on the wall beside the back door, was the crack.

He had forgotten it was there. Or he had not forgotten it, but he had not seen it for the eleven years since he had last stood in this kitchen for more than an afternoon, and it had grown in the meantime, and someone had kept count. It ran from the corner of the door frame up and to the left, at about forty degrees, through the plaster and into the brick behind, and the paint along its length had come away in flakes. Across it, at intervals, were short pencil lines, each one ruled at right angles to the crack where it ended, and beside each line a date in their mother's hand.

17-8-12. Low down, near the frame, where it had begun.

9-1-14. 2-3-15. 8-1-18. He could put a tremor to some of them and not to others. Several had nothing beside them but the date and a short measurement in millimetres, the width of the crack at that end on that morning, done with the steel ruler that still lived in the drawer by the cooker.

The lines went on climbing. In 2021 the hand changed. It got rounder and firmer, and the sevens had a bar through them, which their mother's never had. 17-4-21. 30-9-22. 27-11-23. Hilje's hand. The last line was eight centimetres below the ceiling, and beside it in the same hand: nog 4 mm.

He stood in front of it with a screwdriver in one hand and the barometer in the other.

"She started it the morning after Huizinge," Hilje said from the doorway. She had a bin bag of bedding over her shoulder. "Jan came round with his torch and said write it down, Trijntje, write down where it ends and when, they'll want to see it. So she did. They never wanted to see it. They sent a man with a laser who took photographs."

"You kept it up."

"Somebody had to." She put the bag down. "The field's shut, for good, since the year before last. It still moves. Less. It'll settle for years, they say."

He put the barometer on the counter and took out his telephone and photographed the wall. He took it from the door, with the whole crack in, and the photograph showed a diagonal line through a dirty kitchen wall with some grey scratches beside it. He went closer and took it in sections, four of them, so the dates were legible. Then he stood back and looked at the four photographs on the screen, small and clean and separate.

"That won't do it either," Hilje said.

"No."

He went out to the barn, where there were still tools, and came back with a club hammer and their father's bolster chisel, the broad flat one for brick. He laid the chisel against the wall a hand's width to the right of the crack, below the 2012 mark, and struck it.

"Remko."

"It's coming down on Monday."

"I know it's coming down on Monday."

The plaster was old lime, soft and dry, and it came away in a sheet the size of a dinner plate before the chisel was halfway along, and broke. He swore. He started again lower, taking it more slowly, cutting a line round the dates rather than across them, working the chisel in under the edge to lift the plaster from the brick a centimetre at a time. Hilje watched. After a while she went to the drawer and came back with a flat bread knife and began working from the other side.

It took them two hours to get four pieces off whole. None was larger than a roof tile. The crack ran through each of them, and the pencil lines crossed it, and the dates stood beside the lines in two hands. One piece held 2012 to 2015, one 2016 to 2019, one the three years when the hand changed, and the last the run to nog 4 mm. Where the plaster had come off, the brick behind showed the crack going on into the wall as a black line, wider than it had looked on the surface, with nothing beside it at all.

They wrapped the pieces in their mother's tea towels, each one separately, and laid them flat in the bottom of the cardboard box that had held the good glasses, and Hilje wrote on the lid in marker KEUKEN – NIET GOOIEN, and then, after a moment, the date, and carried it out to her car in both arms, level, the way you carry something full.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Abdellaouiānō Geōgraphiae Genēticae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Abdellaouian Genetic Geography, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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