Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  “That’s great,” she said. “I’ve got a ticket for December 21st. I can be in Enschede in the afternoon.”

  He coughed, cleared his throat, and spat out a thick wad of dusty phlegm.

  “OK.”

  Before or after, he wasn’t sure which way they were traveling, time still flew, or had she crashed?—anyway at a particularly cold moment he picked up the chestnut-brown object by its narrow protruding edges and lugged it, groaning from the effort, over to a wall. Halfway there the side of the chestnut-brown object flew open like a small door and its guts came crashing out. They broke like glass, he screamed from the shock, penetrating odors rose from them. Like a coiled spring, he bolted into the next room.

  He awoke with a start, and couldn’t see a thing. In the darkness he groped for the rectangular opening and stared through it long enough to make out the chestnut-brown object. It did not move. He stumbled cautiously around it, felt through his mitten-covered gloves for the smooth edges. It had become so lightweight he fell over backward. As though gravity did not pull at it. He put the corpse against a wall.

  When he opened his eyes again, everything was visible. Me, here? With a Magic Marker between his teeth he climbed up onto the liquor cabinet (had he put it there?), suddenly high up off the ground, the empty bookshelves intimately close, the edges pressing not unpleasantly against his chest and thighs. Trembling, he took the marker from his mouth and spat the cap into the room. In large, open block letters he drew an “A” on the wallpaper and filled it in red. Then he drew “ROOM,” it was slow and tough going with his double-gloved hand. Before he finished filling in the second “O” he had to get down because his arm quivered and his shoulder ached. After that it was dark for a long time.

  Outside, a layer of white ash covered the remains of houses and flora. Something terrible must have happened, a nuclear disaster of which he was the sole survivor. The ash, white as snow, had come fluttering down from the sky for hours on end. He had probably survived the atomic blast because his house was at a particular coordinate, a thermodynamic singularity impervious to the heat. The entire cosmos was burned to a crisp, everything except the houses on his street. Something, or someone, still appreciated his worth.

  “WITH A”—he was still coloring in the second lonely “A,” a letter that evoked his intense sympathy, more than the first one, he had to fight back his tears, when he smelled that smell. He immediately saw why: the uppermost shelf was covered with an alarmingly thick layer of gunpowder. All of his muscles contracted in a simultaneous spasm, with a yell he shoved himself away from the wall, his body flew through the air, he floated, perhaps he could fly outside between the planks covering the windows, but before he could change course his left arm slammed against a hard object. He landed with a muted thud on the ground, his head was flung back. He calmly rotated with the charred earth, taking note of the throbbing pain in his buttocks and lower back.

  • • •

  Later, someone spoke. When he opened his eyes, he looked up at a figure in the semidarkness. He pressed the palms of his hands into a boggy substance. The creature stood in the middle of the roofed space. It took a step, extended a gloved tentacle that held a weird, glimmering ball. “Easy does it,” it said. With kicking movements he pushed himself back, shouting, sliding on his back across the floor until his head banged into a wall.

  It was puffed up, it wore a kind of space suit, the garments of an alien bomb-disposal squad, he did not recognize the face, it kept morphing. In the shadows it looked like a gas mask made of human skin, a face with big round eyes and a rubber snout. The fiery sphere was a neutron bomb, it emitted golden flames, the creature was offering him Armageddon. It took another step in his direction, he pushed off again, hard, scooted up farther against the wall.

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Aaron,” said a voice of soft velvet. “Calm down. It’s me.”

  20

  When he heard my name his eyes shot back and forth like hockey pucks, he wrenched himself farther away, babbling gruffly, kicking at the debris like the back legs of a scurrying dog. It looked like he wanted to press himself through the wall.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said in a small voice, unsure if it I meant it for him or myself. I held out a gift I’d bought him at the airport, a giant chocolate Christmas ball filled with hand-made Belgian bonbons and wrapped in cellophane and gold ribbons. Half a kilo of utterly misplaced goodwill, I realized at once. It stank too much in the darkened room to even want to think about chocolate.

  He sat jerking his head from side to side until he suddenly looked straight at me. I was so shocked by his face—eyes like sparkspattering transformer stations—that I let the chocolate ball roll out of my hand. It landed with a hollow thud on what sounded like cardboard. Aaron’s reaction was as unexpected as it was terrifying: he let out a shriek, threw his arms over his face, and cowered as though there were a tarantula at his feet, or the devil himself. “Take it away,” he screamed, his voice breaking, “TAKE THAT THING AWAY!”

  The only thing here that urgently needed taking away was him. To a doctor, and fast.

  “Stay there,” I said, “don’t get up,” and staggered backward in panic toward the front hall, dragging my roller suitcase behind me over ankle-high junk out into the sunlight. Panting, I stepped into the snow and pulled the front door shut, the same door I had to open with my own key a few minutes earlier. I had rung the bell but there was no answer; if I hadn’t heard a vague murmur from behind the broken door pane, I’d have assumed he forgot our date and was spending Christmas in Venlo. In retrospect it was clear why our phone call two weeks ago had sounded so strange. What I took for bitterness—he came across as piqued and out of sorts—must in fact have been pure psychosis.

  I went into the alleyway alongside the house, took out my cell phone and called Boudewijn Stol, my tower of strength these last months—to my surprise, he had even met me at the airport, just because, out of curiosity for the person he’d been e-mailing every day—and asked him to look up the number of a mental health hotline. “You want me to come out there?” he asked, “drive to France with you? What did Arend have to say about it?”

  “About what?”

  “You know—it.”

  “Nothing,” I replied. “All he did was scream.”

  At the crisis hotline I got a woman with a surly Twente accent who made it clear they were not going to come and pick Aaron up, but that I could bring him to the outpatient clinic at the Twentse Tulip, a psychiatric hospital on the south side of Enschede. During our exchange unnerving howls emerged from the living room. I walked farther into the ice-cold alley and peered between two conifers at the back of the house. There wasn’t much to see aside from the moldering planks where the sliding door used to be, and the greasy glass of the kitchen door. I hurried back inside, the snow was powdery but treacherously slick, I nearly slipped just before reaching the front walk. Again I waded through the unopened mail and waste paper on my way to the living room. I felt along the wall for the light switch. What hadn’t entirely sunk in before, in the semidarkness, was now perfectly obvious. The mess was unimaginable. You could hardly see the carpeting; the place was strewn wall to wall with litter. Cookie packages, potato chip bags, sweaters, French fry containers, towels, empty milk cartons, wads of paper towels, junk mail, torn-open envelopes, half-eaten sandwiches, rotting fruit, plastic bags in every shape and size, countless pizza boxes, the gnawed-off crusts sticking out from under the same grinning green-and-red pizza man. But the furniture was littered with rubbish too, as though it had rained garbage. All sorts of gibberish had been scrawled on the walls with Magic Marker, I saved myself the trouble of trying to decipher it. A partially charred wooden fence post lay on the love seat. The bookshelves, once his pride and joy, looked as though they had been emptied at random; there were books everywhere, hundreds, some of them ripped to shreds or lying open, squashed facedown. They hadn’t been read, they had been murdered, butchered. The old Aaron use
d to practically wear white gloves to read a book. Now I saw, in the cast-iron multiburner, a stack of scorched, half-charred blocks: books.

  This was television-style dereliction: those awful voyeuristic programs about people with no connection to the species. But what they didn’t show on TV was the guinea pig shit. That beat everything. Guinea pig droppings everywhere, thousands of tiny, slightly curled turds, all exactly the same size, like giant chocolate sprinkles in the corners, along the baseboards, and around the table legs, crushed into a dark-brown mud in the doorway. The guinea pigs were nowhere to be seen—just like Aaron. He had disappeared.

  I walked back into the front hall and stood at the foot of the stairs. Just as I was about to go up I heard the shower—a welcome, promising sound. Maybe he wanted to clean himself up. Had he remembered who I was and what I had come to do? In the meantime I’d have a look for the keys to the Alfa. In the midst of that dung heap there was only one place they could be: the cocoa canister on the mantelpiece, he always used to keep them there. I pulled open the front curtains for more light. The windowpane was covered in red smears I had vaguely taken note of outside, but now I recoiled with a gasp. On the windowsill lay a hairy, bloody cadaver. The black guinea pig. Decapitated, in fact scalped, and cut open lengthwise. I took a deep breath—through my mouth: the stench in this cesspit, that little animal—and tried with all my might not to gag.

  In shock I went back to the mantel and stared at the empty take-out containers and the rest of the garbage. At the same time I was overcome by intense pity and equally powerful guilt: I spent my six months in California feeling so sorry for myself, and gave precious little thought to what had become of him. He’ll be OK, I thought. He’s loaded, right?

  When I had pulled myself back together I found the cocoa canister and dug out a sealed envelope—the same envelope I had shoved through his letter slot six months earlier—with the keys still inside. The idea that Aaron hadn’t driven in six months. I tucked the envelope into the inside pocket of my winter coat and walked back to the foot of the stairs. He was still in the shower. I had to coax him into coming with me.

  I braced myself, went upstairs, and stopped at the landing. Across the jumble of clothes and towels I called out “Aaron, I’m back,” and knocked gently on the bathroom door. There was no reaction, and after a little while I realized the jet was loud and steady—too loud and too steady. I pushed open the door, steam came billowing over the landing. On the tiled floor, amid hairy, nondescript filth, was the cellophane and the gold ribbon from the Christmas ball. The shower curtain was dirty but still transparent; you could see there was no one behind it. As I pulled it aside I burst into tears at what I saw—an odd reaction, in fact, the melting chocolate ball was peanuts compared to the wretchedness downstairs—but anyway, what was left of it lay on the floor of the shower in a bath of gurgling chocolate water, the carving knife that had been stuck into it (rammed, I imagined) lying disappointedly on the drain. The hot water had melted a conical hole in the ball; all that remained of the pralines inside it was their filling. This is not where I wanted to be. Not with this belly. I felt a brief urge to curse Boudewijn out, blame him for everything. Thanks to you I’m standing here, without you I wouldn’t have this damn belly. Sniffling and swearing, I turned off the shower.

  Only now did I hear Aaron shouting. “FUCK OFF!” he yelled hoarsely. “FUCK! OFF!” I followed the sound of his shrieks, fighting the temptation to do just that, to fuck off for good. I opened the bedroom door. He was cowering on the mattress, knees tucked up to his chest, hardly even recognizable with the grubby fringe of hair tracing a line around the back of his head. Between shouts he babbled at top speed, his shoulders and head shaking in violent spasms. As soon as I entered the room he began to shriek, he held the bare, yellowed comforter up to his chin with white-knuckled fists. “Please,” he whimpered, “just leave. Leave me alone. You have a snout.” As if I were braving a hurricane, I climbed onto the double bed and softly took hold of his leg through the comforter. Howling and sobbing, he bit into the cotton blanket, his eyes rolled back in his head and he palpitated as though I’d prodded him with a red-hot fire poker. Now gasping with fright myself, I let go.

  “Please. Go.”

  In order to restrain myself a second time, not to go, to flee from this hellhole, I tried to picture him on his black Batavus. Remember who this is. I saw him sitting on that big bike with its double crossbar, his sheepskin coat open, a silk shirt underneath that could just as well have been a ladies’ blouse, this nonchalant grasshopper on a bike, oversized boots half sliding off the pedals, leisurely cycling off to buy this very bed with me. With that Aaron in mind, I laid my hand as gently as possible on his sweat-drenched thigh, and called him “sweetheart.” It was with that Aaron in mind that I’d come to Enschede, with that Aaron in mind I’d decided to keep it.

  For weeks, Boudewijn was the only one who knew I was pregnant. I was avoiding all contact with Enschede (and Enschede with me), and at McKinsey I kept mum about it as long as I wasn’t showing. From Day One of my internship in Silicon Valley, Boudewijn and I e-mailed each other daily, a routine with which he rounded off his afternoons in Amsterdam and I began my mornings in California. At first they were mostly jokey, corny e-mails, sometimes unexpectedly candid, with an unambiguous undertone on his part that I rather enjoyed. “You’re the only person I trust,” I wrote one day in October. “Of course, of course,” was his almost gilded answer, so I told him I was pregnant and confessed right up front that I was considering an abortion. “Considering” was my euphemism for the appointment I had already made at the Stanford University Family Planning Service. That sure cured him of his corniness; he turned into a sponge that wanted to soak up everything with exacting precision, so I told him everything with exacting precision—but how precise was it all without the sliding glass door and the website?

  His reaction caught me off guard: he explicitly forbade me to go to that Stanford clinic. “Put off your decision for as long as possible,” he wrote, “ask for a cooling-off period.” “I’ve got one already.” “Then ask for another one,” and he reminded me I had responsibilities, not only with regard to the “life” but to the father as well. Excuse me? Really, he was dead serious, he considered having an abortion behind Aaron’s back, “how can I put it mildly,” he said, a crime. “But I don’t want anything to do with the guy,” I protested. “That’s beside the point,” he wrote, “who says you have to have anything to do with him? Who says he wants a child?”

  What Aaron wanted was a tranquilizer dart. His fear itself was terrifying, and still I persevered: little by little I made progress, unhurriedly caressing his thickly clothed arms, his shoulders, until his dread seemed to gradually subside. Both bedside tables, the open drawers, the floor—everywhere, actually—were littered with pill strips and liquor bottles, all of them empty. After rummaging frantically through one of the bedside tables I came up with two sleeping tablets. “Here,” I said, “take these.” But he spat them out, and again I wriggled the soggy capsules into his mouth. I found a bottle of jenever with a swig or two left, put it to his lips and he swallowed. He let me nestle up against him and I continued stroking his arms, his face, his chest, until his breathing relaxed. And only then, when I had calmed down some myself, did the reality of the situation hit me: he didn’t notice. Even if I were to take off my heavy winter coat, even if I took off all my clothes and climbed onto his lap with my six-month belly, even then Aaron wouldn’t notice I was pregnant, let alone comprehend it.

  It was a job and a half getting him down those stairs. He thrashed about and wedged himself between the wall and the railing. His body odor made me gag. In front of the house he fell to his knees in the snow, and while I hastily swept the snow off the Alfa he lay there curled up in a fetal position, wailing and ranting; I smiled at passersby while coaxing him, patiently but firmly, into the car.

  We arrived at the Twentse Tulip before dusk; I had never been there before, it was surround
ed by woods and had a huge Christmas tree in the granite foyer. After a good deal of pleading and explaining on my part they agreed to keep Aaron overnight for observation. I watched as he, meek as a lamb, gulped down two bright purple antipsychotics with a large glass of water; it was as though I was quenching a week-long thirst myself. Only when they asked me for his particulars—parents? employer?—did I realize how extraordinary it was that he’d managed to get to this stage. I’ll bet no one had been at his house in months. His parents lived down in Limburg, and they phoned, as far as I knew, infrequently. And what about his work? Was this the fate of a freelancer? I found Cees and Irma Bever’s number in my cell phone and gave it to the staff nurse.

  I wanted to get out of there. Move on. While Aaron was being examined by one of the psychiatrists, I slipped out of the building. I looked up at the snow-covered oak trees and sycamores, the endless depth of the stone-cold sky above, and thought: this is as good a place as any for insanity to evaporate.

  Driving south through salty slush, coat buttoned up, window open, dazed, I thought: did I really just go through all that? I only braked in Liège, soon after midnight, and checked into the most expensive room I could find. Should I have seen this coming? My suite had those little pillows a pregnant woman can prop under her belly while lying on her side, but sleep evaded me nonetheless.

  I think it was already September by the time I realized it. I lived in a sort of student pueblo with undergrads, foreign post-docs, and beginning consultants, situated in the woods between the Stanford campus and the office park where McKinsey had its local division. I shared a top-floor apartment with two somewhat disagreeable French girls who had allotted me a square bedroom looking out on three sides at the tall, pointy pines. For the first few weeks I was lonely and depressed, I missed Enschede, I missed Aaron, I missed my father. Now that I was alone, guilt got a foot in the door. Hadn’t everything gone haywire essentially because of me? Wasn’t it my greedy exhibitionism that had driven us, a three-way bond with the strength of a water molecule, apart? I saw Siem crash through that glass door more often than I wanted to, I realized all too well what exactly had been smashed to smithereens—but at the same time I was liberated; the newness of being on the other side of the world banished the darkest thoughts of Enschede, distracted me from the irrevocability and hopelessness of the situation. On weekdays I worked long hours; at the weekends colleagues took me with them to San Francisco, where we spent days on the beach and nights in the clubs. This is good, it is good you are in California—and as soon as I started thinking this, sometimes even saying it out loud, I discovered I was pregnant.