Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  You sawed him up. He tried to stand up, his ribs cut into his chest like sabers, he had to grab hold of the aluminum doorframe. The devastating force tearing into him was not localized, not something on the scale of his life—it was immense. You murdered him and then you sawed him up.

  The unease and the happiness when the baby was born. He was happy, because now he had something over the Wijn clan. His own parents were dead and buried, it was him versus them. The unease was stronger, it arose from mixing his genes with these Utrecht low-lifes—but the child was still a Sigerius. Whenever he fantasized about running off, leaving Margriet, in his daydream he always took his son with him—

  His frozen son, Siem Sigerius’s sawed-up son, lay like bait in his shed, a hunk of meat that would soon thaw and stink and betray him. He would be devoured by the scorn of politicos, his disgrace would be broadcast nationwide, his nervous system evoked images of the gray colossus of Justice, in no time it would be established that it was murder. Then visions of something even more merciless: the media, the fucking media, the drooling press, the international press, newspaper headlines in thick ink, dripping columns covering his trial: the mathematician and his children, blackmail, nude pictures, a circular saw. He pressed his chafed chin to his chest and let the water splash against the back of his head.

  Keep on thinking—please. He turned the hot tap halfway off, the water went lukewarm. Tepid water allows him to think clearly. That’s what he did at MIT when he’d drawn a blank: take a shower. No way is he going to just give up. There was a forgotten, primitive shower at the end of the Mathematics Department corridor, beyond Quillen’s room. When he was stuck, like now, he would take his towel and walk down to that cubicle. That sawing, he just couldn’t go through with it. He wanted to turn the hot water back up, but restrained himself. Hot water was for chickens, he needed to cool himself off. Think cold. His shoes made a high-pitched ticking noise in the corridor, on the walls hung portraits of the greatest mathematicians in history: Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert, Fermat, Galois. He stands motionless under the tepid stream, goose bumps on his body. And now? Get rid of him. Make a puzzle of it. He’d stand there in the MIT shower, up to his neck in Von Neumann algebras, not to mention physically bricked in, until his brain underwent nuclear fusion. The puzzling-together of those algebras and the knot theory, he had to support himself against the tiled shower, his fingers spread, to keep from falling over. But now there’s no fusion, on the contrary: his nucleus splits. First comes panic, then the urge for survival. Fission yourself first. He turned the hot water off entirely. Freeze yourself. The coldness, Wilbert Sigerius’s coldness. A son who waits until his father is naked and then attacks him with a lead truncheon. The cold, merciless marrow of that bastard, he drank it up like liquid nitrogen. He ran his hands over his scalp one last time and got out of the shower.

  He walked back to the workshop and untaped the corpse from the board, pried the upper leg out of the saw. He thought for a moment, then threw the wooden door all the way open, stuck his arms under the dead weight and dragged the pillar of flesh into the backyard. Picking up speed, he followed the blind wall of the workshop where chopped hardwood was stacked under a low lean-to shingled with barked planks. In the fresh snow he could see the outline of the oak stump where Tineke chopped wood. He hurriedly kicked the snow off the trunk and laid the stiffened body over it, the waist in the middle of the round platform, head and heels draping into the snow. There was enough light from the outdoor lamp above the terrace. He walked back to the workshop, pulled the roll of garbage bags out of the backpack. In the left corner of the shed, propped in a sooty fire basket, was an axe. He took it with him outside.

  It was an enormous axe with a red-painted steel blade and an elegantly curved, almost athletic handle. First he kicked the left hand away from the groin, and then tugged the leather jacket up a bit. He had brought this dangerous piece of garbage into the world. He had to repeat it a few times before he raised the axe—You brought dangerous rubbish into the world. The first blow was aimed at the saw wound in the thigh, but the axe bounced off something hard and lodged itself in the chopping block. And now you’ll clean up the mess. He crouched next to the leg, wriggled his hand into the greasy trouser pocket. It was his duty. First he pulled out a pack of Sportlife chewing gum, and almost cut himself when he pried out an open jackknife. The kid was three years old, Karin was staying with them, Margriet’s youngest sister. Problems with her father. A lethargic girl in polka-dot frocks who sat there the whole day chewing Bazooka bubblegum. The house was littered with those waxy wrappers with cartoons on them. One Sunday afternoon they heard breathless shrieking on the landing. There he sat, with a gob of bubblegum the size of a golf ball lodged in his throat, Karin had stuck it to the edge of the kitchen table, “a whole pack,” she screamed, while little blue-faced Wilbert lay there choking to death. He should have cleaned up that mess right then and there. He looked at the weapon, the blow must have knocked the blade open, there was a deep groove in the wooden sheath. Should’ve let him choke.

  But he rushed over and gave him a few punches to the belly, held his unconscious child by the ankles and eventually managed, with three fingers, to fish the sticky, bright pink glob out of the toddler’s throat.

  The axe struck the upper leg. With four or five overhand blows—raising it with hate, chopping with hate and gravity—he cleaved the half-sawn-off leg the rest of the way; the flesh was as grainy as sorbet, he heard the bone snap. It became a weird loose thing with a sneaker on it. Dark blood welled up out of the ragged open cut, which he absolutely did not want to stare at, but did anyway; the vivid red surface agreed with what he imagined the cross-section of a leg would look like: skin around flesh around bone. Numb, he stuffed the object in a garbage bag that he then wound shut with the silver-colored duct tape, and carried it to the workshop.

  His gamble paid off: the tent bag was long enough. He carried the backpack back to the chopping block. The darkness seemed less deep. Against his better judgment he gauged the opening of the backpack and then the breadth of the shoulders. The torso was indeed too large, his son had his build, stocky and massive; the good arm simply had to come off too. And the head? Keep your shit together. No time to lose, when would that Teeuwen girl be coming by? Always start with the least fun stuff, that’s what he had told his daughters their entire youth, get it out of the way. The dishes first, then TV. Homework first, then horseback riding. First the head, then the limbs. He fought back the sudden urge to grab the axe and fling it against the sunroom—he could hear the tinkling of the glass already. The awful thought of the head. Wasn’t there a bigger bag upstairs? A taller bag, so that he could leave the head attached?

  What he’d most like is to close his eyes, just for a minute, but he is too agitated. The backpack—got to go to the car. Taking short steps, he climbs out of the hole and makes his way back through the tree trunks. Even without the thirty-kilo load he stumbles against roots and branches, his toes are frozen, the sound he makes is unnaturally loud. As soon as he has spotted the Audi, its silver finish sparkling in the winter sun, he picks up his pace; for the last fifty meters his eyes water from the stabbing pain in his ribs. Without looking either way along the path he gets in on the driver’s side. He locks the doors. In the glove compartment he finds a road map of France. Soon the drive southward, through Reims and Dijon, to his family. But first, the backpack. He turns on the engine and drives, too aggressively for a dirt path like this, toward the country road. He turns off toward Charleroi.

  From the viaduct the long, desolate street looked abandoned, but now a boy is walking alongside him. He is scrawny and wiry, like a stray dog. The boy is wearing clothes that do not suit him: a filthy, oversized quilted body warmer that hangs below his knees, white nurses’ clogs with tiny girlish holes in them. On his hand is a large black-and-red-leather motorcycle glove. It is clothing that doesn’t look good on anyone.

  The boy walks on the gritty, gravelly asphalt and he up on t
he raised sidewalk. He can’t be older than twelve, and yet his eyes, barely visible, are sunk deep in their flaking sockets: black drain holes that keep a continual and close watch on the backpack. It has started to drip and weighs heavily on his shoulders. He keeps a close eye on his car, the Audi is parked half off the road, half under the viaduct.

  He looks around, pretending he does not notice the boy. Much of the already rundown street has been demolished; around the few derelict houses is an empty lot littered with rubble and plastic bottles. They are about thirty meters from their destination: a small dumping ground for household refuse that he’d spotted from the ring road. Old sofas, TVs, mangled bicycles, garbage bags—especially lots of disgorging garbage bags. Answering the boy’s attentive gaze, he points to the dump. A look of dismay shoots over the old-ish, serious face, the purple lips move like worms. “Non,” the boy commands, “non.” He gestures with the huge palm of his leather glove. “Venez!”

  But he does not want to go with him. He has to dispose of the backpack. It appears that the boy understands this, but still knows what’s best for him. He walks up alongside him, and in a flash the enormous glove grabs him by the wrist. The boy gestures with his small, round chin to the opposite side of the street. To oblige him he nods and steps off the sidewalk, the asphalt crunching under his soles. The boy tugs him diagonally across the road, they are nearly running, the white clogs clack like horses’ hooves on the decrepit blacktop. He is worried about the backpack, the load bounces unrhythmically up and down. The straps dig into his shoulders. The blood drips faster, he is leaving a trail behind. Soon the head will be rolling down the street. Why did he put it in the bottom compartment? Is the zipper shut?

  He braces his foot against the curb, but the boy pulls him with the strength of a mule up onto the gray-paved sidewalk. They enter a café with a burned-out beer sign above the door. The boy pulls aside the velvet curtain and what they see is a ruin. The building has no back, blinding sunlight almost knocks over the crumbling cavity walls. His mouth agape, he walks over a wooden floor that gives onto rough grassland. A panorama extends out before them: he sees a sun-drenched railway yard stretching the entire breadth of the horizon, its countless parallel rusted tracks overgrown with nettles, dandelions, poppies. Here and there, dusty coal cars and abandoned passenger carriages glisten in the sunlight. You’d almost think it was spring. Beyond it, in the distance, is a gray canal, or maybe it’s a reservoir. On the horizon, a steaming industrial complex with wide gray towers that spew out thick columns of yellow smoke.

  “Allons,” the boy says, followed by something in high-speed French that he does not understand. He is standing on the third tread of a stairway, his body warmer looks like a kind of dress. The eyes roll insistently in their rusted sockets. Only now does he notice a rudimentary upper floor. Above his head is a half-demolished ceiling, loose copper pipes and tattered insulation material stick out of it. Blood is now pouring out of his backpack, it is too warm here, it seeps along the floor planks. “Bouffer.” The boy mimes eating and quickly takes hold of the peeling handrail—with a shock he realizes the other arm is missing. Just under the shoulder is a pale, sewn-up stump. He struggles up the staircase after the boy.

  Upstairs, a man and a girl are seated at a fully set table, eating a sort of dark-red stew. He smells cooking grease. A stout woman crouches before an open oven. The room has no roof, but is furnished nevertheless. There are floor lamps, a dark oil painting hangs on the wall. The boy has already sat down next to the girl, who helps him remove the motorcycle glove. She is the spitting image of Janis, the same cropped hair, the close-set eyes. She stares past him toward the railway yard.

  “I’m Siem,” he says.

  The man—a former Tubantia dean, he sees now—looks up and nods. “Asseyez-vous.” He suddenly realizes how famished he is. He’d like nothing better than a helping of that mashed food. He could almost cry with gratitude.

  He tries to remove the backpack—the bleeding has stopped, maybe there’s no more blood?—to take a place at the table, but he gets the shock of his life. The straps feel different now, they aren’t straps anymore, but arms that resist. Thin fingers clamp themselves to his shoulders. He screams with fright, but the others watch him impassively. No sooner has he wrested the one bony wrist loose than the other hand clings tenaciously to his coat. “It’s me, Simon,” he hears close to his ear. “Your mother. You don’t want to desert your mother, do you, boy?”

  Even before he opens his eyes he realizes where he is: in his car, he is lying on the reclined passenger seat, wedged against his skis. He is in a rest area just outside Lyons. He is shattered. The dashboard clock tells him it is quarter to five in the afternoon. He has slept for forty-five minutes, tops. Dusk is already settling in. His nightmare clings to him for another ten seconds or so, then the previous twenty-four hours jolt through him like an electric shock.

  The effect is dramatic. Of course he didn’t book a hotel, which is why he is trying to get some shut-eye here, to put an end to the night of horrors that was bleeding into the morning. Usually things seem less catastrophic by day. But not now. The night has deepened.

  He pulls the seat upright, crawls over the gear shift to the driver’s side. He clamps himself to the steering wheel. While he is driving he catches his brain doing more or less the same thing; it clamps itself to practicalities, he’s got his brain’s strategy figured out. It neurotically goes through the whole checklist. Is the workshop entirely clean? No blood on the tree stump? Why did he throw away the chipboard at home? Did he put the garbage bags back in the utility room? Had anyone see him walking through Charleroi? Why’d you answer your phone in the middle of those woods? The suspects in the fireworks case were traced by their cell phone calls. For seven years you’re the rector of a technical university and you happily answer your cell phone in those woods?

  These are diversionary tactics. The manic rush he experienced between Charleroi and Lyons, pedal to the metal, 160 kpm the whole way, Mingus at Antibes coming full-blast out of the speakers, his wild, lawless, furious, frenzied mood—it’s gone, evaporated. As though it never was. Within a minute of opening his eyes he feels something opening under his soul, a terrifying void, above which his most inner core, the man he is, the man he has to remain, tries to keep afloat. Thermal.

  His car eats up the asphalt that separates him from normality. He can be in Val-d’Isère in an hour, one more hour, and the sketch that will become the rest of his life can begin. But he’s losing altitude. He tries everything. The elbow, the scraps of flesh—they are spent, they are what they are. What he wants to do in The Hague, that letter to Joni, one more try. Can he call Aaron? Isabelle Orthel, he tries to recall her face—but raw, nocturnal images overrule his haphazard fantasies. That feverish dreaming has exhausted him, in traffic near Lyons he took a shallow curve too wide and nearly hit the guardrail.

  It went all wrong. He botched it. He had shoved the gruesome torso backward onto the tree stump; the head still hung back and off to one side, he had cut away the scarf with shears—enough exposed neck to finish the job. But that rum he’d drunk. The rum, coupled with what he asked of himself. The first swing fell wide. There was more than enough room to hit the pale, outstretched neck, but he wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps he faltered; in any case the blade of the axe landed too high, struck squarely into the lower part of the face. It cut a deep gash in the left corner of the mouth, through the upper lip and a bit of nose—everything gaped, he heard teeth, maybe even molars, breaking off. For a moment the axe appeared to be stuck, lodged deep in the upper jaw. He gasped for air. When he had jiggled the blade loose his arms, his hands, his entire body started to tremble.

  It’s all going so fast. Got to find thermal. Mathematics. Absolute clarity, synchronicity of beauty and insight? The ecstasy it could make him feel. Yellowish bone and flesh. The diagonal gash welled up with fluid: blood, but something grayish too. The Erdős problems he used to have at his fingertips. During recepti
ons when he felt completely lost, during bad movies. When they lived on Bonita Avenue and he’d sit in the YMCA canteen during Janis’s and Joni’s swimming lessons. But now, Erdős ran through his fingers like fine sand. Joni was totally wrapped up in those lessons. What is going on? Not Janis: she’d keep looking over at him, smiling and waving. The sight of the jawbone, the hacked-off tongue, the mangled face. He tried to raise the axe a second time, but the thing weighed 100 kilos, halfway up he had to let it drop back. For a few moments his head was totally empty, until the clattering sound of breaking teeth returned, the strange overtones in the sloshy blow of the axe. The teeth. Scattered everywhere. A pathologist needed only one tiny piece of tooth. Shovel all that crap into the garbage bin, that was his first impulse, he was about to get the spade but was suddenly overcome with panic. Fell to his knees, tore off his gloves and began to grabble wildly in the snow. The pain in his frozen feet.