Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“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 used 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.