Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

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.