Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

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 the 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.