Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Tell me, Aaron,” she said one morning not long before the breakthrough, “where does it come from, your boundless ability to look up to people? You talk about Sigerius as though he’s the Dalai Lama. Do you look up to me?” You? he thought, offended— you I find hot, but he did not respond. “Who were you actually in love with?” she continued — a taunting, even hurtful question that he eventually, after an abashed silence, answered with a command: go buy Who’s Who in the Netherlands at Broekhuis bookstore and read for yourself about your Dalai Lama.

That Who’s Who was a Volkskrant pamphlet that had been on sale for a year now. Haitink nodded, she knew the title, it was a booklet listing the achievements of the 100 most influential Dutch figures of the twentieth century. Sure enough, the next week she had it with her, still in its brown Broekhuis wrapping paper, and he watched as she pored over the pages that extolled Siem Sigerius and his mathematics, an entry bookended by laudations to the somewhat older Ruud Lubbers and the somewhat younger Freek de Jonge. The article was written in layman’s language; the book’s science editor portrayed Sigerius as a colorful late bloomer with a curious start as a world-class judoka, and thereafter zoomed in on his brilliant scientific career. It mentioned the often spectacular proofs the “mature student” Sigerius produced for various decades-old theories in all corners of mathematics, and how he managed to transform his initial reputation as a Houdini-like “problem solver” into one of a major mathematical theorist. Of course, the article cited, albeit superficially, the “knot theory” breakthrough that had earned Sigerius his Fields Medal.

While Haitink perched on the tiny seat of her severe stainless-steel chair to read the pamphlet, Aaron kept a close eye on the minute movements of her mouth, how it pursed and then relaxed, little grains of lipstick stuck in the wrinkles of her lips. She sat upright and rotated her ankle, and with it a sleek Parisian pump. This’ll teach her, he thought. In the atypical quiet of the therapy room he let his mind wander back to when he asked Sigerius to explain the deal with those knots.

“What do you want to know?” Sigerius had asked.

“Y’know — everything.”

“But it doesn’t interest you.”

“Sure it does,” he insisted.

“It’s either bafflingly complicated or childishly simple.”

“Give me simple.”

“OK. For years I’ve locked myself up with circles randomly scattered in a three-dimensional space. Still interested?”

“Now more than ever.”

“All right. Imagine tying a knot in a shoelace and stitching the ends together so you’ve got a closed circle. Only then do you have a mathematical knot. Got it? Two apparently different knots are identical if you can change the one into the other without having to cut the shoelace. The number of unique knots might be limitless, we don’t know. On the other hand, half the time, outwardly different knots are secretly identical. How do you tell one from the other? For sixty years, research kept hitting a brick wall. And then someone came up with a polynomial, an algebraic formula you can use to give each knot its own identity. That someone was me. Can’t make it any simpler than that.” And then, as though the knowledge had been successfully transferred, he scribbled the formula in the margin of a newspaper, as fluently as a medium, a braid of digits, letters, brackets, and Masonic symbols.

As things tend to go with revolutionary mathematics, the Sigerius Polynomial (as the strand was officially called) turned out not only to be indispensable right down to the hair follicles of mathematics, but also for unraveling the structure of plastic polymers, for DNA research, for the string theory, in other words: the theory of the universe.

“So you’re a kind of Einstein,” he said.

“Yeah, if Liberace is a kind of Beethoven.”

When Haitink was finished reading, she clapped Who’s Who in the Netherlands shut and ran her hand pensively over the cover. “I hate math,” she said. Sigerius used to blow his top when someone with a good set of brains uttered this kind of nonsense, and was proud of it to boot. “What they meant to say is that they’re warm-blooded ,” he’d growl, fidgeting furiously with his ears, “artistic, spi-ri-tu-al, more a ‘people person’ than a ‘number cruncher.’ Meanwhile, Aaron, they fall for all sorts of pseudo-scientific, semireligious bullshit because they can’t make heads or tails of simple numerical relationships. They are stupid, Aaron. Stupid . They want to be stupid. They hate math but looooove Uri Geller. I’ll show you how you can beat the pants off that Uri Geller with a simple probability calculation.”

He looked at Haitink. “And Sigerius hates me,” he said.

She eyed him, frowning. “I know you think so. But why?”

• • •

Why did he confide in her? Because she spoke the language of the civilized world, the language of the campus that had chucked him out? Because in that godawful Tulip there wasn’t another normal woman to be found? (The women in his section had forearms as gouged as the cutting board his grandfather used to slice salami, they claimed to be Saddam Hussein’s mistress, but then on CIA directives, of course, and with orders to abscond with the regime’s laser-powered weapons, so don’t get worked up — but still.) Or did he realize that it was simply her professional confidentiality, that in fact he sat here talking to no one , to a kind of ball-shooter, to a mercenary who would ignore him entirely if they ran into each other later in the supermarket?

No, he trusted her because she laughed at his jokes; when he said something witty a smile would pass across her bony, wrinkled face, not out of indulgence, or worse, out of pity, but because her clinical poker face was simply not wisecrack-proof. If on a good day he’d refound something of his old frivolity, he could crack her up, which made her sixteen instead of sixty-one. And for him, a complete and utter wreck whose self-respect lay like a deflated soccer ball on the clinic lawn, her giggly abandon had a greater healing power than her entire arsenal of psychotherapeutic gimmicks. Although only his nostrils quivered when she asked him that question — why do you think Sigerius hates you? — internally he sprinted as fast as he could to the edge of the long-kept secret, pushed off from the dusty sand and leapt, limbs flailing, over the cliff of profound silence he had managed to maintain for four long years.

“Because I am his daughter’s pimp,” he said. “That’s why.”

Haitink, as he recalled, did not bat an eye. She never batted an eye, she was trained not to bat an eye. With her thumb and index finger she pinched a piece of fluff from her woolen leggings. “Tell me about it,” she said.

He told her, very concisely, about how he and Joni had run an amateur sex site from the end of 1996 until their unmasking in 2000, a paid website for which he had taken the photos, week in week out, photos exposing every square centimeter of Joni’s body, in the most titillating settings possible: to put it bluntly, porn. And sometimes a little bit of himself. “A little bit of yourself?” asked Haitink, pulling a quasi-alarmed face.

Yeah, well, whatever. He made his confession without going into the gory details, after a four-year vow of silence it was all he could do to force out the basic facts. She had questions, and as always she played the certified question mark, she wanted to know exactly what they were talking about; he saw she forgot to take notes.

“Was it your idea?” she asked.

“Yes. No, both of us,” he answered, not even stopping to realize that it had been her idea.