Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

With the stocking in his right hand, he gropes with his free hand in the drawer until he finds a pale pink elastic thong. Gulping back the tears, he steps into it, pulling it along his rounded judo calves and over his hairy thighs. The small triangle glides over his testicles, forcing his member up against his belly.

“There.” His voice sounds heavy and close by.

He inserts his left arm, his arm of choice, into the stocking until it reaches past his elbow. The fascination. Perhaps it is the delicacy. The gossamer fabric that is more womanly than the woman herself. He crosses the bloodred floor to the shoe rack and drops to his knees. Eighteen pairs, he counts, each one more tasteful than the other. No cheap junk, no sleazy overkill. Stylish, feminine. He doesn’t even bother with a photo series without them. In fact, stark naked doesn’t interest him. He doesn’t really even care for bodies. In that sense he is still a boy of twelve. He removes the shoes, one pair at a time, from the rack, arranges them around him as though they were Märklin model railway cars—

He desperately needs to pee. For a moment he tries to ignore the pressure on his bladder, but no, it’s the implacable Jim Beam. He’s on his feet, hurries down the groaning ladder, goes back down the stairs, his bare feet slapping against the steps. He ducks into the lavatory just off the passage. Evolutionary oversight: it’s either urinate or ejaculate. To make himself go limp he studies the calendar that hangs next to the roll of toilet paper, The Super-Scrub Household Calendar it’s called, nothing you’d expect Aaron to have, he looks up his own birthday, “SIGERIUS” is written in what must be Aaron’s handwriting. As soon as he has softened slightly, his urine begins to flow, the thong still snugly around his testicles.

Before he’s even finished his penis bounces back up like a spring, thwack, against his belly. He hears a nearby sound that makes his blood run cold. The jangle of keys, a lock opening— the door . For a moment he feels only ice, his blood has frozen in his veins. Shoes scuffing against a threshold. He has to brace himself against both walls to keep from fainting. The neighbor. Tineke. Aaron’s parents.

“Gosh, lots of post.” Joni .

In a reflex he switches off the light. His mouth wide open, as though in the pitch-blackness he hears with his mouth: footsteps. Someone brushes against the lavatory door. Cramp in his chest, he’s having a heart attack. He’s dying . He seizes his penis, mortified, he grasps it tight, if he lets go he’ll disintegrate.

A door creaks open, the living room door? She goes into the room. Then: stronger footsteps, wiping feet. A hacking cough. Aaron . Every sound pierces through him. He’s caught in a tiled trap: intestines are primitive brains, Aaron’s and Joni’s know they are home and will be wanting to relieve themselves. Aaron is approaching . But Aaron, too, disappears into the living room. He wants to exhale, but instead he breathes in even deeper and kneads his erection with his free hand, slick with sweat. Think , damn it. Nothing comes.

Run for it. You have to run.

Someone turns on the television, TV-station sounds, the voice of a commentator. “Let’s unload the car now.” Aaron. He ejaculates. A stabbing wave surges through his back. Footsteps in the passage. Warm semen falls onto his left foot, his own scent. Silence, then footsteps again, they’re going outside. They’re out at the car .

Run for it. Now is the moment. Go, now . The only way is through the kitchen. He opens the lavatory door and with three giant steps bounds into the living room.

“I’ll give you a hand, honey.” Joni, standing at the dining table, her back to him, examining something, a stack of envelopes and newspapers. Her neck is tanned, her pinned-up hair blonder than usual. The curtain has been pulled open. The room is bathed in devastatingly clear evening light.

“There’s a postcard from your brother.”

His teeth chatter. His daughter turns, the muscles in her suntanned face tighten, then slacken — and then shoot every which way. Her beautiful face dissolves. Joni herself collapses, she literally collapses. He sees himself in her grimace: naked, disheveled, one arm stuck in a nylon stocking. A raw scream comes splintering out of her contorted mouth.

“No,” he shouts. “Not—”

“ Not what, Dad? ”

They are in each other’s nightmare.

The backyard, he has to get away, he can’t just stand here like this. Joni is sitting on the floor, her hands clamped like blinders against her face. She is shaking, her whole body shudders.

“It’s not what you think,” he says. And: “Well, that’s it then.”

He strides toward the light. He walks in a straight line, his body accelerates steadily. He is flying. His knee, and immediately thereafter his overheated forehead, are the first to strike the wall of light and air. A hand of glass pushes him back. The air is a glass wall — but even a wall cannot stop him. The sliding door gives a little, recoils and shatters like a tinkling waterfall; glass showers over his bare shoulders. Needles. Knives. He walks on, keeps on walking. Without slowing down he tramples through the high, lush grass. Curves off to one side, soft, loose earth under the soles of his feet. He hits something hard, something crashes to the ground. He writhes his bleeding body through the mist of conifers.

Spring even came to Linkebeek. The pivot window above his desk was opened all the way, a daddy longlegs stumbled inside. Aaron swiveled his desk chair in synch with the insect; it bumped into the ceiling, banged a couple of times against the molding where the room divider used to be, darted under the obstacle into the back room, and fluttered along the shelves packed with books he’d bought here and those he had managed to rescue from the Vluchtestraat incinerator.

He spun back and checked his e-mail. Still nothing. According to the travel alarm clock next to the monitor it was already past 10 a.m. in Los Angeles. Ducks quacked outside, he looked up, the church tower was now only barely visible through the light-green crown of the maple tree in his front yard. The mild weather tallied with his mood. He awoke mid-morning to an uncommon optimism charging through his nervous system. He frequently caught himself pondering Joni’s life in California. The handful of messages he had received from her elicited in him a mixture of wistfulness and desire, a feeling he hadn’t foreseen when he sent that first feverish e-mail. What was it exactly? A sentimental nostalgia for their long-gone Enschede time, but also some undefined, expectant yearning — both sentiments, he realized, as pitiful as they were absurd. But he couldn’t help himself, he kept wondering how Joni was doing in that immense city, what her job was exactly in that Frisbee factory of hers, what kind of friends she had, where she lived, in short: what kind of life did she lead now? For all these years, self-preservation had held him in check, but he could no longer resist: he looked her up on the Internet. He typed her name into three different search engines, wrung the whole Web inside out, but came up practically empty-handed. The only hits included a couple of familiar Tubantia issues, the archive pages of her student club, and some PDFs of McKinsey reports she had written for firms like eBay and IBM. But these were all from 2001 and 2002. She wasn’t on Facebook, did not have a LinkedIn account. There was a Joni Sigerius who traded on eBay, mostly shoes and dresses, some of which he thought he recognized and whose photos he copied to his computer desktop. The only other relatively recent “Joni Sigerius” hit was on a mile-long membership list of an inline skate club in Santa Monica. And that was it.