Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Strange. You had to pretty much encase yourself in lead these days to avoid showing up on the Internet — even a recluse like Aaron had his own website. For someone like Joni, this was totally out of character. She had been an Internet fanatic, even considered herself a pioneer — and wasn’t she?

Her conspicuous absence fed his fantasies. Did this say something about her present state of affairs? That job at the Frisbee factory was obviously no great shakes, it appeared that, for whatever reason, her brilliant career had fizzled. He envisioned her in a part-time desk job in the accounts department. Maybe that was a pity, maybe not.

And thus an image of Joni gradually took shape in his head, a Joni who, like him (but in her own buoyant way), had meandered off course; he imagined, not without a certain pleasure, that she and Stol had got caught up in a dramatic divorce case, and she was stuck, penniless and thwarted in her career, in a drafty corner of Los Angeles, probably with a couple of fatherless children in her charge. On the other hand, wouldn’t she also have cash left over from their website, or else from the Barbara Ann? Who knows, maybe she blew it all. Unlike him, not everyone buried themselves years before they were actually dead. She’d probably lived the high life in San Francisco, invested in the wrong Internet companies, gambled away millions on Wall Street—

Or was she with somebody after all? Maybe she’d married and taken her husband’s last name. He reread her e-mails for the umpteenth time, but besides Stol there was no mention of men whatsoever.

He’d been so stupid. Last night he woke with a start from a nightmare that took place in a contorted Enschede. At the beginning of the oppressive little saga, Wilbert was his brother and they shared an apartment somewhere, don’t ask why, but soon enough he had turned into Wilbert himself, and he rode a motorcycle down a long, lonely wooded path until he came upon a funeral in Venlo, something like that, he’d forgotten it already. Regrettably, he’d jumped out of bed and, still in a woozy haze, switched on the computer. In reckless abandon he foolishly related the dream in an e-mail to Joni. “Any word from Wilbert?” he inquired, and closed his letter with a semi-accusation: “Did you go see him, back then? Probably did.”

This morning was devoted to damage control. Before breakfast — it was still only two-thirty in the morning in L.A. — he sent Joni an e-mail that at the time seemed relaxed and nonchalant. “Hi ex, it’s springtime here in Linkebeek, it’s not a village but a forest of weeping willows. You’ve got palm trees there, right? Send me a coconut and I’ll plant it here.” And maybe it was relaxed, but then, two hours later, he sent another, weightier message. “I’ve been thinking a lot about us the past few weeks,” he typed. “It’s weird, Joni, if you think of what happened to everyone. Your father, of course, to start with. You there, me here … Your mother remarried. I’m curious how you look back on it all. I’d like to catch up, either here or there on your turf! And vis-à-vis Wilbert: I’m just curious. Love, Aaron.” And meanwhile he’d been waiting for hours, first when morning had reached L.A., and still now. From 7 a.m. her time onward — maybe she checked her mail before going to the office — he refreshed his in-box incessantly, like a snake charmer. He swung between embarrassment and euphoria over his rash suggestion of going to visit her, he alternately blushed and rejoiced, while the knuckles in his index finger, his whole hand, the tendons to his right shoulder, had gone into a cramp as a result of his relentless mouse-clicking. It was nearly afternoon there already.

What was he hoping for? An unexpected twist. That Joni would take the bait, invite him there, or better yet: say that she’d be traveling to the Netherlands shortly, who knows why, maybe she’d reconnected with her mother, he had brought them closer together. And that she would offer, perhaps out of gratitude, to come to Linkebeek. There was much more behind that optimism, he felt it in his index finger, which by now was the same white plastic as his mouse; he secretly hoped that she also thought about him , that she enjoyed pondering his life and that she would also consider—

He got up and walked across the room, stood staring into space by the bookcase. He hoped that, for Joni, the idea of trying to get back together was not only special, but, as he also felt, meaningful. He breathed deeply. The mad but magnificent notion of he and Joni building a normal life together, the life a thirty-eight-year-old man is supposed to have, gave him a smoldering feeling in his stomach, he would like nothing more than to jump up and run outside, down the hill, and charge into the street with outstretched arms, sucking up all the oxygen he could. It seemed so … natural. He was euphoric, it gave him a, how could you put it, an “all’s well that ends well” feeling. Who else but Joni was capable of saving him?

The daddy longlegs skittered past him; he grabbed it out of midair. He skated back to the window in his stocking feet and released the wriggler from his cupped fist onto the open window.

He had, in fact, already forsworn love. He was capable of living on his own, but “on his own” in effect translated into solitary, alone, lonely, abandoned. There had been girlfriends after Joni, certainly, he had tried, but while falling in love was asking for psychosis, cohabitation guaranteed it. A recipe for disaster. Lieke, a Flemish woman — a gem of a lady, civil servant at the European Commission — had lived with him for most of 2005. But she was stingy, pathologically tightfisted. So much so that she would shout “faucet off!” from their bed while he brushed his teeth, so penny-pinching that she checked the supermarket receipts to see if he had really bought the bottom-shelf brand, the B brands, no, the C brands. And as he stood at the stove warming up one of those Albanian delicacies she would crouch down next to him and glare suspiciously under the frying pan and invariably turn down the gas. She couldn’t stand it that he didn’t have a job. “I’m a fucking millionaire,” he said when he walked into a restaurant without first studying the prices on the menu. “That’s not the point ,” she whispered, “I’m simply not prepared to shell out thirty euros for a slab of meat.” She’d rather piss all over the cellar stairs herself than spend money on a cat.

They quarreled about it. Fights about money which for him, as a matter of fact, did grow on trees. These shouting matches made him anxious, caused him sleepless nights, and the worse he slept the more anxious he became. After a few weeks it finally happened: he got up, left the house, and wandered through the undulating, tree-lined streets of Linkebeek, along the hedges and shrubbery, through the Tiefschnee of autumn leaves in all shades of red and yellow. He imagined they were euro banknotes. He dived into the leaf heaps in gutters and along sidewalks, laughing and crying at so much wealth — look, Lieke, look! He recognized the president of the European Central Bank behind the wheel of a Volvo station wagon and chased him for half a block. For two days and two nights he was AWOL, wandering aimlessly through the southern woods and estates in a hallucinatory frenzy: terrified of being robbed, terrified of being murdered, tortured, devoured. For a full twenty-four hours he hid in a ditch filled with rotting euros, his shoulders heaving in terror. On the third day he returned, gaunt, bruised, smeared from head to toe with blood and mud, hacking like a dog. He got the wheelbarrow from their shed and shoveled it full of cash. He wheeled it into the living room and dumped his riches out over the oak floor. “MONEY!” he screamed from the bottom of the stairs. “MONEY!”