Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

A few hundred meters on, Sigerius rounded the leafy curve with a collie on a leash. Nauseous with dread, he swerved off the path, coasted behind an oak tree and into some low shrubs, coming to a standstill against a wall of pale-yellow sand. Still straddling the bike, he threw up. And there he stood panting in his shelter, spitting pukey saliva out of his mouth. The man and his dog walked past.

Cycling through the campus was out of the question. There was no way he would climb the cement stairs to the newsroom, that he would enter Blaauwbroek’s office and take a seat across from him. Every Monday morning at exactly the same time, Blaauwbroek walked across the quad to the administrative wing and sat down with the rector for a “press moment.” As long as this tradition continued, and continue it would, he could not face his boss; facing Blaauwbroek meant facing Sigerius, and the same went for every last soul on this goddamn campus, it was one huge pyramid, everyone supported, in one way or another, the capstone — except him. He had toppled off.

He wiped his mouth, pulled himself together, and pushed his bike up the sloping bank to the path. Go back. Just as he was about to set off, he noticed two figures cycling his way from the Enschede side. Murk van der Doelen and Björn Knaak. As soon as he saw them he looked the other way. Paralysis spread through his limbs. Not now. Knaak and Van der Doelen, he used to chat with them at keg parties and at gatherings of the debating society, student organizations and the like — mostly in a fairly drunken state, them, but him too. Contact within these groups was superficial, raucous, razzing, noncommittally chummy. The guys were in the same clique as Joni, he had witnessed them addressing fellow students from atop tables, bars, and other raised surfaces — brash, eloquent oratories, delivered with a panache he abhorred and envied at the same time.

They were the last people in the world he felt like bumping into. These guys had practically turned white from sheer cockiness, as scaly as an out-of-date chocolate bar. Knaak and Van der Doelen lived with about ten other Siemsayers in a swanky town house on the Oldenzaalstraat where they had 24/7 training in frat-boy superiority. He’d been in the villa about five times, mostly to photograph their top-drawerness in the run-up to the annual house ball, a self-satisfied fête “to put some pizzazz into the city.”

By now they recognized him. Murk rode in front: a blond stack of Gouda cheese wheels, slouching on his bike like an old geezer. An expression of mockery spread over his bean-shaped head, which sat on his full-fat chest without any intervention of a neck. He was still standing there, bike in hand, so there was no avoiding them. Murk screeched to a halt.

“Well, if it isn’t Aaron Bever,” said Björn Knaak, coasting toward him until his front tire banged into Aaron’s. Björn was a thickset fellow with a shaved head, mean eyes, and a low-hanging crotch. He was on the rugby team. Aaron had no idea what he studied, but it would have had to be something concrete and easy to grasp. Like Joni, he considered university the instruction manual for the business world.

“Hi guys,” he said softly, and halfheartedly stuck out his hand. Handshakes were part of their obligatory protocol. Oh well, he didn’t really hate them.

Murk van der Doelen took him in from head to toe. “Bever,” he said, “are you dead or what? You look like you died of a lethal fatality.”

Murk studied classical piano, the last thing you’d expect from him. Once, Aaron had heard him give a recital before some student gala: the picture of refinement, Beethoven, Liszt, Prokofiev, his fat fingers danced over the keys, elegant as anything, and afterward a too-long ovation and frilly nibbles on microscopic melba toasts. But deep down, Murk was a lout. Once a year he had his stomach pumped at the Medical Spectrum following the annual beer-drinking tournament in their wood-paneled old boys’ society, a competition involving twenty-four bottles of beer which he, thanks to both technique and character, guzzled faster than anyone else. During the autumn “rush” of aspirant members, Murk defended the long staircase to the bar like a pale-skinned Hulk, cursing and screaming, his blubbery bare torso dripping with deep-frying oil, his arms around the skinny hips and necks of frightened eighteen-year-old runts who had envisioned something completely different.

“I’m on my way home from work,” Aaron said. “I’m kind of under the weather.”

“About-face, Bever,” Björn said. “There’s a party. It’ll perk you up. We’re going to celebrate your bachelorhood.”

“Who says I’m a bachelor?”

“I do,” said Björn. He wiped his hand over his muscled ferret-snout.

“Everyone does,” said Murk.

“Your lady told me herself,” Björn said. “Your ex -lady.”

Actually, I do hate you guys, he thought. Maybe this kind of jerk was the reason he’d fled Utrecht, not a thought he’d ever admitted to Joni, who surely wouldn’t have understood. Since you always saw Björn and Murk together, Joni gave them the amusing nickname “Björk.” “I was at De Kater yesterday, and guess who was there? Björk.” The complete ease with which she had these braggadocios in her pocket.

In fact, Joni knew little about the Utrecht debacle that had been on his mind these last few weeks. He kept all references to it vague. After high school his mother had packed a student cookbook and teddy bear for him, and off he went to study Dutch in Utrecht. It was a catastrophe. He flunked two-thirds of his exams, and due to unfinished hazing business at a fraternity he missed the department introduction, so that he didn’t know anyone who could pilot him through the winter semester. He pined away in the room he rented from his great-aunt in Overvecht, a suburb with asbestos flats and its own station with two sets of rails to lie down on. Utrecht’s nightlife was out of reach; from the sixth floor he stared out over a dark-green ocean of grass, his great-aunt’s granite balcony was the edge of the edge. His insomnia thrived, he often woke at four, four-thirty in the morning, unlocked the door and sat freezing to death on a plastic garden chair for hours on end, until it was time to go to class. He would then grapple his way into town on his great-aunt’s undersized ladies’ bike, performing depressing slaloms through drafty Utrecht-North, which now reminded him of his cycling expeditions through post-explosion Enschede. He noticed from the pillowcases (also borrowed from his great-aunt) that his hair was starting to fall out, just like the bristles of her silky toothbrush that he used on the sly because he kept forgetting to buy his own.

“I talked to her a while ago,” Björn lisped.

“Who?” he asked.

“Who do you think? Your lady, of course. She was in the Hole, a send-off from her debating team.” The Hole: a dank underground drinking cave that literally bored into the Oude Markt. News about Joni in the Hole was always bad news. “One thimble of Bacardi,” drawled Björn, “and she’s pushing her tits up against you. She’ll tell you anything you want to know. And also what you don’t want to know. And forever pressing those party-knockers against you. Pity she’s buggered off to America.”

His big eyes were slanted, the whites were yellow. One way or the other, this ferret never failed to mention Joni’s breasts. Knaak couldn’t not talk about them. Yes, he hated Björn, even more than he hated Murk.

“ ‘I’ll bet you’re a free agent now,’ I say to her. ‘How’d you know that?’ she says. You know how ladies say that at 4 a.m. in the Hole.” Björn put on a girlie voice. “ ‘How’d you know that ?’ ‘Well, I can feel it on two things,’ I say. ‘Two pointy pieces of hard evidence.’ ”