Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Murk chortled softly. Björn, who only laughed either out of strategic considerations or schadenfreude, put on a serious face. Aaron felt, to his surprise, no jealousy, did not taste the battery acid he used to taste, nor the explosive, childish rage over a pair of nipples poking into the wrong male body — only loathing. What he’d have liked most of all was to tell these two he was a millionaire, and which tits had made him just that. To check himself, he held the wide point of Björn’s necktie between his fingers. The blue and orange tie was knotted in a full Windsor, which according to Ian Fleming was the mark of a cad.

“Paws off the tie, geek,” said Van der Doelen, and wound up as if to slug him. Aaron decided to play along and let go. These ties were a symbol for the outside world that Knaak and Van der Doelen were officers of the Student Union, the crowning glory of their Tubantia years. Murk especially had a knack for looking back on his student years like an honorary minister, a twenty-three-year-old assessing his past over a good cigar. Of course it was Sigerius, as always, who had put the crown on his head. Three years ago there was a sudden and urgent need for an organization that would “steer all student activism.” A student union, after the Anglo-American model. He had seen how Sigerius had screwed another administrative layer onto Enschede’s student life, just like you sealed the lid onto a jar of canned peas. His hidden agenda was to counteract the exodus from campus. Students who were initially drawn to the compact, friendly, over-organized campus, usually thanks to enthusiastic parents, were now taking rooms in downtown Enschede, in a real student house near the bars and fraternities on the Grote Markt. It was 2000: you couldn’t lock up Dutch college students in the sticks anymore. But now that once-provincial area was packed with hundreds of millions worth of real estate: student flats, faculty housing, a cafeteria and restaurant, a supermarket, an infirmary, a dentist, barber shop, swimming pool, library, pubs, theatres, basement party rooms, athletic fields, works of art — Tubantia was the campus. The Student Union was to be the engine behind it. Sigerius budgeted a heap of money for it, and recruited Björk to mind the shop.

“Let’s go, pussypants,” Murk said. “Your daddy-in-law will be there too.”

Aaron shook his head.

Björn laughed at something, but the sound was drowned out by the rustling of so many leaves surrounding them. “What,” he said. “Sigerius is your pal, isn’t he? Or are you chicken?”

Aaron suddenly went red-hot, the air that closed in on him felt like a furnace, it could ignite at any moment. He was ashamed , he was overcome by an explosive shame. But what for? From Knaak’s and Van der Doelen’s mugs you could see he had a strange look about him. His embarrassment had nothing to do with Joni’s breasts in the Hole, nor with the fact that he had wholeheartedly distributed them throughout the world, boobs that would bob like driftwood around the Web for years to come — no, he was ashamed because the guys were right: he was chicken.

“What’s with that Student Union?” he asked off the cuff. “It sounds so namby-pamby. In Utrecht it wouldn’t ever get off the ground, in a real varsity town the frats wouldn’t let themselves be bossed around by some student union. I thought that student associations didn’t give a damn about the university.”

As usual, he was only parroting Etienne Vaessen. To his friend, who had been something of a big shot on the Utrecht frat scene, he defended the campus tooth and nail, but as soon as he stood at the bar with guys like this he became a mini-Etienne and did his Utrecht veteran act. Sometimes he couldn’t resist lying outright that he was a fratter, and if they pressed him he would bluff his way forward, delving into repertoire borrowed from Etienne. “A real frat lampoons the university admin,” he said.

“Your point being?” asked Björn. As opposed to Murk, who was at a total loss for words, and whose body hung like a cheap sausage over his handlebars, Björn sprang to attention, his legs spread like a commando, the crossbar of his sticker-covered bike in his low crotch. He wore neatly polished, snug-fitting brogues straight out of the student handbook. His weird, glowing snake-eyes glared belligerently.

“Real fratters don’t give a shit about how their university’s run,” Aaron said nervously. “They just do whatever they goddamn please.”

Before Björn responded, he slid his pronounced lips up and down over that big set of teeth of his. “You hear that, Van der Doelen? Bever here is in the know. Now that Sigerius has dropped him like a piece of dog shit he’s going to tell us just how things should go.” He shook his disgruntled ferret-head. “The school newspaper photographer feels that we should do whatever we goddamn please.” He looked straight at Aaron, mockingly. “For years he’s got his head up Sigerius’s ass and now he thinks were ass-lickers. You hear that?”

“I hear it,” Murk said earnestly. “Big talker in the bar, Siem this, Siem that.”

His nausea returned. He might be five years older than these guys, but the world started spinning as though he were on a carnival ride, the rustling treetops became a green morass that whispered to him like a theatre prompter. Go on, tell them .

“Sigerius is leaving,” he said. It sounded raspy; he cleared his throat. “He’s through with your campus. He’s going to be the new Minister of Education. I’ve known for months.”

“Bullshit, Bever,” said Björn. “Where were you at Sigerius’s barbecue, anyway? Your bosom buddy doesn’t even invite you around anymore.”

“He’s going to be a Cabinet minister. Still a secret, FYI.”

Björn sniffed and spat into the bushes. “Now that his lady’s off fucking Jim in America—” he said to Murk.

“Jeff,” said Murk.

“Now that his lady’s off fucking Jim and Jeff in America,” Björn conceded, “and Daddy can’t bear the sight of butt-kisser anymore, butt-kisser’s gonna spread some secrets.”

Aaron wanted to respond, but his stomach beat him to it. It clenched like a fist, so that the remaining gall made its way up his esophagus. Yellow bile oozed out of his mouth and dribbled over his handlebars. Björn yanked his bike backward.

“You’ve been boozing, Bever,” Murk said. “Should’ve said so earlier.” He laughed uneasily. “Go curl up in your basket, punk.”

Björn, meanwhile, was back on his bike, and before he rode off he gave Aaron’s baggage carrier a firm kick.

Brilliant June sunlight carved the linoleum floor of the former classroom into slices. We both sat looking at the grainy, glossy wooden crucifix on the white stucco wall, so colossal and three-dimensional that it persistently caught your eye. Jesus as hand-hewn athlete in the romantic Tyrol shepherd-with-flock style I recalled from ski vacations in Val Gardena. Every drop of sap would ooze out like blood.

“You hang him up?” I asked to break the silence. Wilbert seemed better at silences than I was. We sat opposite each other, me on an uncomfortable wooden chair, him sprawled on a formless thrift-store armchair covered in light-brown patchwork leather.

“Nah, the Romans did,” he answered.

I didn’t even realize he’d made a joke, that’s how nervous I was. I can barely remember what we talked about for the first half hour, or should I say: what I talked about, agitated, high-speed, haphazard, like a wound-up toy mouse. Wilbert, cracking his knuckles, asking the occasional question. The whole time I saw myself through his eyes. I regretted my coquettish miniskirt, I detested my droning account of my internship in California, I cursed the Quote I’d bought at the train station newsstand and that had slipped out of the bag.