Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

First his hand goes hot, then cold and clammy, his sweat soaks into the paper of the envelope. So his wife does not think Mr. F.(ucking) Wanker lives here. The urge to run to the utility room and embrace her, confess everything, say he’s sorry, and at the same time the fear that she could just walk in on him — he’s paralyzed. He stares at himself in the photo in Marseilles: a hunk cradling a tree trunk. You won’t get me, pal .

He presses the envelope against his chest, goes into the bathroom, sinks down onto the toilet. While he lets his bladder go he tears it open at the bottom, because the top is sealed with wide brown tape. His trembling hand pulls out terrible things: black fishnet stockings, red panties, a clump of cotton fabric, a wadded-up handkerchief— his handkerchief, he sees through white lightning bolts of shock. The cotton feels crusty in the middle, maybe from snot, but probably from something else, something that infuriates and saddens him at the same time. A hard object slides out of the envelope, falls to the rubber toilet mat with a loud tock . It is a lifelike black fake penis.

He exhales deeply, flabbergasted, furious. And afraid. The brazenness shocks him. He gets up, sits back down. “Asshole,” he mumbles. This is taking things pretty far, he thinks, it’s taking things to their limit. Was that jerk up in the attic? He can hardly imagine it. When he says: you have no evidence, then the kid gives this as an answer? Was he really at the Vluchtestraat? Or did this packet come from … from Aaron ? No. No? He just doesn’t fucking know. Did Aaron let Wilbert in? Or did the lunatic break in?

He picks up the veined dildo from the tiled floor and tries in vain to break it in half. Then he wraps it up in toilet paper, in the naïve assumption that he can flush it down the john, and the rest too, all of it, get rid of it — but he reconsiders. Tineke will wonder what happened to the envelope. He’s going to have to watch his step.

Only now does he look in the envelope, something is still wedged in the far corner, a letter, he fishes it out, lined notebook paper, he unfolds it. Crude handwriting that corresponds with the jagged letters on the envelope. “Withdraw 100,000 guilders, wanker,” he reads. “Show some ministerial accountability.” He is instructed to go to the beach at Scheveningen—“I’ll make it easy for you, wanker, right near your jerk-off den”—on Thursday, December 14th, at 8 p.m. and bury a bag containing a hundred 1,000-guilder notes at the edge of the dunes directly across from coastal marker 101. “If the money’s not there then some pictures are going to get sent around.”

Again he breaks out in a sweat, out of anger, but also out of nervousness bordering on panic. Damn it, this isn’t just harassment anymore, it’s blackmail — high-stakes blackmail. He is being shaken down by his own son. Shouldn’t he make a beeline for the police? Yes. And yet … no . His calves harden, he clenches his teeth until they almost crack. So this is what blackmail feels like.

He has to deal with this shrewdly and methodically. Calm down a bit. He can’t go into the living room like this, carrying this envelope. Upstairs, to his study. He hurriedly shoves the contents back into the bubble wrap. He’ll take all the mail up with him, stash the envelope there. He listens for a sign of Tineke; only once he’s sure the coast is clear does he flush and sneak out of the bathroom. He grabs the stack of letters and magazines and bounds up the stairs.

His study is chilly, he sits down, pushes the regular mail to the corner of the desk. Before he locks the poisoned package in one of the green steel drawers he removes the blackmail note, steers his eyes once more through the brief message. At the words “ministerial accountability,” doubt sneaks up on him again: is this terminology that his son would use? And: does he have such disdain for his son that he doubts whether the kid knows the term that is, after all, his job description? Yes, he does.

He folds the note and shoves it deep into his wallet. With a nominal sigh of relief he turns the key and for a few moments stares out into space. The small windowpane above his desk is pitch-black against its chrome-green frame. He swivels his chair to face into the room, but what should be familiar and trusted, the only square meters in the world that are his exclusive domain, his cave, his thinking space — this very space reminds him of his tormentor. That snake slept here. The serpent he flung out of the window with a stick. Now, ten years later, here he sits, sweaty, stressed, strung out. Now that bastard is letting him feel what power is.

Enough. Basta. He takes a deep breath, slaps his thigh with a flattened hand. He has to tell Tineke something at least. Tell her some or other half-truth, this is the moment. This time it’s an envelope full of underwear, next time it’ll be the lunatic in the flesh — and what then? His twisting and scheming has already put Aaron in danger, which in itself ticks him off, his reflex is to protect Aaron: in the insane soap opera his life has become, he has to protect his near-son-in-law from his son ? It’s time for a confession.

She’s not downstairs. That usually means she’s in her workshop at the back of the yard. In the kitchen he drinks a glass of water. He gazes indecisively into the darkness beyond the utility room, switches on the outside light and walks through the overgrown winter grass where, he sees, thistles are growing. Halfway there he can already hear the buzz of the circular table saw and the vacuum. He opens the heavy door and remains standing in the bricked opening. About twenty meters away, under fluorescent lights suspended on thin cables, his wife is piloting a plank of wood along the blade. She does not notice him, she’s wearing hearing protectors.

How to begin? He inhales the pleasant, constructive scent of freshly planed wood. He is grateful she doesn’t notice him. As always, he admires her creativity, his wife thinks up something, sketches it, lets it materialize from her fingers, sells it. As he watches her — she is concentrated, focused, swift; her overweight body seems to work to her advantage among the machines, as though it were a precondition of her mastery — the urgency ebbs from him like a receding tide.

Should he approach her? Tap her on the shoulder, honey, come sit down, there’s something I have to tell you. What touches him at this exact moment, this impossible moment, is her cheerful pragmatism in standing by him all those years whenever it came to his son. As catastrophes small and large piled up around the boy, she was always the one who put things in perspective, she was the one who offered solutions, saw points of view without which he’d have sunk into something that might have turned into a depression. Where on earth would he have been without her? She’s the first one to dismiss that thought, sweep it off the table, just like she does with the curly wood shavings now; he sincerely believes that without this woman he’d still be lying on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, plastered leg in traction for eternity, with a beard reaching all the way to the Willem van Noortplein, wallowing in his thwarted Olympic ambitions.

For months there was no getting through to him. One look at his judo suit and the tears welled up in his eyes. Sometimes he and Margriet heard her bursts of laughter, loud, light, irresistibly cheerful, right through the kitchen floor, straight through their own sullen, disgruntled silence. A combustion engine had moved in under them, a female force that made their windowpanes rattle in their sashes. After he had that accident with the scooter and Margriet, by necessity, went out to work, and the woman from downstairs had started making ever-so-friendly house calls, from that moment on he forgot his wife and little son. He has to admit it. They ceased to exist. He lay on his cot, and next to him sat Tineke.