Authors: Peter Buwalda
“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.
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!”
E-mail beats Chinese water torture hands down as an instrument of agony. Not a damn word from her. In the old days you had that thin, blue, pre-gummed airmail stationery that you folded up on itself, licked closed, and, after a refreshing stroll around the corner, deposited in one of those red boxes on legs, and the rest of the week you could lead a normal human existence. He tried to restrain himself, but sent another e-mail anyway. “At least tell me if you went to see Wilbert. How was it?”
Smacking himself on his bald head, he put on a summer jacket and pulled the door shut behind him. He walked down the hill. It was still warm outside, the elder bushes in the gardens, the hawthorns and hornbeams, were starting to thicken. His neighbor across the way, a blond Dutch guy with an assortment of children,
rounded the corner on his old-fashioned racing bike on his way home from work. They nodded at each other. He strode down the sun-flecked Grasmusdreef, followed the shallow curve of the Kasteeldreef, continued for a kilometer, and crossed the railroad tracks. He kicked a stone onto the shoulder. She could skate here too. You didn’t
need
palm trees to skate.
A shortcut through a stretch of trees led him to a path that wound its way under a young but thick canopy of leaves. Mossy air that smelled of damp earth; he listened to his own breathing. After about 100 meters he could see, in a clearing off in the distance, the Roze Molen, a ruin of dirty white pumice that you could indeed call pink. He walked around the mill house and inspected the rusty waterwheel sticking out of the creek, just as it had done for centuries. Until a few years ago the place had been a youth hostel and had still generated its own electricity.
As he strolled across the rough, grassy meadow, he thought of Dr. Haitink:
she
had put him up to it, coming here to live. What else was he to do? Enschede was over and out, everything that bound him to the city had either emigrated, exploded, or—he was convinced—was after his scalp. “Just imagine being in a place where you’re the most content, or once was”: Haitink’s advice for when he got antsy, a psychotherapeutic trick which he grumblingly accepted and which led him straight to this pile of stones.
Right about where he now stood, under the stringy branches of perhaps even this exact same willow, his parents, his brother, and he had stopped, entirely by coincidence, to camp one summer in the 1970s. Early one morning they ended up at this very spot in their raspberry-red Citroën van after fruitless attempts to find a hospital in Brussels. All night long, or so it felt to him, his father had dashed on and off the motorway, constantly getting lost in poorly lit suburbs, their mother groaning next to him in the passenger
seat, while he and Sebastian sat silently in the back, staring at the impressive lump on her shoulder. They had left Venlo the previous evening, destination: campground in Brittany. He and Sebastian were expected to sleep in that clattering tin can, but instead they spent the entire trip teasing and taunting each other, bickering, hitting, spitting, until he ripped a fistful of pages from his brother’s library book and their mother lost her temper and attempted to smack him with a backward fling of her arm. Dislocated shoulder. She wailed like a banshee. His fault.