The blinking dot now reappears on the far side of the trestle.
“Where’s he going?” asks the colleague who was just outside for a smoke.
Then the bell rings. “I bet that’s my pizza,” the other man says.
For a moment they stand there, wavering. Just how serious is this? It’s not the first time someone with an ankle monitor has entered forbidden territory. Nine times out of ten, they turn around and go back after a minute or so, to the area where they’re allowed to be. In the background, we hear the opening jingle for the weekend soccer recap on Studio Sport. The timing is perfect: at the very start of the first highlight, a slice of pizza can move from box to mouth.
I stop, turn around, walk back to the trestle.
“Look, he’s realized, he’s going back.” The bell rings again, more impatiently this time. “Could you answer that? It’s my pizza.”
The blinking dot disappears beneath the bridge, disappears completely.
“What do we do? Report it? Send a car out?”
“Hold on a minute. If he comes back out on the right side, it’s a false alarm. They don’t like that much.”
I wait under the bridge, I count to twenty, more or less as long as it would take me to come back out on the right side again. But above all I wait to hear if they’ve done anything yet. If I can hear a siren in the distance.
If I do, I’ll call it off. Tomorrow is another day. But if things stay quiet, I’ll wait those twenty seconds and race out from under the bridge, into the new neighborhood. I’ve already looked at it at least a hundred times on Google Street View — this neighborhood wasn’t there yet when I disappeared from public life — and I could find the door to her building in a flash, even blindfolded. I figured it out. Less than two minutes. I’m an athletic person, I’ve been training, I stopped smoking ten years ago. Within ninety seconds, I’ll be at the door. I’ll ring the bell — not hers, the neighbors’ on the floor above or below her.
Hello?
It’s your neighbor from the ground floor, they left a package with me yesterday, it’s for you.
At a household appliance store on Linnaeusstraat, I checked out a few of the carving knives in the display case. If I wanted a better look, I’d have to ask the salesgirl to unlock the case for me.
I was going to have to rely on my own strength — I could do it with my bare hands if necessary. And maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I thought about how I would put my foot in the door, the panic in her eyes.
Just want to talk to you for a moment, I’d say. If you’re smart, you’ll keep calm and let me in.
At the stationery outlet a little farther along, I bought a cardboard mailer and a big fat marker. The mailer was one of those you have to put together yourself; I stopped in a doorway on Hogeweg and folded it together, wrote her name and address in block letters on the label.
Back in my day, there wasn’t any fountain at the corner of Hogeweg and Linnaeusparkweg. On that corner, there used to be what the people called a seamy bar. Now there’s a patio restaurant where mothers sit drinking café lattes while their children shriek and splash in the fountain.
Café latte, another one of those expressions. In my day, the year I was sentenced, they were still just calling it a coffee with hot milk.
In fact, restraining orders can be a good idea. What I’m saying, I guess, is that I’m not opposed to restraining orders in principle. They can keep you safe from certain things, they can protect you from yourself, like an ignition interlock in a car. If you can’t get the car started, then you won’t hit a tree on the first curve or cream somebody at a crosswalk.
What I hadn’t counted on was that the ankle monitor would warn not only the imaginary crew of the ankle-monitor tracking room, but that it would warn me too. Halfway down Copernicusstraat, about a block and half from the crossing with Archimedesweg, it started buzzing. Not only buzzing: it actually vibrated. It went off, like an alarm clock.
“Fucking shit!” I said, and picked up the pace. Maybe they’d told me about this, maybe they hadn’t — in any case, I couldn’t remember. The deeper I went into the area covered by the restraining order, the louder the buzzing (and the vibrating). Under the trestle, it buzzed and vibrated almost nonstop.
I picked up the pace a little more; by the time I came out from under the bridge, I was sprinting. The sidewalk went up an incline there. From Google Street View, I recognized the new glass building at the corner of Archimedesweg and Carolina MacGillavrylaan. Like I said, this neighborhood hadn’t been built yet when I went into the slammer. Back then, the only thing along the Ringvaart, across from Flevopark, were some garden plots and a research lab where they did tests with radioactive material. Kids I went to grade school with used to claim they’d seen frogs with three legs and two heads along the banks of the Ringvaart. On Saturday afternoons, we combed out the whole shoreline there sometimes, but we never found a deformed frog.
There weren’t many people out on the street, fortunately. Not a lot of passersby who might hear the buzzing of my ankle monitor. That seemed pretty unlikely to me, anyway; maybe in a closed space, a room or a shop, but not here, not outside.
I was panting by the time I got to the doorway of the brown building with its two apartment towers. I scanned the nameplates beside the doorbells, waited till I’d caught my breath, then rang the one that belonged to her downstairs neighbor, on the ninth floor.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said through the intercom, no more than ten seconds later.
“I’m your downstairs neighbor,” I said. “They left a package for you at my place this morning.”
I held up the package in front of the camera and started counting to ten; at four, there was a loud click and the glass door swung open.
As I was about to get into the elevator, a guy came through the entrance: a man in a blue windbreaker, short gray hair and glasses. It would have looked strange if I had let the elevator door close in his face.
“Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
The man pressed the button for five, I hit ten.
We started up, without another word. But there was no silence. From somewhere underneath my pant leg, at ankle height if you listened carefully, came a clearly audible, rhythmic buzzing. The man looked at me.
“My cell phone,” I said. “I’m not going to answer it now. Have to deliver this package first.”
The man nodded, but kept looking at me. Then I saw it happen in his eyes: he knew me from somewhere, though he didn’t know exactly where.
There had been a documentary about me, and the biography Marc Verhoeven was working on wasn’t the first book; there was already one about my formative years in the neighborhood, out in Watergraafsmeer, a book with way too many photos in it, from back then but also from the present.
“I live downstairs,” I said. “I’ve seen you before.”
The man got out on the fifth floor. Was I imagining it, or did he reach into his pocket as soon as he stepped out of the car? Was he maybe going for his cell phone?
Time was running out. It had been running out from the start, but now it was really running out. When I left the elevator on the tenth floor, I heard it right away, and this time I wasn’t imagining things: a police siren. Close by. At the end of the corridor I was in now, there was a little window. The flashing blue lights could be seen from all the way up here on ten.