Would it not therefore perhaps follow, she continued, should we grant such a surprising premise, that, in order to escape our night dungeon and reunite with light, we must leave our fleshy selves behind as swiftly as possible? Let us think of the model lives lived by those called Les Parfaits—men and women who welcome the pure ascetic refusal of corruption, whose modest and unfussy acts reveal the antithesis of the church's opulent duplicity and obese comfort. Eat less, they say. Drink less. Avoid all things stemming from sexual reproduction, since sexual reproduction's mission is to burgeon sin and thereby suffering: meat, milk, cheese, eggs, progeny.
Be fretful to multiply. Live frugally. Leave life with dignified haste. Stand back and let humankind do what it does best — battle, blunder, and besoil itself into oblivion. Then we can all go home.
Bosch looked back at the pasture, the polished pond, the sky bullying his awareness. The inside of his mouth tasted like chicken shit. What he studied before him seemed, all at once, diaphanous, as if it were a sketch some artist had begun to erase.
You will not hear me speak of these things again, Aleyt said beside him, tender, even. With this my beliefs, my family's, become invisi — ah, look!
She let go of his hands with a squeeze and lifted her left to point at the blenching sky.
A crested lark! she sang.
Bosch squinted, squinted, strained, but could make out no bird, no blot, no movement up there whatsoever, no matter how hard he tried, because—
Because—
Because in that temporal throb he made out something else altogether: something that struck him with the force of an idea he had always known to be true, yet one he could never quite have brought himself to articulate until now. Until now, it had remained a poppy-seed notion wedged between two molars, a nagging semi-thought, an almost-philosophy, like a semi-solid, an almost-animal, a unicorn awareness. He understood the evidence had always been everywhere: in those speckles constellating Groot's bald pate, in that plague chewing across northern Europe, in that ship of fools drifting through his consciousness.
Not long after, Aleyt's father invited Bosch to dine with the family, solo, and, once everyone was comfortable, everyone sipping his or her pea soup, the patriarch began explaining to the painter how, sub rosa, they had fashioned their house into a Cathar girls school; taught reason behind closed doors; studied numbers, the lute, grammar, logic, rhetoric; struggled through scriptures, rehearsing the intricate art of the fourfold interpretation: the literal or historical, whereby what happened happened; the allegorical, whereby every detail in a tale releases a symbol that whispers Christian doctrine into your ear; the tropological, whereby you glean the moral of what transpires as it relates to your own life; and the anagogical, whereby the import of what took place is applied to the largest Christian concerns: death, judgment, heaven, hell.
Privately, Bosch took up Cathar habits one by one. Publicly, he continued to embrace The Brotherhood of Our Lady, continued to tow his spirit to church every Sunday and sometimes more. He introduced Aleyt to its members. They took her under wing, lent the young couple a hand in securing an agreeable dwelling on the market square into which Bosch and she moved the day after their nuptials. When no children were immediately forthcoming, their friends began murmuring among themselves, treating Bosch and Aleyt with the same patronizing solicitousness good Catholics set aside for the penniless, pitiful, and palsied, in an attempt to make themselves feel better about themselves, more deserving of what they didn't deserve.
On occasion, Bosch still saw his older brother Goosen. The man had married an amiable possum-faced woman with a high forehead named, hideously, Griseldis. Griseldis was so fat, so short, so indelicate that she trundled through existence without bending her knees. Sometimes Bosch found himself wondering, his brother nattering on about this or that in the sitting room after dinner, if the two had in truth enjoyed different mothers and fathers. What else could account for such egregious dissimilarities? After all, Bosch found Goosen's paintings humdrum, merely competent, nostalgic as a Christmas tree in June. At their most successful, they were talented in the way a wicker basket can on occasion be said to be talented. His canvases depicted flat fields, feathery clouds, half-baked haywains. Evidently, the man was incapable of facial particulars, so each of his subjects stood either some distance from the painter's vantage point, or nearby, but with his or her back turned squarely to the viewer. All you had to do to see better examples of nature was look out your own front door — and what sort of art was that?
Not, needless to say, that Bosch would admit as much to the fellow. Rather, he was painstakingly polite, scrupulously diplomatic, altogether reserved in his remarks. He strained to seek out a reasonably well-executed white willow or beige heifer cramped in some corner of Goosen's canvas and compliment its execution, all the while searingly envious of — of what, exactly? Not his brother's talent or achievements, no, but rather of what others had mistakenly imagined that talent and those achievements to be.
Worse, when Bosch showed Goosen one of his own works, Goosen stood before it in speechless perplexity. His wide shoulders slumped. His dim eyes partially closed in partial contemplation. It appeared as if he were teetering on the very brink of thought, that the approaching intellectual breeze had cost him no little bodily discomfort.
What is the point, Hieronymus, I wonder, he would say after a time, of such hellish visions? They bring… they bring mischief to the mind.
Of course they bring mischief to the mind, you dolt, Bosch did not say. Instead, he watched Goosen become increasingly well known and respected while he watched himself become increasingly tolerated. His hair faded from the color of butter to the color of ashes to the color of babies' teeth. He could not grasp the upended reality of the odd aging man glaring back at him from that small round convex mirror floating alone in an ocean of bonewhite wall in his studio. Yet, as if to convince him of the apparition's authenticity, his knees began to ache, pissing syrupped into extended acts of dedication.
His backside deflated so thoroughly that one day it struck him with a twinge that he had come to resemble nothing so much as a frog reared up on its hind legs.
Nor was growing older any kinder to his wife. Aleyt's skin drooped, crimpled, crinkled, browned, stained. Her breasts emptied and flattened. Her periods perished. Headaches and flushes flocked her. She found herself unable to sleep.
Be strong, the world told the aging. Be brave and obdurate.
But the world was wrong.
Growing old turned each day into a small catastrophe shaded with just enough wisdom to allow one to understand wisdom changed nothing.
Bosch and Aleyt tucked into themselves, embraced, huddled against time's uncaring weather. They watched acquaintances thrash against the bloody flux, St. Anthony's fire, typhoid's poisonous patches. They watched friends lose life's footing, topple out of contentment, go bankrupt, become the object of their offspring's derision, fall prey to highway bandits, drunken soldiers, mountebank monks, and—
And what—
And what in God's name do you call all this, Bosch wonders, back with himself in front of his easel, if not travel? A journey that is no journey at all, yet one that undoes you as you race along on your way to nowhere, and—
And—
And, in the midst of this thought, Bosch becomes aware of himself again because something in his chest slips.
The surprising sensation arrives between inhalation and inhalation, a bluewhite spasm sluicing through his left arm, billowing down his back.