You okay, hon? Jean asked.
I'm fine. It's just…
He had to close his eyes to steady himself. The blurriness became thicker. Then the universe canted. It seemed to him he was lying on his back on the sidewalk and standing up at the same time.
Jean's voice dropped into the distance.
Dan? it was saying. Dan? Dan?
It felt like something was yanking at his right ankle. Dan looked down to check. Yeah. That's what it was. Something was definitely
September
yanking at his right ankle. He wants to say claws. Peculiar paradox: numb from neck down, he is distinctly aware of the insistent jerk, rest, jerk, rest, jerk. Yet what really gains the painter's attention is the recognition that he has never before actually seen the ceiling.
All these years loitering beneath it, and he has never once fully taken it in. He imagines extending his arm up, up, up to touch it, the veiny wood, the tiny prickle on his fingertips. Prickle. Admirable noun. The grain flowing northeast to southwest forms the amorphous contour of a — of a what? A massive eye, plausibly, gazing down, as God is not, from heaven. Or, conceivably, the head of an ant? Yet the lips. If insect, where would the lips be? Not lips. Pincers. Another moment of admirableness in a world of widowed words and orphaned phrases.
At the upper left, a smudge. Ivory? Puppet perception. No: ivory with a suggestion of zinc. No: ivory with a suggestion of zinc with a suggestion of — how to say it? — hue of an extended dove's wing on a winter morning in a church steeple with a light snow falling.
How can you claim membership among the living if you cannot name such a simple color?
Wake me from this narcosis.
The yanking becomes more pronounced. Bosch raises his reeling head inconsiderably to have a look around. Founders. The base of his skull clumps plank. He retracts his chin, stretches his neck, can barely make out the small devil tugging at his right ankle. Body of ape. Head of beetle. Claws of crab. Bosch is unsurprised. This caller has dropped by before. It is presently endeavoring to drag him toward the black yawn in the floorboards half a meter away, although admittedly having quite a troublesome time. The devil pants and slobbers, snickers and growls. Another bluewhite squall surges through Bosch's body. He hiccup-groans. The devil jumps. Freezes.
Time hangs.
Time hangs.
When it is apparent Bosch presents no imminent threat to the fiend, it crouches to resume its loud toil.
Bosch has the impression the thing is talking to itself. He cannot distinguish individual phrases, no, but the overall sense is one of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latinate discourse. No sooner has the painter enjoyed this knowledge than his tongue slips back in his throat, slick and swollen as an elongated oyster. Of a sudden gargling, Bosch squeezes shut his eyes, thinking he is opening them. Or he opens them, thinking he is squeezing them shut. Either way, without warning he sees himself as a young pock-faced boy lying on his stomach in his attic room on an overcast Sunday afternoon, the great fire having burned itself into his imagination, the great rebuilding having commenced.
The young Bosch is drawing, filling sheet after sheet with figures of fauna — donkeys, dogfish, duckbills, tigers, newts, narwhals, nighthawks, dung beetles, dragon flies, dolphins — and then carefully separating their paper heads from their paper bodies with a fillet knife, wing from thorax, arm from trunk, tail from arse, so as to coin new chimeras by pasting together bits from the originals on a fresh sheet. It did not matter, so far as he could see, that he had never observed a squid or skink in person. He had heard stories, read descriptions, seen sketches, and what else did a fellow with a whiffet of imagination need to fashion beasts that interested him canyons more than those boring old brutes he suffered every day beyond his bedroom window?
Stretching out on his tummy, alive in his head, the boy Bosch always became someone else. He glanced up and it was one o'clock. He glanced up and it was five. Stretching out, he experienced the same thrill that sparrowed through him every time, closing his eyes, he skated faster and faster across the frozen pond at the city's dusking edge, everything suspended in bluing gloom, removed from the other bully boys and their menacing world, then opened his eyes once more to find himself with a testicle-lifting shock fifty meters farther on in an utterly different fluttery existence.
Remembering reminds him: there are endurable moments. Yes. Of course. A pocketful of them, at least. No. More. Much. How, for no particular reason, Aleyt sometimes hurries into his studio while he is working, even after all these years, takes his face in her palms, kisses him fervently on the lips, and hurries out, just as if she had never entered there in the first place. How the angelic four-voice vocal texture of Guillaume Dufay's masses make the day on which you hear them feel thoroughly lived. How your consciousness arranges the entire piece of theater called living into a series of remarkable paintings called recollection.
A polyptych.
That word again.
Bosch is observing the three pudgy blind men who used to shuffle past his house on their way to market. Fascinated, his younger self waited for them at the window the second he had backhanded breakfast off his mouth. Capes flapping, milky eyes upturned toward a milky sky, fat lips slices of lilac liver on their faces, they held hands with each other like a human daisy chain to site and steady themselves on their perilous daily expedition.
What delighted Bosch was how effortless they made their passage appear, the most natural thing in creation. They were sightless, their hesitant and meandering dance declared. They were hungry. But they had business to do, and so, unfussy as stewed mutton, they did it. They just went. Bosch wondered what they could possibly see in their not seeing. Bleared bodies? Dense darkness? Nebulous light? He wondered how the cobblestones felt prodding the trio's leather soles, whether or not the room in which they would someday expire had already been built.
And then one morning, just like that, only two passed. Two? Bosch could not believe what he wasn't witnessing. At first he thought perhaps he had made some sort of mistake. Perhaps he had miscalculated their rhythms and was in truth looking at a different pair of blind men altogether.
No: next day, the same two passed.
And, next day, the same two.
And just as Bosch was concluding matters could get no worse, one of those dropped off the canvas as well.
Then there was a single blind man groping his way along the lane, palming house fronts, stumbling, unsettled.
And, a fortnight later, he vanished as well.
The young boy felt dreadful, guilty, ashamed. Had he somehow injured them by doing no more than speculating about their existence? Had the very act of studying them somehow changed them irrevocably and for the darker, made them less than they were?
For the following week Bosch slept a sleep thin as moth wings, rising each morning, gobbling his food, hastening to stand watch, only to learn repeatedly that the three were never coming back. After much hand wringing, he finally collected his courage, rolled over in bed one night, and asked Goosen, already aslosh in sleep, what he imagined could have happened to them. Suspicion of a joke being played on him tinting his tone, his big brother told Bosch, pokerfaced, that he had never seen such a group of men. He had no idea what Bosch was talking about.
Unnerved, Bosch approached his father in his studio the next morning. His father's face bobbed out from behind his easel, demanded the boy quit making up tall tales, and bobbed back out of sight.