The boy found his mother cooking in the smoky kitchen. He asked her the same question. Smiling down on him, wooden spoon in one hand, she mussed his hair and said:
What thoughts you have, sweetheart. What thoughts.
But mommy, Bosch did not say, standing there, looking up at her snaggling teeth, helpless, but—
But—
But there is a devil sunk to its waist in the hole in my floor. My legs have disappeared up to the knees, up to the thighs. A chubby toad with a man's hairy arms is squatting on my belly, grinning, smoking a cheroot, while a pair of meter-tall mice are hunching on the chairs Groot and I occupied only minutes ago, cleaning their snouts with their hoofy paws, while a swarm of cat-sized mosquitoes is burring around a lamp, each sporting the face of a grim elderly priest carrying on a busy liturgy, and mommy, mommy, what do I do now?
Bosch finds the pandemonium noteworthy. All this hubbub, all this mayhem, and yet somewhere nearby Aleyt reads on in perfect peace. What a startling place to be: here. Here rather than, say, there, rather than, say, anywhere else.
With his next breath, the painter's energy suddenly becomes an old man pushing a wheelbarrow piled with stones up a hill. It will not be long now, he has time to reflect before his body bucks, his eyeballs pulse, his facial architecture assumes an unusual construction.
And, with that, Bosch becomes a stranger to himself.
The final beast of which he catches a glimpse boasts the head of a rabbit atop the unclothed torso of a young woman with girlishly pert breasts. She is wearing a nun's headdress. That one. Her brown eyes glisten with compassion. Chalky white fluid dribbles from her nipples. She collects it on her long first fingernail and licks it off, pink nose twitching. Bosch conjectures: an itch, season for fleas.
He balances on the very brink of the black absence.
The devil braces, sucks in a lungful of strength.
Gives one last great heave.
And Bosch tips over.
And yet, he thinks, beginning his plummet—
And yet—
And yet, despite all the waiting, the apprehension, in the end the end happens much more rapidly than he ever could have anticipated it might: his stomach lunges, weightless, and then he is freefalling through boundless night — unless, it shimmers through his mind, he is not plummeting, but rather hovering in nothingness, turning head over heels like a slowly revolving fetus. How, after all, could one tell the difference?
More perplexing still, a frantic din has broken out around him. Honks, tweedles, squeals, brays, barks, clacks, rattles, roars, hisses, hoots, yackers, yammers, yawps, bleats, grunts, chirrs, gobbles, coos.
Death, Hieronymus Bosch thinks to himself, is a very crowded affair.
Needless to say, of course, another option is that he has already reached bottom, softer than a bed of breath, is safe, sound, surrounded by God's minions, yet does not know it. Today is nothing if not one for shockers. The painter decides to test his hypothesis by peeping open his right eye, having a peek around, and several tiny luminous white Arabian horses gallop past chased by a large snail with bat wings. Bosch squeezes shut his eye again, settles on the encouraging datum that his throat seems to have quit bothering him — unless, needless to say, this indicates he is already dead, a bodiless spirit with no need for swallowing.
There are so many universes in the universe. It would not be an overstatement to suggest Bosch expected white tranquility, a spotless sense of wellbeing, but surely not this: tumult and bewilderment and an agitated gut. Surely the angels would never make such a racket — and, well, if these are not the noises of seraphs and cherubs clamoring around him, if he is not in heaven, but the other place, would he not feel rather warmer than this? Here the air is frosty and moist as if he were suspended topsy-turvy in some sort of gigantic cavern.
Wherever he happens to be, Bosch cannot shake the corroding awareness of how little difference his passing will make to so many. He calculates the number of people who will not miss him, and the sum is astronomical. Shaken, he begins again, this time trying to calculate the number of people who will miss him, and derives such a low sum he is forced to re-reckon to assure himself he has not made an error. Aleyt, undoubtedly. Yes. Absolutely. And beyond her? Beyond her, the children he did not have. His missing children's missing grandchildren. His parents, were they alive. His wife's, the same. His brother, had his brother treated Bosch as something other than an expendable social obligation to be met once or twice a year. Four or five uncles, five or six members of The Brotherhood, six or seven Cathars, each of whom, upon hearing report of his demise, will pause in some lane to remove his hat, lower and glumly shake his head, less out of any sense of real sadness than because removing one's hat and lowering and glumly shaking one's head is what one does upon learning of someone else's crossing the bar in public, regardless of one's own genuine viewpoint on the subject, then reseat said hat and push on into his errands without even the sip from another thought about the deceased except, feasibly, for some minor concern over who the painter's replacement might be on this committee or that, how the listener will phrase his note of condolence to the painter's wife.
Then, swiftly as it thronged Bosch, the uproar dissipates, shoots past, rises away at terrific speed, because—
Because—
Because Bosch has no idea why. He realizes unenthusiastically he is still on the descent, has been for quite a while now, if his sense of time is faring any better than his sense of space, a notion open to some speculation. He could not say with any conviction, naturally, but he has the general impression his drop has encompassed minutes, not seconds. Two? Ten? He would not want to hazard a guess. For all he knows, he may have been at it for weeks already.
Little by little, thinking these thoughts, he becomes sentient of another body falling alongside him. He can sense the heft of its company, hear the airstream of its presence. Curious, he opens his right eye for a second peep and has, he discovers, crossed into an extensive realm of grayness. Blackness has given up to grainy opal light as far as he can see.
Opposite him hurtles down the naked burned girl he spotted from his attic window all those decades ago during the great fire. He is confident he could reach out and touch her, if only he possessed the strength to raise an arm. Her blond hair flutters in a large shredded and singed teardrop above her head. One side of her body is skinless. Wisps of smoke flicker off her blackened flesh, evaporate quick as a cough in the wind. Her hands cup her privates, making her appear modest as Eve after the bite. Her eyes, which are taking in her traveling companion with interest, are precisely the wisterial of his wife's.
Do you by any chance fancy ginger snaps? she asks.
What's happening to us? Bosch shouts back against the bluster.
Because I simply can't get enough of them. They're my weakness. I can't help myself. Don't you love how special they make your tongue feel?
What's happening to us? Bosch repeats at the top of his lungs.
Oh, right. Sorry. I'm dead. You're dying. Not to worry. It shouldn't be long.
This is what it feels like?
Forever. Yes. Odd, isn't it. Not how they described things in the least. Then again, they wouldn't have had the faintest, would they? The stories people tell. I'm happy to say the worst is behind you. More or less.
The worst?
The shock. The jolt that startles and scares.
I was imagining the most horrible things. Lying on the floor. Swallowing my tongue.