You had. Have. You'll get used to it. Everyone does. But what do you think?
About death?
Ginger snaps. The honey. The cinnamon. The ground white pepper. Isn't it extraordinary? Like a street fair below your eyes.
I haven't given it much thought.
Goosen has. I could eat them all day. Gave it quite a bit, in actual fact. Of thought, that is. It has two tastes, doesn't it. The sharp surprise, and then the — the what? — the flood of prospects.
Ginger snaps?
Death. A shame, really. He never was very keen on your paintings. But you already knew that. Always considered them rather… indecent, I suppose, is the word.
He went behind my back?
No, no. Didn't have it in him. He merely made certain of his sentiments… available. What I think I fancy most is the texture. Don't you? Crackly and chewy and melty all at once. You were more interested in doing your own work. No fault in that. What sort of artist would you be if you hadn't been?
He called me a heretic.
Everyone does. Did. Because… because you were, weren't you? Only snag was you believed you were good at keeping secrets. Still, then again, who doesn't?
You're saying our falling won't end?
There are various theories on the matter. Some maintain it's a logical impossibility to keep going and going until the end of time. Others aren't quite so sure. Personally, I've been at it now for — what year is this?
Fifteen sixteen.
More than half a century. Isn't that curious? You meet the most fascinating people. I once fell for rather a long way with an explorer from the future. Blond fellow with a sprained wrist. Trekked though the Far East. What stories he had — Oh, dear!
Bosch notices the girl has picked up momentum, is beginning to pull away from him. Her head is level with Bosch's belly, with his knees, with his ankles. Hope contracting, he peers down at the top of her smoking plume of hair.
Can't you stay a bit longer?
Oh, I do wish I could! she shouts up at him, exasperated. But I don't believe it's in the cards. Perhaps we'll see each other again sometime.
She adds something else Bosch cannot hear.
What? he calls after her. What was that?
Arabella! she shouts, face shrinking. My name! It's Ar-a-bel-la!
Goodbye, Ar-a-bel-la! he calls out after her.
She lifts a tiny white hand from her sheltered pudendum to wave discreetly, but does not answer, or, if she does, Bosch can no longer detect what it is she is saying.
Arabella becomes a lost clog drifting down far below him. A marble. A pinprick.
And then Arabella becomes nothing at all.
And then—
And then—
And then, plunging, the painter does no more than tilt back his head and squinch shut his eyes in preparation for his inevitable trip through eternity.
When he opens them again some time later, what he sees startles him: the daedal ceiling of his studio.
The veiny wood.
The non-eye of non-God not peering down.
Stunned, Bosch discovers himself on the floor beside his easel, gazing up, mouth dry as pumice powder. Perspiration saturates his shirt, squiggles down his temples. The notion comes to him that he stinks of oniony sludge and bitter pissoirs. He is lying in a swampy puddle of himself, his heart beating so hard he can see the pulses in his eyeballs.
A grown man, a not wholly undistinguished painter, a detester of the flesh and all earth's excesses… and this. Satan has one pure pleasure: waiting until you have forgotten him, moved on with your life, feeling, if not a certain variety of cheerfulness, precisely, then at least the deficiency of immediate despair, and stepping up beside you on the street, nestling up behind you in your bed, to remind you in his hissy whisper of just who and what you are not.
Nonetheless, if the truth be known, Bosch would much rather hear that hiss than its opposite, than silence, for its sound suggests by its very presence that Hieronymus is not quite done yet. The painter certainly does not feel quite done yet. To the contrary. Lying there, he senses life beginning to trickle back into him.
And so he settles, watching the vision of the market square that has started coalescing above him atom by atom. The spot is packed with people, merry shouts, carnival commotion. Bosch watches Bosch gather into being on a wooden platform in the middle of it all. He is clothed in his finest attire. Across from him stands Goosen flanked by two somber cloudbearded men dressed in the black robes of distinguished scholars. The crowd is chanting. At first Bosch cannot decipher what it is they are going on about. Then his brother steps forward, and the sound resolves into intelligibility.
They are, if Bosch is not wholly mistaken, cheering his name.
Not his brother's. Not his father's. His.
What an astonishing fact: Hieronymus Bosch is being honored. He is quite sure of it. Goosen reaches out, and in his slender hand appears an offering: a lambskin scroll — a prize, a decoration, Bosch is uncertain which — and the artist's lungs go light with love.
These people have come to see him. That's what they have done. They have come to pay tribute. All these years. A lifetime of not being seen. And here Bosch is, arriving into visibility.
Placing one palm on chest, raising the other in a sign of mock modesty, Bosch basks in the waves of admiration.
No, no, his gesture says, I could not possibly, but, of course, he can. He will. Goosen presses the gift upon him. Bosch accepts it. The multitudes erupt into jubilant roar.
Hieronymus! Hieronymus! Hieronymus!
Hieronymus! Hieronymus! Hieronymus!
Hieronymus! Hieronymus! Hieronymus!
The scholars nod in solemn unity. Bosch undoes the black ribbon binding the parchment, works the scroll open, bashfully turns it out for the throng to savor.
The problem, the painter suddenly suspects, is that something is not quite right. Something is not quite right at all. Rather than meeting the howls of approval he expects, Bosch meets only chirped laughter. He raises his chin slightly, checking. An outbreak here, there, as the few barely literate townspeople up front squint to figure their way through the stubborn alphabet, then pass along the news to their neighbors.
Before Bosch knows what is what, a wall of hilarity surges back and forth before him. His appreciative beam thaws, melts away, and, in its place, a hot confusion overflows him.
Panicky, he looks to his brother for reassurance. Goosen lends Bosch a gummy smile that says Don't worry — I'll protect you, then bursts out laughing himself. Head thrown back, stained teeth sharp and unruly, the yokel reminds Bosch of nothing so much as the maw of a predatory fish bearing down on him.
His big brother holds up the unrolled scroll for Bosch to read.
Time hangs.
Time hangs.
Bosch cannot initially pull the nouns, verbs, and prepositions into meaning. Then the appalling information reaches him: he is reading a list, not of his accomplishments, but of his foibles. Bosch is taking stock of the once secret catalogue of his shortcomings. There are, he is somewhat startled to see, remarkably many of them.
And now they are public knowledge.
And now the public is adoring each and every one.
With that, the scholars turn their backs to him, bend at the waist, hoist up their robes, and present their sagging hairy asses for his benediction. Farts tuba out. The crowd's laughter intensifies. Bosch's chest staggers, his face goes on fire, and—