Lance Olsen: Calendar of Regrets

Aleyt showed Groot into the studio where Bosch set down his brush, dabbed his fingers with a nearby rag, revolved stiffly on stiff knees, reached out, and wobbled Groot's chubby hand. Aleyt disappeared, reappeared with a hectic silver serving tray, then vanished for good, leaving the painter to fend for himself. He felt like the last soldier on a battlefield, the enemy of thousands descending.

The huge hideous Groot half-cleared his gluey throat and began boring Bosch with details concerning his imminent departure to Helmond. From what Bosch could tell, it had something to do with finance and dry goods. Bosch loathed finance and dry goods. He slipped into his mask of feigned interest while privately calculating this afternoon's labor on his piece-in-progress. Groot worried aloud about having to travel so soon after a resurgence of the plague in the region. Quarantine had been declared in Breda and Oss. The burghers had taken it upon themselves to aid the Lord's wrath upon the peasants by islanding their neighborhoods. The idea was to let the buggers cull themselves, thereby hastening their atonement. It was the least decent people could do.

Bosch stared stonily over Groot's right shoulder at his canvas in the fidgety lamplight. He would, he decided, fork a cinnabar serpent's tongue between the homunculus's lips. Alter the ears from donkey to rabbit to signify the unholy Catholic exuberance for bottomless proliferation.

A miniature nun, unclothed but for her headdress, breasts girlishly pert, rode a large mouse with horse's skull bareback and upside down across the shadowy ceiling. Bosch raised his chin slightly and studied her with interest. A portwine stain in the shape of a crucifix ornamented her bare left flank. Her tongue, a good meter long, flapped behind her like a purple scarf.

Such waking visions did not especially surprise him. They had visited ever since that night more than five decades ago when he was awakened by his mother's screams down in the street. Never till that moment had he heard raw terror tear through a voice.

Lord save us! he came to consciousness hearing his mother cry. The End Times are here! The End Times are here!

He lurched up in the bed, his muscles thinking for him, and—

And it occurred to Bosch that Groot had just asked him a question.

Bosch's thoughts had been wandering down their own paths and now they were lost. His attention flicked back to the halfwit's face. Ginger snaps crumbed the whiskers at the corners of Groot's grouper-mouth. His dewlap toaded him.

Silence unfolded through the studio.

Bosch attempted to follow the thread from Groot's slack expression back to what his question might have been, but came up short. Apologizing, he asked the lummox to repeat himself.

I don't suppose, Groot began again. That is, I wonder if I might, you know, entreat. If you would be so kind, that is, as to consider. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Bosch, if you would contemplate giving up, you know… all that .

Bosch shut his eyes and watched a small wooden ship packed with fools flirting, eating, drinking, gaming, cheating, begging, singing, carousing, and puking over the side, waft through bluegreen time, aimless, never nearing harbor.

Opening his eyes again, he reached up, scratched a wild white brow, responded, deadpan:

I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Groot.

Please, Mr. Bosch. You receive my meaning perfectly clearly. You know as well as I do what your neighbors and friends are, you know. What they have. Begun, that is. Behind your back.

Bosch raised his china cup, sipped, set it down in its tinkly saucer.

The ship sailed on through the years.

If they are whispering anything about me behind my back, they are whispering rumors. Rumors, as I am sure you are aware, are bad air in words' clothing. Bad air is malice in gaseous form. It disappoints me greatly that you pay heed to such bodily functions gone public.

A member of the Cathars , for Christ's sake, Mr. Bosch. Affiliate of a cult .

Clothesline comments. I should be interested to hear what tangible evidence your blatherskites and quidnuncs might have provided you in support of such accusations.

You call charges of heresy rumor ?

Bosch, I'm afraid, Bosch replied, is Bosch. People trust and repect him, or they do not. Regrettably, there is nothing poor Hieronymus can do about it.

I am sorry to hear that.

I am sorry to hear you are sorry to hear. But there it is. Now, if you'd be so kind, Mr. Groot, you must excuse me. He nodded in the direction of his self-portrait. I ought to be returning to my toddler.

Bosch made to hoist himself out of his chair.

Groot's stubby arms became upturned porcine legs erect beside his ears.

But why ? Tell me that, at least. Why in the world…

Bosch paused. Bosch sighed.

He took in the brownblotched back of his hands starfished on his trouser legs, then lifted his head to meet Groot's anal eyes and answered, as if answering an imbecilic child:

Because , Mr. Groot. Because—

Because when he was thirteen his mother's panic voice shredded his sleep like a swirl of scythes. Bosch had been a cat curled on the hay mattress beside his big brother Goosen, so far submerged in unconsciousness he had left even his dreams behind. Next he was a finch flitting around his small hazy window, straining on tiptoes to peer over the sill at a nightworld swallowed by flames.

Buildings burned all the way to the horizon. Houses. The guildhall. Barns. Schools. Stables. Depots. The globe itself was ablaze. A dense umber cloud roiled above the bedlam like an inverted sea, its behemoth belly glowing orange. Ash snowed down through air thick and acrid with brimstone, cooked horsehide, clamor, clangor, whinny, bleat, bay, bellow.

Chickens flapped along the street below, hugging shop fronts, trying to gain altitude, cackling torches.

Bosch's mother, still in her nightgown and bare feet, white hair witch mad, tiptoeing among a gathering crowd of burghers, was right. This was what she had always warned Bosch about, what he could never bring himself to believe. But now, watching existence explode around him, watching his father, a goosenecked man with fierce eyes and flared nostrils, throw on his trousers, shirt, and shoes, and plunge, determined, into the throngs trying to hold back the conflagration with picks and axes and sloshy buckets of water, Bosch saw how Doomsday came calling on those who refused to take heed of its inevitability. His mother stood in the doorway, back to the boy and his brother. She refused to retire, refused to shed her nightgown for a dress, refused even to slip into her clogs. She forgot the presence of her own sons looping around her. Her thin lips just thinned a little more every minute with the recognition that what she had assumed was life, wished was life, was not, it turned out, life at all. This was life, the world whirling.

The boys clambered back up the ladder into their attic room and spent what felt like weeks at that window, staring out at reality shredding in bright strips, talking about how they had always supposed hell's upsurge on the final hour would somehow be fast as a cannonball, a lightning strike, an epiphanic burst, and over. On the contrary, its advent had come to pass as a protracted smoke-swamped scramble.

The beautiful angel with the blue eyes, it turned out, came at you, came at you, came at you.

She was everywhere at once, forever.

That evening they beheld the steeple of their church collapse into itself in a billowing rush of sparks.

The next afternoon they craned to catch sight of three large hogs gnawing at the buttocks of a charred corpse lying facedown half a block up the lane.