Calendar of Regrets

September

January February March April May June July August September October November December   & & &431' 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 432 b & LANCE OLSEN ' 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? & calender of regrets ' b 433 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...