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Vol. I
Issue 4
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Venus at her Toilette
By Tom Whalen
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I try to remember a time but I can't, a time when, and I can't go any further. Perhaps I'm trying too hard. So I start again. I try to remember a time when I was not alone, not in this bed, surrounded by these walls, a window somewhere, above me, behind me. Once I stared out of the window, but that must have been long ago, when I could still rise from the bed. The sheets are old, older than me, paper-thin sheets. Perhaps someone changes them, but it's always the same sheet, a wet leaf, I can't move for tearing it. No, mind is not the problem. I think that. I think: Mind is not the problem, but then, with the body rumbling and rotting, churning and dying, I think: Mind is the only problem. Then a pain not in my head wracks me. Ripples, wracks, ruins. Not the word, not the words. The words, still, come, thank god, thank god the words still come. I say this to myself, the wind from somewhere, from memory, and it's always like that, and with pain. I try to remember but I can't because I'm trying too hard and only when I stop trying do I remember. The wind it must have been that took me back to town, after days (weeks, years?) in the forest, in the abandoned school buses by the pond, the field mice eating through the last paperback, fat with moisture, the pages curled, I don't even remember the title, cover long ripped off. The town took me in again like a sack, old in this case, rotting, no churning maid I, at this time, how long ago, not long. The prospects, as I knew they would be, were dreary. An alley. A bar. Another alley. Under the bridge by the river. I chose the latter. There was a small fire, bad drink, reconstructed cigarettes. My flesh rippled like a flag, my face a lava flow. No one smiled, nor I at them. I washed my crotch and underarms beside the river. How long, not long, before my man had died. I say my man, although in the last stage only in a sense, the body in its decline, the colors, the skin turning yellow, the eyes seeing whatever they see, not what I see, not now, soon enough, the whole saga of the rotting corpse as various as a sunset. I wrapped him in the sheet, not unlike this sheet, the sheet he died in, as old as this one, more rips, fewer stains. We met one day in the town museum, the handful of old pictures on the walls more a suggestion of art than art, but still one picture I stood before longer than any other—School of Fontainebleau, likely a forgery—"Venus at her Toilette." How artificial the three naked figures in it were: Venus center frame looking at herself in a hand mirror, her right arm crooked over her head, index finger pointing at the mirror in her left; her maid or friend at frame-left also nude on pillows on the floor, staring at her iconic counterpart at frame-right, winged cupid holding up a jar (to drink, to sniff?) to center-framed, twice-as large Venus. I remember the maroon curtains behind the figures, the chamber pot or pitcher covered with ornate nudes with a spout or seat like an outstretched bottom lip. The allegory didn't interest me, only the milky skin of the three figures, and their smiles, their eyes, amidst all this form, all this form, I said to myself, and suddenly there was nothing in the painting but form, only form in the painting. All this form, this madness, I thought, then surprised myself when I heard myself say it out loud. This painting appalls me, I am utterly appalled by this painting, I said, and a young man whom I only then noticed was standing beside me, said he knew well what I meant. The form, he said, and I said, Too much of it. What then? The frolic, the fumbling, the sex, the jobs, the three kids one after the other, out one came, then ten months later out came the next, spent most of my time on my back in a hospital, now this one, now that one, St. Peter's, Memorial, delightful names, on my back in the hospital with this or that disease (kidney, pancreas, liver) or pregnant with the daughter, the two sons, the sickly daughter, the sick sons, Laura and Michael and Jochen, more than I could manage, one was enough, one was plenty, one maybe I could've handled, but we couldn't stop, mistakes once made impossible to correct, that dodge. Then later, how much later, not much later Bill's rotting kidneys, not that mine . . . One day I remember I passed a stone as big as my fist, the pain rippling my body, a scouring pain leaving my body a ruin. For what? Only to have the little beggars, all three of them . . . But wasn't there a smaller painting in the corner by the window? Against the west light, the picture might have been an abstraction or a maiden in a field, haystacks stretching away behind her under a cloud-wracked sky, where I walked as a child, away from the abandoned school buses behind me, my mother dying in her bed, no father, no brother, no sister, only my mother, already the shroud prepared by the neighbors, trolls each one of them, they stank of ham and cabbage, cows, sour milk. Soon, I thought, kicking leaves when I found them, I would be like a storybook child bereft in the first chapter, but the trials I endured I never overcame. Even then, as I paced in the field, my tennis shoes black with mud, I knew the problem facing me was how to escape the rot everything about the buses had become. The dead mother, the funeral, father unknown. The trolls smiled down upon me. The two rusting buses slanted toward the ponds from which snakes crawled up. Around us a forest, a small field thick with mice. Every night they invaded the buses, scrabbled over the books, the tables, the silverware. The ponds were ringed with cypress trees. I walked round and round them in lemniscates and stared down into the water at thick cottonmouths curled against the bank. When they flicked their eyes at me, I backed away. Mother read to me from her favorite book, Ibn Tufail's Alive, Son of Awaken: "Now it appeared to Alive the world was of one substance derived from one random agent, but whether it existed in time after it had been, and whether the agent was nothing or eternity he did not know." When I ran away after the funeral, I took the book with me, and before work, for even here I had to work, at the town dairy, where my expertise was much appreciated, I read the book over and over. During the day I churned butter in the shadow of a ruined building until my hands were only pain, and my eyes glazed over like windows in sun, and at night I read Tufail. "So that he was inflamed with the desire of Him, and his heart was altogether withdrawn from thinking upon this inferior world, which contains the objects of sense, and are wholly taken up with the contemplation of mind." Still, I had nightmares, one nightmare after another, churning in my brain. I tossed and turned under the sheet. In one the walls would close in. In another, I sailed in a car off a bridge, to land in a swamp that became the two ponds. Again and again, the same dream, the same weightlessness, then the descent and a gap to awaken in the swamp, the two ponds. . . to awake with my head a ruin. Some nights, when I was terrified by the dreams, Mother let me sleep beside her. I try to remember more but I can't because I'm trying too hard. Still, the words come, thank god, thank god the words still come. I say this to myself, the wind from somewhere, from memory, and it's always like that, and with pain. No, mind is not the problem. I think that. I think: Mind is not the problem, but then, with the body rumbling and rotting. I try to remember a time when I was not alone, not in this bed, surrounded by these walls, a window somewhere, above me, behind me. Once I stared out of the window, but that must have been long ago, when I could still rise from the bed. The sheets are old, older than me, paper-thin sheets. Perhaps someone changes them, but it's always the same sheet, a wet leaf, can't move for tearing.
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Tom Whalen's stories have appeared recently in AGNI, Fiction International, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Idaho Review, The Iowa Review, and Marginalia. He lives in Stuttgart, Germany.
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