Aleid stooped in that remarkable way women in tight skirts stoop, knees together, off to one side, and then the torso drops straight down. She snagged another droplet from the tiled floor and rose again as if magically elevated. Aleid made the money, the money that ran their lives. Her skills had always proved more marketable than his own. They were going to promote her again. They often did. How organized she was, how purposeful and efficient. Her certainty was her tranquility. No indecision, no doubt, no error. He often thought that she married him as an act of youthful rebellion, and wondered if she regretted it. Doubts. And sometimes he wondered if she were real. Was perfection ever real? He watched her back as she worked at the sink, rinsing the sponge, cleaning the cleaning.

For a moment Bosch thought of his paintings. Why would anyone want them, let alone buy them? It was one of those days. Ech! He quickly slammed the door on that mess. Aleid was at the table again gathering up her cell phone, her pager and all her other communication gadgets. She dropped them into her bag.

"Don’t forget the lemons." She smiled a perfect smile, pecked his cheek and was gone. Bosch stared at the empty kitchen. Did he deserve her?

Hieronymus Bosch stood up on the pedal of his bicycle and, catching his balance, set the machine in motion. It was a physical thing, of size and weight and cause and effect. Not some intangible, airy-fairy thing he couldn’t grasp. He could feel it, like a good tool, responding to his touch. He felt the cool antlerbars in his grip as he chased the bike out into the streets. New York streets. Summer in the city, ribald and bizarre and hot. Already Broadway lay restless in the heat, the buildings glazed and shimmering, and the smell of sex hanging heavy in the air. Bosch struggled to keep his equilibrium, but everywhere the sensual lure of flesh, naked thighs and midriffs, bare gleaming backs and swelling breasts pulled him apart.

Outside the Korean grocery he chained the bicycle to the hydrant. Someone always wanted what you had. The hydrant smelled of piss, the gutter stank of waste, body odors of the sweating city. A small, wall-eyed man with a nickel in his ear hovered in the doorway as Bosch went in.

The grocery was quiet save for the hum of a cranky air conditioner. The cashier stood expressionless at the counter fiddling with a radio. Bosch walked through the densely packed isles as Abba burst out over the sound system singing Dancing Queen. He picked it up and shimmied through the canned goods section, rolling his shoulders, making a little dip, until he came up face to face with the peeled plum tomatoes. Why was he here? Lemons, of course. He found the open cooler where fruits and vegetables lay neatly stacked and constantly bathed in mist. He chose the lemons with care taking delight in their yellowness, picking only the most perfectly oval among them.

Then something caught his eye – a head levitating down the center isle severed by the height of the shelving. A woman's strong boned vital face trailed by luxuriant black hair. Her eyes were focused straight ahead, intense in the effort of balancing a large book on her head. She passed, not seeing him, and floated away into the canned goods section. Her beauty was shocking. Bosch turned to face himself in the glass refrigerator doors, dripping with the same icy perspiration he felt rising on his neck. Beads the size of gooseberries.

He didn't particularly want a soda but reached for the handle anyway and pulled. At first the door resisted and then, with a little effort, flew open with more ferocity than he wanted. His arm shot backward and immediately felt the impact of a warm body. Something flew past in peripheral vision, and then a crash.
"Betulaceous!"
It was her. Her face only inches from his, wide-eyed, her mouth curled in mockery.
"Well, well."
Bosch reddened and looked down at the book sprawled supine on the floor its pages like spread white thighs. She was amused.
"And what do you say to that?"
"Oh, yes." He scrambled to the floor retrieving her book. A big illustrated book of gardens. She took it with the same playful glint in her eye.
"Thank you."
"What's betulaceous?"
"I don’t know. Something to do with trees ? I just like the sound, the mouth feel. I think the B words are very sensual don't you? Beguile, belladonna, bibulous, blasphemy. The air pouts your lips till they pop like bursting fruits."
Bosch felt groundless, a stammering hick.
"The S words can be good too," he tried. "Sententious, salacious."
"Too hissy by far. Vituperative. The bee's are best. You like the sour fruits I see."
Bosch fumbled his lemons. "Yes."
She took a cherry from the cooler and held it between her lips. She was mocking him again, toying with his desire to play and he not knowing the rules. She bit into the cherry letting its juice moisten her lips.
"You like the bagpipes, don’t you," she said.
"No. Not really."
"You'll like the way I play."

She said her name was Lima Peru. She beckoned and Bosch followed. She was lascivious, maybe even a little dangerous. He could hardly contain the joy he felt. And she lived right across the street, no need to even unchain his bicycle.

Her apartment beguiled like the woman herself, rooms richly colored with the soft Renoir tints and the fleshy palpitations of Boucher. Fluorescent parakeets flew about, shifting and reforming a kaleidoscope of colors, setting a gentle breeze over the abundance of flowering plants. An albino giraffe sauntered by on the silent television, tropical fish hovered in the luminous tank. It was a menagerie of blasphemy.

Lima Peru lay back on the chaise and watched him absorb her garden of earthly delights with child-like wonder. He plucked a berry from the cluster of fruit set in vaulted bowls, shapely as her pear-shaped lute. He drew his finger tips across the strings of her harp. The air quivered with the fragrance of Chambord roses. On a chair lay the bagpipes, its chanter pipe curled like the neck of a swan.
Turning to her at last, he asked, wide eyed:
"Are you?"
"A whore?" she smiled.
"Really?"
"Your lucky day."
The thrill of it. She openly flaunted conventions of shame. How he envied her wanton scorn. Imagine the attraction. His lucky day indeed.

"So, what's your fancy?"
"Fancy?"
"Your desire." Lima Peru flipped open the top buttons of her shirt. "When you're flying on that bike of yours. Do you dream of the supplicant or the dominatrix, or the Rubenesque mother?" She rolled a glass ball across the carpet to his feet. "The belly dancer bedizened in beads. Or the Scandinavian stewardess with the frigid smile. For the hypochondriac, a nurse all in white. Or the nun, all in black, for the heretic."
Bosch watched her easy smile imagining the pleasures of rodeo gals, Spanish dancers or Polynesian charmers. But one impulse kept returning.
"I don't know why," he said, "but there's something ? about the executive type."
"Oh, I know why," she said and slipped from the room.

Why? Bosch waited by the bay window looking down at his bicycle. Was it the adolescent dream - the authority figure, the teacher, the young librarian tossing aside her glasses? Was it a desire to have respectability lust after him. Power over power, defile the forbidden fruit, take respectability and ravish it? And there was Aleid, his wife, was it her he saw and wanted to turn into a lustful sybarite?

Lima Peru returned to the room transformed, a form fitting powersuit tightly bound her body. Her hair was pulled back and severe, and her lips were berry red. She walked back and forth with purposeful strides every muscle and curve in her long legs dancing under the dark sheer stockings. Swaying her shoulders, swinging her hips, she swept the room with utter confidence stabbing the floor with the heels of her ‘come and take it’ sling-backs. She paused and smiled a professional smile full of venal competence.

Bosch shuddered in boyish glee. With her hands on her thighs Lima raised his desire. She made love to her body as she moved, caressing, cupping, stroking. Bosch crunched his fists with delight, pounding them on his knees. She leaned over him and with some magical movement her breasts began to rise and bubble up from the jacket of the pin-striped suit.
"Agh!" Bosch squealed and his eyes span away in ecstasy catching a glimpse of the window.
"Agh!" He shouted in sudden anguish.
"What?" Her breasts fell.
"My bike's gone!"
His eyes tore up and down the street looking for the culprit.
"I gotta go."
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Suddenly the business suit had another meaning.
"Yes, of course." Bosch dug in his pockets and pulled out several small bills. "You take plastic?"
"Anything but American Express, you wouldn’t believe what they charge me.”

After a fruitless search of the nearby streets Bosch descended into the subway. He knew Tomkins Square, used to be the market for hot bikes, maybe it still was. On the platform he glanced at the headlines of the afternoon tabloid - a sensationalist gossip language paper stacked on a sagging milk crate. SHE-WOLF it announced. Bosch couldn’t imagine why. The morose Pakistani vendor wept openly as customers handed him coins. Tears glistened on his brown cheeks. Would this do for Hell? Charon selling tabloids.

Bosch wandered down the platform until he found himself grinning foolishly at a disfigured film poster. The movie-star's eyes were gouged under blobs of bubble gum, her ample breasts transformed into eyeballs. Was this Hell? He thought of the poet’s line – "because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me." On the track below, between the rails, a worker hammered at a metal box. Bosch watched his mechanical action - hammer rising with the echo, falling harshly with a crash. It was a broiler down there, a hundred and twenty at least. Hell enough.

As he watched he remembered buying a copy of Dante’s Inferno at the Strand, a used Penguin Classic. He hadn’t opened it until he was home where he’d found it once belonged to someone by the name of Greg. Greg with a heavy hand, a ballpoint, and yellow highlighter. Dante may have had Virgil as his guide, Bosch had Greg. It was impossible to look at a page without being first drawn to Greg’s vigorous highlighting and his big scrawling notes in the margin – Dante not dead??? Must be a good guy!!! Awesome!!! The worker between the rails banged on, metal on metal. Then the train came roaring through. ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YOU WHO ENTER. Ballpoint underlined and yellow highlighted.

The riders squashed their body heat together in the cars and blinkered their eyes against intrusion. Bosch pushed in with them, took hold of the upright pole, and focused on the panorama of ads running above the windows. Most were from Blake’s Printing House – proverbs set in the hand of that atheist typographer Baskerville: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Pithy enough. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. Bosch pondered his inaction ? his doubt. Was he breeding pestilence? Then the air assaulted him, someone in back was eating a burger. The smell greased the air and the train grated on, loud and pungent.

With abusive noise the train snaked into the 14th street and the iron grills came out to meet it. Bosch realized they’d passed the local stops of lust and gluttony and wrath, he was riding the express. The doors opened and flames rained down on the burning sands where a river of blood flowed through. Riders clung to the walls defending their ears, re-using the stale air, inhaling one another’s neuroses. Greg’s yellow highlighter pointed out the blasphemers and usurers laying about the platform. And the sodomites who
wandered aimlessly, aggrieved and agitated making trips to the platform's edge peering down the dark tunnels for signs of the local.

In a blast of heat the doors closed and the train moved on, Bosch wondering what the punishment for his own lust would be. For Lima Peru he’d suffer through. From the Blake’s Printing House: The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock; but of wisdom no clock can measure. Was it the bike? Why would he be punished for lust? Where was the circle of Hell for bike stealers and murderers? Lust wasn’t so bad, this was someone else’s Hell not his. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. That appealed to Bosch’s love of the ludicrous. And the train thundered into the Hampstead Station. Bosch glared out of the windows at the Underground signs slipping by in their unfamiliar red circles. What the hell is this? Greg came quickly with the highlighter. The Eighth circle of Hell. Pimps and panderers.

But this is London. Hampstead station.
Deepest in the system.
In the underworld?
London. St. Petersburg is the deepest in the underworld.

The train was barely moving again before a stench rich enough to fog the windows filled the car. The passengers wretched and gagged as charming voices drew closer. The seductive sounds of the flatterers passing through the car immersed in their own shit. Bosch held his breath and nailed his watery-eyed attention to Blake’s Printing House proverbs: Always be ready to speak your mind and the base man will avoid you. And even when they’d gone the reek remained. The fox condemns the trap not himself. Wait, was that Dante’s curse the sin but not the sinner. Or something like it.

At Paris, Peré la Chaise to be precise – The train had barely stopped when six squabbling gendarms rushed aboard and grabbed an unsuspecting grafter of the public trust and dragged him out to the platform. Dressed head to toe in black these devils beat the man senseless with their sticks. When their leader intervened they greeted him with Bronx cheers. blowing raspberries. "And he blew back with his bugle of an ass-hole." F A R T Greg wrote in bold block capitals down the margin, and highlighted the hell out of them. It was the best damn thing that happened in Hell as far as Greg was concerned.

Bosch finally got a seat and for the first time a chance to look at his fellow passengers. There was a fellow down the other end biting and snapping at the air with some kind of Terrets syndrome tic. Across the way sat a man with such a bloated, disproportionate body that his shape resembled a lute more than a man. And another, further along, his face was disintegrating and flaking away in some form of leprosy. And the stink in there, the stench of liars and falsifiers. How mad we are, thought Bosch, the sum total of our neurosis, imitating human beings.

What happened to Greg? There had been no sign of him since Paris. Bosch searched about as they sizzled through the hypocrites, thieves, and deceivers but not single thing was underlined, all traces of highlighting had disappeared. Ne’er a note to be seen. Had he just quit? Gotten the Hell out?

Bosch felt oddly alone in the chill wind that had overtaken the car. A sudden drop in temperature before they clattered into Pushkin Square made him shiver. Ice covered traitors were everywhere frozen in place. Nothing moved. Bosch’s limbs began to stiffen as he stared at the sign – Pushkin Square – How like the Russians to name a station for a poet. Pierced by the cold he shoved his hands into his pockets and realized at once he was no longer carrying the lemons. He foolishly looked at his empty lap as if to confirm they were gone. Aleid would think him irresponsible. And so he was.

The cold grew more intense as the train sped on its long easterly haul. A stabbing pain seared through Bosch's head, a giant knife slicing between his ears like someone eating his brain. It was everyone’s Hell, some nightmare, some self induced terror. As Tokyo’s Hibiya station slipped by he felt his entire torso hollowed out with anxiety. Then from the shadows of his mind Bosch looked at himself, sneaking glances at first, till he finally approached himself head on. Time to leave he said to himself as the doors opened and he rushed from the train.