The boat is sailing towards the origin of everything: the world’s birth in an eddying whirlpool. The horizon seems cast in ink, drawing a hard line where one would expect softness. Freshly green forests planted with sea; wet coves, even wetter rivers follow one another. He scratches the stubble on his chin, and for a moment he is dizzied by all the liquid. The place the water is flowing towards, a gigantic rising vulva, seems dangerous; still, the aperture lures him in. He moves closer to the picture and sniffs it. Musk and brine, a dampness that has lingered in one place for too long, a smell that used to drive him wild, the smell of a woman from below. He takes a step back. Tufts of splashing foam, the ship barely visible between the raging waves. The tides are pulling the prow down into the eddy, towards the black tapestry of pubic hair. The cunt’s siren song has driven the rudder off course. Ever so subtly, he strokes his fly with his right hand. Everything is, and will remain, limp.His gaze wanders towards the white wall across the room. The picture appears in negative: blue and cherry red, a black spot in place of the ship. A sudden burst of pain shoots from the corner of his right eye to the back of his head. Seasick, that’s how he’s feeling. It’s been months since he has felt his own stiffness pulsating warmly and reassuringly in his hand. The blue pill on the tongue more and more often, becoming less and less effective, his arteries rigid by the mismatch between inside and out, outside and in. How long has he been walking around in here, in this detached and cold museum, staring at colours and lines, gaping at other people’s imaginations, hoping to awaken something equally ancient inside of him: movement, growth, power? He clenches his fist, something else tightens; something resistant, its release as yet unknown.
The next picture shows a detail of a veined cock, barely fitting into the cunt surrounding it. Not that different from the close-ups he’s played on his laptop at maximum speed, he thinks, compilations of one penetration after another, faster and faster, leaving no room to think, to localise the arousal, his ejaculation being the only logical consequence. He shakes his head, thinking of how natural that release was. A woman comes to a standstill beside him. He looks at her, she doesn’t look back. He’s invisible, a bloodless shell of his former self. He touches his crotch again and is caught this time. She averts her eyes, takes a step aside. Her aversion stirs something inside him. His eyes feverishly roam the museum walls, but whatever just arose disappears immediately. He can’t handle any prying eyes in his pitiful state.
He takes a couple of wobbly steps, his one leg dragging a little, but he forces himself to look at the next picture. A big, hairy man in rapture, the woman trying to wrest herself free from his grasp and pushing away the erection. She’s driven her teeth into his neck; little red pearls are dripping onto the floor. But the beast’s concentration can’t be broken: the tip of his cock is already brushing the wet aperture, her refusal only stiffening his stiffness. Her apparent refusal, he thinks, and reaches out to feel the tension. For a moment his finger hovers in the air, then he carefully places the tip of his thumb on the spot where the two bodies dissolve into one another. He shivers. Remembering the opening, the possibility of unity, of communicating with a vessel, of pouring out into someone else. It’s so easy, so ridiculously easy. So impossible,
these days.
The skin of his thumb sticks to the paper, leaving a cellular mark, as he touches his chest with the fingers of his right hand. He leaves himself behind in the picture, the male act duplicated. Doing something someone didn’t want to have done to them; once, it was just once. He flinches, his skin still stuck near the aperture. Whatever enabled him to seize and take is no longer his. He breathes in, scans his body: fists clenched, head throbbing vaguely, heart beating loudly, but he can’t retrieve the fury, the blood’s imperative demands. A dizzy spell and he tries to step aside, boorishly, clumsily. His eyesight clouds over, the people are just silhouettes, they’re staring, he tries to move forwards, looks around for the exit. His gaze falters, a moment of recognition, the heart again, beating louder now, his fingernails cutting into his palm. Woman rides lover, eyes wide open, hands and feet in spasms, the brilliant blade of the knife she has stuck into his side, the same red, the colour of overripe cherries, the same current running into a dark centre of gravity. He is blind, his retina burning. A flash of pain rips through his eye, his head. The smell of almonds. He becomes stiff as a board. The corners of his mouth curl up: skin tightening, blood pumping, his weight where it belongs. Finally, he thinks, he wants to grasp, but his hand won’t open. The dark lines of the picture fade into one black mass, a hole he will never climb out of. Dark water fills the aperture, there is only one origin, he lets himself be carried along, and drowns.
***
The man who collapsed at the Art and History Museum at the Jubelpark in Brussels on 22 January 2023, while visiting an exhibition on ukiyo-e (erotic prints from Japan, 1660–1850), died instantly from a cerebral haemorrhage. He left behind neither partner nor child.