Homunculus * Ižák is never inspired by the somber portrait of Hieronymüs on the wall beside his desk. It came with the room. There is a crack in the plaster: the echo of a river, its source-spring hidden by Hieronymüs in his frame. There are times when Ižák imagines the land belonging to that river, the source-spring and headwaters hidden in the depths of old Hieronymüs’ shocking, white beard. The crack extends all the way to the floor, hidden—at first—by the ancient, framed scholar, and then—just a bit lower—by Ižák’s own desk. Mice scurry behind the plaster at night, and perhaps by day. When the sun is out, he never hears them. Cats aren’t allowed here: the landlady is terrified of them. Three rooms away, an old man coughs. The air smells of rotting smoke, absinth, and splinters in the foot. An angry waft of asphalt carries itself through the open window. Ižák, clothed in nothing but sweat, sits at his small, cluttered desk. He has cleared enough space for two important books, for the jagged, slanted scrawl of his own notes, and a small flask of absinth. The day’s need is centered on the weighty tome open beneath his seldom-blinking gaze. The Algebra of the Jaw. An illuminated text. He scratches idly at the thatch centering his chest. Sweat moistens his fingertips. Çiandrö has made attempts to brighten the room, and even in his absence, his gentle assertions persist. Hieronymüs remains where the landlady hung him, but the other walls bloom with a riot of palm-wreaths and hand-tinted heliotypes. Household gods from Çiandrö’s homeland stand guard on the window ledge so that sunlight might warm them and release their near-sweet aromas. I have no use for gods, Ižák, but I like the way they smell. Two weeks (two unkind eternities) remain before Çiandrö returns. The urge to smoke comes to him, a subtle twitch: nerves plucked like lute-strings by deft and cunning fingers. It is a minor cruelty: one of many that the day might offer. He yields. The flattened, metal tin lies in easy reach. The first drag, when it comes, calms him with its astringent burn. A doodle of smoke curls from the match-head when he blows it out. A smell like burnt sulfur asserts itself and is gone. Though welcome in and of itself, the smoke conjures a ghost: Azéla, like Çiandrö is adamant in her assertions. She is conjured, in some occult way, by the smoke dragged into his lungs and exhaled, conjured—as well—in the lazy, undulant curl that climbs from the smoldering cigarillo. My father appreciates your potential, but he’s too proud to beg. He sees that you’re already a Master of the Algebras, but you chase some stupid obsession. He’s done all that he could for you…and more than he should have. There’s still a place for you. More than a few Masters lust after the chance to mentor your journeyman’s trials, my father foremost among them. But even a Master of the Algebras has set limits, and if you want a chance at anything then don’t surpass those limits. An earwig scurries across the floor and investigates a hollow between his toes: they are creatures of tight spaces and the intimacy between dough-pale toes is no place for them. He whispers idle warnings, curls his toes up from age-darkened parquet, and watches as the insect scurries across an open expanse of woodwork and sunlight, woodwork and shadow; it vanishes beneath the bed. Outside, entangled with the sounds of traffic and random laughter, whores argue. The street is no place for his thoughts: there will be time enough for street-concerns. Later. As he buys bread, absinth, and cigarillos, and later still, as he makes his way to the dark, cramped office on Tan Barrel Street: where light, shadow, and air are all variations of the same dingy sepia. Now, in sunlight and smoke, and in the presence of a strident ghost, he smokes—naked at his desk—toes itching in memory of where an earwig has walked. A clock chimes: the hour of the ox. The day has slipped closer to its end; Ižák has claimed a single task to accomplish before nightfall. He has made the necessary preparations. There is a glass of water on his desk; an egg has been broken into it. Raw yolk and amniotic mucus have sunk to the bottom and are at rest in the drowned depths like an amoeba conforming to the shape and the nature of its confines. A moment’s focus on the glass and its contents are all that it takes to erase Ižák’s idle ruminations. He inhales a long drag and exhales. He stubs the remainder of the cigarillo out among the stump-corpses and ashes of its compatriots in the tin plate appropriated as an ashtray. Azéla’s wraith vanishes. Ižák draws a deep breath and opens The Algebra of the Jaw to the pages he needs. It is necessary to learn a particular set of subtleties: the specific, semantic tales on the ends of familiar equations: little things…the structure of an alchemy of interest to no one but dentists. He plunges into a universe of shapes and meanings: the scent/texture of velum and fine, expensive ink. He swims through an ocean of poetry: equations that are pictures of things that are pictures of equations. Fractal recursion. Layers of an infinite onion. Though unknown, the Algebra of the Jaw is familiar to him, replete with the same quantum iterations that define all of the algebras, right down and through the algebra of algebra: what drunken apprentices call Calculus in the momentary genius of intoxication. He goes as deeply as anyone might, when drunk, and right there in the liminal spaces between the Algebra of the Jaw and his own needs, he caresses the edges of the necessary calculus and without thought, his fingers draw patterns in the air and weave them together: flesh learning what the mind has just absorbed. And then, a clock chimes, somewhere in the distance: the hour of the fox. Ižák emerges from the fugue-state of voracious study; his fingers have cramped from the notes he has taken, from the equations he has sketched in his own journal, and from the lone doodle in the margin, Çiandrö’s penis as he remembers it from their next dalliance, upon Çiandrö’s return. Ižák’s hand wanders from desk-edge to stomach; fingers splay as his palm finds the crater of his navel; touch becomes caress as bronze hairs snag his fingernails. His hand, driven by the surge of amatory fire in his blood meanders—of its own accord—in a more southerly direction. But the moment is derailed— …shattered… —by an ear-splitting thud, and the sound of the wood-mounted bug screen dislodged from the window-frame. It lands on the desk, scattering papers and the ashtray; the ashtray falls to the floor, darkening the pallor of Ižák shin, instep, and toes, with dusting of ash and tobacco crumbs. The glass (and the drowning egg inside) remains undisturbed: an accidental mercy. A rock (half of a brick, actually) has skidded across the desk, disturbing books and notes. It comes to rest on the dislodged bug-screen at rest atop The Algebra of the Jaw. His hand is on the desk again, on the edge as he pushes back. The chair scrapes on parquet flooring; there is a creak as he rises, leans across the desk, and catches an eye-full of nothing but traffic on the street: lorries and carriages, and a duo of rickshaw men, smoking in a moment of quiet gossip between fares. Whores amble through the sparse crowds. A woman—in the tenement across the way—hangs sodden laundry on the railing of her balcony. She makes a show of ignoring him, of not seeing anything but the task at hand, and the street itself yields nothing. He scans the street, expecting to see the backs of fleeing miscreants. They are gone. And so Ižák makes quick work of cleaning up the small ruin, of sweeping ash and cigarillo stubs into the dustpan and simply dumping it out of the window. He replaces the bug-screen and pads into the bathroom to wash himself; and upon his return to the desk (Hieronymüs glowers on the wall beside it) he notices the half-brick. It is wrapped in a note and tied with a length of cheap butcher’s twine. He doesn’t think about reading the note, even as he unknots the twine and un-crinkles the paper. And finds Azéla’s handwriting. A simple declaration: Ižák. Good-bye. If he loves you half as much as I do, then be happy. The argument—every argument—has always been the same, and always about Çiandrö, as Çiandrö has always maintained that it would be. She has good taste in men, Ižák; but she doesn’t understand what we are. He’d said that on a night silvered by moonlight and shooting stars. He’d said that, beneath the sparse boughs and gnarled foliage of an imported baobab tree, its trunk distended with hoarded water. He’d sat with Ižák, cradling him from behind and marveling at the play of moonlight on them. Ižák considers the pallor of his own flesh, now, in contrast to the deep, wooden color of Çiandrö’s intoxicating skin. He folds the note, neatly and in quarters. He sets fire to the cheap butcher’s twine, watching it dissolve into smoke in the now-empty ashtray. For a while, he sits, listening to the silence in the room. My father made homunculi…little golems he’d give to me every Nameday until I was twelve. They were always the best. Everyone wanted them. Ižák recalls the question that followed. It echoes, now. Why did he stop? The Algebra of the Jaw is closed now, and dusted of errant ash disturbed by the half-brick thrown through the window. It’s easy enough to dispose of it: the brick…to simply drop it out of the window. He kicks it under the desk, instead; he gathers what stillness the room offers, while considering all that he’s read in The Algebra of the Jaw. Ižák holds the equations of the jaw in his mind, as he opens his mouth, catches the third, left molar between thumb and forefinger. And pulls it out. There is a moment of pressure, a moment of release like a cork dislodged from the mouth of a bottle. The excised tooth, clasped between forefinger and thumb, gleams with spittle. There is no blood. There is no pain. He has remembered the algebra of a different jaw, though still his own. He considers the tooth: the third molar with its complex, tripartite root. It is a shocking enormity, too big, Ižák thinks, for any human mouth. And without thinking, he reaches forward, and drops the tooth into the glass of water. It sinks and comes to rest on the sodden, yellow yolk. In scant moments, the first blood vessels begin to grow through the yolk and into the nearly-visible amniotic white: delicate, forking bolts of blood-colored lightning drawn with throbbing, spider-webs. * End This is one of those stories that comes out during particularly condensed stretches of time. The urge to write this tale came about long before I even knew what it was about. It starts with a simple image: the image you’ve presumably just read. Even with that image in mind, I had no clue to its tale, until Ižák stepped forward and…well…the rest is recent history. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.