The Theurgist

There is a man, a theurgist, who does not adhere closely to the boundaries of time and space. He works alone, tirelessly, in a dark laboratory somewhere in Europe. He is a busy and meticulous craftsman with thick spectacles and a hunched posture. He wears a frock stained with the particles of a thousand materials, and never breaks for lunch.

He works, almost feverishly, with a singular purpose: to create. His methods would appear to the uninitiated as random, incoherent, and perhaps even absurd. One day he might fill a decanter with golf balls, and then hurl it violently against a wall. He might spin around a dozen times and then spit into a small, mercury-filled dish. He might bind the legs of a spider together with its own webbing, and whistle discordant rhythms as it struggles to free itself.

Once he painted a canvas using only the very last drop of mucous from a dying achatina iradeli. On another occasion, he scratched the surface of a tiny photograph depicting the microscopic texture of a red mosaic tile, taken from a mosque in Casablanca. Another time, in a fit of rage, he tied the roots of a certain species of fern, carefully imported from a small copse in eastern Albania, to a hot light bulb in his ceiling. Using an old, metallic syringe, he captured the tiny wisps of smoke that eventually began to evanesce from the point of contact with the bulb. The syringe was later injected, very carefully, into the abdomen of a roasted turkey, which was then fed to a blind weasel the theurgist had raised precisely for this purpose.

Every so often the theurgist would stare down knowingly at a tiny mote of dust freshly settled on a table, or a half-dead rat twitching beside a faded portrait of Abraham Lincoln, or at a small wrinkle just at the hem of his trousers, that hadn’t been there a moment before. Upon these occasions, the man would smile contentedly, dust his hands, and smoke a pipe in his favourite rocking chair by the fire. His work would, for a time, and only on these rarest of days, be done.

Somewhere else, in time and space, a God would be born, and with Him the precepts of a new religion, ready-made to be loved, worshipped -- and, possibly, feared.