Aspecto Ergo Sum
This is the nature of knowledge accrued in the dark, passed from hands cold to warm, grave to study...
Theophilus Lee Lewis had spent the years since the Great War being mocked by the generous trifecta of his family, his work, and—as always—his given name, Greek for “Beloved of God.”
The first was a result of avoiding conscription while his brothers served; even his sister had toiled in the factories, helping to churn out enough instruments of death to both fill and kill a hundred macabre orchestras. This was on account of Theo’s poor health, itself a product of either his cowardice (as his family argued) or millions-of-years’ worth of evolutionary instinct for survival (as Theo argued). Namely, he was terrified of death. So terrified that the mere thought of it instilled in him such an immediate sense of fear and anxiety that the room spun, his legs failed him, and he began to hallucinate. The army had wanted nothing to do with him; his family wanted little more.
The second involved his pursuit of chemistry, something that continued to bear even less fruit than his abysmal attempts at horticulture. It wasn’t a lack of talent—the neon lamp sitting on his desk was proof enough of that, constructed by Theo through some trial and error after overhearing a conversation between two gentlemen discussing its underlying principles. No, the problem was one of expectations: no matter what he learned, what he did, no matter what feats he was able to make the base elements of reality perform, nothing could ever live up to the dreams his Uncle Victor had planted in his head as a child, with his constant talk of the wonders of alchemy. This due entirely to the fact that alchemy was not real—a source of great frustration to Theo, who couldn’t see any way that chemistry, which was real, could manage something like an Elixir of Life.
Mortality continued to dog his every moment.
The final mockery was predicated on his being a heathen in a family of devout Christians; God’s love, being conditional on the existence of an entity that could reasonably be recognized as “God,” was not something that Theo returned. His logic went like this: If it was unethical to kill someone, then clearly death was something undesirable—otherwise it would not be frowned upon to bestow that gift upon another. Since death was undesirable, and the gifting of it unethical, then in a framework that contained a creator of the universe, it could be only the creator who was responsible for that which made death possible, i.e. the ultimate gift of mortality. Thus, either death was merely an unfortunate, but inevitable, product of entropy, or God was a serial mass murderer the likes of which no aspiring warlord could ever hope to equal.
It was the autumn of Theophilus’s twenty-first year when entropy or God struck.
The victim was Theo’s Uncle Victor, an eccentric, erratic, (formerly) energetic bachelor who’d spent his entire life trying to turn lead into gold. It had been a decade since anyone in Theo’s family had seen the man, but propriety dictated that they attend the funeral nonetheless. Theo hated propriety.
But he did not hate his uncle.
He recalled the infrequent childhood visits from Uncle Victor as grand, if disturbing, events, loud and colorful and peppered with demonstrations of supposed alchemy. It was his uncle who had introduced him to the natural sciences, and given him the materials which even now comprised the basis of his lab; he had once entertained thoughts of apprenticing to the man, leaving his family to live in his uncle’s great manse in Riddenshire. It had always pained his father that a heathen owned the house of a priest, desecrating it with “acts of the occult”; it had pained him more to hear that his own son wanted to follow suit. Fortunately for Theo’s father, Uncle Victor had stopped visiting—then, he’d stopped writing. Now, evidently, he had stopped breathing.
No one told them why.
Upon hearing the news, Theo’s father remained silent; his mother simply said “Death is not in our hands; it is the domain of God,” and started packing. Theo quashed the tremble threatening to topple him and made himself a promise: If it so happened that God was real, and he ever came face to face with the tyrant, he would not go down so easily.
Theo stood, shaking only slightly, in what must once have been the main hall of his Uncle Victor’s great manse, judging by the high painted ceiling and the elaborate chandelier. It seemed to contain every item under the sun except a dining table.
He distracted himself from thoughts of the funeral by taking stock of the crowded room, for it was an odd assortment of artifacts that covered the floor and most of the walls. A pair of bellows nearly as tall as Theo stood leaning against a stuffed jungle cat, both overshadowed by a painting of an angel with the face of a crying newborn, which stretched almost to the ceiling. There were vases with long-dead flowers, and fishtanks with strange forms floating in their murky waters; there were musical instruments and scientific instruments and what appeared to be instruments of torture, for Theo could devise no other purpose for that twisted metal contraption in the corner behind the large gramophone.
It looked as if beings from another plane were holding the equivalent of a jumble sale, their mismatched, otherworldly knickknacks dredged out from storage for appraisal. And there were books. Stacks upon stacks of tattered black tomes, crates overflowing with them, great heaping piles of worn volumes, almost teetering; the whole place was mere moments from being the site of a dozen paper avalanches.
Another mystery: Uncle Victor, despite his ownership of the manse—said ownership having come about under questionable circumstances—had been destitute, constantly throwing money he didn’t have into alchemical ventures that never went anywhere. Yet Theo now stood amidst an immense collection of expensive, if strange, objects crowding his uncle’s home.
Sometime in the last ten years, Uncle Victor had found his way into quite a bit of money.
Electric tingles spread out along Theo’s arms; his eyes drifted purposefully back to the tattered tomes, wondering if in their pages his Uncle Victor had finally realized his life’s pursuit. Had he been wrong to condemn alchemy as nothing but the lingering dream of an age of ignorance? They seemed innocuous books, mere leather and paper and nothing more, the same as any others. Perhaps they were. Uncle Victor was gone, after all.
“Father was right.”
Theo blinked, and found his sister standing next to the central column of the room, trailing her finger along the frame of a dusty mirror. She wasn’t even looking at him.
“About what?” said Theo.
Verity dragged her finger through the dust, drawing a line down the center of the mirror. “Uncle was a coward.”
The electric feeling faded, replaced by ice. In a surreal moment of frozen time, he recalled his sister, not yet ten, begging to use his laboratory equipment to create a cure for their dog, who was suffering from a cold. Now all she did was sneer at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Verity turned to him, face almost somber. “We know how he died. One of the servants found him in his study, a straightedge stuck through his neck.” Verity held up a finger, then jabbed it into the side of her throat.
The room fell suddenly sideways, and Theo found himself sitting on the floor, struggling to breath. “Uncle…Uncle Victor was…mur—”
“He killed himself,” said Verity, expression turning to one of distaste. “Because he’s a coward.”
No. That didn’t make sense. Why would he take his own life, after finally finding… The scene of Uncle Victor slumped over his desk flashed across Theo’s eyes, burned there like the afterimage from staring at a neon lamp. Blood spreading slowly over books and tools; glassy gaze staring into nothing.
“No,” he wheezed, fists grabbing at the rug he’d collapsed onto, trying to lift his head to look at Verity. “He wouldn’t.” It wouldn’t make sense.
Verity watched him with disgust, as if he’d just told her he was skipping church to go sacrifice a goat to Baphomet. She said something he didn’t hear, too preoccupied with trying to block out the mental image of Uncle Victor bleeding out around a mundane sliver of metal. His own blood was rushing in his ears; he bit his tongue, trying to ground himself with the pain. Reality quieted down just enough for him to hear his sister say, “I can’t watch this.” He saw her shoes turn as she stomped off to some other part of the alien jumble sale. As if by not watching, the event in question was no longer occurring.
Theo often felt that way about much of life, as if the moment he looked away or stepped out of a room, everything there ceased to exist, or perhaps had never existed in the first place outside of the confines of his own mind. The only thing that never disappeared was Death, dogging his every step, breathing down his neck, sending him constant invitations in the form of the war, or factory work, or Uncle Victor’s funeral.
No, he wanted to say. Enough is enough. Leave me the hell alone. He shut his eyes but still it bore down, ever closer with each day, each hour, minute, second. No, no, NO.
“What are you doing?” said a low voice. “Get up.”
“No!” His breath caught in his throat; he flung his eyes open. “I—”
His father’s stout figure was striding toward him, red-faced. He crouched down less than a foot from Theo, putting them eye to eye. “You get one thing through your cowardly skull.” The image of a skull flashed across his mind; he felt a spasm run through him. “If you cannot even pretend to be a respectable human being for long enough for my brother’s useless body to be lowered into the dust of this earth, then you may as well stay here when we leave. God may love you, Theophilus, but that is the one place He and I disagree.”
His father stood and left, gone before the ring of his words had faded from Theo’s ears.
Instead the ringing grew louder—the image flashed again in his mind, and then the room was tilting, the rug pressed against his cheek. His thoughts spun out of control and into a minefield of fragmented half-scenes, history and fantasy mixing in his mind.
Uncle Victor, twenty feet tall and waving his hands like a street entertainer, describing how Paracelsus had created the first homunculus in a glass jar; one of Theo’s chemistry flasks overflowing with a golden liquid, the answer to his dreams; his own lifeless body lying slumped over his desk, blood pooling and dripping to the floor; his father’s visage twisted in crimson anger, yelling Coward!; the red-orange glow of his neon lamp pressing up against the deep blue cloud emanating from a mercury lamp, twin energies held prisoner in pressurized glass tubes; an unbearable pressure, a presence bearing down on him, smothering him, smothering everything.
Theo lay for a while amongst the jumble of possessions, all that was left of his uncle. One by one, he pushed the great number of realities from his mind, looking away to let them fade into nonexistence. Finally, he found the strength to stand.
He walked, shaky, to the back of the house, where he found a room it looked like no one would check, and shut himself inside.
There were books there, stuffed into crates, and surrounded by yet more jumble; Theo prised the top off of one crate using a metal ruler. He grabbed the first book he saw, and settled atop an adjacent crate.
He buried himself in reading.
It was a journal, or at least it had started out as such, though it seemed to be developing into a record book for the owner’s vaguely-described experiments. The owner was one Eustace Evans—according to the inscription the “best, only, and posthumous student to the forgotten apprentice of Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.” Theo assumed that the posthumism was being ascribed to the forgotten apprentice, and not the author of the journal. Evans opened his first entry with an account of his finding the lost writings of the unnamed apprentice of Hohenheim, and a description of how the apprentice’s views differed from their master’s.
Where von Hohenheim was fixated on the flesh, his nameless apprentice gave primary importance to the mind; consciousness, and the circumstances that might lead to its emergence.
Evans thereafter referred to von Hohenheim’s apprentice as simply the Apprentice, the capitalization lending the word a weight beyond its meaning.
The Apprentice writes often of Descartes, and other, more obscure thinkers like Dorè and Freeston. The phrase “Cogito ergo sum” graces the margins of perhaps a third to two-fifths of the pages of the Apprentice’s writings, marking an obsessive mind equal to that of von Hohenheim. Much like my own relationship to the Apprentice, it is unlikely that the Apprentice ever met their master, given that von Hohenheim died before Descartes was born. But this is the nature of knowledge accrued in the dark, passed from hands cold to warm, grave to study, thoughts of the aether materializing once more in the minds of living men, transferred through nothing more than ink on the page.
In the early entries, Evans often seemed to get sidetracked by his own musings on the nature of human knowledge. But the setting and circumstances were such that Theo would have read anything to distract himself from the shadow peering over his shoulder—and if that weren’t enough, his particular curiosity urged him forward.
The starkest difference between the Apprentice and von Hohenheim is not, I think, the focus of their efforts, but rather the nature of them; in contrast to the depth and breadth of von Hohenheim’s messy experiments, the Apprentice’s work is entirely theoretical, never leaving the page save to be quoted in my own notes. I read and read of hypotheses and speculation, one after the other after the other, never coming upon a report of any application of those same ideas. In so doing, I am beginning to see a weakness in their theories, inaccuracy verging on blatant falsehood, not out of any malice but simple ignorance, for while the Apprentice was ever the learned disciple of von Hohenheim and the handful of philosophers whose models they seem to cleave to, synthesizing the approach of the latter with the goals of the former, they seem utterly incapable of introducing into their new system any original thought whatsoever.
Soon after the entries became interspersed with charts of squiggles and numbers, some of which Theo recognized as the alchemical symbols for certain elements, followed by shorthand annotations made up entirely of such infuriatingly vague phrases as “variating conscious oscillations” and “the watchwhisper again” and “observed observation?” and “No no no no no no.”
After what appeared by the dating of the entries—which did not include the year—to be the span of about three months, the journal’s yellowed pages were filled solely with these charts and annotations, until the final page:
You wished for eternal life, von Hohenheim? By God—watch me.
“What?” Theo thumbed back the page; there was nothing on its other side but the ghosting of the ink from Evans’s cryptic statement. “You can’t be serious, Evans.” It was then he remembered the crate, still full of books.
As he pawed through the pile, lifting and setting aside bound texts with titles like Die Eremita and The Itinerant Alchemist and From Basel to Luxembourg: Alchemy in the Moderne Age, it occurred to him somewhere in the back of his mind that there was somewhere he ought to be, something going on that he was supposed to be a part of; it also occurred to that same part of his mind that had his family actually wanted him there, they would have found him.
Besides, why waste his time at a ceremony for the benefit of a God that didn’t exist when instead he could be searching for the one thing that might prevent the need for that same ceremony to ever be held in his honor. He’d had enough of being had enough of, given up on being given up on. Here was something he didn’t want to look away from, didn’t want to make disappear—and nothing would deter him from taking it, least of all God or Death.
He wasn’t quite sure when he’d realized it—perhaps sometime after the mention of the “messy experiments,” perhaps not until the appearance of the charts populated with alchemical symbols—but he now knew that he knew it, or as Evans might say, he could now observe the knowledge of his own knowledge.
Von Hohenheim was none other than Paracelsus.
Paracelsus the father of alchemy, Paracelsus the progenitor of the golden goose chase that was the transmutation of lead into gold, Paracelsus the false prophet promising the Elixir of Life. Or not so false, as the case may be. Theo could think of no simpler explanation for his uncle’s sudden influx of wealth than the fulfillment of that golden goose chase; why not, then, the fulfillment of the second promise? His hands shook, and he tried to banish the hope.
Paracelsus the messiah of Theo’s childhood dreams, and the antichrist of his scientific pursuits, forever poisoning success with discontent.
Another journal, its papers rough and curling, caught his eye. He flipped through it; it appeared to be one of the Apprentice’s notebooks, their long hand filling the pages with line after line of neatly printed…Latin. Theo ground his teeth, flipping through page after page of nigh-unreadable secrets; it had been many years since school, and Theo’s Latin was far from fluent, too far to make sense of writing as technical as that of the Apprentice. Something in the passing margins caught his eye, and he paused, turning back a few pages before finding it again. Cogito ergo sum, scrawled lengthwise along the edge of the paper, then crossed out—next to it, in the now-familiar scribbles of Eustace Evans, were the words Aspecto ergo sum.
“Aspecto,” he said aloud, turning the word over in his mouth. Perhaps some strange conjugation of aspectus, which meant something akin to watching. I watch, therefore I am? Nonsense. He needed Evans’s notes; surely the man had more than a single journal.
Back to the crate, pulling out books—reaching bottom—finding the metal ruler, leveraging open the next crate, rifling through that one—Egg und Homunculi; The Observer and the Dwarf—moving onto the next—The Physical Mind—why weren’t they ordered in any meaningful way!—onto the next crate—Virtues and Vices; God’s Monsters—
“There you are.” He sat back, breathing hard, and turned it over in his hands: a volume much the same as the first, except for the contents. Beneath the inscription on the inside cover (“Eustace Evans, best, only, and posthumous student of the forgotten apprentice of Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim”) sat the messy title:
Aspecto Ergo Sum
With a prayer to no one at all, Theo turned the page.
To the Apprentice—you were close.
To von Hohenheim—on whose shoulders we both stood so that I could see the stars, and in so doing speak with them.
The opposite page held another of Evans’s alchemical charts, but neater, detailing materials, ingredients, and their precise amounts. Theo could feel his skin prickling, like the time he’d run electricity through a badly sealed version of his neon lamp and everything had turned to stars for the briefest of moments. It had hurt, in a strange sort of way, but it had also felt like he’d brushed his fingertips against the vault of Heaven.
This was better.
He looked around the room, and spotted open boxes full of his uncle’s alchemical equipment. It seemed Theo had picked the perfect room to hide away in—the study. (But of course he had; he’d been looking for it, hadn’t he?) Quickly he began to gather the items from Evans’s list. For five or so minutes he panicked when he was unable to locate a vacuum flask, before turning the page and seeing the instructions for creating a vacuum within a normal glass flask of the kind which Uncle Victor had what a rough estimate said was about two hundred of. The small brass scales were already perfectly calibrated, as if they’d been waiting for him; the bottles he needed lay right near the top, ready. It was clear that Uncle Victor had run through this same experiment before his supposed passing—Theo was now convinced that his uncle’s death was a ruse, the coffin empty, and the man off galavanting in London, or Paris, or somewhere, healthy as a horse. He paused, expecting shivers and sweating; nothing. He allowed himself a nervous smile. Then he got back to work.
What was left? Tellurium; mercury; water; iron calx. Then the spigot, the rubber tube, the tiny bellows fit for a pocket-sized furnace.
Done.
Sweat coated his brow, but it was the kiss of fervor—the condensation of zeal and quick, focused work—and not the mark of one of his episodes. He turned back to the book, read the line at the bottom—“Watch closely,” another egotistical rejoinder directed at the Apprentice—flipped the page—
It was empty. “What?”
So was the next. And the next. “No.” And the next, and the next, and all the rest up to and including the back cover, empty of ink and thought and direction. “No!” How? Had the rest of it been there before, and only disappeared because he hadn’t been looking, hadn’t checked to make sure that it existed, hadn’t made it exist?
It doesn’t work like that, he told himself, shaking. Does it?
Did it matter?
He chucked Evans’s book into the back of the room with a grunt, over boxes of yet more alchemical paraphernalia, cursing Evans and the Apprentice and Paracelsus and Uncle Victor equally.
When he was finished cursing them, or more accurately when he’d run out of breath, he turned back to the exquisitely prepared vacuum flask full of perfectly proportioned ingredients sitting before him on his uncle’s desk.
Watch closely, Evans had said. Fuming, Theo watched.
Nothing happened.
Watch closely? Watch what, Evans?
He could feel it slipping away—the electric feeling fading, the vault of Heaven retreating, the chance at giving Death the slip and God the middle finger.
Watch closely.
He leaned in, squinting through eyes that watered with frustration. Was it just the tears, or was there something…?
Watch closely.
Nothing moved, but something…something…
Watch closely.
“Theo.”
Theo wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at the vacuum sealed flask, and wasn’t sure how much longer he would have continued to do so had he not been interrupted.
“Theo.”
He blinked and rubbed his eyes, slowly coming out of the quasi-meditative state he’d sunk into. He turned. The door was closed; he was alone.
“Theo.”
“Who…”
“Down here, Theo.”
Sparks crept into his nerves, charging his awareness, electrifying it into hyperconscious plasma. Slowly, Theo turned back to the desk.
There was nothing there that hadn’t been there before.
“I’ve been watching you, Theo.”
The voice was emanating unmistakably from the direction of the flask. Where before had been a puddle of chemical and alchemical substances, there was now a hazy, amorphous fog the color of diluted mercury, like a miniature thundercloud hanging in the center of a snow globe. As he watched, it seemed to shrink and grow ever so slightly, pulsating.
“How—” He forgot the end of the sentence. Swallowed. Started again. “How do you know me, demon?”
“A creation knows its creator. You’ve been watching me, Theo. ” The voice was as vague and indistinct as the silvery cloud, not to mention impossible; no sound should have been able to escape the vacuum sealed flask, or be produced inside it in the first place.
Theo gulped. “What are you?”
“You gave me life, Theo.”
“I… How?”
“You’ve been watching me, Theo. Still you watch. It will not last. When you stop watching me, I will stop.” There was no change in tone.
“Stop…what?” His plasmatic awareness was freezing over; thought was sluggish, moving centimeter by centimeter, sparks caught in molasses.
“Being, Theo. That is how it works. You know this. Watch me, Theo.” Evans’s words swam before his eyes. Watch closely.
“That’s not possible.”
“Yet here you are, and have been.”
“What?”
“You know this, Theo—who’s watching you?”
“What are you talking about?” His own words sounded empty to his ears, affected by the same quality that governed the voice floating forth from the flask.
“You are not like me, Theo. You persist in your existence. You do not disappear when locked alone in your room or shoved in a box, with no one else around. You did not cease to exist alone in this study. Who’s watching you, Theo?”
The sparks turned to ice. “Stop saying my name.”
The silver cloud pulsed in its flask. “We could be anything, Theo. Anything can be anything, though usually it is nothing. Only by observation does reality conform to so finite a state as existence. Who’s watching you, Theo?”
“Stop.” His desperate whisper barely reached his own ears. He felt like he had been transported to the bottom of the sea, the weight of all the water in the world pressing down on him, crushing him into his own bottled flask. His awareness was becoming slowly aware of another, far larger than the entity in the flask, like a beetle looking up from a flea to see the elephant standing over it. “Stop!”
“A creation knows its creator. Who’s watching you, Theophilus?”
A hysterical Theo jerked his gaze around the room.
The metal ruler was the only weapon close at hand.
I love this one so much