Track 19
Delilah
He hath formed, weighed, and composed with these twenty-two letters every created thing,
and the form of everything which shall hereafter be.
Jacob’s journals are a treasure trove.
Delilah pages through them with careful fingers as Emmett drives them across Iowa, endless farmland streaming past them along the sides of the highway.
They don’t have anything planned for the day other than travel, so it’s easy enough to let Emmett stick to the speed limit—her own lead foot would be getting twitchy—and instead focus on the delicate sheets of paper bound up into the leather folio in her hands.
It’s probably misleading to call the collection of papers a journal.
It’s more like a tiny archive, pages and pages and pages of letters and diary entries and records and charts and notations she can’t begin to understand.
The oldest of the pages date back to the seventeenth century, and have been carefully encased in laminated sheets to preserve them—much to Delilah’s relief, since it means she doesn’t have to worry about the natural oils on her fingers disintegrating the fragile paper.
The handwriting varies, from a cramped, scrawling hand she can’t decipher to a neat, fluid cursive that reminds her of the letters she used to get from her grandmother the few summers she’d gone away to camp.
Most of the first half of the folio is in a language other than English.
Some of the notes and annotated charts are in Hebrew; the rest are in something she thinks might be Czech, based on Emmett’s stories.
Post-it notes are scattered throughout the pages, a modern intrusion into an ancient document.
The handwriting becomes more and more familiar as she continues turning pages—it must be Jacob’s, she realizes.
The man wrote with a firm, decisive hand, but also crossed out or wrote over his words and phrases in a way that reminds her uncomfortably of how she drafts music, especially when she’s trying not to think too hard about what she’s writing.
And what were you avoiding thinking of? she wonders, running her fingertips carefully over the edge of one ragged note.
Or was it who?
Delilah shakes her head, flexing her fingers to shake away the thought. She’s not here to look at the book as a psychological record. She’s here to find a story.
And oh, is there a story.
Delilah can’t read the incantations or interpret the charts or understand a thing about the numerical notations and their corresponding letterings arranged in complicated circles and stars, but she doesn’t need to.
The pieces she can put together, from the fragments of Jacob’s notes to the increasing use of English as the timeline of the pages inches closer to the modern day, are beyond anything she could have imagined.
Not the magic or the alchemy or the fantasy of it all, but the centuries of fearful, grieving, anxious men whose actions, again and again, and misguided or not, were motivated by love.
Love of community, love of family, love as desire, the love that spills from a truly broken heart until it fills the endless basin of the soul and turns to desperation, denial, and despair.
She remembers reading, once, that the man who invented rubber gloves did it for his wife—a nurse who complained about the dryness of her skin from how frequently she washed her hands.
Delilah had seen the story in a play; the playwright, Sarah Ruhl, writing a line about that urge to create in a way that Delilah’s never been able to forget: I loved her to the point of invention.
There’s so much more than a song here, Delilah thinks. There’s an entire fucking symphony.
Delilah closes the cover and turns to look at Emmett.
Eyes on the road, they’re humming a bit tunelessly along to the radio, Delilah’s rainbow sunglasses perched on their nose, the sun having made it past the clouds an hour or so into the day’s drive.
It’s getting warm; Emmett’s discarded jacket is on the floor behind Delilah’s seat and their sleeves are rolled up to just below their elbows.
Delilah swallows when she sees the rough patch of exposed stone on Emmett’s inner arm on display, feeling sick.
Guilt has been one of her most familiar companions since before she was old enough to know what it was called, but there’s something worse about this intentional dishonesty.
She could make the argument that she’s not not looking for some kind of loophole, some kind of way out of Emmett’s Final Destination situation.
She’d be lying to herself, though, if she tried to pretend that was the only reason why she was reading so closely, why she was turning back to reference previous pages or squinting to try to decipher particularly cramped or illegible scrawls of writing.
She wonders if this is how Sam felt about using her.
“They’re a lot, aren’t they?”
She snaps her gaze away from Emmett’s forearm in time to find them glancing between her and the road, a small wry smile tugging at the edges of their mouth. “What?”
“The journals,” they say, taking one hand off the wheel to gesture at her, without turning their head.
She’s glad she didn’t try to take notes, at least not in the first read-through; she often ends up with ink all over her face when she tries doing that while editing lyrics. “You’ve read through all of this, right?”
“Once or twice.”
Something in Emmett’s tone makes her think that they weren’t supposed to, and she raises her eyebrows. “Is there a story there?”
They give her a ghost of a smile. “There’s a story anywhere, isn’t there?”
“Don’t get all philosophical on me when I’m trying to be nosy.”
Emmett shakes their head. “I read them after Jacob died. He kept them close while he was alive—not that I blame him, given what’s in them. He never told me not to read them, just never gave me a chance. But I was curious, so when he told me to bring them with me…” A shrug. “It seemed only fair.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“I thought so.” Emmett taps their fingers against the steering wheel, a rolling staccato.
Their gaze is fixed on the road ahead, and Delilah knows that if the sunglasses weren’t in the way, she’d be able to see the clear blue of the sky reflected in their eyes.
“Reading it was…strange, for me. I have—I have their memories, in a way, going all the way back to the first of us. We were all made from the same clay, and that means something. It connects us somehow.”
Delilah doesn’t catch her breath, but it’s a close thing. “So you can—what? See their memories? Their lives?”
“No. Not exactly. It’s…impressions. Flashes. Feelings, more than anything.”
“Feelings like emotions? Or like sensations?” Her fingers itch for a pen, and she gives in to temptation and fishes one out of her bag. At least she has the sense to dig her own journal out as well, instead of acting on autopilot and scribbling notes on the priceless artifact in her lap.
Emmett casts a quick glance at her, but she can’t read their expression, caught as it is somewhere between surprise and amusement and uncertainty. “Both,” they say, after a pause that seems to last an eternity.
Delilah’s hand stills, and the pen with it. She looks up. “When I asked if you’d kissed anyone before,” she says, slowly, “if you’d ever done more than kiss someone, you dodged the question.”
They don’t answer, but they don’t stop her line of questioning either, so she pushes. “Did you mean—did one of them—”
She lets the question hang in the air. Emmett flexes their fingers against the leather of the wheel, then relaxes their grip. “You read the diaries,” they say. “You know.”
“It’s only implied.” Chaim Hoffman, Jacob’s great-great-whatever, had written as clearly as he dared, given the year and the risks, and his courage in doing so was honestly more than Delilah would ever have expected.
Even so, he wasn’t explicit; he never admitted to anything in writing that could have gotten him jailed, or worse.
“They really were lovers? Was that…I mean, could the golem—choose?”
Emmett makes a soft, thoughtful sound in the back of their throat. “I think so,” they say at last. “When I reach for the memories, they feel—gentle. Warm. Safe.”
“Jacob could order you to do things, though,” Delilah says. Her stomach twists, sick and spiraling, like the feeling of looking over a cliff and seeing an impossible fall below. “I mean—God, you’re doing all of this because he could order you to do things.”
“Do things,” Emmett says. “Not feel things.” They shake their head. “My heart, or whatever I have instead of one, has always been my own.”
“Do the memories feel different? When they’re doing something they—don’t want?”
Emmett’s grip on the wheel tightens, their knuckles whitening. “Yes.”
Delilah can recognize an emotional door slamming shut when she sees one. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
Their shoulders tense, then relax. Another raw-egg slide of guilt oozes down to Delilah’s stomach and sends it churning. “It’s fine,” Emmett says. “You can—if you think it will make a difference, in whatever work-around you’re trying to find, you can ask me whatever you want.”
“Right,” Delilah says. Because that’s what she’s supposed to be thinking about. Focusing on. Digging into as deeply as she can, because it’s Emmett’s life at stake.
But God, she thinks, with another swell of shame, the songs I could write.
Delilah presses her lips together. Takes a breath.
She picks up her pen.