Instrumental Emmett
Instrumental
Emmett
Emmett sits by the crackling campfire and waits for madness.
It’s been more than half an hour since the lights inside the van went out, and with them the barely audible murmur of Delilah’s voice.
The sounds of distant conversation drift across the campground from the other sites, but here by the still-crackling fire, Emmett feels alone and unsteady in a way they can’t ever recall experiencing.
It feels different from being just a room away from someone in a house or a synagogue, places where they were long practiced in recognizing the barest change in someone’s breathing, or the smallest sign that someone needed help.
Even sitting by themself, reading or sketching or just existing, Emmett had always been listening for Jacob’s call.
They sigh and tug the unzipped sleeping bag around their shoulders like a cloak. Scooting their chair closer to the fire, they stretch their hands toward the flames, almost near enough to touch. The fire wouldn’t burn them—at least, they don’t think so—but they keep a few inches back all the same.
Still, the warmth is nice. Emmett doesn’t really feel the cold, but they’ve never really felt properly warm either.
There’s a quiet buzz from the side pocket of their backpack, where they tucked their phone away hours before. Emmett reaches for it on instinct, then stops. There are only a few people who would reach out to them, and Emmett isn’t supposed to be talking to any of them.
Or—are they? Jacob had told them to go west, to undo what Jacob himself had done. He hadn’t said to disappear. And even if he had, it’s not like they hadn’t been looking already. Just in case it’s important. Just in case it’s something Jacob would want them to…
To what? Know? Act on? Care about?
Emmett allows themself another moment of hesitation, then pulls the phone out.
It’s not a surprise to see another flood of messages from Ruth, or the increasing frustration in her words.
Emmett wants more than anything to be able to send a reply, to reassure her that everything is fine, that there’s nothing for her to worry about, but their hands have trembled through even attempting to compose those messages, and their fingers refused to send them.
Apparently, the rules that keep Emmett from lying extend to saying anything—or even writing anything—that so much as feels untrue.
They’d learned that earlier, every time they mentioned anything about Jacob’s role in their life, their instinctive loyalty catching against the ragged edge of a hurt and loneliness they’ve never really allowed themself to express.
But Delilah, so earnest and genuinely interested, had read enough between the lines that Emmett hadn’t realized how much they’d said until it was too late to stop.
The texts are short, a mix of hopefulness and sadness and an underlying disappointment that twists something inside Emmett’s chest to read. They read the messages through three times and then put the screen to sleep again, leaning back in their chair and looking up at the clear, starry sky.
What would Jacob think, Emmett wonders, their fingers drifting over the pronoun button Delilah pinned to the chest pocket of their jacket, if he could see them now?
Not that Emmett really has to wonder. Jacob could never stand disobedience, not even the suggestion of it, and hated the way Emmett slipped through the spaces between the letters of his laws.
He had furiously consulted his journals and notes to determine what he’d done wrong when he crafted Emmett from old clay and fresh water and divine words to make Emmett capable of toeing the line.
For Emmett, though, what Jacob saw as nothing short of rebellion was just a yearning for a thought, a breath, a hint of an agency they could call their own—a book Jacob didn’t approve of, a quiet conversation with a young man at shul that Jacob thought went on too long and too privately, a walk in the night air that brought Emmett home too late after a curfew they hadn’t known they were expected to keep.
Emmett takes a breath they don’t really need, watching as their exhale clouds their view of the stars.
They can take as many walks as they want now.
Stay away as late into the night as they dreamed.
Read whatever books they can find, use up as many sketchbooks as they can afford, talk to anyone they—
The sudden spasm that shoots through their left arm startles them into a gasp.
Emmett curls forward in the chair, so shocked that they’re jerking the arm closer to shield it against their chest before they’ve even fully recognized the unfamiliar sensation as pain.
Emmett shoves the sleeping bag off their shoulders, shrugging out of their jacket and pushing up the sleeves of their flannel overshirt and the simple long-sleeved tee underneath until they uncover the source of the feeling.
Halfway between their wrist and elbow is a rough, discolored patch of skin, about three inches across and four inches wide. Uncertain, Emmett runs the shaking fingers of their right hand along the blemished splotch, then flinches back just as quickly.
What had once been smooth, unmarked skin has turned to cool, rough stone.
For a moment, all Emmett can do is stare at the patch, convinced that the firelight is playing tricks on their eyes. Then they swallow hard and carefully roll their sleeve back down.
There’s nothing in the journals about this.
Nothing that says with any kind of certainty what happens when a golem disobeys.
Jacob liked the version with the madness, the loss of control, but Emmett had always wondered if he liked it simply because he knew how terrified they were by the possibility.
He’d known that even the potential of harming the children they’d been created to protect was enough to keep Emmett willing to do anything, no matter how trapped or lonely they felt, to keep it from happening.
Emmett knows this isn’t madness. Their mind feels as clear as ever, maybe even more so, without Jacob tugging their metaphorical leash.
But it’s something. Something that feels much more final. Something they don’t think they can stop.
A twig snaps in the fire, sending a spray of sparks up against the sky, and Emmett flinches, almost missing the buzzing of their phone.
Text message from: Ruth Stein
It’s not just Noah. I miss you, too.
Emmett stares at the words, floating in their little bubble.
They wonder what Ruth is doing tonight. Shiva is over, but it’s still the earliest days of shloshim, the first thirty days of mourning.
Ruth is at home, since she lives there, but is Noah still there as well, or has he gone back to campus?
Is Dana grateful to be home with her children, her duty to her estranged father finally done?
Is Miriam still drifting listlessly through the walls of the house, something between widow and ghost?
The skin around the strange new patch on Emmett’s arm tingles and tugs. Not quite painful anymore, but not far from it.
They pull their jacket back on and click the phone off again. They tuck it into their inside pocket, close to their chest, the only way they can think to keep Ruth with them until they can decide how—if—they can respond.
They wrap the sleeping bag more closely around their shoulders, close their eyes, and tilt their head to the sky to wait until dawn.
[on an old, cracked page of the journal in Emmett’s backpack, tucked inside a protective plastic sleeve behind a drawing of a five-generation family tree on much newer paper, lines connecting a circled R.
YOSEF HOFFMAN (Z”L) to an R. JACOB STEIN; the ink of the handwritten lines on the older page is long faded and smudged with age, but appears recently restored]
The Maharal’s instructions were clear enough, for his purposes—a creature capable of movement and obedience and even of caring.
But my Rivka needs a companion, to stay by her side, because her mother is gone and I cannot be there, not every moment of every day, not the way she needs.
Her lungs are weaker every day, and who will help her clear them, help keep her breathing until a physician can be found for her infusions?
No—I will take the work further than my great-grandfather’s master ever dared.
I have searched the pages of the Book of Creation, I have found the divine words, and I have solved the mysteries of the gematria.
The creature I will make will be no simple, mindless thing.
She will have as close to a soul as I can make for her; she will think, she will reason, she will love.
I have solved the problem of obedience within the incantation; she will have a mind of her own, but she will not stray from the work I have given her to do.
If she obeys, she will flourish. If not, she will lose all that makes her capable of thought.
May God forgive me, for daring to trespass in His domain. But I am a father first, and I will not let my girl pass her final days alone.
Rabbi Yosef Hoffman
December 16, 1808