The Magus and the Fool by Akiva Hersh

Author:Akiva Hersh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novel
Publisher: Akiva Hersh
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Peaceful wealth, or painful toil,

Chance of war, or civil broil,

‘Tis not for man’s feeble race

These to shun, or those embrace.

But that all-disposing Fate

Which presides o’er mortal state,

Where it listeth, casts its shroud

Of impenetrable cloud.

Bacchylides

Chapter Six

One morning, a gutsy reporter from the Statesman arrived at Jacobi’s door.

“Mr. Jacobi, would you like to make a comment?”

“About what?” asked Jacobi.

“Anything to clear the air about you.”

“Madam, you are claiming that there is a tiny china teapot orbiting the sun. I have no interest in proving otherwise. Good day.”

It turns out that the woman had overheard Jacobi’s name around her office. She had connected him to something of a scandal, she thought, but wouldn’t give any details. She said she had come out of “a courtesy” to Jacobi.

Anyone with an ear to the ground could have picked up the story. Jacobi’s fame had been the talk of his guests on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, each feeling they had the true story about his past. Accusations of human trafficking surrounded him, and one rumor, in particular, gained traction: the mansion wasn’t Jacobi’s after all, and that he lived out of an RV, traveling from city to city only to rent a house for his wassails. I never understood why these tall tales gave Oskar Jakobovits of Minnesota so much pleasure.

Oskar Jakobovits—that was his name at birth. He had legally changed it when he was seventeen when his life changed forever on account of meeting Morty Foster. It was Oskar Jakobovits who had been lingering around the parking lot that day in dirty khaki pants and a shabby green hoodie, but it was Oskar Jacobi who approached Foster’s Cadillac Escalade and told him that a good sanding and new paint would protect it from the road salt in the winter.

I think he attached the name to himself long before that. His parents were struggling farmers, and in his mind, they weren’t his parents at all—they were just people he had to put up with. The reality is, Oskar Jacobi of Emerald Bluff, Texas, stuffed Oskar Jakobovits of Minnesota inside a magic black box and made him disappear. Freed of his past, Jacobi became like Kronos, son of Gaia and Ouranos, and leader of the Titans. He accumulated perverse powers and hungered after extravagance and beauty—the archetype a teenage boy would invent, and a persona Jacobi maintained to the end.

Jakobovits had lived this way for a year in Minneapolis, working odd jobs like biking to and from offices as a courier, washing dishes, doing masonry work at construction sites; whatever could earn him enough for food and shelter. He had an eye for older men who he knew would spoil him only to end up resenting them for it. He hated boys his age because they were clingy and going nowhere. Everyone else he disdained because they were short-sighted and served him no purpose.

But his soul was tormented. Lustful and extravagant fantasies played in his mind at night. An unspeakable sumptuous world materialized while the sun passed

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