Jakob as Worm

"Still City Full Moon" painting by Nuala McEvoy

by David Leo Rice

This story marks the beginning of The New House 2: The Chapel of Humiliation, sequel to the 2022 novel The New House, about a family of outsider artists roaming the American interior in search of The New Jerusalem, which they believe will only be revealed in dreams. At the end of that novel, an adolescent boy, Jakob, watched his father sacrifice his mother in his stead, and vanish into the woods, leaving him alone with her headless body. Here, he tries to strike out on his own, hoping to make a name for himself in New York City in a way that neither of his parents, despite the efforts they claim to have made, ever managed to do.

After all that went wrong—or right, according to a scheme he couldn’t bear to fathom—with the sacrifice upon the mountaintop altar in the woods in the part of the country he’d been forced to grow up in, there was nothing and, more importantly, no one to stop Jakob from wandering for days and weeks, along country roads and then along main streets and highways, until he reached the Lincoln Tunnel, which he’d been warned against entering for as long as he could comprehend speech.

“Portal to the Great Moloch, Babylon of Babylons, the Art World in which souls are sucked out through their body’s anuses and crushed to death in gutters overrunning with the blood of diseased and decanted infants,” his mother, under whatever duress throttled her maternal interactions, had made a point of telling him every day.

That and more, he’d been forced to swear he understood, awaited him on the far side of the Lincoln Tunnel, a death canal that would seal behind him and never permit his return. His father, a braver man than he by several orders of magnitude, had barely made it out of New York alive.

But now, after his father’s swing of the ax and the note he’d found inside his mother’s skull, which amounted to little more than Go while you still can, he was on his way. He trudged mile by mile across withered countryside, already building within himself the trembling fury that would, as soon as he emerged from the Tunnel, expand to blot the entire metropolis, not only consuming its galleries and museums and everyone in them, but in a sense, he knew he was not yet seasoned enough to articulate, making them real for the first time. “There is no New York, not really,” he whispered, “until I arrive at the site of its becoming.”

This, he came to understand, as the maw of the Lincoln Tunnel opened out of the road ahead, swallowing him along with three other pilgrims who emerged from the shadows just in time, is the essence of Art. Not the production of trinkets and baubles. Not even the production of beauty. Nothing less than the first and final act of making-real that the world, oversteeped in its own half-completion, has waited so long to undergo, dredging millions and billions of souls from the underside of eternity, hoping each time that I would be among them to make it so they had someplace to land.Well, at last, the wait is over. Here, on the far side of the Lincoln Tunnel, I have crossed over to the place where I will answer the Call. Let no one say I have missed my Appointment.

But it wasn’t the Lincoln Tunnel. Not yet. Not by a long shot. Jakob scraped together enough coins and curled bills from his knapsack to earn the keys to a room in a low, wide dormitory on the outskirts of wherever this was, a building that housed, he came to see, dozens or hundreds of pilgrims like himself, all bound for the city, none yet strong or fierce or angry enough to get anywhere near it.

He lay down on the cracked plastic pallet on the far side of the room and at last consented to hear the message he’d felt hovering behind him, or just off to his left, throughout the entire journey so far. The message came in the form of the Night Crusher, who’d either followed him half-hidden in the wake of other pilgrims, or gone up ahead, staking this place out, perhaps even preparing it for him. “A room you’re hereby warned not to languish in,” the Night Crusher growled, perched on Jakob’s chest with enough force to stun but not yet to crush him. “Take to roaming, explore the grounds, form an escape plan. One can only fail to traverse the Lincoln Tunnel so many times before that failure becomes permanent. Before one becomes not merely someone who’s failed but a failure, never to be redeemed.”

On the word failure, the Night Crusher leapt up and tore through the flimsy paper wall between Jakob’s room and that of the pilgrim beside him, revealing a similar room with a similar pilgrim, but one who was even more squalid, the air of lostness and desperation even thicker about him.

“This man, or boy, if you’d rather,” the Night Crusher whispered, “is one rung beneath you. He is dead weight pulling on your heels, sagging your ascent. He is what you will become if you linger here. Summon, instead, the courage to invite him to your room.”

Jakob awoke to the tapping of a nervous foot. “You invited me over?” He glanced up at a lower-quality Jakob clutching a sweaty portfolio. “You… wanted to see my work?”

He remembered enough of last night to nod. “Definitely. We’re all in this together, right? We’re all trying to make it as one through the Lincoln Tunnel.”

The other Jakob placed his portfolio on the plastic pallet with a hesitant, “May I?”and began to unpack a series of charcoal drawings on cardstock sheets of various shapes and sizes. “These are my… uh… they’re my,” this Jakob stammered, while the other Jakob dragged a plastic tub out of a closet where something told him it would be waiting, and filled it with lukewarm water from a spigot that hung over a grate by the window, as if this room had been meant all along as a processing stall—a term that announced itself here as the title of the artwork he could sense was already almost complete. “My power, the essence of what will allow me to triumph,” he explained, entering a dim apartment with two sleek leather armchairs, one for himself and one for his biographer, “comes either from an ability to direct reality, that is, to force it bend to my will, or the exact opposite, a preternatural humility, a totalizing submissiveness, that allows me to hear and then to obey the dictates of a power that few if any other pilgrims have, due to their own foolish pride, ever allowed themselves to consider genuine.”

Returning from the dim leather of that future apartment to the processing stall where he still faced the sub-Jakob—one of perhaps infinitely many, all waiting their turn—Jakob glanced at his visitor’s earnest, naïve sketches. Blurry, as if drawn by a left hand dragging across the page, they depicted two young men as one pulled the other’s arm off with a delicate, even airy touch, like the arm had been perforated for removal.

Jakob regarded his visitor’s arm. It hadn’t been in this condition before, but it clearly was now. The sketch had either made it so or revealed what could otherwise not have been seen. You never should have shown me your work, he thought, though he knew this made no sense, or at any rate could provide no consolation: the sub-Jakob would never have come here were his fate not his fate. None of the Jakobs would have. The circularity of this formulation made him grin, though he knew it was dangerous to play mind games in public. He knew well, as his father had known better, where such games could lead.

“Did you… did you want to show me your work in return?” the visitor asked, itching his ear with the fingers at the end of the perforated arm, as if a rough tongue had just fed him the line.

Jakob nodded, turned to the far side of his cell, and tested the water in the tub, all as depicted in his visitor’s sketches. Then he opened his mouth, as curious as anyone present, to hear what came out. “My Worm,” he said. “It’s not very long yet, but it’s growing. Please, reach out and touch it.”

As the smaller, paler Jakob leaned over the water to touch what wasn’t yet there, the larger, more powerful one—“The one,” he told his biographer in that dim room in the deep leather future, “who’d been doomed to triumph”—crept up behind him and removed his arm, pulling on it as if determined to save its owner from a deadly fall.

The arm came off and landed in the tub and hissed and fizzed. White tendrils extended from the wound where it had been severed from the shoulder and, from the finger tips, flapped thin fibrous minnows.

Jakob and his visitor—”Both Jakobs,” he told his biographer, in what had already amounted to a thick volume that appeared in the side pocket of his duffel bag, standard issue among all the pilgrims—”watched the water fill with tendrils and minnows until it looked like a pot of boiling pasta.” Then the two boys turned to regard each other and Jakob had the type of thought that came to him “more and more often,” verbatim from the Biography:

In that moment, the Jakob who’d come to show Jakob his charcoal sketches passed at once into and out of the plane that we’ve learned to call real life. He became, in the instant during which his arm was removed, a real boy, which he had never been before and would never be again. In all the moments leading up to that one, he’d been nowhere, not even waiting in the wings. Waiting nowhere until summoned. And in all the moments thereafter, he would rot as a hunk of dead matter on the cracked pallet that Jakob had slept on the night before. But it was crucial that, in the decisive instant, the visitor experienced via the removal of his arm the full intoxicating admixture of animal pain and fear, combined with shame at the realization of his own cowardice and pride at the simultaneous realization that he would now be part of the life’s work of an Authentic American Genius. Nothing less would have made the Genius who’d removed that arm as authentic as he’d known he could be—he would not settle for being known as one more butcher of wastrels or gluer-together of wobbly simulacra.

Jakob placed his visitor on the pallet, kicked the charcoal sketches into a corner, and left that place, dragging Worm in the tub behind him, attached to his wrist with the belt that had once supported his grass-stained Levi’s.

He roamed the outskirts of that false New York, past the downcast eyes of the pilgrims just arriving and those already departing in defeat. Beyond the commissary that offered the few comforts these failures still believed themselves worthy of, he marched through the next Lincoln Tunnel, this one a fiberglass culvert ten or twelve feet long, so low and narrow he had to stoop and twist the tub, wasting a portion of its water and agitating Worm as it struggled to grow from the arm’s remaining flesh, having already eaten all the minnows.

On the far side, he emerged into another New York, lit a dim yellow and encircled by a winding freight train, its trajectory spiraling ominously inward. He checked into another dormitory, nearly identical to the first, but this time he found—”Or thought I found,” he admitted to his biographer—that his reputation preceded him. The proprietor and several pimps in the lobby looked up from their paperwork and whispered, “Oh my God, that’s Jakob and Worm.”

It took almost no time at all, once he’d gotten settled in his room, for the next Jakob to arrive with a copy of the Biography under one arm and a portfolio under the other. He unfastened the clasp on the portfolio’s front flap and spread out his sketches of a second arm joining the first.

Without being asked this time, Jakob agreed to show some of his own work in return, dragging his visitor by the arm across the barrier that made him real for a moment before he collapsed on the bed with marble eyes and red shaving foam blood. A photograph of this scene marked the end of the Biography’s introduction. Beneath the image, the caption read: Jakob began here to envy the transformation he offered his inferiors.

Shaky with longing, he submerged this new arm in the tub beside the first, adding more water from the spigot by the wall. Then, he sat on the bed to watch the two arms commune, flipping and thrashing about in what almost amounted to a mating ritual, and did indeed result in more flesh than had been present in either arm before.

“I will win,” Jakob warned his visitor on the bed. “I have the killer instinct and you do not, and that’s all it comes down to.”

But his visitor was gone by then, reverted—as Jakob knew he would be, but had let himself forget in his eagerness for someone to witness his triumph—to the raw materials he’d briefly emerged from. Jakob looked around the room with a loneliness almost like terror at the thought that no one would agree or even know that he alone possessed the killer instinct. Even the Night Crusher declined to appear; so Jakob left under cover of night, dragging his tub through the next Lincoln Tunnel—an asbestos tube twenty feet long, its crannies seething with slugs—taking what pride he could in the sound that both arms made as they consumed their own elbows in their eagerness to multiply.

In one New York after another, he gathered arm after arm, building a Worm that would one day grow long enough to stretch through the real Lincoln Tunnel—long enough, if need be, to force that tunnel to become real, emerging from the earth for what would turn out to be the first time—and thereby make him real too.

Worm consisted of a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand, and then ten thousand arms threaded together, the tub long since abandoned. It crawled on its own volition now, so assuredly that sometimes Jakob rode on its back through the Lincoln Tunnel, from one stretch of dormitories to another, each one filthy with pilgrims offering their arms to a Worm that, they had come to see, possessed the killer instinct they did not.

At this point in his career, the Biography continued, already well on his way to international renown, or infamy, Jakob had left so many sub-Jakobs behind, sprawled one-armed on so many plastic pallets and wispy cotton bedrolls, that critical opinion grew sharply divided as to whether all of this—the squalor of endless sub-cities, the vast array of Lincoln Tunnels, some as anodyne as children’s bouncy houses and others harrowing concrete vaults twisting hundreds of miles underground, from one occulted location to another, toward a bloodbath so colossal that its reverberations would be felt as far as…

Jakob couldn’t read any more. He hated that this book had traveled so far with him. If he were honest, he had begun to doubt whether he was its true subject. Perhaps his memories of having dictated its contents to his biographer in the deep leather future were no more than memories of having read one of its later chapters, wherein was described an artwork in which he, or someone, pretended to have done so.

He lay on his pallet in yet another New York, this one made of little more than carboard boxes and masking tape, and listened to the fry of the Worm’s arms, each stripping the next of its muscle and rolling the skin between its stripped fingers, and he entertained the thought that his years in the city had already come and gone and that here he was, in some slum suburb, trying with half of his will to recall what the other half had already succeeded in forgetting.

This phase, which he expected to last for weeks, lasted for months, and then years. Jakob became a kind of reaper, gathering arms without joy and imputing them to Worm without purpose, watching them affix to the beast’s sides or spine, where they’d wriggle for a day or two and then fall off like dead toenails, rotting where they fell. Jakobs from neighboring rooms appeared with armfuls of arms, wheelbarrows full, like depreciated currency after a war, desperate to contribute, but their cowardice was too common to make any point other than that which had been made long ago.

Each Lincoln Tunnel led only to the next, so Jakob became known throughout the territory as just another eccentric, one more balding man with a beer belly dragging trash from room to room. No one wondered any longer whether the arms that made up the Worm were real, much less whether, as Jakob still claimed, the process of removing them had made them real whereas before they had not been. That story belonged to an earlier idiom, the fad of an era that Jakob had nearly caught the wave of but then hadn’t, or had but then the wave had broken, leaving him back where he’d started, the same in every regard except that of no longer being young.

The section of the Biography entitled Early Years was long over.

Jakob began to while away his afternoons in posh cafes, drinking black coffee and mopping spills with the book’s edges, spills that seeped more often than not into the bars across the street, where he’d park Worm by the dumpsters out back, as the Biography claimed he’d grown famous for doing. He was maddened to find that even here his shame tracked perfectly with the descriptions in a book he’d lately come to fear he’d grown up with, sneaking glimpses from his father’s shelf while the old man slept in the garage. He grimaced through pint after pint, indulging fantasies wherein a gang of local hoodlums—a further degeneration of the Boys’ Boys, who’d tormented him throughout his boyhood—killed Worm with a brick, allowing Jakob to respond in kind, doing to them all at once what he’d come to fear God was doing to him with sadistic patience.

This period grew insufferable. In its early days, people—young men with the crazed gleam he too must’ve exhibited at their age—shuffled over to him with a quavering “Are you…?” and offered to buy him a drink. He never said no, but the young men, themselves aging, soon receded and were not replaced.

Though he could see there were hundreds of pages left in the Biography, he affected the world-weariness of an artist whose career had peaked with its early promise. He was at this stage when he turned on his barstool in a tavern built atop a dock in a harbor full of windy piers and sunken pylons to regard a face he was sure he’d seen before, though whether inside or outside the visionary mania that had guided his father’s life and sometimes still guided his own was more than he could say.

“Remember me?” the face opened to ask.

Jakob wanted to say no. “Yes.”

“Good,” said the Night Crusher, dressed in civilian clothes with a face only relatively similar to the face it had once greeted him with. It occurred to Jakob that perhaps Night Crushers were not as unique as he’d imagined. Perhaps they circulated freely, any number of them following or guiding any number of Jakobs.

“We’ve been worried,” it said. Jakob resolved not to view this Night Crusher as his own, even if part of him still believed it was. “You’re lagging behind expectations. A long time ago, I told you to invite your neighbor to your room before his dead weight pulled you off the ladder. Now, I’m inviting you to my room for the next part of the same reason.”

Jakob said nothing.

“Ask me what I’m working on,” the Night Crusher commanded.

“What are you working on?”

The bartender, sensing that Jakob and his friend would be leaving soon, brought the check.

“I’ll show you,” said the Night Crusher, curling the check in his fist and swallowing it. “Get your Worm. Leave the Biography on the bar.”

Jakob and Worm followed the Night Crusher through the red-light district, along the harbor past a hushed complex of storage units abutting an airstrip, then to a shuttered motel at the edge of an inlet. Behind the motel, a garage stood alone in a weedy yard, light shining beneath its half-closed door.

“You know if you go in there you’ll never—”

“I know,” Jakob replied, eager to get through what was coming, even as a large part of him wished he were still in the bar. He could feel, in a way that he’d come to fear he never would again, that something genuinely new had taken up residence in the moment right after this one.

Worm filled all the space between where they stood and the water, its arms swaying in time to the rhythm of the moored boats knocking together. The Night Crusher hauled open the door to reveal Tobin in a leather apron. “We meet again, Little Fink. First time since the mountaintop,” Tobin drawled, wiping his cleaver on his hip. “Bet you thought I was still up there!”

Worm crawled past the three of them where they stood, pressing its skinned palms against the concrete floor. “The cowardice has calcified,” the Night Crusher remarked, admiring the musculature and bone structure that stitched the Worm together. “It takes so many cowards to make something beautiful.”

He wiped a tear as Tobin, in a sudden fit, dragged three pigs out of a metal stall and beheaded them in what looked to Jakob like a single motion. He whirled with his cleaver, chopping at neck bone and shoulder fat and sending sparks off the walls until three heads floated into the corner on a wave of bloody straw. Then he kicked the carcasses so hard he fell over.

When he got up, he panted, “Are we doing this or not?” His cleaver swam again through the air, grazing Worm’s flanks and lancing pockets of pus in its armpits.

The Night Crusher turned to Jakob.

Jakob nodded. He allowed the Night Crusher to drag him by the head around the room while Tobin rampaged, slashing at the walls, the floor, and himself, keeping the cleaver in constant motion, dragging it along slick tiles until it slipped and slashed into his thigh, then ripping it out and hacking at the tables and the pig carcasses where they lay. The Night Crusher danced Jakob through this chaos, determined to salvage the face. He’d introduce the neck in Tobin’s direction, then grab it away when the blade flew past at the wrong angle. He did this over and over until Jakob grew so dizzy he couldn’t say, having no means of guessing how it would feel, when the fatal chop landed.

The Night Crusher leapt to salvage the head while Tobin hurled the Jakob-body onto the pigs and began to do what he wanted with it. With a powerful screwing motion, the Night Crusher cupped the head in his palm and forced it down onto the fingers protruding from Worm’s neck and held it there until the calcified cowardice slithered up to stuff the brain with nerves and flush it full of blood.

With no ceremony or parting words from anyone involved, Worm slithered out of the shed, past a nest of shipping containers, and along the bay until it reached the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel.

So I triumphed in the end, it thought, filling Jakob’s head with its own voice. I was right to believe that I alone possessed the killer instinct. It pressed its thousand arms into the root-cracked asphalt of the docklands and entered the tunnel, aware that the next light it saw would be that of the sky over the Art World. Of course, there was a note of tautology about this victory—in the end, the winner won while the losers lost—but Worm either did not see it this way or did but nevertheless felt no diminution in its triumph. It did not matter which Jakob the head had come from; it mattered only where that head ended up. Whether the head of the Worm was any more the victor than its arms had been was not a thought it had any reason to entertain. It only knew that here it was, ready to accept all of New York as sacrifice just as it had accepted all the Jakobs it took to get here. Ready to pull off the city’s arm and thereby make it real. And thereby commence the process of rendering the world and then the universe real, pulling off one arm after another until an infinitely vaster Worm, with arms made of whole cities and countries and cultures, slithered through the final wasteland bound for The New Jerusalem, just visible on the farthest of all horizons. And then, at last and also for the first time, eons of desperate waiting would turn out not to have been for nothing.

Worm sped up, grinding its palms against Twelfth Avenue, shaking with purpose, as it pictured what pulling the city’s arm off would entail. The power it had been vested with to heed the world’s prayer for deliverance. It slithered beneath street signs and past shop windows, only gradually looking up to behold the poster, spread across bus stop benches and subway entrances and the glowing signs on taxi roofs, of Jakob’s career retrospective at the Whitney: Chapel of Humiliation: My Journeys to New Yorks, From Altar to Worm.

The poster showed a dense line of people, tourists and couples and families, lined up outside the museum’s glass entrance, shrieking as a Jakob-headed Worm with thousands of arms slithered between their legs. For a moment, the worlds in which the coming event had not yet occurred and in which it had occurred long ago, and in which it had really occurred and in which it had occurred only as Jakob’s most ambitious work of large-scale public art, cohered. They overcame the impossibilities of physics and fused into a perfect whole.

Then, with a shrieking that crushed part of the skull, they ripped apart. Worm was terrified, exposed, lost and alone in New York. Bloated with horror, it sped up as the gates of the city slammed shut and the Lincoln Tunnel dissolved underwater. It dug its fingernails into the sidewalk and pushed faster down the island, through the West Village and into the Meatpacking District toward the Whitney, where the line stretched for blocks. Flexing its arms and licking its teeth, Worm forced its way around this line and into the museum, where another Jakob, born an instant ago, waited to install it in the exhibition space and then to sign copies of the Biography for those few sneak preview ticket holders lucky enough to be admitted into the VIP section of the lobby downstairs.

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