Mark Mayer

Inside

They are the waverings of his mind. Baruch de Spinoza has determined—emotions are the waverings of a confused mind. A swimming worm must wiggle to go straight.

He feels them in him, he writes to Oldenburg, tiny worms living in his blood, steering his tongue as he says his father’s Kaddish and allays his father’s creditors, and only in flashes does he see that he himself is a tiny worm living in the blood and that the corpuscles he swims through, the guilders and stuivers, are his city’s living fluid. He is a bloodworm in the vessel of God.

The city is Amsterdam, richest and most beautiful in the West. The city fathers have approved the Plan of the Three Canals which will open the city like a flower. At night drunkards tumble into canals and by the morning float as the moon instructs. It is the worst plague in twenty years, seventeen thousand deaths in the city alone, it is reported, and the plague throughout the whole country, even in the little dorps and villages. How could one fail to feel the touch of God in such a year? The Angel of Death, who the Talmud teaches requires eight wavering flights to reach his destination, during times of plague arrives everywhere at once.

He has had himself declared an orphan though he will soon be twenty-five. His parents are dead. His father, stepmother, and sister have all died in a run, and he has inherited so much debt he rejects his inheritance altogether. Sometimes he trembles (it is his mind wavering) and drinks until staggering (it is his mind wavering) and fights with de Prado, but it is all his mind wavering as it swims where it is bound. All thought is the body of God.

According to the report Brother Tomas Solano y Robles gives to the Inquisitors in Madrid, Baruch de Spinoza is “a small man, with a beautiful face, a pale complexion, black hair and black eyes.” According to Captain Miguel Perez de Maltranilla’s report to the Inquisition, he has “a well-formed body, thin, long black hair, a small mustache of the same color, and a beautiful face.” He is dark and beautiful, and his body is God’s thought. He has never been healthy. The cough that killed his mother when he was five has never left him. He hacks all his life and never gets it out.

He speaks. At the synagogue, he shares his knowledge of God with two men who leave the conversation in anger. Two days later he is attacked on the steps, his cloak slashed, he wears it proudly. Aboab and the rabbis talk to him. His ideas, they call them. “All thought is God’s thought,” he corrects. They grow angry. Holy men, their skulls tremble in God’s rage.

On July 27, 1656, Aboab stands before the arc of the Torah and reads a judgment: “We have been aware for some time of the evil opinions of Baruch de Spinoza. We have endeavored to turn him from his ways. But being unable to effect any remedy, and, on the contrary, each day learning more of the abominable heresies he teaches and monstrous deeds he performs, we put under herem, ostracize, and curse and damn Baruch de Spinoza with the consent of Blessed God. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in . . . .” His body receives the incantation.

He will be alone. He may no longer mourn his father. No one may speak or write to him, nor provide him any favor, nor be with him under the same roof, nor be within four cubits of him. They reclaim his place in this world and the next. They have opened the ark so the Torah may curse him too, and they are blowing the shofar to charge the words with the force that felled Jericho. The women have lit black candles and hold them inverted so they drip their wax into vessels filled with blood.

But the words are so beautiful. By day and by night, going out and coming in, lying down and rising. It is as if the curse names every ripple of the ocean. And how could one so surrounded in curse ever be alone? By day, by night, by day, by night—this is how a bloodworm swims and going out, coming in, going out, coming in is how a heart pushes blood, convexities and concavities in its walls. By day and by night, going out and coming in, lying down and rising he will sway with every feeling of his Lord.

He grinds lenses for a living. He writes to Oldenburg. At last, he breathes too much glass dust and dies. He is forty-four. The physician steals his coins and his knife with the silver handle.

Mark Mayer's first book, AERIALISTS (Bloomsbury, 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Guernica, and the Iowa Review. "Inside" is from a new collection with a story for every preposition. He is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Memphis.