“Good,” he said. “Now you do that over and over for about an hour and then you got something. Type out the letter and the response. Never repeat an answer. It gets hard. You have to be creative with the things you can use a pencil for. But that’s how you make a Homunculus Totem.”
“What’s that?”
He patted my back and smiled. “I’ll show you when you’re done. And you’ll know when you’re done.”
I walked down the hall with the pencil, shut the door on the blaring TV noises coming from the living room, and got to work. I typed the letter, followed by a use for the pencil, typed the letter, followed by a use for the pencil . . . . When the puppies come, should I even give my grandma one? This pencil erases . . . should I even give my Grandma one? This pencil picks teeth, picks noses, picks guitar. This pencil plays drums. This pencil helps start fires. This pencil stabs . . . . I quickly ran out of the obvious uses for a pencil and had to get a little more creative: This pencil resets modems to factory defaults. This pencil paints impressionistic dot paintings. This pencil replaces the plastic man missing from a parachute toy. After ten minutes I began dissecting the pencil in my mind: This pencil catches fish, the metal part holding the eraser can be used as the lure, and the wood as the bob. This pencil can be sawed into rounds, which can be hollowed and used as beads. This pencil can be hollowed and used as a snorkel. This pencil can be shaved into confetti. After thirty minutes I was listing the pencil’s sexual potential. After forty minutes, I was desperate, reaching for anything no matter how thin: This pencil is a previously agreed-upon signal that the cops are coming during a bank robbery . . . .
Then, finally, after typing, “This pencil can help demonstrate how the pyramids were built,” I smelled menthol and strawberries and something else, something like ammonia, and the pencil erupted with tiny, yellow—not blue—hairy, wriggling worms that together made an undulating mold, but only for a moment, and then the mold was gone, leaving the pencil unchanged as far as I could tell.
I was proud of myself and glad I didn’t have to think of any more uses for a pencil. I was a lot better at this rekulak stuff than I was at riding the Ghost. I brought the pencil to the living room and shouted over the TV, “Something happened.”
Lonnie swiveled around in his chair, a bag of chips in his lap, and Shirley trotted around, sat in his new line of sight, and resumed her begging. With his mouth full, Lonnie said, “What happened?”
I held up the pencil. “Some weird yellow stuff I’ve never—”
“Ha!” Lonnie said, tossing the bag of chips onto the carpet as he stood. Chips scattered everywhere, and Shirley darted back and forth, sucking them up. “You’re a natural.”As he wiped greasy hands on his jeans, he looked around the room as if searching for something and sent me back to the room to grab the typewriter and user agreement.
When I returned, he’d placed a TV tray table and a folding chair between the Harley and the kitchen counter, in front of the sliding glass door. He told me to set the typewriter and agreement on the table, then pointed out a specific tree in his neighbor’s yard and triple-checked that I was looking at the right one.
“Now,” he said, after shutting one eye and lighting a cigarette, “I want you to make a gap in your choices like you did the other day, and as soon as you smell your rekulak coming, stop typing and read the Help-Me-Rhonda letter out loud for the first time, and at the end, answer it with these exact words: This pencil knocks down that tree. And when you do it, make sure you’re thinking of the right pencil and the right tree.”
“Okay, so let me get this straight. I’m making a gap in my choices, and I’m going to fill that gap with the choice I reclaimed with this pencil, or whatever, and this choice is to knock down that tree?”
Lonnie shrugged. “Basically. I want all my channels. And this is how you’re going to repay me for training you.”
Apparently, the groceries I kept buying him weren’t enough payment for him. “Is this tree actually going to fall down?”
“If you do it right. But even then, maybe not. You’re conducting the Homunculus. That has a lot of limitations. Think of it this way: you tricked a god and stole one of its symbols. If you want to use that symbol, you have to do it without the god noticing. Imagine all of your choices make up a huge mirror that this god, your rekulak, uses to look at itself. If you replace a small piece of this mirror with a small piece from a different mirror, a different universe, like knocking down a tree or breaking into an ATM, your rekulak’s probably not going to notice. But if you replace a big chunk of the mirror with something like murder or a volcanic eruption, your rekulak’s going to see that and stop it. Conducting the Homunculus only works for small things, or some big, if you’re clever about it. And it basically follows the rules of entropy and time, which means that any destruction you cause will be permanent and anything you create will be temporary. If that tree goes down, it stays down. But if you say instead, ‘This pencil makes daisies in the lawn,’ the daisies will come, but they’ll be invisible, and they’ll only stay for twenty or thirty seconds, maybe a minute at the most, but they’ll be there.”
“What?” I cocked my head. “How will they be there if they’re invisible.”
“The effects of
