The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

hurriedly slipped his letter opener into the right-hand side, and flicked it open with a swish of the wrist.

      Dear Johan,

       Bad news, I am afraid. Your father has lost his job.

       So, I hate to put this on you, son, but we need your help.

       We all know how important your studies are to you (and therefore to us) and we love you for this, so God forbid they be affected.

       Your father sends his love. As do I (of course).

       With all my heart,Your Mama xxx

      He closed the letter slowly and slipped it back into the envelope, staring straight ahead.

      * * *

      At night, Johan’s father, Drago, used to tell the boy fairy tales. The magical stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm would bring each day to a close. Drago then would return to one of his three favorite hobbies: campanology, constructing matchstick models, and collecting pinecones.

      Every morning, Drago rose at six minutes past six. He showered in cold water for nine minutes. He ate a bowl of cold salted porridge. He imbibed two glasses of tepid water. He tried to put a comb through his crazy locks after he’d shaved his beard, already heavy after twenty-four hours. Johan used to love rubbing his face against his father’s five-o’clock shadow, begging his dad to give him a chin pie.

      Drago left the house on the stroke of eight every morning and walked (always without an umbrella, for he, like Johan, suspected them of mischief) the two miles to school. He taught an array of subjects to an array of ages, but his lectures were always met with enthusiasm, for they were delivered at an impeccably high level.

      He was a jack of all trades and a master of many: languages to philosophy, sciences to the arts.

      He remembered every pupil he had ever had, their quirks and their strengths. He had a private joke with each of them. This endeared him to everyone at the school.

      He instilled the love of knowledge into his own flesh and blood, too. Many evenings, Johan and Drago had sat by the fire in the living room of the old house in Argona as Drago set his eight-year-old boy mathematical problems of increasingly tough proportions, and within three years, high-end calculus, integration, differentiation, coefficients, constants, cosines, sines, tangents, and logarithms. Sheets covered by sigmas or dy/dx’s would be strewn across the deep red hearth rug, spilling over onto the surrounding mahogany floorboards. Pythagoras’s theorem on right-angled triangles followed. Then Drago passed on Pythagoras’s lesser-known theorem on beans. It is lesser known for very good reasons, for Pythagoras’s better work was—at this stage—well behind him.

      Pythagoras reviled beans, for, they say, beans reminded him of testicles. Drago called it frijolophobia. Pythagoras developed an acute case of it, and could not even say the word bean.

      Beans, however, just made Drago Thoms fart like a clogged sink.

      * * *

      THE BRIEF, YET VITAL STORY OF DRAGO’S OBSESSION WITH PYTHAGORAS

      Pythagoras founded his own Orphic cult in Greece in 530 BC. His main and hugely controversial theory centered on the existence of zero. Previously, there had been no concept of zero. Greek digits had started with “one,” because who would take “zero” goats, “zero” donkeys to market?

      Pythagoras proposed the existence of zero, and with it came its inevitable inverse of infinity. And if one believes in God, then one has to accept that there is a Satan. This, along with the predictable cyclical nature of mathematics, undermined the teachings of the Scriptures and the possibility of any all-seeing deity. It was heresy.

      Society became split. Pythagoras and his Orphist followers broke away. They fled Greece and settled in the ancient city of Crotone, southern Italy, where they could live in relative safety from their now sworn enemies within the old order.

      They really should have stuck to mathematics. Many of Pythagoras’s followers were forced to take vows of silence and to observe bizarre customs, which included the outlawing of beans. Initially, the word bean was banned. Later, all verbal communication was forbidden, apart from within the higher order.

      Birds, particularly male swallows, were never allowed in any house.

      Any dropped objects, particularly food, were never to be picked up. This, they believed, was bad luck. They would instead invite Pythagoras’s favorite hound, Braco, into the dining hall after each meal, to clean the floor of any tidbits. During thunderstorms, one’s feet had to remain on the ground. Any imprint of the body on bedclothes had to be smoothed out.

      The pursuing zealots tracked down the heretic to his enclave in Crotone. They were feeling murderous, but in a way that only a lynch mob of very understanding, tolerant religious fundamentalists can be.

      Some they slaughtered within the city walls, and they left some others castrated in the dusty streets. Then they chased Pythagoras and the rest out of Crotone. When the castrated victims rediscovered their vocal cords, Pythagoras was well out of town and making his escape. He came to, of all places, a bean field, which he had to cross in order to survive. His remaining trickle of fickle followers trampled through the crop; only Pythagoras had the conviction not to cross, not to make a Faustian pact with the diabolical bean.

      And so he was cut down at the edge of the bean field, screaming anti-legume propaganda until his last breath. And THAT was the end of one of the greatest mathematical brains and maddest men the world had ever known.

      * * *

      It was Drago’s obsession with Pythagoras which eventually tipped him into his very own deep-trenched psychosis.

      There were those locals who would suggest that in order for Drago to arrive at the front doors of madness, the journey need be neither long nor arduous. It was less a prolonged and tortured ride, and more a popping around the corner for a pint of milk. The effects on his family (and the unsuspecting world), however, would be catastrophic.

      * * *

      Drago, although fully versed in the hypotheses of Pythagoras, refused to subscribe to any of his teachings. He started to eat beans with every meal.

      Before long, he would have bouts of eating ONLY beans, and beans of every breed. He became prolifically flatulent, often attempting traditional folk tunes with his emissions. Pythagoras became his nemesis, his Professor Moriarty.

      Drago’s physical health began to deteriorate. His face was gaunt and shadowy. He became a bean expert, and grew beans in any spare patch of land or any darkened cupboard.

      The vitamin deficiency from his bean-only intake progressed; previous eccentricities were magnified and new ones multiplied by his physical decline. His colleagues, who still had enormous respect for the man, tried to intervene, but the madness was taking over his behavior. He would be found carrying out more of the very acts against which Pythagoras had rebelled.

      For example, during a thunderstorm, Drago would be found not only NOT touching the ground, but climbing trees or, worse, sitting on the roof of the house with his arms wrapped around his knees, his chin resting on them. He refused to use bedsheets, for fear of rising with them uncrumpled. He left beans in every room. He laid them out in a circle around the house and wore them on strings around his neck and wrists.

      Furthermore, when he was at the dinner table, he would clumsily, but purposefully, knock food and utensils onto the floor, and slowly pick them up with a wide grin.

      Johan’s mother, Elena, consulted her closest friends and then a doctor. She was concerned, more so when he started to leave all the windows open and, with bread and seeds, enticed into their house birds of every genus.

      At school, meanwhile, any kind of quiet was a sign to Drago that his pupils were being tempted into