Fogginius was tyrannical and for the slightest infraction locked his stepson inside his sea trunk, which, as Phosphor grew, seemed to shrink. There, curled in a fetal knot, Phosphor would will himself to sleep, only to awaken screaming, having dreamed of tombs and wells and pits.
One day, as the boy lay helpless and enraged, a beam of sunlight flooded the keyhole. For a few brief moments, Phosphor amused himself by looking at his thumb, first with one eye, then the other. This game caused the thumb to lose its chimerical double and to leap, singly, from left to right. Later he tried this small experiment upon the back of his stepfather’s head, and noticed how it too jumped—and how flat it looked. One-eyed the boy navigated the room and attempted to dip his pen into the inkpot. Tipping the pot over and onto his knees, he found himself lifted into the air by an ear and once more tossed into the trunk, where he played the same game with the root of his nose. It perplexed him to discover that he seemed to have two noses. Seizing them with his fingers, he was reassured.
Except for the tiny beam of light that collided against the back wall, the trunk was perfectly dark. Having napped now, rolled into a ball and blinking, Phosphor was startled to see a projected image of the room’s one lopsided window and of Fogginius suspended before it upside down. The effect was as terrifying as it was magical.
For weeks thereafter, Phosphor taunted his stepfather so that he would be punished and forced to crouch alone in the dark. An inventive child, he pocketed a lens from the scholar’s misplaced spectacles and held it to the keyhole. The image of Fogginius suspended was so sharply reproduced that, illumined by intuition, Phosphor realized the magician was not the sordid scholar bent with pitiful patience over a heap of parrots he had reduced to trash with a savage and religious passion, but the sun itself. The sorcerer was light—not Fogginius, who, if he was capable of talking from dawn to dusk, could not fry a proper egg.
Fogginius wondered at the eagerness with which his stepson climbed into the trunk. He supposed that the boy used its pinching privacy for purposes unclean and so severely thrashed him. But although he cried out for mercy, Phosphor forgot his pain because it had come to him that he must make a miniature model of the trunk in order to discover the secret laws of holes and beams of light.
“Just as my master thrashes and contains me,” the child reasoned, “and just as the thunder causes it to rain, so it is possible that light creates images.”
The idea that would haunt him for the rest of his days had begun to take form: that everything visible and palpable is light; that the world is but a seeming, and, above all, that form is matter dreaming—an idea he would not articulate for years but that would, once formulated, inform his creative life with an exultation born of conviction.
Once when Fogginius had hobbled off in his rags to hunt the skins of a scarce species of stoat, Phosphor made himself a box, pierced it with a hole, inserted, with some fuss and bother, a tube of black paper, capped it with the lens from Fogginius’ spectacles, placed a mirror inside, and lastly, after much tinkering and in an inventive fever, fitted a pane of ground glass onto the top. Light from the little window entered through the lens, was reflected by the mirror onto the glass, which, when manipulated, produced an image of the room in sharp focus. Toying thus, Phosphor stood for hours until, seeing Fogginius’ face staring at him from within the box, he was thrust back into the real with a shriek. But instead of thrashing him, Fogginius embraced his stepson.
“You have rediscovered the camera obscura!” he cried, and, bursting with pride, congratulated him. Phosphor was disappointed to learn that the black box was not his own invention. But when Fogginius told him that painters used it to trace figures on paper, Phosphor declared:
“A poor use for it! I would fix the image and do away with painters!”
“Fix it! Fix it!” The scholar slapped his stepson twice most viciously upon each ear. “I’ll fix you! Would you thus steal the world from God?” Lifting the box above his head, he sent it crashing into the deeper shadows of the room, exterminating, as he did so, an entire litter of newborn rats.