The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister

by Landon Wark

  The New Magic

  -1-

  The Revelation of Jonah McAllisterah

  Copyright © 2021 by Landon Wark

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  For more information, address: lando.wark@gmail.com

  Children at Play

  The classroom was alive. Within its confines the industry of childhood churned out finger paintings, building block structures and Plasticine sculptures, perhaps not efficiently, but with innovation that would make any Capitalist blush. In the corner an in-room sandbox, surrounded by a skirt of thick sheet plastic, was dominated by the loudest and the strongest children, their hollers echoing off the concrete walls.

  An exhausted teacher slumped in her desk, her thin mouth upturned. A travel mug stood in for the imaginary bottle clutched in her right hand. Her thin fingers rubbed her eyebrows and the faintest sigh escaped from her lips as a screaming gaggle ran past her desk. With a shuddering, begging voice she tried to catch their attention.

  “Children, play nice. Children, play nice.”

  The boy sat near the sandbox, along the very edge of the plastic sheet. Within the borders the yelling cacophony of his peers were shouting at each other, arguing over the correct structure of the tower they were building with blocks perched upon a foundation of sand. The boy's face furrowed around his brow as he looked over what they had built. Part of it was leaning precariously, threatening to topple the whole thing over. Even the most generous of block structure architects would have called it a design flaw. It glared out at him accusingly, a gaping wound in the fragile order of the classroom. If nothing was done about it the whole structure would collapse into the sand.

  A brief mutter, words of nonsense that had survived his infanthood escaped his lips as the boy looked around at the other children.

  For the most part they had left him alone with whatever toy he had managed to get his hands on. Another boy was rolling a tiny car around near him, but they could hardly be said to be playing together. He scanned the floor for a few stray bricks that might hold the section of the leaning tower of blocks in place.

  The boy stood up and started moving over the outer edge of the plastic. His hands closed over the three nearest blocks as he stooped over. With steps as quiet as the transparent sheet would allow he approached the tower. At the same time he eyed the larger children who seemed distracted by a ball and a collection of sticks from a game he didn't quite understand. He bit on his lip. They were completely ignoring the teetering tower and their backs were turned.

  The mutter continued.

  The boy lowered himself into a crouch and began inching forward to the edge of the tower. He was aware of every sound that was produced by his feet on the plastic and of every sound of the shouting kids in the room. His heart beat wildly in his chest as he closed in on the edge of the box. Sweat began to form on the rim of his brow as he pieced together the three bricks he had liberated from the floor. He braced himself on the moist sand with his hand. With a lick of his lips he reached over and tried to lift the toppling section of the chaotic tower. He clenched his teeth and pressed in the comfortably smooth edges of his solution to the impending collapse.

  “Hey!”

  A strange force grabbed him by the fabric of his shirt and pulled him forward, placing him face first into the gritty wet sand that clung all over his new clothes. His mom would be pretty mad. He tried to pull himself up, his heart pounding with fear. Almost instantly a dark shape was standing over top of him like a great and terrible vulture.

  “That’s mine,” a voice snarled as the foot of another first grader was planted on the boy’s back and forced him, face first, into the granular mud before moving up to the back of his skull and pushing him further into the loose earth.

  He fought desperately to get free, twisting and turning under the oppressive boot. The sand parted as if opening its arms into an embrace that pulled him down farther. He couldn’t breathe. Already he could feel tears begin to form in his closed eyes, nurturing the gritty mud around him.

  “That’s mine,” came the voice again.

  By then there were cries of surprise, awe and joy from the others in the area. Though no louder than the cries that usually ran through the classroom there was a certain edge to them that seemed to lacerate.

  The exhausted teacher looked up for a mere instant and then back down again, unable to see the source for an island counter in the way.

  The boy tried to yell out, both from the physical and mental torture they were putting him through. Embarrassment and hatred ran through his mind like a pair of animals chasing each other. His hands slipped in the grit around him as they tried to push him back up. He battled to pull some sort of oxygen from the dark air. His hand clenched tightly around the softness of the bricks in his hand.

  “You don’t touch my stuff!”

  There was something else down there in the sand with him. It was not a person, nor was it one of the monsters he imagined lived in the terrible places of the world. It was less of another physical presence and more of a feeling that was down there. It had waited for him. It had waited for this exact moment. It was something that forgot the very reason he was there, that forgot the structure of bricks, or the tiny cars on the play mats. It forgot everything, it forgot home, the comfort of a warm bed or Saturday morning watching cartoons on the sofa in the living room. It screamed for air, shoved with all its strength against the foot that held him down. It was a hot thing. It was a demand, a roar, the hot sweat of humiliation and…

  The foot gave an inch and his head rose above the confining sand.

  He screamed.

  The thing retreated back down into the sand as the classroom exploded into anarchy. The teacher, roused from her imaginary binge was wading through the bodies of children and pulling the larger boy off his back. He was already aware that he was crying, but there was no way to stop it. Tears spread the grit all down the side of his face and his hand, still clutching the blocks wiped furiously at the sides of his face despite the teacher’s attempts to stop him. For the most part the other children just milled about, half curious, half disturbed.

  There was a moment of clarity, a moment of realization that the horror was over, but his mind would not seem to fully grasp it and he continued to scream, tears flowing faster and faster down the side of his face. His body throbbed with rage and embarrassment.

  The solemn brick structure, it’s beauty forgotten by the world toppled over as the teacher led the boy out of the room and closed the door.

  The world rushed by the car window and all was silent within. He was vaguely aware that he had done something wrong. The teacher had taken him down to the principal’s office, which was where they sent kids who had done something wrong. He had sat there for what seemed like an eternity before his mother had come to collect him. In all that time he had been crying, a torrent at first and then wallowing sniffles for the remainder.

  His mother was silent beside him. Even at his young age he was beginning to grasp the fact that grown-ups could not handle everything. Between Saturday evening movies there were flashes of anarchy in places he was just beginning to learn about and there were stories told when he was dragged along to neighbour’s houses for afternoon coffee about thefts and beatings and other such things. He was just beginning to understand, but that understanding grated on his sensibilities. It made him feel edgy and vulnerable, even sitting in the car next to his mother.

  She broke her silence.

  “Do y
ou know why that boy was picking on you?”

  He merely shrugged.

  She was silent a moment longer, the kind of silence he would come to recognize as helpless silence.

  “Your teacher says you’re having trouble making friends. Have you talked to any of the other kids?”

  He shrugged again. The truth was he didn’t like the other kids. They ran around and toppled over his blocks (the few times he got to play with them) and they screamed too loud when he was trying to read one of the thin storybooks hidden on the back shelves.

  “And you don’t know why he was picking on you?”

  He shrugged, but this time answered. “I just wanted to help. The tower was falling over. I don’t know why…”

  It was hard to talk out loud.

  “Is this the same boy who hit you last week?”

  “No. I don’t know why he hit me. I just wanted to answer the question, so I stood up.”

  She frowned as she turned the steering wheel.

  “You wanted to show off?”

  “If you know the answer you’re supposed to answer. I—”

  “Do you answer a lot?”

  He frowned. He didn’t like these kinds of questions. And he didn’t like being interrupted.

  “I try to. The teacher doesn’t always pick me though.”

  “Maybe you should let the other kids answer.”

  “But if you know the answer you—”

  “Some people don’t know the answer all the time,” his mother said, struggling for terms a six year old would understand. “And sometimes they get mad at people who do. I bet if you just answer one question a day the other kids might like you a little more.”

  The boy’s hand rolled up into a fist and for an instant he could feel the thing that was with him down in the grime of the floor, skulking at the edge of his vision. His face welled up, red.

  A string of nonsensical muttering let out.

  “And stop muttering,” she exhaled.

  There was a long silence as the awkwardness of her command ate up the air in the car.

  “I got you something,” she said, reaching into the backseat and clutching at anything that would move them forward, past all the tears. Her hand re-emerged holding a hard, glossy rectangle.

  The thing from the classroom receded and the boy’s eyes lit up, most of the trouble had dimmed. He eagerly grasped at the hard block of shiny paper.

  “It’s about plants, and how people use them to make things like medicines and other things,” she explained as he rifled carefully through the pages, trying to take in all of the sharply coloured pictures he could before tracing over some of the hard to read words, sounding them expertly.

  "I don't like medicine."

  "Well, it's something that people need. And food. Everyone needs food."

  "Like cheese and crackers."

  “I guess. It’s a little ahead of where you are in school, but… I tell you what; you read that book, but don’t tell anyone about what’s in it. We’ll make it our little secret. Don’t even tell your teacher.”

  The boy nodded furiously, starting in the middle of the book and running his fingertips over the lustrous sheets.

  He would read it all and he wouldn’t tell anyone.

  Part One

  Jonah McAllister Goes to School

  Days were bright misery.

  The sun shone in the sky so brightly that it forced a squint, but it gave no warmth and upon waking, if the sun were shining in the window there was a deep spasm of chill and a sudden urge to stay in bed. But the city would not wait for the cold, and the university had no sympathy, even at minus forty degrees. And so there was the morning ritual of pulling on clothes that would have seemed ludicrous at any other latitude, and of wrapping the head so tightly that a stroke never seemed far off. Then there was the terrible wait in the crowded bus shelter for a bus that never failed to be one minute late for every degree below zero, trying to save his vision from the blast of light reflecting off the snow and ice. The worst was the worn out state in which it left him, the constant exhaustion from having his metabolism running full tilt to counteract the feeling that a frosty death was looming before him.

  Jonah McAllister exhaled a fog of breath and looked at himself in the shining surface of Plexiglas.

  His skin was dry and pale. The sun was bright, but the angle with which it shone to the earth had taken its tanning power (not that he was outside much anyway), and the cold had strangled all of the moisture from the air; leaving dry anything it came to touch. His eyelids were dark and sagging. He had the look of a corpse that had realized it was too cold in the ground and gotten up to look for a warmer grave.

  People, what might be called his peer group, had piled into the shelter, shoving him towards the back. He did what he could to keep from touching any of them, invading their personal space and to keep them out of his. He suffered in silence, every instant the urge to speak up and ask for room doubled, but he did and said nothing. Under his breath, between wishes for the bus to hurry, he uttered a string of nonsense, words that had no meaning for anyone but him. It was a nervous tick that, as a boy, his mother had tried to wean him off of, but that seemed to hang around, becoming worse when he had left home six months ago.

  If anyone heard him, they said nothing.

  They talked and chuckled and ignored him, standing in the back of the bus shelter, blissful in his solitude. With a “cold enough for you?” they whiled away the wait. He listened, distantly, as thoughts of student loan interest and late night study binges fought for supremacy inside his head.

  The bus emerged from around a corner and the air in the packed shelter tightened. People began inching forward, politely pushing and shoving around two girls blocking the exit to the shelter; so engrossed in their own conversation that they had failed to notice what was going on outside.

  Jonah grit his teeth and muttered.

  The bus doors rattled open and everyone funnelled inside, feet stuttering toward the door, blocked off as someone counted out their change.

  He grit his teeth again.

  At the last moment before he got on he thought about running back inside his building, throwing the blankets over his head and not coming out until spring. But there were labs to take and practice questions to get the answers for and a million other little tricks that professors had for making certain students attend; at least those who did not have friends to get the answers for them.

  The promise of warmth inside the bus kept him moving forward.

  Inside he found all the seats occupied so he clung to a railing, awkwardly dodging out of the way whenever someone got on and trying not to smash his head on the roof whenever the bus hit a jolt. He listened to the people having conversations about classes and about parties as he stared blankly out the window, feeling like everyone was staring at him, standing in the aisle, but eventually the number of other standers grew and the feeling subsided.

  He might have felt a burning hatred of public transportation, but the weather outside was too cold to have a burning anything.

  He rode like this all the way to the university.

  The lecture theatre was packed. As with the bus some were forced to sit in the aisles, but Jonah had managed to procure a broken desk in the back everyone had overlooked. The folding writing platform flopped this way and that, but his longer legs allowed him to set it steadily in his lap.

  As the professor—a small dot down on the ground level of the theatre—began his lecture about nuclear magnetic resonance Jonah found his mind wandering. He wondered how, in the middle of a recession, there could be so many students in a lecture hall. And beyond that, how there could be so many of them talking about how much they had had to drink over the weekend?

  The finances of leisure boggled his mind.

  He paused in his note taking to pull out the loose-leaf he had done the assigned practice questions on Saturday night, tapping his pencil on the paper and muttering to himself as the answers were p
osted. He went down the paper, checking off each answer without really looking. They were all correct.

  Two of the other students flanking him looked over at his muttering. He flushed a little and stopped, checking off the last few answers in silence.

  The class ended and there was a mad rush for the door, the same stuttered steps as with the bus. Jonah entered the hall with the flood, pushed from behind by those desperate to get out.

  He sat down on a bench in the hall and ate his lunch alone.

  It was a rare day when he arrived at the lab before everyone else had gone. His afternoon class had been cancelled, again with no notice. Hurting for money he caught the early bus across the campus and managed to show before four o'clock, unslinging his bag onto his bench chair as all the graduate students looked up at him with unrecognizing eyes.

  He turned away as the girl from the lab down the hall passed by carrying a full jug of distilled water, stealing a look out of the corner of his eye.

  He had barely picked up his clipboard before Doctor Merrin leaned his bulk out from his office and waved him in. Reluctantly he put down the board with its stack of papers and nervously entered the office.

  “I've,” Merrin began, taking a sip from an ever-present cup of coffee. “I've been looking over some of the data you've been collecting for the grad students.” He ruffled through a stack of figures. “It looks good. How long did it take you to chart all this?”

  Jonah looked at the paper, uncertain of where to cast his eyes. “About a week; I've been staying late.”

  “You're a hard worker. Have you thought of a project for your presentation yet? It's worth twenty-five percent of your grade.”

  “Not yet,” he admitted. His brow was beginning to feel moist.

  “You've only got ten weeks to think of something and get your data,” Merrin said, his voice becoming gruff. “I took you on here because of your grades, but brains and work are only going to get you so far. You have to find some inspiration.”