by Landon Wark
The phone on the desk rang, high and loud. Merrin knocked over a tower of papers reaching for it. Cursing he placed his hand over the receiver and motioned to Jonah.
“I've got to take this. Why don't you ask some of the grad students if they can help you come up with something?”
Jonah gave a short, unenthusiastic nod and backed out of the office. He shouldered into his lab coat and grasped his clipboard and pen as one of the grad students, a short, fat creature named Sara something marched up to him, shoving a small piece of glass at him.
“You left this on the microscope last night,” she said, voice heavy with accusation. “I almost cut myself on it. Don't leave your trash lying around again.”
Jonah frowned, but said nothing save for a low mutter, barely audible even to him. It had been a late night and he had only barely gotten out in time
He clutched the slide in his right hand, reaching for his discard bin and dangling the slide just above it, but at the last moment he pulled it back, clutching it to the point of almost slicing his hand. He stared at the translucent section of plant material under the cover slip, blinking his eyes as if trying to remember something.
He frowned, opened his drawer and tossed the slide inside. His extra time was a blessing that was fast running out, and if he plotted the plant growth quickly he could get home before ten.
He had finished with the first greenhouse and sat in the small break room, trying to keep his dinner from touching any of the sticky, multicoloured stains that covered the table and breathing through his mouth to keep from smelling the phenol and chloroform wafting in from the labs when one of the grad students burst in. He could not remember this one's name, but he did vaguely remember a certain dislike for the older student.
“Josh, dude.” The recollection became stronger the moment he opened his mouth. “I need you to do me a solid.” Without waiting for a reply he continued. “My girlfriend's car just broke down uptown and I gotta go rescue her before she gets stabbed. I need you to salvage my sections and finish staining them for me for tomorrow.”
Jonah frowned. “I'm actually tallying up some of—”
“Come on man, this is an emergency. That's four months of work.”
“I—” Jonah shook his head and muttered below his breath. “Fine. Yeah, no problem.”
“Thanks. Directions are on my bench. I owe you one.” The last part of the sentence was lost as he disappeared down the hall. Jonah heard the sound of the main door opening and closing and in between the two he sighed.
“So much for getting home by ten.”
He returned to the second greenhouse after two hours of cutting, positioning and staining the twenty-eight slides required for the graduate's experiment. His temper flared as he picked up the clipboard and angrily scribbled the time on it.
“If you want to account for the two hour discrepancy between these figures...” he muttered, rattling off a string of nonsense behind it.
He went from plant to plant, uncoiling tendrils and putting the ruler to them, cutting off a piece here and there. His mouth moved the entire time, random syllables pouring out of his mouth. Once, a pair of technicians came in and retrieved one of the larger trees in the back. They stared at him as he reeled off sound after sound, looks of concern on both of their faces. Jonah took no notice.
He finished in three hours; his usual thoroughness putting him even farther behind, but try as he might he could not make himself abandon it. He scribbled down the final figures; marched to the computer lab, threw down the clipboard and stared, tapping his pencil on the column of figures before him. The black pencil marks glared out at him, an affront to his frontal cortex, a conundrum that craved attention.
“And how is that possible?” he demanded of the empty room.
Almost casually he flipped the page over and stared for just as long at the settings for the greenhouse systems. He compared the water, the temperature, the angles of the sunlight. Jonah scratched his head once and then twice, he chewed on his tongue for a moment, tapping the pencil, a string of mumbles uttering from his mouth.
He stopped in mid-mutter.
His finger traced the rows of figures, first one and then the other, one greenhouse after the other and then back again. His brow furrowed and he shook his head, running back to the environmentals. He shook his head and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Outside, the sun had long since set and the crescent moon was shining in through the frost rimmed window of the lab. Once again he shook his head in frustration.
“Two hours shouldn't make that much of a difference.”
It was night. Cold, dry and clear. A few people dared to venture outside, sipping at the chill, crystal air. In the light of the street lamps they danced across some of the packed, snow covering the black ice that lay on the sidewalks, blissfully ignored by a city that bowed to the whim of the automobile. Several of those breezed along beside the walkers, exhaust billowing white into the cold night.
From inside the scene below took on the likeness of a snow globe, one that was far too large to shake, but entertaining to look at none-the-less. The few people on the street would be unnerving to be around at this time of night and in this part of the city, but from above they had an almost friendly air that brought a tiny smile to the unfamiliar lips of their observer.
Anyone looking up at the window of the laboratory, or anyone walking through it for that matter would believe that it was deserted; that anyone who worked there, looking after the machines that fed and watered the plants that were the sole reason the building existed had wisely gone home for the night. Of course they would have been wrong. For if the lights had been on at that moment, anyone looking up at the window would have seen the thin, unimposing figure standing at the center of the window, staring down with judgmental eyes, arms folding over his chest. He tapped his foot impatiently; ear straining to hear the alarm of the timer that he hoped would sound at any moment.
After several seconds the timer beeped and Jonah sprang into action. His lips moved, vocal chords thrumming at barely a whisper as he pulled a single slide out of the square jar of solution on the bench. Wiping it twice with a tissue he carefully placed it on the microscope stage, voice asking it silently, with words that anyone else would have described as nonsensical, to yield its secrets to him. After several seconds of staring intently through the eyepieces his shoulders slumped, his hands loosed on the knobs and a sigh let out of his troubled lips. He leaned back and sighed once more, putting his hand to his eyes to rub the sleep out of them. There were a few more mutterings, more nonsense words that he couldn't keep from coming out.
Jonah grasped a blue notebook and jotted a grim message to the future, when light would peer in through the window and the people who worked in the laboratory would return. He waited another several seconds, mind trying to decide between staying another few minutes to double check, possibly missing his one means of getting home and leaving immediately, possibly letting hours of work have been in vain. With a sigh he decided and he pressed his eyes to the microscope once again.
This time he took longer. His brow furrowed suddenly and his hands tightened on the knobs, moving the slide about the stage. Anyone watching him would have been concerned, for his mouth began churning out new nonsense, flinging it around the room with near abandon. But, after a while he settled, removing his eyes from the eyepiece, furrowing his brow even deeper. A strange thought began to form in the back of his head, in a place where all ideas to be forgotten as soon as they are thought are formed, the refuse area of the brain.
He scowled, suddenly aware of the ticking of the clock on the wall. Struck from the chair he grasped another book at his side, this one hard, heavy and its slick cover nicked and scratched from innumerable droppings. This he shoved into a bag slung over the chair, barely remembering to grab the coat hanging on the rack nearest the door and tugging it over his arms as he waited impatiently on the impossibly slow elevator.
The bus door hissed open and he and th
e driver made tired acknowledgements; two warriors of the night hours saluting on their battlefield. Both knew that there would be no further conversation even though they were the only two present. He merely slipped his bag onto the seat in the back, took the huge hard book out of the largest pocket and sat, reading for the entire trip.
All the while, as the streetlights brushed by the window, unnoticed by his tired eyes and unremarked on by his muttering mouth, the refuse area of his brain remained uncleared and every once in a while, even though his conscious mind would never admit to it, that part of his brain that still clung to the mutterings of his youth could not help but think that back in the laboratory he had witnessed something entirely amazing.
“And what did you do today, Jonah?”
The voice on the other end of the line was somewhat distant, as if otherwise engaged. Jonah shifted the receiver under his chin and slumped back in his chair, the only piece of furniture in the tiny bachelor apartment other than his bed and a small table that doubled as a nightstand. His brain churned over the reasons he made these weekly calls, unable to come up with anything other than guilt.
“The same as always,” he breathed.
As was always the case during this time every week, in addition to this actual conversation, there was a second, more honest conversation taking place inside of his head. This second conversation always began with the question of why it was he had left home to go to school in the first place. It was answered, as it invariably was, with distance. With his distance from his parents, mental distance at first now made physical. And then there was a long pause, or sometimes several small pauses put together.
In the back of his mind he would wonder sometimes how those people on the bus could talk on their phones for extended lengths of time and he would tap his foot impatiently on the grungy carpet of his apartment while the voice on the other end of the line went on about all the various other relatives he had barely heard of. His grandmother was in the hospital again for the fourth time. His father was working through the night.
Jonah sat and stared at the wall, barely conscious that any conversation was taking place beyond that phantom conversation in his head. They were fast approaching the point where the large lie lay. Where she would ask it and he would provide the answer that was expected. He didn't want to, but the truth would never get past the barrier between his mind and his mouth, a barrier that seemed to grow daily.
His eyes felt moist by the time she had finished talking and he pushed his fingers into his temples to maintain some kind of order there. His body slumped ever further down into the soft cushion of his chair and in addition to tapping his foot on the floor, he skittered his fingers on the table next to him.
“Is there anything else?” his mother asked as she took the last breath of the conversation.
She was bored, he had decided during a previous conversation. She was bored talking to her son. He looked around the cramped bachelor's apartment and the messes of his books and clothes. Everyone would be bored by him, and he knew it.
His brain clicked into gear. “I...”
He fought with it for a moment. The feeling of insistency, the feeling of pride, the great eclipse that took place between the two. The dance went on for little more than a second, but it felt like forever.
“No, nothing else.”
There was a brief goodbye on the other end of the phone and then the oblivion of disconnection. Jonah slowly lowered the phone and took a look at the vast emptiness of the tiny apartment around him.
“Everything is... everything is fine.”
Jonah McAllister Argues With the Data
It was past midnight and if he had any brains at all he would have been asleep already. The hour at which he had to get up was fast approaching and if there was anything worse than facing the morning out in the cold of the bus stop it was doing so with only a few hours' sleep. But his brain refused sleep, it had too much thought within it to allow for something as trivial as sleep to interrupt. His tiny apartment had taken on a foreboding atmosphere, as if some forbidden knowledge was beginning to creep into it.
He had checked and double-checked the greenhouse systems, made certain that the exact amount of water and sunlight were getting in that should have, wracking his brains to come up with some other explanation. The feeling that he was about to latch on to an incredibly stupid idea was filling him, but there was little he could do to ignore it. The only difference he could come up with, the only thing that was different between the two greenhouses was that he had been angry when he had done the second, and because he had been angry he had been grumbling. He had heard of plants responding to people speaking to them, but he had always accredited the difference to simple increased carbon dioxide input.
But the plants in the second greenhouse were larger, on average by a whole three millimetres and the ones he had measured last had grown the most. The longer he had been in the greenhouse the more the growth had accelerated, but... He had been in the second greenhouse for twenty minutes less than he had been in the first one. And yet those plants had grown the most.
Restlessly he grasped the small fern that was sitting on his dresser, a present from his grandmother whom (according to her) he never called and placed it on the folding table in the middle of the room.
Tenting his finger he stared at it over the backs of his hands. There was something strange in the air as he catalogued the green fronds of the sun-starved plant. He took in a long breath and exhaled, tightening his vocal chords in a low grumble. The anticipation that hung in the air was almost electric and it hummed within his voice.
Nothing happened.
He frowned and repeated. Still nothing.
There was a moment of clarity and the tension in the room snapped. He looked at the clock on the wall and with the revelation of the time came the revelation of his own stupidity. He blinked once and then twice and then chuckled slightly; grasping the plant and shoving it back to its place on the dresser. He breezed into his bathroom, nearly livid with laughter. He spread a dollop of toothpaste onto his brush and struggled to brush his teeth through fits.
He repeated the mumble with a chuckle through a mouthful of froth.
The movement of the brush stopped suddenly in his mouth.
He ran his tongue over the lump on the side of the brush. At first he was certain that it was merely a crust of toothpaste that tended to form on the side. But, it wasn't softening under his saliva and it wouldn't be moved out of place by his tongue.
Slowly, with an almost paranoid caution he pulled the brush out of his mouth and stared at it.
It fell into the sink with a clatter and he backed slowly out of the washroom, blinking the way he did whenever he was stressed. He peered around the edge of the bathroom door jamb, looking into the sink at the angle at which the brush had fallen. He bit his lip briefly and then mustered up the courage to reach in and grasp the brush like it was a coiled viper that would bite him if he made any sudden movements. Carefully he placed it on the same table he had placed the plant on. He slunk into the chair before it and stared.
What appeared to be a second head was growing out of the plastic of the brush.
The second head looked the same as the original, minus the bristles of course, but was little more than a nub sprouting off the side.
The brush looked like it was budding a second head.
Jonah chewed on his tongue for a moment.
What does this mean?
His mind ran at a speed that belied the slow thoughtful action of his mouth. Eyelashes flittered suddenly in a series of random blinks as he ran his eyes over the tiny bulge in the side of the brush, surely an optical illusion. Surely...
Jonah took a long breath and allowed the mutter to escape once more.
There were two toothbrushes on the table.
His hands trembled and clenched the arms of the old chair in a death grip. He imagined his eyes were the size of dinner plates and his skin was whiter than even his sho
uld have been. His heart was pounding furiously, his nerves flinched and flicked, told him to get the hell away from the things that were lying there before him, but his fingers refused to release the arms of the chair.
He imagined for a moment that he was dreaming, that at any time he would wake up and find himself asleep in that same chair, with his head on that same table at which he sat. He would even accept waking up with a snort in the lecture theatre. But the moment passed when he licked the taste of toothpaste off the roof of his mouth and winced as he chewed on his tongue. Then there was a moment that he thought of insanity, which faded away for the same reasons.
His mind calmed and his powerful rational brain came to bear on the problem. He reached out and picked up the second toothbrush. It was nearly identical to the first, minus the bristles, and the colouring of the rubberized bits. It felt real. It felt the same as the other one had before he had dropped it, if a little bit lighter. He reached out his other hand and grasped the first. That too felt real. Slowly he brought his hands together until they were only a few centimeters apart and he turned both over. The same, minus the bristles of course.
He staggered. His mind tried to wrap itself around what was going on but it was far too bizarre. Even the possibility that what he was seeing was what he was seeing was too much. All of the laws. Conservation of mass. You don't get something from nothing. You just don't. Impossible.
But...
You don't argue with the data either.
He panicked. Pens and pencils scattered over the floor as he pulled out a thin cheap pen. He slammed it into the table between the toothbrushes and licked his lips. The world seemed to tremble as he inhaled and...
There were two pens on the table.
Well, one pen and one plastic mass that looked something like a pen. The inkwell was missing. Why exactly he could not say, but that was the smallest why on his mind at the moment. He ran his fingers through his hair as he paced in front of the table, biting his tongue to keep from shouting, or worse.