by Landon Wark
He ducked into an aisle that promised him a new pair of winter boots. Thick soles were the key here. The concrete was frigid and it had a tendency to seep straight through the bottoms of his current shoes while he waited for the bus.
The idea of buying a car came and then just as quickly went.
“What do you think of these?” a voice next to him interrupted his search for the perfect shoe.
A short, older woman with grey hair was standing next to him holding out a pair of what looked like brown work boots. She turned them over, glaring at the yellow soles as if they were an affront to nature. Jonah frowned and kept looking through the black boots in front of him.
“They’re okay,” he said, hoping she would leave it at that.
“I can’t decide if my husband will like them. Last year I got him a pair of gloves that they would go with but…” She put the boots back on the rack and pulled out a second pair.
The urge to point out that he had not developed a telepathic connection with her husband’s tastes occurred to Jonah but he kept his mouth shut and grabbed a pair of black boots from the rack that looked to be about his size. As he threw his coat and gloves onto the bench and sat down to unlace his shoes the woman grabbed a third pair.
“I shouldn’t even be buying anything. We promised each other no gifts this year. But… well I guess that’s one of those promises you don’t intend to keep.”
“Hmm.” He rejected the boots as the metal lace guides would destroy anything running through them in a matter of months.
The woman laughed slightly. “He almost hit the roof when the bills came in January last year. The economy being what it is. Things are becoming dearer every year.”
“Yes.” Jonah replaced the boots he had taken, wondering what kind of answer she was looking for. The urge to leave was growing by the moment.
“We agreed to send any extra money out to the kids this year, but I managed to stash enough away for a good pair of boots anyway.”
The pair of boots he had chosen were not perfect, but they were probably the best he would find on the rack and they were good enough to get him out of this awkward situation. There would be money to buy another pair if he desired to anyway. He shoved them back inside the box and laid his new coat and gloves on top of it. With a weak smile he left the old woman to her rummaging and fled out into the aisle. He passed, musing, by the electronics department with moderate interest. The new winter clothes would be enough for now and if everything worked out he would be back for other things later.
The idea of buying a small house on the outer edges of the city came to him and went in the same breath.
This was not something he should get used to. There was no telling how long he would be able to get away with it.
The lines for the two operational cash registers were a dozen people deep and the two at the head of both lines were piling strollers and mobiles and whatever one might buy for an infant or a person with an infant onto the conveyor belts leading up to the gum chewing checkout girls.
“You’ve got a million salesmen roaming the store,” Jonah found himself muttering.
Before he was able to stop himself his muttering took on a life of its own. The man ahead of him looked over his shoulder though Jonah took no notice and as the woman at the front of the line swiped her credit card for the fifth time his frustration grew and along with it the muttering.
As he approached the checkout his attention fixed on several of the impulse magazines lining the racks along the checkout. Among the headlines were several reports of Bigfoot sightings, two celebrity divorces and a promise for him to find his fortune using psychic powers. The last one drew a laugh… until it began to smoulder before his eyes. Black blisters began to form on the glossy smiling face of The Amazing Mento and plumes of smoke began to rise into the air.
Jonah froze, his mouth slammed shut and he nearly dropped the clothing he was carrying. His lips trembled as he looked around to make certain that no one else had seen what had just transpired. The line moved forward at its slow pace and no one said anything. The man in front of him sniffed at the air a little until Jonah frantically grasped at the magazine and shoved the blistered cover against the backs of the gloves to smother whatever combustion was occurring.
He shook where he stood. His brain told him that something new was happening, but it refused to process what exactly it was.
The smoke ceased its spiral into the air as a few people in the line began sniffing suspiciously. Jonah forced his breathing to level off and he shuffled the magazine under the clothing in his arms. No one else had noticed what had happened.
“Hi there.” The words caused him to jump and he swivelled to meet the eyes of the cashier. Her suddenly startled expression showed him the state of his own panic.
His palms sweat profusely as she slipped the tags of his new clothes over the scanner; the little beeps jerked his eyes away from the clothes hiding the magazine cover.
“New things,” Jonah whispered to himself.
“Is that everything?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied without any hesitation, eliciting an expression of confusion and a wrinkled brow.
The cashier stuffed the clothing into a bag quickly, using a separate one for the shoebox. If she saw the damage to the magazine as she scanned it, she said nothing. Jonah gathered the bags up in his arms, not sparing a moment for the straps, and, after throwing a cluster of bills at the girl, practically ran for the exit. Anyone watching him would have thought that he had just stolen the entire jewellery counter.
He sat on the bus, madly scribbling on the receipt the check-out girl had thrown into the bag containing the shoebox. He racked his brain trying to remember exactly what it was he had said to make the magazine cover smoulder the way it had. It lay on his lap complete with promises of psychic riches and success in love. The crispy, flaking face of the Amazing Mento glared accusingly up at him. New questions sprang up with this new development. There were more words than just the ones that had allowed him to make the money to buy his new clothes!
With a quick pen stroke he crossed off several of the things he thought he had said and set to writing new ones. He dared not speak any of them while surrounded by people the way he was. He would have to wait for the privacy of his apartment before he was able, but the temptation was there, almost irresistible. It nearly overrode his self control as the bus rattled down the street, over the last bridge that separated him from his building. The door flew open and he flew out, trailing the bags of clothing after him as he ran toward the door, not stopping to catch his breath until he was safely secured inside his tiny apartment.
He leaned back against the door, propping himself against it so that no one would be able to barge in on him. He ran his hands through his hair, streaked with sweat even at minus twenty degrees.
“There’s other things out there,” he breathed quietly, almost afraid to speak the words.
He took the receipt with the scribbled words out of his pocket and stared at what he was confident was what had caused the combustion of the magazine in the store.
There was a moment of chewing thoughtfully on his tongue and then he was all the way into the apartment, tearing open his backpack and throwing textbooks out onto the floor until he wrenched free one of the many coiled notebooks full of practice problems and professors’ ramblings. Page after page ripped free of the bindings until there was a clean white sheet staring him in the face. He carefully laid the notebook on his bed and took one of the many pens lying around. With all the delicacy of a calligrapher he inscribed the words he had used in making the money on the first line. Two lines below he transcribed the words from the receipt. The way he had written them was awkward, even with his purposely careful handwriting. Trying to write it in a way that resembled English syllables was imprecise. If he had to come back to it at a later date he doubted he would be able to discern what it said.
He spent the better part of an hour looking vacantly a
t the series of words before him, his powerful sense of observation noting that two of the syllables were the same. He ran his tongue over the sharp ridges of his teeth and let out a long breath.
“So exactly how much more is there?”
Jonah McAllister Makes a Deposit
He sat, staring at the remaining six bills in the strip of sunlight spearing through the blind slats for longer than he would have thought it possible to stare at a few pieces of paper. He was already kicking himself for not realizing it sooner. He had risked getting caught copying bills when it would have been so much easier to copy coins. They had no numbers and would never be traced as bills were. Certainly whoever kept track of this sort of thing would not spend as much time and effort tracking something that required molten metal to make. It would definitely take more time than copying a ten-dollar bill, but the lower risk was worth the extra time.
He fished around in the change jar on the nightstand next to his bed until he managed to find a two-dollar coin. He stared at both sides of it as if he had never seen one before. No serial numbers. No numbers at all save for denomination and date. He placed it on the small folding table and glared down at it as if it were a specimen under the microscope. He began to wonder exactly what would happen to the economy if there were a sudden upsurge in the number of two-dollar coins.
He muttered something casually under his breath before he caught himself, stopping mid-syllable. His eyes darted back and forth to make certain nothing had changed, hand poised over a nearby pen, brain desperately reeling back over what it had unconsciously pushed out of his mouth. Nothing seemed any different. He relaxed, placing his fingers over his eyebrow and rubbing back and forth.
“So, what did you do today, Jonah?” he asked the empty room. “Oh nothing,” he replied right back. “Just destroyed the world economy.”
He glared at the coin a little longer.
“Well, think of it like a research grant.”
The line at the bank was long, consequence of a Friday afternoon. He waited patiently, not sharing the cares of his still-employed brethren with their clock punching and lunch hours. Over the past few days he was able to appreciate more and more how different the world looked when there was money and time enough to enjoy it. The clouds in the sky, made grey and looming by the time of year seemed to have backed off to a more friendly distance. The ice on the sidewalk seemed less pervasive and even food tasted a little better. But it was more than just not having every hour filled with work and study, it was knowing. Knowing something that no one else knew, having a huge secret that no one else had.
He had to bite down on his lip to keep from smiling.
The cashier called him up and he brushed past the previous client, a short man wearing a hat and frayed farmer’s jacket. Rare in the city. Jonah swung the shopping bag of rolled dollars onto the counter to the teller’s Friday afternoon chagrin. She reached a pudgy hand inside the bag in and began pulling out the rolls, scooping them out six or more at a time.
“And, what are we doing with this?” she asked.
“Half for deposit, half in bills,” he replied with much more ease than he had at the pawnshop. For a moment he worried this was becoming too easy.
She accepted his account number, counted up the rolls. Tapped on her keyboard a bit. After a minute or two of counting she moved the rolls, six at a time behind the counter, opened a drawer and counted out a number of bills. Jonah ran a mental calculation as she handed them over, nodded politely and jammed them down into his pocket as quickly as he could. Gone were any notions of subtlety. There was no way to trace him; no way to tell immediately that he had done any wrong. The only way they would be able to tell anything was amiss would be to examine the coins one at a time and find they all had exactly the same scratches and exactly the same tiny nick in the side. Not a job anyone would likely be willing, or even think, to do.
“Eighty dollars,” he muttered as he left the bank, drawing the attention of the man who had been in front of him inside, stopped outside smoking a cigarette. Jonah continued on a few steps before adding. “Not bad for two hour’s work.”
In the following week there were times when he would sit in the worn out chair in his bachelor’s apartment and stare off into space, his mind too overwhelmed by the immensity of what he was doing. The new things, electronics, clothing, etc. he had purchased with his new source of revenue lay forgotten around him as he tried to wrap his head around it all. He was much more interested in the new words that were filling up his notebook than he was with any of the new gadgets and garments he was accumulating. He rarely went outside anymore, save for his daily trips to the bank where they had come to know him by name and by time.
There was almost no way to care about anything anymore. He was lost in a sense of giddiness that he could only liken to what it must feel like to win the lottery. Only it was more than that. It was like being elected without realizing you were running. Like… well he couldn’t tell what it was like because he was certain that nothing like it had ever happened before.
New words had begun to appear in his notebook on an almost daily basis. They began as nonsensical jabbering that might make a circle of his carpet change colour or turn the leg of his table into a puddle of mush, or in one case, cause a fire underneath his television.
But slowly he found that by adding bits and pieces of new words to the already existing ones, new syllables and phonetics, he could change what the word did. He could control what colour the carpet became, where the fire started. He felt constantly on the verge of being able to understand the patterns behind the whole thing. But not the cause. That stayed forever beyond his grasp. It bothered him a little.
Sometimes late at night he would awake and be certain that he was dabbling in something that was never meant for human eyes or mind, that he was unleashing something dangerous on the world, but such times were rare and overshadowed by the need to continue, to find out more. He was vaguely aware that anyone intruding on him would think that he was obsessed, but he was also aware that anyone intruding would become obsessed also.
He paced about the apartment during sessions of mumbling, pen constantly in his hand, slashing this way and that like a sword in a twist on the old adage. He would be in the middle of a thrust or parry when a splotch of colour would spontaneously appear on the wall and then he would scrawl down the exact sounds that came out of his mouth at the time as described in a textbook on phonetics he had bought three days earlier from the university. After a while he had a collection of nonsense words and their use that he began to spend time reviewing like a manual, pouring over it in between periods of adding new words.
There was, of course, only one word for what it was he was doing, but he found himself unable to use that word. It felt too tacky and too simple for the great secrets he was uncovering. To call them such was to relegate them to the realm of cheap tricks and nursery rhymes. He felt offended by the word whenever it happened to be mentioned and on the rare occasions when his television was on he cringed at the commercials where it was used to hock flimsy plastic wares. The power Jonah McAllister felt was beyond the realm of commerce, beyond the realm of a child’s dreams, perhaps beyond the human imagination if he chose to take it there.
As he drifted off to sleep at night he was often confronted by the dilemma that he could not be the only person who had discovered these things, these simple words. He found himself sweating at the thought of someone else playing with his discovery, so much so that, during these times he would grab for his notebook and place it under his pillow while he slept, a now jealously guarded secret. He bought a safe in which to lock the book when he was away from it, barely even opened the door anymore and had ceased his trips to the bank. He had everything he needed in the apartment anyway.
It was after the ninth day of not going outside, of obsessing inside, that the sanctity of his self-imposed prison was shattered.
The outer wall of his apartment exploded.
He had been
fooling around with the phonemes that had started the fire under his television, mixing in another one that had caused a glass to fly five feet across the room. A swing of his pen here, a turn of his tongue there and suddenly…
He found himself staring, dumbstruck into the gravel parking lot five stories down. His ears rang with the sound of it, but he barely noticed. Bits of insulation and plastic sheeting floated like feathers in amongst the dust of drywall and brick. The harsh bite of winter wind hit him instantly, but he barely noticed. The sight of the gaping hole in his wall and the strewn debris down below struck him so harshly that he felt his knees buckle.
There was a moment of sudden clarity, like that of a child playing with a gun when it inevitably went off. The forces with which he had been playing with had ripped a hole in his wall, reached into his apartment and slapped him across the face.
He sat there, staring out of the gaping hole even as the sirens approached, waiting until they were below him to snap out of his trance.
The jealousy that had taken ahold of him bade him to quickly gather up the notebook and throw it into his bag, insistent that they not be allowed to get their hands on it. As the loud banging announced the arrival of fire fighters came at his door he shoved the money and anything else on which he had performed his tests into the safe.
Jonah McAllister Celebrates the Holiday
The occupants of the next room were fighting. Either they were fighting or they were loving. And the less effort spent on figuring out which the happier everyone would be.
Jonah sat on the edge of the motel bed, unable to sleep with such noise. Of course he likely wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. The explosion two days earlier had shaken him more than he would have admitted. The sense of giddiness was gone, broken, and in its place was a great sense of worry that if he tried to further understand what it was he was dealing with he would wind up destroying himself, either physically, mentally or both.