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
