The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

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 posted. 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