Jonathan Stein
by Thom Garrett and Danna Colman
He blinked awake, not surprised to see his dingy ceiling, but still disappointed. Of course he was in his own bed in his own room. Why would he expect anything else? He was a scientist, for chrissake. Well, sort of. He had a degree in Geology, mostly because he was a lifelong rock hound, but that had landed him a job with the EPA. Now he worked in a lab forty hours a week analyzing soil samples, looking for whatever shouldn’t be there, usually measured in one or two parts per million. It was boring as hell, but it was real. The job was real; the lab was real; and the soil was real, not some stupid dream. It was as real as the walls of this room, as real as the bed he slept in, as real as the morning sun shining through his window.
As real as the small stone he felt in the palm of his hand.
He sat up in his bed, just a twin mattress on the floor, and held his breath as he looked at his clenched fist. His fingers unfurled like a blossoming flower, and he grinned at the dirty little rock he held, just a large pebble really, encrusted in dried mud. He swung his feet in their heavy boots off the bed and reached his hand out to the big pickle jar sitting on the wooden chair that served as his nightstand. The jar was now more than half full of dirty little stones, some larger than this one, some smaller, all mostly covered in red mud, but many showing just a hint of the luster hidden beneath the mud. Today’s stone fell into the jar with a very real, very satisfying plunk.
Jonathan Stein scrambled awkwardly to his feet in his drafty one-room walkup, pulled off his muddy boots and heavy denim trousers. He placed those, along with his wool shirt, windbreaker, and wide-brimmed hat in the closet. He was already too late to get any water pressure, so he had a tepid shower under a dribbling, crusty showerhead. He found some clothes on the floor that didn’t smell too bad, threw them on, and ran to catch the bus. His first meal would come later — weak coffee and a day-old doughnut at the lab.
Work dragged on at a glacial pace. He did his job and kept to himself while most of the other slackers slouched around, wasting time and laughing about him behind his back, or even in his face. He didn’t care. He watched the clock.
Finally home, Jonathan pulled a packaged dinner from the freezer and stuck it in the microwave. He ate it without complaint, something brown on a bed of pasty potatoes. After he’d eaten, he turned to his oak cabinet, tall and wide, a matrix of drawers labeled with words that made his heart beat a little faster. Azurite, creedite, malachite. Corundum, topaz, wulfenite. His life’s work, and easily as fine as any university collection. Every specimen either gathered by himself or obtained through a trade after weeks of haggling with another collector. While it cost him every cent he could spare and more to build this collection, he took great pride in knowing he had never purchased a single specimen.
Jonathan spent time with his collection every evening, and that was, or at least had always been, the best part of his day. He entered that perfect state of flow — engaged, enthused, intrigued — and time ceased to behave. Hours might pass in a blink, or he could feel as refreshed as a new morning after holding just one brilliantly radiant crystal. What others found in friends and family, Jonathan found in the intricacies of crystal lattice, Moh’s hardness scale, and reflective indices. The only thing he liked more than the pure pleasure of examining his many drawers of minerals, some subtle, some spectacular, was the hunt for yet one more.
He closed a drawer and smiled to himself, his eyelids growing heavy. He stripped off all his clothes, tossing each piece thoughtlessly to the floor, and then opened his closet door. He withdrew the one set of clothes in the closet, each piece carefully hung or folded on a shelf. These were his collecting clothes, expensive, but rugged. He dressed slowly, with the ceremonial reverence of a matador, allowing each article of clothing to draw him deeper into his focused state of mind, ready to begin the hunt for another treasure. He sat on the edge of the mattress to pull on and tie his boots. He placed his hat on his head, and then he lay down and fell asleep.
Jonathan Stein awoke to the gentle rocking of his bed and the burbling sound of moving water. He opened his eyes as the morning sun filtered through the leaves overhead where his ceiling should have been. He looked around in time to see his walls fade away just as the river floated his mattress and carried him downstream. This was an impossible river flowing through a forest that couldn’t exist, past the solid walls of his apartment that were no longer there.
When his bed nudged up against a sand bar at a bend in the river, Jonathan rolled off and clambered up the bank. Cresting the top, he stood and looked around at what was becoming an ever more familiar landscape. Craggy mountains, cascading streams, forests somehow shadowy and welcoming. No buildings, no roads, no jet contrails crisscrossing the blue sky. No people. Only him; nobody else. On the grass beside him was his growing collection of minerals displayed in rows and columns on the ground, some of the most spectacular specimens he had ever seen, let alone personally collected.
The day unfolded as wonderfully, impossibly perfect as all the others since he first woke up in this place more than a month ago. He hiked side canyons, climbed rocky cliffs, explored caves with his flashlight burning bright. After timeless hours, he raced the setting sun to return to the river bank. In the golden light of sunset, he stood in the shallow backwater, the place where floods and erosion had deposited eons of silt, along with the heavier stones that had been washed down the mountainside, finally to rest here. He plunged his hand into the sloppy, wet mud and fished around until his fingers nudged something substantial. He grabbed it in his fist and climbed back onto his mattress.
As he closed his eyes and let sleep overtake him, he felt his mattress rocking in the flowing river water. He knew this place shouldn’t exist. He knew he must have lost his mind. After all, he was a scientist. He knew what was real and what could never be. But he gripped his hand a little tighter around the one thing he couldn’t explain or ignore, the one thing he brought home each night to add to his jar each morning — a shiny pebble, polished by a river that shouldn’t exist.
