Writing Prompt Boot Camp, Day 10

Dollar Message

(The original prompt involved buying a birthday gift at a department store, but that scenario didn’t feel desperate enough for me…)

Despite the rain, Jonny wanted to spend as much of today walking around town as he could. Portland is a very walkable city, and he had been getting around “via the shoe leather express” (his late Mother’s saying) for most of his thirty-nine years. He had two more stops to make before he could call the day finished, and they were both easily accessible by walking.

Stop number one was a branch of his credit union that he rarely visited. It wasn’t close to his work or his apartment, which is why he hardly used it. But it was close to stop number two, so that made it his branch of choice today.

Jonny entered the credit union and noted the retro, teal-colored walls and fake walnut desks and chairs. His regular branch had a much more soothing interior design, and he decided this ugly room was another thing he wasn’t going to miss. He pulled his debit card out of his wallet and stood in the short line for the tellers.

“How can I help you today?” the teller asked him. She was a pleasant middle-aged white woman with very white skin and very red hair. Each of her wrists jangled with at least half a dozen bracelets and she wore a necklace with a God’s Eye pendant that rested on her full chest.

“Um, I need to withdraw some cash from my account,” Jonny said, handing over the card.

“Enter your PIN on the pad,” she said as she pushed it toward Jonny. He did as she asked,  and she consulted her monitor. Jonny swore he saw a faint grimace on her face as she noted his economic condition.

“And how much would you like to withdraw?”

“Three hundred dollars. And can you make half of it in small bills?” Jonny asked, tentatively.

“No problem,” the teller said as she entered something on her keyboard. She nodded at her monitor and then moved to open her cash drawer. As she counted out the money, her God’s Eye pendant caught Jonny’s eye and he quietly stared at it.

“Here you are,” she said. She pushed the money toward Jonny for his inspection. “Will this be sufficient?”

Jonny inspected the bills: half the amount was in twenties and tens, the other half in fives and ones. When he pulled all the bills into a single pile, the height was more than he expected.

“Can I have an envelope, please?” Jonny hated the way his voice sounded, but he had always talked in a low voice. His late Mom hated his “mumbling” and always chided him to “speak up so grown folks can hear you.”

“Here you go,” the teller said as she pushed an envelope beside the stack of bills.

“Thanks,” he replied, putting a bit more umph into his voice.

He opened the envelope and began putting the bills inside, starting with the larger ones. After five twenties and five tens went in, he began to work on the smaller half of his remaining economic worth.

“Would you like to sit down and count all that out in private?” the teller asked. Jonny looked up and realized that a line had begun to form behind him.

“Um, sure, that’d be great,” he said. Another woman appeared at his side, almost like a magic trick.

“Right this way,” the new woman said. She was also middle-aged and white, but rail thin and she had long, straight, dark hair that hung down to the middle of her back. Her skin was also of the pale variety (most Portland natives, including himself, shared this dermal trait) but hers seemed to glow.

As she led him away from the main desk and toward a door in the rear of the office, Jonny realized that he would have followed this woman’s direction even if it led him to step off the St. John’s Bridge.

“This should work for you,” said the thin woman. She pulled the door open to reveal a space not much bigger than a closet, with a desk connected to the rear wall and a simple wooden chair.

“Thanks,” Jonny said as he entered the room. He placed his money and the envelope on the desk. He turned to ask the woman another question, but she closed the door, leaving him alone in the small space.

***

Jonny sat down and put his money and the envelope on the small desk. There was nothing else in the room, not even one of those cheap ballpoint pens with the stupid chain. He remembered seeing those when he was a kid tagging along to the bank with his Mom. She used those pens to endorse her meager paychecks from one of the many mean little stores she worked at all through his childhood. When had he last seen one of those chained cheap pens? Probably when he last endorsed a paycheck of his own, and that had to be more than a decade ago.

“Count it out and let’s go,” Jonny muttered. God, he felt so tired. He was tired all the time now, had been since he received the diagnosis six weeks ago. All he had to do is finish counting the money and then put the bills in the pockets of his jeans for easy reach. When he was done, he could walk across the Ross Island Bridge one last time in order to reach stop number two.

Jonny rechecked the amount in the envelope, one hundred and fifty dollars, and briefly debated adding another fifty when he noticed something strange on one of the dollar bills. He teased it out from the loose pile of cash that was not in the envelope and held it with trembling fingers. Words were written on the bill with some sort of marker pen: FORGET STOP NUMBER TWO.

Jonny dropped the bill and pushed away from the desk still seated in the little chair. He hit the closed door with a bump that sounded loud in the small space. He tried to get his panic under control by breathing slowly and quietly.

Two knocks on the door, followed by “Everything all right in there?” It was the voice of the woman who escorted him in here.

“I’m fine, everything’s ok,” Jonny said with as much cheer as he could force past his lips.

“Ok, let me know if you need any help,” she said. Jonny heard her footsteps on the hard tile floor moving away from the door.

Jonny sighed and pulled himself back to the desk, the chair scraping the floor a little bit. He stared at the bill with the strange black writing on it. He moved it to the upper right corner of the desk and decided to inspect the rest of the bills instead of just counting them. He started with the singles and found another message on the second to last dollar bill: THERE ARE NO HUMAN SOULS WITHOUT LIVING HUMAN BODIES.

Same writing, no doubt. Had to be made with the same marker, Jonny thought. He moved this bill under the first one. Next, he moved on to the pile of five-dollar bills where he found two more messages:

READ THE TOYNBEE CONVECTOR BY BRADBURY

STICK AROUND FOR THE END OF THE STORY, JONNY

Jonny moved these two bills over to the corner to join their “brothers”. He shoved all the other cash aside and dragged the four bills with messages so they were right in front of him. He read them over and over again:

FORGET STOP NUMBER TWO

THERE ARE NO HUMAN SOULS WITHOUT LIVING HUMAN BODIES

READ THE TOYNBEE CONVECTOR BY BRADBURY

STICK AROUND FOR THE END OF THE STORY, JONNY

Tears welled up in Jonny’s eyes. He let them fall down his cheeks and patter onto his lap. He had not cried when his doctor told him that the lump on the side of his neck turned out to be aggressive thyroid cancer. He barely remembered what the doctor said about his chances and what his treatment options were. Jonny just thanked him and left the office. He had not gone back. Dozens of voicemails and emails had gone unanswered.

“Stick around for the end of the story? What end? The end? The end of me?” Jonny said in a voice barely above a whisper.

And that story by Ray Bradbury? Jonny read that years ago. He happened upon in the pages of an old Playboy magazine from the 1980s. One of his old D&D buddies, Keith, asked Jonny to hold onto it while his Mom was repainting his room. Of course he only read the story after he looked at the pictures. The story was about a time traveler and how he somehow tricked the world into making itself better.

Could he do the same? Could Jonny trick his cancer into going away?

“Of course not,” he said in a voice approaching normal. But what if he could trick himself into sticking around? Could he do that? Just until the end of his story?

Jonny didn’t know, but he wanted to find out.

***

“May I help you – oh! It’s you again!” the middle-aged woman with red hair and too much jewelry.

“Yes, I’d like to deposit this back into my checking account, please,” Jonny said. He handed over his debit card and the envelope full of bills.

“Certainly, by all means. Just enter your PIN like you did before,” she said and indicated the pad. He did as instructed while she withdrew the money from the envelope and began counting it out.

“OK, that’s two-hundred and eighty-eight dollars,” she said and looked at him for confirmation.

“That’s right,” Jonny said. He could feel the twelve dollars he held back sitting in his front pocket. He didn’t put them in his wallet, that didn’t feel right.

“All right, would you like a receipt?”

“No thanks,” Jonny said and left the bank.

He walked all the way back to his apartment. And he didn’t even have to cross a bridge.