The Adventures of Jøran

The Pattern in the Dust

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Jøran sits at the back of the classroom, and he doesn't look at the blackboard where the teacher writes formulas with white chalk. He looks at the air between the desk and the window, where dust motes dance in the sunlight. To him, it isn't random movement. The atoms vibrate in a pattern, a rhythm that repeats every seven seconds, as if the room itself is breathing.

No one else sees it. He knows this because he has asked before, and the answer has always been the same look, the one that says he has once again said something that doesn't fit into the world the others live in.

"Jøran? Do you have anything to contribute to the assignment?" The teacher stops with the chalk in hand, and the whole class turns toward him like a flock of birds turning at the same instant.

He doesn't answer. He can't explain that he has already solved the problem in his head, three times, using three different methods, and that none of them interest him anymore. His silence is interpreted as insolence. He hears the snickering behind him before he hears the actual words.

"He's there again, in his own little world," says a voice he knows all too well. Marcus, with the broad smile that always looks like it was borrowed from an advertisement. "Hello? Earth to Jøran."

Jøran turns his head toward the window. Inside him, a cathedral rises, stone by stone, vault upon vault, and every laugh from the classroom becomes just another stroke of mortar in the wall he is building around himself. He doesn't need their attention. He needs time.

Out in the schoolyard, in the shadow of the flagpole, stands a shadow that doesn't quite belong there. It doesn't move like the other students; it stands still, disturbingly still, looking up toward his window. Jøran notices it without looking directly at it, a chill in his neck that doesn't come from the wind.

When the bell finally rings, he leaves the building without speaking to anyone, and no one tries to stop him.

His workshop is located in an old garage behind the house, a room filled with circuit boards lying like shells on a beach, oil paints in tubes without caps, and drawings fixed to the walls with tape that has yellowed with age. Here, he is no one's son, no one's classmate. Here, he is just his hands.

He finds the bottle behind a stack of old motherboards, covered in a layer of dust so thick it almost looks like frost. The label is faded, but he can still make out the symbols, signs that don't exist in any language he has studied, and he

has studied many. The bottle is said to be eight thousand years old, an inheritance from an uncle who never told him where he got it from, only that it was "too important to be drunk."

Beside it stands a clay jar of grain beer, thicker and darker than anything he has tasted before, brewed according to a recipe he found in a notebook that accompanied the bottle. He has never opened either of them. Until now.

Something in him, an architectural instinct he cannot name, tells him that these two liquids belong together, like two halves of an arch that cannot stand without each other. It isn't a thought. It is a necessity, as fundamental as a pillar having to carry a load.

He begins to set up his machine, a construction of glass tubes and sensors he has built over three months, intended to measure microscopic time variations in liquid substances. His school project, which was supposed to be about simple chemistry, has grown into something much larger, something he hasn't told any teacher about because he knows they wouldn't understand why a barometer for time is more important than a titration.

On his phone, which lies glowing in the corner of the table, messages he doesn't read are boiling over. Someone has posted a video of him from the classroom, with the caption "crazy Jøran is staring at the wall again." He skims over the notifications with a gaze that doesn't fix on anything, and

places the phone face down. He touches the bottle to loosen the cork, and the moment his fingers close around the glass, he feels a warmth that doesn't come from the room. He looks down. His fingertips glow faintly golden, as if his skin has become thinner and something underneath is shining through.

He freezes. Not out of fear, but from the same feeling he gets when a drawing suddenly clicks, when the lines on a sheet stop being lines and become a form. Reality around him flickers, just for a moment, like an image breaking up into squares, pixels, before it settles again. He blinks. Did he see wrong?

The garage door slams open without warning. Marcus stands there, his face twisted in the grin he uses when he's about to destroy something he doesn't understand. "Heard you had some kind of rocket science thing out here," he says, reaching a hand toward the machine's main power cord.

It crackles. A blue spark jumps from the wire and hits Marcus on the back of his hand, and he howls and pulls his hand back as if he has touched a hot plate. "What the hell was that?" he shouts, backing out again while clutching his hand to his chest.

Jøran doesn't answer. He knows the machine shouldn't be able to give a shock, not with the voltage it's running on. Something protected it. Or protected him.

When Marcus is gone, and the garage is quiet again, Jøran sets the bottle down in front of the jar of grain beer. His fingers still glow, faintly, like embers under ash. He doesn't know what he is in the process of building, but he knows it is close to being finished, and that no wall he has raised around himself will keep it in.