the vision

It came to him as he sat in the toilet, reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. He was having trouble with it; meaning wasn't coming to him easily. In order to clear his mind from the confusion, his attention shifted to the bookmark: an old receipt noting the purchase of a rolling tobacco pouch. The receipt showed the place it was purchased, Easter Tobacco House, the date, and the amount he paid for the tobacco. There was also the last four digits of his debit card; the rest had been replaced by asterisks. There were sixteen numbers total, four which were printed out on the receipt.
He was a thoughtful young man, some considered him idealistic. He had ideals on utopian society, socialism, equality and justice. He hated the war overseas, and sometimes hated the people who preferred getting shipped out to kill people on the other side, than being put in jail for refusing to kill. Because of this idea, James could sometimes be cruel. He believed that ultimately they are given two choices, and they always choose the easiest one, the one that won't harm them.
"That is the problem with the world!" he thought, "The selfishness! The f*cking selfishness!" He felt bad for the families praying every morning and night for the safety of their children, parents, friends who were out there killing people, protecting a supposed freedom which they couldn't define but knew existed. Bush had used 'freedom' like churches have used 'God' for centuries and Obama had recently used 'change'. It was all so vague and deceitful...
His mind went back to the receipt, the four digits, and the unknown 12 digits preceding it. He smiled when the idea came to him. He had just watched the film '21' which spoke about the MIT students busting casinos in Las Vegas by counting the cards at the blackjack tables. All they did was practice counting, device a system for being able to keep tally of the cards on the table and the cards on the deck. Once they mastered it, they went home with thousands of dollars every night. But where did all the money go? To fill their pockets- again the selfishness resurfaced in his mind.
He lived in a rich neighborhood a few blocks south from the poor neighborhood, one cut from the other by the wide Broad Street. Every time he walked the blocks he would be reminded of the fact. Every time he met people on the street he would be reminded of the poor bastards playing with drugs and guns at the other side of town. They all seemed so happy here, as they walked their aristocratic little dogs. He felt somehow, that the only reason these rich people walked dogs around the place is because they couldn't own slaves. He was certain that if it were legal to put some black or immigrant child on a dog leash and parade it around town they would do it.
He had read Robinson Crusoe once, the Robinson the Calvinist, the old Capitalist, stranded on an island stashing away all the treasure money he found, and always repeating the fact that he had no use for the money. The book was odd in how it resisted the call to humility. The man could never settle and be happy for the little he had. He had to catch, master, tame, enslave what he could, from the animals to the native Friday and his father.
Sitting on the toilet, all these thoughts flooded his mind as he pondered over the significance of the figures on the receipt. They came quickly like winds over a plain, and molded his state of mind as they came to him. He determined he would be different from all those people, he would use the money he made to help make the quality of the services to the poor in his city and in other countries better.
His mind was the kind of mind that could never stop rolling. It was a generally unfocused mind, it surfaced through multiple possibilities at a single moment and could thus never decide on any. But this time his thought process became crisp and clear, following a linear path towards this goal.
If the rich didn't want to contribute, somebody else would have to contribute for them. He knew they would notice the money missing from their accounts. James knew he would be committing a crime every time he did it. But when they noticed the purpose to which the money would be used, he hoped the people would just reclaim their lost money from the banks and receive the praises of their donation. He knew they would come out victorious in the end, because that is usually how they turn out, having so much power at their disposal. James knew, in his heart, that the process to this goal had been a gift rather than a curse; it was so simple yet it had taken him 24 years to think of it.
He closed his book, cleaned up, washed his hands, and left. There was something glorious mixed in with the stench in the bathroom; it was the smell of the justice he was about to commit.
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He remembered from psychology 101, in the chapter on memory, more specifically short-term memory, how an experiment conducted had involved memorizing long strains of numbers. The experiment spoke of runners who began by memorizing units, which once grouped, became a unit on its own; these group-units then were paired up with other group-units to make longer group-units. It had to do with the fact that short term memory could only hold 5-9 files or pieces of information at a given time in order to pass them on to the long term memory, where they could be later easily retrieved.
Another similar method involved the Greek method of recreating in the mind the memory of a familiar place, and writing upon its walls the information he wanted to retain. Nevertheless, he preferred the former method. He didn't like vandalizing the walls of his memory.
These files could be any size as long as the mind understood them to be units, so if James could group every four digits from the card he would already have four units in mind, the name on the card would be another unit, the exp. date, would be the sixth unit and the three numbers in the back would make up the last units. Sometimes he did not have to memorize as much, since the receipts sometimes held some of the information for him.
He adapted it to the Consonant peg system, which he found looking for different methods on the Internet. It was a similar concept to the one used in the movie 21, as they both involved replacing numbers with words in order to create an image which would be easier to remember.