Manifest

Miriam absentmindedly turned the small black leather book over in her hands as she studied the man across from her.

I know him. I swear, I know him.

She flipped through the pages of her notebook, trying to conjure something. The book often held all the answers—but today, she was drawing a blank. As the train rattled into the 42nd Street stop, there was a soft-lighted memory. A friend in town. A visit to Times Square.

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“Come on, just buy something!!”

Ever since she’d moved to New York, Miriam had become the friend that everyone from high school wanted to come visit—and with visits, came the requisite tourist traps. She’d reluctantly agreed to take this friend-in-town to Times Square—but no one had told her that buying souvenirs was part of the bargain. Still, she wanted to make him happy, so together they wandered through gift shop after gift shop, the friend goading her with personalized candies and postcards. Finally the red storefront on the Strand’s stall called to her like a buoy at sea.

She made her way through the crowd and picked up the least-expensive-looking item she could find: a small, but well-made black leather notebook.

“Those are great.” The guy manning the stall looked up from his book. “The lines are juuuust the right height.” He punctuated the statement with an enthusiastic “OK” sign.

OK, weirdo. “Yeah, I’ll take this.”

Weaving back over to the friend-in-town, she triumphantly held up the paper bag containing the small black notebook—which was, of course, not enough to satisfy him.

“That’s not a souvenir!” He poked her with his plastic replica of the Empire State Building.

So Miriam ducked into the nearest shop, bought the first thing she saw—an “I <3 NY” shirt—and put it on immediately.

“Good enough for you? Hey, take a picture of me in front of this cursed Statue of Liberty.”

On the train ride home, there was nothing but exhaustion. Miriam was alone—the friend-in-town hadn’t been interested in the way Miriam had hoped he might be. A disappointment, but not a surprise. Oftentimes Miriam felt...simply like she was there. Not invisible or anything dramatic like that, just—she just felt like a supporting character. Friends, coworkers, everyone liked her well enough, but people didn’t particularly notice her. No one really went out of their way to talk to her at the bars. She examined the hot guy reading in the seat across from her.

Oh yeah, he’d never.

Miriam’s troubles didn’t feel dire enough for therapy—not that she could afford it on a QA tester’s salary in New York, anyway. But as the train rattled along, she started to feel like she should do something about her gnawing feeling of smallness. She opened the paper bag and looked at the notebook. Maybe she should start journaling. No, no, not journaling; was journaling dead?? What was it that all of her Midwestern high school girlfriends were into now? Ah, yep: manifesting. Maybe she’d start manifesting.

She fished a pen out from the bottom of her purse and opened the soft black book. Slowly, in the best script she could muster (while trying to resist the urge to physically cringe), she wrote neatly across the first line: “I wish the boy across the aisle would look at me.”

His head snapped up. And Miriam nearly jumped out of her skin. He’d locked onto her face, kept holding her gaze. Panicked, she snorted, stopped, covered her face, knew it was red, felt his eyes remain on her, felt a heat creeping down her neck.

Looked down at the line written neatly in front of her.

Of course, the thought entered her head. But...it couldn’t be. Right?

Only one way to find out.

Ducking, shaking, writing more quickly, messier this time, she tried it: “I wish he’d stop!”

“Stop” got underlined for good measure. And...now the man was calmly rising from his seat. He held his gaze but raised his eyebrows. “Nice shirt,” he said to Miriam, walking off the train at Rector just as the doors opened before him.

And that was that. Miriam had stumbled upon, what turned out to be, something quite magical.

As she bolted up the stairs of her walk-up, she started to think of everything that could come next. Love! Success! Money. She looked around the dingy apartment. First, money.

The thing is, no one tells you how many stupid wishes you end up making when you have infinite wishes. The undoing. The listing-out all the explicit details of how the obscenely large sum of money you want needs to be untraceable, non-taxable, stored safely in an offshore bank account, yet still accessible to you at any time. The number of drafts it took before Miriam had figured that out! The “I wish the IRS would drop all pending charges”-s. The number of “I wish Forbes magazine would forget I was ever a billionaire”-s. The “I wish the uncle I’d never known about hadn’t actually died”-s.

Before she was rich, Miriam had to spend pages getting the wish exactly right. And in the end, once she nailed it...well, she hadn’t been able to spend much of the money anyway. Turns out, arriving in a black car raises serious eyebrows among your millennial friends.

So she stayed reserved. She managed to upgrade her apartment—nothing flashy—and was living comfortably thanks to a carefully worded wish regarding rent control. She bought progressively nicer clothes, but she exercised restraint. Her friends and family thought she was rising through the ranks at work; her coworkers were led to believe that she’d come into some family money.

Sure, she could’ve wished for a whole new group of billionaire peers, but the more Miriam experimented with the notebook, the less confidence she felt in executing her requests. She was more or less at the notebook’s mercy. She could make a man look at her; but that didn’t keep him from making fun of her shirt.

Recently, during a once-in-a-lifetime stock market event, she’d managed to publicly claim a small windfall (“Seriously, I only invested for the meme!”) and decided to treat herself. She strolled into a Fifth Avenue store and bought a beautiful black leather bag, a perfect compliment to the notebook.

On the train ride home, she was on a high. She pulled out the notebook to contemplate her next move. A major promotion? She liked her manager—could she word the wish so that she wouldn’t take the brunt of the shuffle?

Lost in her thoughts, she almost didn’t notice when the new bag was snatched off her lap by a man who hustled out the door and into the crowd at South Ferry.

Clutching the notebook in disbelief as she watched the culprit slip away, Miriam overcame the initial shock and whipped it open to a fresh page.

Scribbling furiously: “I wish that thief—”

Her eyes widened as she realized the form her wish was taking. Could take. She was, always, at the mercy of the words.

She snapped the book shut.

Right when she got home—well, after a hefty pour of wine and a brief cursing tirade aimed at New York City at large—she hopped onto her laptop to start the process of canceling her credit card. But first, out of curiosity, she decided to check her recent activity.

There was a train pass purchased, a large order at McDonald’s, a visit to a market.

This wasn’t some criminal mastermind. This was just someone who needed the essentials.

She slowly closed her laptop without reporting the charges—in fact, she let the man make several more purchases over the next few weeks, watching him buy furniture and food from cautiously spaced stores across several boroughs. She didn’t want the bank to think anything was out of the ordinary—she wanted him to keep going. So she calmly paid down her balance again and again, feeling a small satisfaction as she dipped into the immense hoard of money she couldn’t spend anywhere else.

Then one day, right after the man had racked up about $20,000 in goods, the charges suddenly stopped. Maybe his conscience had kicked in; maybe he’d gained enough to stop depending on the card; maybe he’d lost it. Miriam would never know. But finally, she began the process of ordering a new card.

The guilt about what could’ve happened with that hasty wish still nagged at her. Could the thief have been seriously injured? Killed?? He was just trying to get by.

From that day forward, Miriam kept the book in her perfectly averagely priced bag, only calling upon its services when discretion was absolute, and when the wish felt absolutely necessary. Modest requests. Nothing world-changing. Nothing that seemed to have an effect on other humans. And definitely no more money.

--

After so long, the leather-bound book had become an extension of Miriam—which is why it came as a shock when, that evening on the subway, craving a way out of the next day’s work assignment, she’d flipped to the next blank page...and realized it was the notebook’s last.

Now here she was, turning the book over in her hands and pondering the day it’d all begun...and sitting across from that exact same boy on the train. The one who’d made fun of her shirt.

Of course that was why she’d recognized him! She’d wasted her first line of notebook real estate on making this guy look at her—and now, as she approached the end of her wishes, here he was, sitting across the aisle, chewing on his pen, looking thoughtfully at a page in front of him.

Love. It was the one thing Miriam had never touched on in the notebook. With all of the red tape around trying to acquire money and success and basic necessities, she’d written off the difficulty of love—in that, she’d never written down anything about it. The notebook worked in mysterious ways. She wasn’t sure she wanted to test them in this arena.

Yet! The time for experimentation—for, for wishing for her true heart’s desire or, or...whatever the phrase was? That time was running out. Back when she was still in the phase of figuring out the notebook’s power, she’d scribbled and scribbled in the margins, to no avail. She’d studied traditional proofreaders’ marks and tried to squeeze in some carets. No success. She’d drastically reduced the size of her handwriting, but there was only so much she could do. These lines were all she had left.

She counted: 30 of them.

If not now...

Calmly, carefully, Miriam opened the notebook, flipped to the very last page, and wrote out across the top line: “I wish the boy across the aisle would look at me.”

He paused, as if he’d remembered something, slowly lowered the small black leather book he’d been considering, and looked up to meet her gaze.