Jan had been in the middle of conversation when he noticed they had just come off the freeway. He was explaining to everyone in the car how he felt that in the post-modern age the paradigm of reason had become the expanse of doubt. But the freeway had interrupted his dialogue in same the way a hard rap to the head would interrupt any person’s natural emotional course. It was awkward to be so in tune to him, and suddenly have all the aching curiosities in the air broken by only his silence.

It only was a brief second, but it was enough for the lifting of eyebrows, the glance of eyes in the rearview mirror, and the turn of head from front seat to back just to see why he hadn’t continued. Jan only lifted a polite finger in pause to the other parties and slid out of the backseat through the open window. He did so with as much simple grace as his natural walk contained: smooth, snakelike, and without any kind of visual confirmation that the laws of physics applied to him. Some, like his girlfriend Evie, (who happened to be the most suspended of his conversationalists) were sure such corporeal laws as those had been vetoed by him long ago.

The front passenger, Christi, didn’t know Jan well enough to have a preconceived notion of why he did what he did. But the sharp dropping of her jaw said that she would from then on. Others who did know him well, such as his best friend Brendan (who happened to be driving at the particular moment Jan’s feet disappeared out the window), just assumed his life-long friend was a product of the universe around him fusing wrongly—or put simply, that he was completely crazy. Though by now Brendan was accustomed to Jan’s random behaviors, and likewise often enamored himself to partake of such games when he felt spry. It was obvious, if one looked, that Brendan merely wanted to live in the same vein; hoping at very least achieve the same looks of suspense from any succession of passerby. Maybe he’d even impress a girl?

Still, it was always January first—a beginning that would resonate long over its finale through the shredding aches of time. Something internal would resonate in him, and like a white knuckled rider on the fastest roller-coaster, his body would scream the direction and he would ride it out. It would mean stories he would have to sit through later, but that made no difference. It was always a fair trade to live through it and be forced to reconcile the behavior in the dramatic over-coffee-retellings later on.

Even so, when those times came he would never stoop to encouraging such grandeurs about himself. Not when asked about them, and most especially not in common conversation with people he knew little of. He would patronize them if it came, or offer a diminutive brush-off. Conversely, if it rested to those around him to tell the tales as they saw fit, he certainly wouldn’t inhibit his friend’s free will. He respected them too much.

As it were, anyone who was new to hearing about antics such as these would never be privy to actually witnessing them, anyway. But if somehow they stayed around long enough in his circle, and his mood was just right, one could certainly be assured that he would give a surprise, on-the-spot demonstration.

The girl with the open jaw leaned in and whispered to Brendan as he drove, probably wondering why Jan needed so much attention all of the sudden. And even more, why would he risk his life for it? But she would learn very quickly that today’s session wasn’t for any such thing. That in truth they never were.

And when another week would go by with Christi still lingering in that small, tight circle of friends, this was made even clearer by the facts. Everyone Jan surrounded himself with had seen it before and numerously. It was nothing new to them and therefore it left no glamorous impression to make, approval to give, or opinion to instill. No, this was just Jan being Jan. They also gave the impression that if there was any way he could have done it all by himself, on his own time—driven the car and still been on the roof—he would have.

He would have because for January, daring death to take him was one part ritual, one part act of cleansing. It was what woke him up from the mundane and offered a release from the building tensions of mediocrity that confronted him at all sides. Seeking the accompanied rush was definitely a part of it, but not simply for the slim stick of a junkie high. It was to feel different for a moment; to set his being apart from life but still contain its meaning. He pictured it like a siren screaming against a storm. Certainly it was escapism in its purest and most ideal form… but there was yet even another reason. One he wouldn’t cognize until later that night.

For now his hands held loosely at the roof of the car as they sped through the heart of the city. If Brendan swerved or braked unusually hard (which he often did while Jan was car-surfing) he would tighten his grasp. Until then he would try his damndest to enjoy the feeling of the wind rushing over him. It fluttered his already unkempt hair, caressed his freshly shaven face, sent cool waves through the tweed of his overcoat—kissing his young skin, and whispered to him a waking dream: the fantasy of flight.

Plenty of people noticed, but barely any reacted beyond a shaking head, pointing a finger, or the common aversion of eyes. At one particular stop sign a very respectable looking elderly couple noticed the young man laying belly first atop the roof of the car opposed to them. Not unlike Christi, the flexible hole below their noses ridiculously extended. Jan could hear his friends laughing from inside somewhere below him, and when Brendan’s turn at the sign was up he hammered on the gas. As the tires squealed, Jan offered the geriatrics a friendly wave and mischievous grin as they passed.

The red Ford station-wagon finally roared around the corner onto Evie’s happily suburban street. By now Brendan was trying his damnedest to sling Jan off the roof by yanking the wheel side to side. For driver and surfer, it had become an expected ending to these sorts of excursions. Neither one of them had any idea how they’d come into their twisted little game of stay-on-or-fall-off. It had just happened. Ultimately, Brendan would never win and Jan would never ask if that bothered him. It was an unspoken thing and they let it lay. Having known one another for well over a decade, they did this with a lot of things. It was accurate to say that unspoken understandings were the brunt core of their friendship.

A few houses down the block, Jan smacked the roof with the palm of his hand and the car slowed. He slid once more into the backseat with his girl, just seconds before the view was open enough for her parents to happen upon the insanity.
Evie’s parents already didn’t care for their daughter dating a self-actuated bum, but figuring out that she was dating a self-actuated maniac bum would have been their breaking point. So he kept it cool around them. It wasn’t a big deal. Provided he wasn’t drinking, Jan kept it cool around anyone who wasn’t in his circle of friends.

Their kiss fell deep before she shut the car door and walked up the yard to her house. She always turned at the doorway to smile and wave one last time, and he was always caring enough to wait for it and give a grinning wave back. Brendan was used to the routine by now. Even if he had wanted to skip the traditional goodbyes Jan would’ve chewed a hole through him. He’d seen Jan do it to people he didn’t even know, so it only stood to reason that someone he did know could only be ten times as easy.

That wasn’t the reason to stay the pedal, though. Purely it was respect for a friend. The gauged difference between capabilities and actual happenings were a prerequisite when one was friends with Jan. It was a precursor to all things on an instinctual level, and while no one ever said it, Jan was quite aware of it. So it only made sense that anyone near him should be, too. Hence Jan’s complicated being and enter here any person whom he’d have teetered to know or disregard.

“Where we off to?” a perky Brendan wanted to know just after the waving.Jan’s head cocked to the side as he spoke. His thick bottom lip lifting up just a little in the corner was always a definite sign of the man in serious thought. “Uh, good question, man. I guess I’m not quite sure.”
“You staying at my place tonight?”
His brow furrowed to the set of eyes looking at him in the rearview mirror as he spoke. “No, I don’t think so. Think I’m gonna stay at the dam tonight. Kinda in the mood to write, y’know?”
“My couch is a whole lot more comfortable than that slab of concrete under the lookout. And I’ve got a lot of pens!”

Jan laughed. Brendan had the same sort of boyish lilt to his humor that he had, and clearly he was capable of being just as conversationally clever. It was cute for lack of a more heterosexually encompassed word, and Jan could only admire the other man’s similarities to himself. It was interrupted quickly by Christi, Brendan’s flavor-of-the-hour, who still sat comfortably in the passenger seat.

“Oh my god. You’re fucking sleeping outside, Jan?”

He dismissed her with an apathetic yeah and quipped back to his friend without pause, “I only need one pen to write with, man. And listen, there’s nothing your spare down pillow can offer me that a full-fledged duck can’t.”

Brendan laughed on cue and the man himself only shook his head in exemption, a wry grin forming on his face. He knew better than to try to talk Jan into anything he didn’t want to do. To even consider it would have been an act of self-defeat.
“Okay, okay. I just hate the thought of you sleeping outside when you know you’ve got a place. Anyway, where’re we going?”

“Pool hall?” replied Jan, in mock question.

“Exactly,” the other man said, emphatically.

“I should probably get home, Brendan,” strawberry-banana-twirl, said.

“Exactly,” Jan mimicked, under his breath.

“You’re such a dick-head, January.”

“Are you implying I speak in urine, or are you simply showing off your great mastery over the English language?” he asked, somehow making it sound like a legitimate question. She answered with only her middle finger, to which he warned that such flattery would get her nowhere with his best friend in sitting right there. Arrogant he was, and to the core. All the same it must have been irresistible, because by the end of the month she’d be sleeping with them both off and on.

A short drop-off and drive later, blue chalk dusted the crooks of finger and thumb before every shot. Lacquered shafts attacked cue-ball after cue-ball, clanking a succession of sequentially numbered multi-colored balls into every pocket and back again. Tables changed. Music changed. Hours passed, and so did the girls. When they ran out of money for table-time, they played for other people’s money, and of course did so on said other people’s time.

~ ~ ~ ~

The night sank rich into the endless sky above the cement lookout at the city dam. Just below it, January wrote by moonlight, filling his half-sized notebook with new poetry and thoughts for the day. His mind edged the ever swirling pool of energy that shot from the heavens into his soul, and it soared out of his pen for hours. He started a stanza about Evie, but crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the dark Mississippi. He wrote about blood and rolling fingers, and flipped to a random blank page.

He never just turned to the next open page. He couldn’t. Sequence wasn’t meant for his work, and he wouldn’t offend himself by forcing such a thing into it. That was why there was never a date to be written onto any of them in any of his notebooks. Titles were equally as non-existent—unless the finished piece demanded that he provide one. So many rules to his writing… and what’s more no one would ever know them from just opening the cover and reading from front to back. They would have to be him to know them.

As far as he was concerned, all poetry was meant to carry itself that way: alive and unbridled, like a deep and flowing vein that chose its own path to the heart, through the eye and mind of the reader. Yes, his work was meant too, for an audience. Only an audience would never come. He disallowed its future and thereby sealed his work’s fate. It wasn’t an insult to his writing. It was a mark of just how precious it was to him, how personal.

He’d written several more pages before his pen stilled. It hovered millimeters above, steady and eager, yet did not land. Jan’s mind was working overtime, the faculties of his imagination hardwiring themselves into the den of logic before firing against query. He was picturing the wind whistling by him again, and wished to be on that car roof one more time.
To be free.

And that was it, right there—the other reason that had escaped him earlier. The one that life had made him wait all day to come to understand. It was yet another impassioned form of proving his freedom, and for a man like him, proving it true was the only thing that drove him.

For Jan, every person, thought, place, thing, and notion was approached in three ways. The first was the manner in which it presented itself as being, while the second was how it should be in its purest, most ideal form. And within the structures of these was laid the foundation for the third, which was, very simply, the formula for any of these things’s likelihood to permeate.

He wondered: could this freedom stand to flood from its presentation into the second sum? He was convinced almost all things could. It was important to know, because here in this second sum was the giant combination lock to making all things fantasy come real. Yes, to test all bounds and come out unscathed—and ultimately to surpass the thin veil of general wisdom and achieve a thing deemed unbelievable. It was psychic alchemy; the way to turn bullshit to gold, simply by recognizing its inherent properties and coercing it to transform.

Freedom was one such thing. It had to be, he surmised. In its first sum it was privilege given only on the threat of constraint. But ideally it is meant to be like the wind he felt on his face. Joy without bounds, he wrote, without consciously dictating it. He understood more and more as it sounded-out inside him. He was doing the things he was doing to prove the final sum, to excite the third option. He was excessively fucking and drinking and creating; reveling in life low-strung in order to prove he could be free without definition. With that knowledge he could re-apply it to everything, and make endlessly anything into whatever he wanted.

The external world that surrounded him as he sat now existed in hyper-realism, while his ball-point pen scratched out more words on paper. His eyes were wide open to witness it, yet he did not see anything with them. He was gone and still there; completely enveloped in a cathartic state so deep that it openly connected him to his subconscious. He was, by the third sum, awake.

This bum. This child-man. This vapid, fleshy creature looked to the moon and found another revelation: he was nothing. He was, at this very point in his life, at absolute zero. No money, no virtues, no home, no possessions, family, or work… and certainly he had no place within the world where he truly fit. He was nameless sediment in the bottom of a beautiful sea. He was a vagrant looking at the moon, and it was divine.
The catharsis was over, but the words remained. He tried to force himself to see the page before him, but it was too dark. He wrote anyway.

Brendan woke up the next morning, only a little groggier than usual. After a quick scratch, he made his morning trek to the bathroom. His long, straight, dishwater blonde hair wiggled at the middle of his back as he relieved himself before committing paste to brush to teeth. From there he headed for the kitchen to cook breakfast (pepperoni pizza was his usual morning feast), whereupon he noticed a piece of paper on the floor in front of the door. It must have been pushed in from underneath. He unfolded its neatly pressed corners and recognized his friend’s handwriting instantly.

Jan wrote ridiculously small and suspiciously neater than anyone he’d ever seen. He had told him he did so to have an idea of how it would look printed in a book. Brendan was convinced Jan just liked to cover-up for being a fanatical write-o-condriac. He’d been given too much shit from Jan for having sloppy handwriting to believe anything else. Still, he stood in his underwear in front of the door and read. The first paragraph was scribbled out, but he could still make it out.

To appreciate the generous bliss of our surroundings, to be at once courteous and respectful of all things—from each morsel of shit to every bright and outwardly shining star, we must understand what it is to be less than an inkling of substance. To suffer is to know that we kill from above, and love all from below. Walk out from the shadows to worship the sun.

The intended lines sat just below, cleanly spaced and obviously edited from the scrapped piece above it.

In order to attain true beauty, we must first attain absolute-zero.

“Yeah, whatever the fuck that means, Jan,” Brendan said to the note. But it had meant something—something important enough to want to share. That much he knew for sure. As he thought on it more he realized that to Jan it must have been of great importance—being that the dam was easily twenty miles from his house. Thus the only way Jan could have possibly dropped the note here was to have walked the whole way. And he didn’t stay, which meant he had also walked the whole way back to where ever he went.
That was January Lost through and through, as far as Brendan was concerned. He knew his friend well enough to know the guy was capable of anything, the least of which would be walking forty miles to deliver a note. He supposed he’d have a hard time imagining him actually wanting a ride for this particular venture. It would have been out of character.

He pondered the mystery of the intended lines—taking the rest into context—all through the following week. Jan hadn’t been heard from in at least that long, but this was just as in character for him as the rest. The guy had spells where he’d just disappear for awhile and then he’d pop back up on the map and stay with him for weeks. Brendan was used to it. Jan’s excessive nature was just too incredible to do anything outside of admire it.

Still, the nagging thought of the note stuck with him; always ready to pounce somewhere in the back of his head. It was a little piece of intrigue that eluded him of sure answers, and it continued until it bothered him to the point of throwing it away. Probably Jan had intended it to happen that way. Clearly he had a unique way of getting something into someone’s head. As he walked away from the trash bin, Brendan relented that at very least if Jan had not found his absolute-zero, his note sure did.

Another week later Jan would explain his epiphany to his friend. After learning of the note’s demise he joked that under the new philosophy, at very least the note would better appreciate the purity of garbage. A laughing addendum to his thought came only a split second later: “Apparently philosophy is trash, too.”

© 2011 J.Lax
(Apologies for the shitty formatting. apparently WordPress doesn’t accept Tab-spaces or octupled normal spaces.)