on the roof

I was woken from a fitful sleep by cold water.

Upon opening my eyes, I quickly ascertained that it was, in fact, rain, and that I was, it would seem, outside. A cursory photoreceptive investigation into my surrounds further suggested that I was on a roof, although which roof I was on and why I was on it were at that time mysteries unsolvable by observation alone. I was neither clothed nor naked, but in the middle state provided by a two-piece cotton pyjama suit, and I promptly thanked the stars for small mercies. It was a flat roof, thankfully, but much to my chagrin was of the sort commonly associated with factories or other such industrial premises and littered liberally with sharp gravel, that had apparently taken it’s toll on me during my nights slumber. Feeling my back with one hand, under the now sodden material of the pyjamas, I felt myriad pockmarks and grazes about my person, and as I stood up I couldn’t help but to allow myself a high pitched yelp as the gravel embedded itself in the soles of my bare feet.

The wind whipped and whistled around me as I stood, forcing the coldness of my pyjamas onto my skin. My muscles ached and my neck was in a miserable state of stiffness. I yelped again as I tried to turn my head, and again and again. For the life of God almighty I couldn’t move the wretched thing, it had locked fast into place and imposed the most crippling agony upon me if I tried to make even the slightest rotational motion. My luck had run out with the pyjamas, it seemed, and appeared to be waning further with every second that passed. With my back locked in a rigid vertical pose, the only stance that reduced the need for movement in the neck and thereby eased the debilitating pressures upon it, I rotated my whole body around an arc of some 270°, feeling both absurd and uncomfortable in nigh on equal measure. Such pain in the neck should never be underestimated, and I vowed there and then to take regular meetings with a chiropractic executive at the earliest available future opportunity. Thus with my head held in perfect straightness I tried to pick my way around the gravel as best I could – which was far from easy when incapable of looking downward – and, like a man beset by the final paralysis of rigor mortis, attempted to better assess the inexplicability of my unfurling situation by grasping where I was, what I was doing there and how I might rectify the inappropriateness of my exposure.

A slow and lumbering walk to what appeared to be the edge of the roof initiated more mysteries than it solved. By now holding my head still, with hands on each side of my face, to prevent the wind from blowing it and inadvertently triggering the acute sensitivity of the neck, I glanced awkwardly, and not without a rather porcine expulsion of grunts, in the southerly direction, due downwards, for even the vaguest suggestion as to my whereabouts. My first observation confirmed my suspicions that this was indeed the roof of a factory of some sort. The crudity of the brickwork, the dulled glass of the windows, the sooty chimney structure; it fulfilled the necessary factorial stereotypes to make such an assumption acceptable – if not entirely correct, then certainly in the higher end of the probable, and when considering the current state of personal discomfort to which I was a party (to wit: pyjamas, roof, inclement weather, sustained neck injury), I proceeded without further ado with the secondary observations required to address the issues at hand.

I had still not managed to angle my neck sufficiently to see all the way to the ground below, but nevertheless I began to shout out for assistance. To the best of my reckoning, yesterday had been Tuesday which would make today Wednesday, which ipso facto would likely have all manner of menial workers and blue collar ruffians within receptive distance of the impressive range of my voice, and happy to help a gentleman of fine nightwear from the pickle in which he had somehow found himself by the mystery of the spheres, especially in exchange for a fiscal reward concurrent with inflation and representative of the severity of the work conducted to be assessed and calculated at an opportunity satisfactory to either party and to be conducted on neutral ground.

“Hello there!” I hollered. “Hello and I say, down there! Forgive my countenance, I have been struck to stiffness by neck ache of the grossest calibre. By some madness it is I slept a slumber atop this flat roof of your humble factory, and for the love of man could not tell you why! I say, might I trouble you for your generous time and assistance from this devil of a predicament, see for I can’t rotate the old think tank due to the aforesaid! Call me a sausage, I fear I might be stuck up here! And only in the pyjamas I stand up in! I say? Hello down there? I say?”

Despite my eloquence, replies remained minimal, or rather, more correctly, absent. I listened as best I could, angling my ear – and thus my whole body – toward roofs edge, squinting my eyes into the wind, but heard nothing but the rasping on the rain on my pyjama shirt. I swallowed out of concern, and felt immediately struck by the most awful horror. I longed to do something fast, anything, to rush from one side of the roof to the other, to shout and scream and jump around, but my neck made anything of the sort impossible. A blessing, in that respect; sometimes it is only monstrous pain that enables a man to stand still and proud with dignity firmly intact, contemplative, calm. I took some deep breaths and attempted a philosophical reflection. I had only woken a few minutes ago, after all, and without my wristwatch I had no idea what the time was. It was of medium lightness in the sky, I could establish that much despite the looming menace of the rain clouds overhead, but that could put it anywhere between seven or nine o’clock in the ante meridiem period, I reckoned with confidence. Which would in turn suggest that patience, once again, might prove to be my greatest virtue, for the factory wouldn’t begin clocking in until half past eight or perhaps nearer nine, and therefore if I merely bade my time then I would surely be noticed by the approaching workers who would immediately come to my aid and feel refreshed and invigorated by the humour of the situation and talk about it for years to come in voices loud enough to be heard over the production line, one of those bizarre little stories of human interest that have no precedent and are eventually engulfed in the darkness of the unsolved.

Of course! My pleas went unheard, not ignored! What a fool I was! With a smile, which sent a jolt of pain from my neck to every inch of my body, I vowed to sit tight and to occupy myself with my thoughts for next hour, two at most, and would again call for assistance when I heard the first of the workers slurred and broken English make its approach from the road. Dare I say I even felt a glimmer of amusement in my reverie, despite shivering as I was in this rotten weather, and the many aches too plentiful to list. A roof! I couldn’t make it up! None of the gentlemen would believe this one, no matter how I told it! I felt slightly queasy, some combination of tiredness and the cold, but pushed it from my mind, saying aloud to myself in a cheery voice: “what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger!”, a cliché I tended not to agree with in the slightest but that seemed appropriate, despite its hackneyed and misleading sentimentalising. I thought about Herrington, turned to jelly by a post-traumatic stress disorder, and felt oddly guilty. It was certainly character building, I admitted that much, one of the many fragments of life’s rich tapestry, all combining to make me the man I will one day be, the little stories that form a history.

I wanted to sit down, but feared I might never be able to stand again, what with the ache of my neck, and I certainly didn’t want to go unnoticed, or miss the arrival of the factory workers – they shouldn’t be long now – so decided to head towards a raised skylight that jutted from the roof like a greenhouse. Whilst it offered no passage into the dryness of the factory below, I theorized that its structure may well provide minimal protection from the rain, which had settled into a constant and repetitive blanket of wetness that was abusing the ground like a violent superior. I ambled over with slightly spasmodic movements, and leaned back against the glass as best as I could. It pressed the pyjamas back into my skin, and I winced at the coldness, but it felt pleasant to take the weight even slightly off of my feet, and indeed did offer some shelter the relentlessness of the rain, effectively reducing its onslaught by a good thirty per cent, which you might think is a trifle for a man already soaked to the skin and atop a factory in his pyjamas, but even the wettest man can feel the often crushing sadness of a constant precipitation, perhaps the wettest man most of all. Something about the monotony of the drops can shred away the dignity and, indeed, the sanity of a man greater than myself, and I greedily relished the thirty per cent reduction in rain contact with all the gusto of a man not afraid of the loss of the comforts to which he is accustomed.

As the time slowly passed my mind too began to wander to a topic I had hitherto ignored somewhat in my excitement and instinctual desire to remove myself from the roof that held me captive, victim of the elements. Namely: how the devil I came to be on that selfsame roof in the first place. Try as I might, however, I just couldn’t seem to piece together the events preceding this present unfortunate circumstance. The previous night was a blur at best, and beyond a glass or two of – particularly fine – brandy and some hearty laughter, there was little either unusual or untoward that had so far formulated into lasting memories. Whilst I was unable to recall with certainty the personal use of my own bed, I could make certain educated assumptions about its likelihood, for the simple reason that I was wearing my own pyjamas, pyjamas which I kept in a silk pyjama case beneath the topmost pillow of my luxurious bed and nowhere else. Perhaps not evidence that would pass as fact or truth in a court of law, but amply sufficient for the purposes of a reconstruction of my previous night, and how it contributed to my current, rather compromising location.

I squinted in concentration, desperate to recall even the smallest detail. There had been people with me. Johnson-Devizes and Willis-Harker, that was it! And little Rawlings, the blighter! Yes! They had been with me, all three of them. We had eaten a meal of exceptional goodness, and conversed into the late hours as only the educated will, exploring amongst ourselves in the sanctity of my drawing room all manner of philosophical concepts and treatises, both Western and the other. We had laughed, we had bickered, we had ribbed, but only ever in reverence of the deepest respect we felt for the next man. Come the striking of the first hour of morn, my three closest, most male friends bade me simultaneous farewell and took leave as one in a shared taxi, propelling them to their respective bedrooms as my weary legs had propelled me up the staircase to my own. I did remember! I slipped between the sheets with only just enough time in which to pull on my pyjamas, and then I had drifted easily into the blissful complacency of a delicate unconsciousness. Then I had woken, at which point you joined me in this most bizarre of adventures.

I rubbed my hands together briskly, and impulsively raised the wrist where my watch would usually be to a level at which I could examine it. Dash it all, it was getting even colder. No closer to discovering the reason behind my altitude, I decided that perchance a stout constitutional around the perimeter of the roof might both circulate the heat of my blood somewhat, whilst passing the dragging time in a more interesting way than that in which I was then engaged. After a democratic assessment of the pros and cons of the suggested constitutional, a vote of one was passed, counted, recounted and announced, and promptly acted upon in the most effective fashion available, namely the commencement of motion.

The rain had slowed but continued to fall as a thin sheet of sadness in the morning air. The pain in my neck seemed also to be easing, but I couldn’t be sure whether I was simply getting used to it, and any rash movements would cause significant and lasting harm in the long-term, so I continued to move in a posture of absurdity, my neck rigid and straight atop my shoulders.

Perhaps sleepwalking was the answer? I had heard tell of grown men wandering from their beds and almost functioning in their lives without ever leaving the realms of the dream. In my youth an acquaintance had drifted into some poor lad’s room in the thick of the night and started removing, of all things, his underwear. The nude sleeper then attempted passage into the startled boy’s bed, who – woken in accordance with the rustling of his blankets – had had to use words of force and sincerity to rectify the intrusion, much to the hilarity of the dormitory. Unsure, come morning, as to whether he had dreamt the whole affair the lad thought no more of it, until later that day he had uncovered the sleepwalker’s boxer shorts at the head of his bed. We questioned the latter, who – embarrassed and shamed as he was – tried to explain his history of sleepwalking, which we found even more hilarious as he tripped over his own words and bumbled out apologies. It was an occurrence beyond humour, I said to myself, but there was something in it. The human unconscious is of powerful design, and as we submit it to the silence of sleep only fools or madmen would attempt to guess at what might happen, or what could happen. I was happy with this, and decided to write more about it when I finally got off of the roof.

Whilst seeming like the most fantastical explanation, sleepwalking was also currently the only explanation I had, and though I had no history of the act and no reason to assume that it would be to this location that I would sleepwalk, it was a possibility at least, and sometimes even a poor or ridiculous explanation is better than no explanation at all. It can help us to make logic in a situation devoid of the same, and without logic the god’s themselves wouldn’t know where to begin.

I edged to the drop and again tried calling out for assistance, to no avail. I reassured myself with a contemplation of the perceived contortions to the passage of time, and how – despite my growing boredom and feelings of uneasiness – I had probably only been waiting, in truth, for a period of around ten minutes, and that the workers would still be arriving, as expected, come the appropriate time for a Wednesday of honest hard slog.

But then it caught my eye, glistening under the force of the raindrops. I squinted against the weather and shielded my eyes with a hand. From this distance I couldn’t quite be sure if my initial perceptions were correct, but as I became more focused in scope I saw quickly that they very much were. A fire escape! Of course! Health and safety demands no less than these mighty steel structures wending their utilitarian metal features towards the skies! Groaning with joy I began the painful walk across the loose shingle of the flat roof and towards my salvation. O sacred metal bonds, pantheon of legislation and forethought, scaling buildings large and small with the perpetual determination of a celebrity escapologist! I would fall at your feet in worship, were it not for this wretched neck!

As I reached the far side of the roof, and in so doing the entrance to the fire escape, I breathed a sigh of relief and laughed aloud, making a mockery of my prior fears. I had made it through whatever test the divinity had deigned to throw at me, had stared adversity in the face and felt the force of its moist flanks within my very hands, and now, here, with decorum and grace, I would make my descent from the wilderness and back to the daily motions of my life, a little stronger, a little wiser, and always with the conduct of the gentleman that I was. It was a feeling so glorious that I felt it in my loins.

*

Alas and to bastard! Imagine, if you would, my very despair. The fire escape, that heavenly structure, that feat of engineering, it was incomplete! INCOMPLETE! With straight neck I made a steady path of descent down its surface, still only able to direct my gaze forwards, never from side-to-side and never down. Despite my pain I could now found time for a smile and had almost even started to enjoy the rain, in some strange way, as often one will when the promise of a hot cocoa, a fine robe and a good fire awaits them at journey’s end. I heard a sound akin to watery motion, as of a lake in the breeze, or a slow moving river crossing flat earth, but in my reverie I dismissed it as imagination, or as the driving rain in transit and against the side of the building.

Yet as I edged my toes over the crest of the sixth step down, extending them like sensory receivers of some kind, like the feelers of a blind man, I noticed a distinct lack of further steps. Queer, I thought, and tried to turn my whole body around forty-five degrees. I could see that I was as yet less than half way down the fire escape, and therefore the side of the building, but the fire escape seemed to simply stop. I again moved my toes down, further this time, even bending my other leg at the knee (in a motion of profound discomfort to myself) to reach as far as was possible into the space below me, in case a single step had somehow been misplaced, or dislodged in an act of nature or of heinous vandalism. But no, the farther I leaned, the more space there was, until with a scream from my lips and a sense of horror running in an unbroken line from heart to anus, I felt the unmistakable coolness of water about my toes, and from what I could make out in this spontaneous initial assessment, rather a lot of it.

“Pending disaster,” I squealed desperately. I lowered my toes once more, faster this time, and reached the same conclusions again, for the second time. Wrenching my neck southward with a shout I looked, looked dammit, looked below me to where – as the power of universal logic would suggest to any man of remotely sane faculties – the remainder of the fire escape should be.

And there it certainly wasn’t. Believe me when I say I nearly died on my feet – right where I stood and let the god’s take me up – when I saw the truth of this unbelievable nightmare. The world had gone. Not only the fire escape, which had rusted and broken off at the banisters, but the world on which I stood, from which my life had grown. It was gone, flooded, washed away like some Biblical metaphor. The water had risen to just below the now bottom of the fire escape, the last step of which I was now astride, paralysed by disbelief and pelted with terror.

The water surged and rose and waved as if it were breathing and I looked up at the thick grey sky, certain that the rain had once again started to increase its falling quantity. It will only continue to rise, I thought, mentally referencing the standing water, and looked hopelessly towards the horizon. The town around me had all but vanished, only the odd tips of church spires or the occasional roof still peeking sporadically from the watery depths, the cruel liquid swallowing buildings and vehicles without thought or remorse. There wasn’t a person in sight, no cowering mothers clasping to their roofs and longing for a rescue mission, no brave husbands tying their family to their waists with an old bed sheet and paddling carefully to a floating piece of furniture. There was nothing, no one. I realised that it wouldn’t be long for me either, that only the slight incline on which the industrial estate was built had preserved me for this long.

I made haste up the stairs, and realised to my rather muffled joy that the pain in my neck had finally subsided. It must have been the speed of my earlier motion somehow forcing it back into a comfortable alignment. Loathe as I may be to admit it, as I reached the roof again I must confess to panicking, almost awfully. I ran one way, then another, then a third after that, all the while grinding my teeth uncontrollably and emitting little screams from between my teeth, that were again chattering in the cold. I began to shout out words quite randomly.

“Canister!”

“Funereal approach!”

“Scabbards!”

“Interrogate!”

“For the love of the one good God, please help me!”

I fell to my knees in an act of bizarre and hysterical prayer and bellowed from the pain of the sharp stones that littered the roof digging through the fine cotton of my nightwear and into the soft skin of the knees below. Slumping to my side in the very pits of despair, I am man enough to admit that I wept, wept with the force of a naughty child, wept until I could weep no more, wept until an acrid bile was vomited from the sanctity of my innards. I was doomed, and even my trademark optimism was powerless against this particular reality. My plight now definite, like the unfolding plot of a scripted stage play, and I knew then that I would die on this roof. I was a broken man, my death the epitome of the pointlessness I had spent a lifetime running away from, dowsing in brandy, throwing my wealth towards, shoving beneath the fibres of one expensive rug after another. Finally it had caught up with me. One wet roof, one lonely man. It was exquisite, in a strange way, and I closed my eyes and willed death upon me, taking little comfort in the poetics of my downfall. Let the rain engulf me, I thought, let it swallow me in its eternity, let the decision be taken, wipe me from the face of this monstrous world!

*

As I sank into the blackness of irreversible oblivion I was soon jolted back into the coolness of truth by what sounded like a voice. A human voice.

“Good God, it’s Peterson!” the voice said.

“Great Scott,” said another familiar, if somewhat high-pitched voice. “Peterson, you devil!”

“It is,” said a third voice. “It is, it’s Peterson!”

“Peterson!” chimed all three of the voices simultaneously, as I felt several sets of hands fall upon my shoulders and pull me somewhat gracelessly to my feet.

I opened my eyes, and almost couldn’t believe them when I did. I didn’t know whether to laugh or die.

“Johnson-Devizes!” I said, joyously recognising the spreading bulk of his flanks beneath his sodden pyjamas. The sight of his paunch had never once made me so happy and nauseous in equal measure. “Willis-Harker!” I exclaimed, the meticulous parting of his thick black hair starting to droop under the persistence of the rain, thick globules of pomade hanging awkwardly around the hairline. “And Little Rawlings!” I said finally, genuinely uplifted by the presence of this unusual little man, his white-bottomed pyjamas stained liberally with the most unflattering yellowish tinge centred around the genital opening. “You three!”

“Peterson,” said Johnson-Devizes again, “just what the heck’s going on here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said firmly. “Isn’t this all some trick, some prank, organised at your hands?”

“Pah!” ejaculated Willis-Harker, wiping his forehead with a wet handkerchief. “A prank! A prank, he says!”

“Come on Peterson, for goodness sake. A prank? We’re as wet as you are man, soaked through! Would we pull such a prank on ourselves?”

“I suppose not,” I said, curiously. “Then what the devil is going on here? Look around you. It’s flooded, the world has flooded!”

“Most unavoidably,” said Little Rawlings, his voice the high-pitched one I had recognised previously.

“Indeed,” said Willis-Harker. “The question remains, gentleman, of why? Why and how?”

“And more specifically, I should think,” I interjected, “why are we here?”

“Very much the case,” Johnson-Devizes concurred pensively. “Last night, I for one sought slumber in my own bed and my own bed alone, and it was within that bed where I slept the sleep of the good this very night past.”

“Likewise,” said Willis-Harker.

“Most agreed,” said Little Rawlings.

“Concurrence is extended voraciously in my favour,” said I. “Tipsy, perchance, I might have dabbled in the fineries of the aqua vitae, but drunk I wasn’t, and in bed I most definitely had been. That much is remembered clearer than the lights of the brightest days.”

“Tipsy!” exclaimed Willis-Harker with a snort. “My friend you were more beast than man!”

“Devastated!” laughed Little Rawlings.

“Primal!” chortled Johnson-Devizes.

“How dare you, three of you!” I said defensively, feeling my cheeks aflame with the indignity of their claims.

“It fails to matter either way,” snapped Willis-Harker. “Drunk as manticore or sober as church mouse, it means little. The fact remains that, irrespective of the intricacies of our faculties in regard to the aqua vitae we all of us can honestly and with certainty plead a guiltless guilty to the fact that we did appropriately commit acts of sleep in one – or rather four different – places, to wit, our own beds, places most intimately familiar to us, and yet have seemingly awakened in an unfamiliar location without the benefit of shelter. Namely, and primarily, outside.”

“Here-here,” rallied Little Rawlings.

“Damn your accusations, Willis-Harker!” I growled.

“Accusation nothing, Peterson. The veracity of your abject drunkenness is of no consequence to our current disagreeable position, and so merits no further discussion at this or any future point.”

“Come on Peterson,” said Little Rawlings in an amenable tone. “Let’s not dwell on your penchant for a drop or three.”

“Damn your eyes if I wasn’t drunk, you funny little person!” I’m sure I was perspiring, but thank the lord for mercy’s large and small if it wasn’t too wet both in the air and on the pyjamas for anyone to notice.

“Let us all give due consideration to shutting up hurriedly,” said Johnson-Devizes, rather sternly, I thought, considering it was my habituals on the smorgasbord of discussion. Regardless, we did as he suggested and he continued to speak. “That is agreeable,” he said. “Now, as our mutual associate Mr Willis-Harker has rightly exemplified, we did all, as men, seek the comforts of our own beds in the night prior to this morning. Might we vote for agreement?”

“Agreed,” we other three chimed in unity.

“Democracy in action,” smiled Johnson-Devizes warmly. “Now, based on proven consensus pertaining to the workings of time, space and the associated universals, we educated men can most confidently make certain assumptions regarding our presumptive whereabouts in the morning immediately following the act of slumber in one’s own chambers. Namely,” he said, looking at me as he spoke, “that one will wake up precisely where one fell asleep, save for the odd movements performed during said act.”

“That certainly is of sense,” said Little Rawlings sycophantically.

“An undeniably accurate summary of the truths leading to a construction of the present,” congratulated Willis-Harker.

“Or, to summarise yet further,” continued Johnson-Devizes, “one can only assume that one will rise in the self-same place where one has previously fallen. At least pending some external intervention within the rise-fall continuum.”
Little Rawlings went as far as to applaud as he spoke. “I would find it perhaps as definite as the impossible to agree with you any more than I currently do, Johnson-Devizes, which is in the figure of one hundred per cent, to the best of my mathematical calculation.”

“Far be it from to me to agree with Little Rawlings at this or any other interval,” said Willis-Harker, “but on this I must. I took leave of my consciousness within my chamber and yet awoke atop this building of apparently industrial intent. And it is from this fact that I take discomfort and, more significantly, no little amount of confusion.”

“Confusion indeed,” I said. “Or still worse, as if the broadly metaphorical carpet of comprehension has been markedly wrenched from beneath the soles of our feet. Do I dramatise my emotions when I say that my above-average understanding of the very workings of the known universe has been rendered meaningless in such a way as to leave the essence of not only my intelligence but also and inextricably the essence of my humanity in some way wavering on the fragility, emptiness and callous impersonality of the ever-turning heavenly bodies?”

“Dramatise you do, Peterson my friend,” said Willis-Harker with more than a hint of sympathy to his voice, “but for once you are vigorous and justified in so doing. For this is, indeed, a most puzzling and inexplicable occurrence within the established paradigms of scientific spirit. In short, I am at something of a loss as to understand our own position and likewise the tentative position of the experientially flooded world of which we are a sentient organic component.”

“Oh my earth!” exclaimed Little Rawlings excitedly. “There is no answer, only pain!
There is no reason, only the frailty of the submerged aged rocks! There is no respite, only the eternal wetness of relentless precipitation! There is no avoidance of the unfurling scenario, only acceptance of our perilous stance! God save us! God save us all.”

Willis-Harker struck a brisk slap to Little Rawlings’ cheek, then another, and Little Rawlings fell prostrate to his knees, deep in meditative sadness, knees apparently unscathed by the imposing pressures of the stones.

“Show some decorum man,” snapped Willis-Harker harshly, rubbing the offending palm in his other hand. Little Rawlings mumbled inaudibly from the floor. He had tendencies to speak in tongues, and we remained staunch and unfazed by his terminal oddity.

“What are our choices?” I asked out of the silence.

“Choices?” asked Johnson-Devizes.

“Peterson?” asked Willis-Harker.

“Or rather,” I continued uncomfortably, “what shall we, as it were, all considered and theretofore consented to, do?”

“Do?” said Johnson-Devizes. “Do? My dear fellow, anything we go so far as to ‘do’ as of now is a pointless act of self-invalidation.”

Both he and Willis-Harker laughed briskly.

“How so your cynicism?” I asked cautiously.

“Dearest Peterson,” he continued, his voice slightly strained by the smile on his face, “to engage in any attempt at action at the present time, considering as we have the intrinsic destruction of any semblance of sense hitherto garnered from generations of learning by the illogicality and impossibility of our current spatial coordinates, would be folly.”

“A waste of time,” Willis-Harker interjected. “Although quite how one can specifically waste time when the very notion of time itself has been severed from meaning within the passage of a night, is a conundrum the likes of which invert reality, sense, logic, language, mind and man.”

“Quite particularly,” said Johnson-Devizes, almost flirtatiously. “You see Peterson, nothing is the same. This has become the one basic fact to which we can extend any consensus or any trust without fear of inaccuracy. Nothing is the same. The structures of meaning that had previously underpinned both our mental and physical interaction with the world have since been rendered meaning-less, our very bodies have defied those structures in their appearance on this... this roof. All we had understood about our impact on the world and about the world’s impact on us has been disproven. We have lived our lives within and as a part of a flawed paradigm, but a paradigm so flawed it has effectively put an end to life, at least life as a meaningful abstract discussable with merit. And thus to you I ask: why act at all? Any performed action in which we might engage could only be in concordance with the outdated rules that still bind the processes of our brains, and what could possibly be more pointless than playing a game of life, death or anything in between with the wrong rules? It would render the action ridiculous, and I for one will not be a party to ridiculousness. We would be men of insanity, men imprisoned within the mental shackles of an unchanged world whilst the world as it pertains to be real or of existence has in fact changed around us, and changed intolerably, men displaced without structure, displaced to what past glories might refer linguistically as ‘roof’, and roof very much within what we might similarly verbalise to be ‘rain’. Would, in the name of all things past, I deign to act in the midst of such madness? No, no, no. Action is something I refuse to take, and refuse wholeheartedly. I refuse to be a madman!”

“I...” I said.

“Precisely my point,” he replied.

“So in effect, Peterson, the question is not, as you so quaintly placed it in the sphere of dialogue, ‘what shall we do?’, but rather and more properly, ‘what shall we be?’” Willis-Harker beamed with perplexity as he spoke.

“Hence put to you,” I said, “gentlemen, sometime associates and furtive lovers, what shall we be?”

“Now that,” said Johnson-Devizes, “is a question!”

*

The rain toppled and the waters rose and the four men of whom I was one watched in a silence contorted by situation. Johnson-Devizes smiled broadly under the grind of breaking metal as the fire escape was pulled from its moorings at roof’s edge. Despite its passage downward into the certainties of death, I couldn’t help but feel dismayed at its loss, like the accidental drowning of a familiar acquaintance and the awkward funeral that follows. I rubbed my hands together in a brisk gesture and Little Rawlings stood up.

“I demand appropriate action,” he said.

“I see,” countered Johnson-Devizes. Willis-Harker walked ferociously towards us from the far side of the roof, where he had taken station. His face scowled in the dull. “And what, pray heavenly, is the specific of this action to which you allude in minimal verbosity?”

“Heck, Johnson-Devizes, you know I don’t know.”

“Perfectly adequate ignorance.”

“We’ve already established the end,” snapped Willis-Harker, “if you’d damn well listen.”

“End?” said Little Rawlings. “What end?”

“The present end,” said Johnson-Devizes reassuringly, slapping a palm onto Little Rawlings shoulder. “To wit, the end in which we are. There is nothing to do and nothing to be done and still the world will change around us. And so nothing is what I will do and nothing is how I’ll enjoy it.”

“But isn’t that...”

“Waiting, indeed, and in effect, most affirmatively.”

“But we can’t just...”

“Wait, on the alternate, we most positively can though.”

I yearned for the comforting shroud of alcohol, for the decisiveness of good tailoring, for the intimate sculpting of well-upholstered home furnishings, and sharply cried, to the surprise of all.

“Peterson?” sneered Willis-Harker, a satisfied expression melting across his rather angular features. “What on this or any other earth might you claim to be allowing yourself?” I laughed, so almost hysterically, and dash it if I knew for why. Willis-Harker’s body tensed in reply, as if ready to pounce. “He’s gone mad,” he said, “mad as mad. Driven out of his operational thought processes. Messily divorced from his faculties. He’s...”

“That’s enough, Willis-Harker,” said Johnson-Devizes. “The poor blighter’s at the edge of something difficult, I’ll concur. But mad? My dear erstwhile conversational recipient, in a world inverted by the chaos of bodily transference there is no mad. Or more prudently, there is no sane, and thus it is your sentence pertaining to the mad which is the maddest, or rather least sensible, of all!”

“Genitals to your patterns of logic, man,” growled Willis-Harker. “Mad? Real? Logical? It’s of minimal import!”

“Entirely sympathetic to your gripes, old bean. Which is why I plan to wait for the cold fingers of death to stimulate me away from the terra firma and into the oblivion of the beyond. Assuming, of course, that death is to be expected, and if not then I shall wait all the more. After all, something will happen.”

“Please deliberate yourself into existence!” I cried, vomiting as soon as the words had passed my lips. Johnson-Devizes jumped as I said this.

“The speaking of Peterson!” he said.

“Why wait?” I continued. “We are dead already, to all but ourselves. Why sacrifice our integrity yet further to the fickle passage of expectation?”

“Interesting,” said Johnson-Devizes. “Interesting in the mid-spectrum. Correct me if you are not suggesting by waiting for the inevitable I am intrinsically presupposing this notion of the inevitable as the, as it were, inevitable outcome of sufficient waiting time?”

“Precision analysis,” I nodded.

“Very much a case of accuracy on your part, Peterson, and an inexcusable oversight on my own, for which I beg the forgiveness of your functioning brains.” A mumbled agreement of valid forgiveness barely heard over the fierce movement of the water. “Most certainly yes,” he went on, “to hand my limp passive body over to the inconsistencies of this altered world like a pound of unwrapped butter, to let it run some course around me, would be to give a credence of the monumental to its paradigm, a credence I do not purport to be satisfactory. Yes! Of course, and curses! We must impose our own active humanity upon it, and forthwith to do so!”

“And how to do the aforementioned, do divulge?” asked a sarcastic Willis-Harker.

“Suicide!” proclaimed an animated Little Rawlings, arms extended to his either side like a pyjama-clad Christ of the industrial roofways.

*

Within a passage of minutes Little Rawlings – in a manner more enthusiastic than any in which I had ever visually observed his countenance – had retrieved four shards of glass of varying sizes, and issued one to each of us three, keeping the largest for himself. Willis-Harker, holding the glass at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger alone, guffawed and looked at it with such disjointed disgust that I felt a wave of nauseous sadness through the depth of my body.

“What the good God is this?” he spoke like a derisive laugh. “Some solid, some inorganic product of fusion, some... glass!”

“Most affirmatively, dearest acquaintance whose association with my personal has extended into the realm of years,” said Johnson-Devizes, examining his own shard with an almost affectionate yet oddly scientific exploratory stare. “Glass it is.”

Willis-Harker laughed again. “And what, please express, is the suggested democratically proposed usage of this solid?”

“I think the man Rawlings has a plan to imminent self-induced destruction,” I said. “Put bluntly, an act of the suicide.”

“Surprise unconcealed, he’s serious!” Willis-Harker shuddered, as if the glass he held already dripped with his own blood, transparent engine of his own destruction. “The suicide!”

“It’s the only choice we have left,” Little Rawlings said, pleadingly. “The only thing upon which we can make a difference.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Willis-Harker. “I refuse to believe that it will be an act of violence as performed with an edge of broken glass that will draw the final curtains around the glory that was my presence within the expanses of the firmament!”

“Whilst it remains far from me to offer sympathetic agreement with the mental workings of our own Little Rawlings,” said Johnson-Devizes, running a fingertip across the length of the glass in assessment of its effectiveness as sharp-edged tool of controlled harm, “in this instance I would tend to offer at least partial support to his decisiveness.”

“It’s the only thing left that retains a context of meaning,” said Little Rawlings in a voice of patronizing quality, placing a hand on Willis-Harker’s shoulder. The latter withdrew roughly.

“Touch not, devil!” he snapped. “This is preposterous, preposterous!”

“He’s in hysteria,” I said, “embroiled by the unfolding madness of life. His faculties weathered, his capacity gone.”

“I fear yes,” agreed Johnson-Devizes. “Little Rawlings, your proposal, most honourably, and entirely hurriedly in the spoken word of mutual comprehension.”

“Certainly to express. I propose a sitting for the four men in a formation of the circular structure.”

“Blessed geometry, you live on in us in sacred memoriam! Logic! Structure! Sense! Dear mathematics, forevermore at peace and held tenuous within hearts and minds, your boundaries engulfed in the movements of history!” Johnson-Devizes smiled at the sincerity of his own rhetoric. “Do continue, Little Rawlings,” he continued, “and forgive me my interruption. Momentarily I was overcome, as soon we all will be by the grandiosity of death, the finality of an ending!”

“Most acceptable,” said Little Rawlings, “most acceptable indeed. Following the formation of this circle, I suggest a mutual and simultaneous drawing of the glass hitherto issued, raised henceforth to the throats of the individuals involved, thus with a minimal application of pressure invoking an incision into the depths of the neck’s soft tissues and through the jugular vein. The singular result, of course, being fatality.”

“Bravo, sir, for your evident respect for the rituals of closure,” congratulated Johnson-Devizes. “Peterson, do you find yourself in consensual union with Little Rawlings and myself with regards to the necessity of an act of suicidal intensity, in concordance with the gravity of the hopelessness of our current situation?”

“I must confess to a full agreement,” I said loudly. “I consider the meaninglessness of an act of suicide to be rendered itself meaningless by the full meaninglessness of our plight. A lesser of two meaninglessnesses, as it could be.”

“Difficultly put,” nodded Little Rawlings.

“Certainly put,” nodded Johnson-Devizes.

“You’ve all gone potty!” blurted Willis-Harker. “Absolutely. Suicide? It’s madness.”

“On the contrary,” said Johnson-Devizes, “it’s the one sane move left to the tactician of life.”

“I hereby extend my full refusal in the participation of this psychotic glasswork,” said Willis-Harker defiantly, smashing his shard on the surface, despite the cries of Little Rawlings.

“Social improprieties abound,” responded Johnson-Devizes. “Then for the sanctity of good taste and in a respect of completion, at least, I assume you will join us in the seated circular formation?”

“I will,” said Willis-Harker, head bowed venerably.

“For that I thank you.”

We sat down as four awkward points dotted around a circular circumference, Willis-Harker of empty hand on my left direction and Johnson-Devizes on my right. The remaining three of us held our glass as one would any sharp object, at odds from our body. I knew that to use it in self-execution was in the utmost defiance of nature, but saw all around me a nature in defiance of man, the only escape being this final escape, a sneaking unnoticed from the back door of life.

“Tell me, Willis-Harker,” said Johnson-Devizes in a voice that seemed inappropriately pitched in the rain. “What the blazes will you find to do with yourself, following our departure from the physical realm?”

“A fine question indeed, and one to which accurate response is still notably impossible. I must imagine that it will be a time for enriched contemplation of the highest order. From there one might only speculate as to what could follow, or to when it will follow.”

“Very much.”

Little Rawlings coughed and both myself and Johnson-Devizes looked toward him. He had raised his glass and held it clutched between both hands at a height level with his neck.

“I think perhaps now is profound,” he said.

“Now begins now,” said Johnson-Devizes, lifting his own glass likewise.

“To here now, now and the eternal now,” I said, glass identically raised.

“My gentleman,” said Johnson-Devizes, “I presume it would not be excessive of me in the current climate of illogic to propose a four count. For in consideration, the simple count of three seems so suggestive of a dead past of purpose as to be the ultimate irony.”

“Four count it is,” agreed Little Rawlings. “I refuse to die in irony.”

“Partners in vocal exchange,” said Willis-Harker. “In absence of sentimentalizing, I safely feel that it is still of prudence to express myself at this, the time of your demise. I disapprove, wholeheartedly, of your methods, your motives and your actions. To that end, I must congratulate you from the bottom of my selfishness, for in this disapproval lies the determined hope of something better, a hope somehow still alive in this appalling doom. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Johnson-Devizes, wiping a tear briskly away with his pyjama sleeve. “Your selfishness was always your Achilles heel, dear Willis-Harker, the finest aspect of an otherwise drab personality.”

“Johnson-Devizes, thank you.”

“I’ve never known a woman,” I said, my hands trembling around the glass.

“Good cosmos, Peterson, this is hardly the time!” said Johnson-Devizes.

“There isn’t much to know, Peterson,” said Willis-Harker in self-satisfaction.

“I thought you should know,” I said apologetically.

“Honestly, Peterson, we already knew. Little Rawlings, are you of satisfactory preparation?”

“Impeccably,” said Little Rawlings. “Let us act, and quickly.”

“Then it is for I to speak and say: on four. On four.”

“One.” I focused on the glass, its razor sharp edge catching the rain as it fell from the sky.

“Two.” I focused on Willis-Harker, the friend I never liked, so greasy in the rain.

“Three.” I focused on Johnson-Devizes and Little Rawlings, never faltering.

“Four.” The sound of the flesh tearing open was deafening and terrible and I looked at my own glass, which hadn’t moved, still levelled in front of me. Johnson-Devizes and Little Rawlings had fallen onto their backs and were bleeding heavily. Willis-Harker was staring at me with an emotion of intense negativity.

“Peterson!” he shouted. “You haven’t done it!”

“Peterson?” spluttered Johnson-Devizes, trying to lever himself onto his elbow so he could see his disbelief with his own eyes. Observing his struggle Willis-Harker moved to his aid, holding the dying man under his armpits so he could see me the better.

“This is unbelievable, Peterson! You’ve shied away from the final action! You are beyond inhuman, Peterson, beyond inhuman!” There was blood in his mouth as he spoke, and Willis-Harker laid him back down into the growing puddle of blood and rainwater.

“He’s right Peterson,” said Willis-Harker. “You’ve let the future down.”

I stood up, placing my glass carefully onto the roof, and it looked like Little Rawlings was already dead. He seemed enraptured on the pebbles. Johnson-Devizes gurgled the noises of death from his wound.

“Come on Peterson,” he said. “Take the plunge. I feel strong in my pain! Alive in my death!” I looked at him with a certain sadness, at the fading colour of his plump cheeks. Good old Johnson-Devizes. I could delight in the essence of a brandy.

I ran from the three and to the edge of the roof, leaving their blood and their deaths behind me. It was a personal affair, death, and anything pertaining to its actuality seemed most definitely enjoyed in a state of comparative isolation. The sky seemed to be clearing, but perhaps my eyes were finally adjusted to this perpetual darkness.

For all that sings holy in this wild world I’ll jump!, I thought, impassioned.

But I was already in the water, and tired, so tired.