Jack stared at the ceiling.
It was two fifty-nine in the morning, Jack guessed, the night held fast the world outside his apartment as the street lights cast an amber glow through the window on the walls surrounding his bed. He often woke like this, not from troubled sleep or insomnia but because his body decided it was time.
The alarm began to ring on the nightstand.
Jack listened to the tune, feeling the faint vibration as the phone doubled it’s effort to wake him, but it was pointless since he no longer needed it.
Jack didn’t intend to be so acute to this moment in time, it’s just the way his body responded to something which happened nearly every morning, but Jack enjoyed beating his alarm to the punch, it was easier to wake out of his own accord rather than rattled by the effervescent jingle that marked his waking hour.
Jack remained still for a minute longer, allowing the alarm to sing, it would happen any moment. The silence was pushed back by the reverberating melody since no one in their right mind or in this financial zip code would be up at such an ungodly hour.
Jack knew it wouldn’t be long now.
The anticipation was almost as good as the sudden sharpness of the sound, Jack knew that, but what was even better, was what it meant.
Whaaaaaap!
The sound was enough to jolt the dead out of their graves or, at least, to force a reluctant dreamer, who allowed his alarm to play for too long, back to the land of the living. It was as if a hammer had been dropped from five feet and struck the wooden floorboards, head first, would be.
For a long time, Jack thought this sound was all in his mind. He believe that he’d knocked the old candle or pill-shaped stereo off the nightstand in his groggy effort to silence the alarm, but, when he searched for the items on his nightstand, they were all accounted for and not a single thing was on the floor below.
There were times when the sound brought him out of a terrible dream and Jack began to equate the noise with a ghost, theoretically living in his room and theoretically enjoyed making loud enough noises to wake him from the nightmares but Jack ruled that out when the nightmares were gone, when he began waking a few minutes before his alarm went off, and the sound didn’t end.
Whaaaaaap!
As if someone punched the floor with a iron fist, Jack felt the aftershock of the impact through his bed.
This time, Jack smiled and reached for the alarm, pressed the snooze button, just incase he drifted back to sleep before putting his feet on the floor, and rolled to his back to ponder the ceiling, once more.
Jack couldn’t decide why he enjoyed the loud thump on his floor so much. It could be he was glad that someone else shared his suffering, to be awake before the rest of the city bothered. Possibly it was that the alarm, attached to the crashing sound, no longer had its desired affect on Jack because he was already awake and ready. The last could be that it made him feel less alone because another human shared this moment in time with him, three in the morning, even though the person responsible for the thumping against his floor was certainly less than amused to be doing what they were doing, rather than sleeping, because of Jack.
To be certain, there were no rooms under Jack, he was on the first level of the small, older complex, or at least the rooms underneath him weren’t for rent. Jack only knew this because there wasn’t a way to get down below the first floor except by a special key, which he assumed belonged to the property manager or something of that sort.
If it is the manager, Jack thought, I should be a little more cautious in how I find amusement.
But it’s not like they could kick him out for waking up early. Blame it on the old bones of the building, which allowed sound and movement to be transferred between rooms as if they were separated by paper walls and wire strings.
Waking at three in the morning wasn’t a crime.
Jack never researched the validity of his belief, that someone did live under him, as he never heard sounds or saw anyone going to or from the basement to support his claim, but it was easier to believe that then the other scenario, which was that his complex was haunted by a ghost who didn’t appreciate Jack one bit.
Jack balled his fist and rubbed the dust bunnies from the corner of his eyes.
His body ached, mostly from the whisky but also from an ex whose visit last night ended after twenty sweaty minutes, it’d been awhile since his body had worked as hard for anything.
It would have been better to spend the night alone, Jack thought.
Not that he didn’t enjoy seeing his ex, it was just that seeing an old flame was like lighting a candle and placing it at a distance. The heat and passion that was once familiar but mysterious and exciting because it was hidden somewhere inside, was now outside of him and it would never bring back the warmth to his chest as it once had. Now, such visits, were only a checkmark on a box that sometimes ran overdue, the empty square with the words copulation next to it. If Jack had the choice, he’d wish away the need but it seemed this was impossible, to manipulate the basic instincts, whether he found himself in love or not, mostly being the latter.
Jack moved cautiously to the kitchen, which was only a step from his bed in the small flat, and greedily drank the glass of water he’d set out the night before.
Yes, Jack thought, if I had it my way, I’d give up the distractions, including the whiskey.
Jack moved throughout his morning routine with ease, or so he thought. From a distance, it was like watching a hallucinating rhino attempting to climb out of a wooded swamp. Things were knocked over and spilled, dropped but luckily didn’t break, and eventually, feeling very much accomplished, Jack was at his computer some forty-five minutes later.
This was the reason for such an early morning, to be at his desk and working before the light came up on the world outside and it was time to run off to work. Jack, unfortunately for him and his downstairs neighbor, was a morning person. Which, to Jack, was in itself a form of a curse. He would give anything to be the kind of person who could focus after work, so he didn’t have to wake before the rest of the world, and it would make his social life a little easier to navigate or it might develop it because he really didn’t have much of a social life to speak of. But it didn’t work that way, not for Jack, the morning was his time to listen to the voice and the only time he could hear the voice was when everything else was quiet.
Too much noise would gather in his mind from the news, commuting, working, then repeating the first two, possibly an errand or two attached, before he was back in the lonely square flat with old wood floors where the laptop taunted him from the corner or the room, daring him to try again this late in the day but he couldn’t. The static in his brain was too loud, as if everything that happened since waking caught in a basin and the only way to drain it was to sleep or drown the voices with whisky.
When Jack woke, the basin was empty and he waited to absorb the voice, fingers ready.
Which is where Jack sits now, after fumbling through the start of his morning, in the less than comfortable chair in front of the dull glow of the laptop.
Jack read the last few lines of what he’d written the day previous.
It was a story he’d been recently inspired to write, a tragic story of betrayal which took place in a small town outside of the city. It was about a successful woman, with a powerful father, and the young farmer, with meager beginnings and a father who’d taught him everything he knew.
Jack was in a chapter where the farmer, Seth, was writing in his journal, Seth’s troubled loneliness trembled through the ink in the form of a poem, which Seth often turned to in the solitary work of farming in a small town, where there were too many words but no one to listen to them.
The poem began easily enough:
Lonely are the nights
Lonely are the days
Lonely am I, in so many ways
Jack read on to its completion.
It wasn’t Jack’s work, or Seth’s work for that matter, but rather a poem by Jim Foulk that ended tragically, as most sad things do. But what inspired Jack about this specific poem was the story Reagan told him, about the suicide of a young man in Minor about three weeks ago, his body was found on the site where a new prison was being constructed. The poem was pinned to the victims chest, whose body was found underwater in a ditch. Apparently the pumps which kept the water out of the ditch had been tampered with and allowed the flooding, concealing the body for a short time but it wasn’t drowning that ended the victims life, it was poison. Cyanide to be certain.
Anyways, they never found a killer or motive and eventually labelled it a suicide, because their was enough evidence backing that conclusion, stating that the victim tampered with the pumps himself, then tied himself to rebar in the ditch and placed a pill of cyanide in his mouth, which he bit into just as the water began to cover his body.
It was dramatic and alarming. The idea that someone would drown and poison himself, while holding onto a poem that seemed to say something about his situation, was elaborate and premeditated. Almost as if the kid had planned his own death for a very long time.
Jack didn’t know whether to believe it was suicide or murder but Reagan was a firm believer that it was murder and, in her own Nancy Drew sort of way, was trying to put the pieces together in her spare time. Reagan believed it was just a way of the city cutting ties to a case that didn’t matter enough to keep paying their men to figure out what really happening the the kid. By labeling it suicide, the only thing left was to sweep it under the rug. Which the city did, quickly, because there were more important things to focus on like traffic problems, rampant construction, and bringing in more big business.
But Jack put that aside for the moment, the poem and the lyrical quality of the murder/suicide was enough to inspire Jack for the idea of this new story of a lonely farmer’s comeuppance.
Jack knew how Seth’s story would end, before it began and it was a troubling thing to carry when you’re writing a story because Jack didn’t want it to end that way and frequently fought to bend the story to a happier conclusion. But every time Jack wrote a few paragraphs, diverting from the natural course of the story, against the whispering voice in his mind, he read them in disgust and quickly deleted them. You can’t tell a story that isn’t true, even if it’s all a lie, and believe in it when the voice inside tells you otherwise.
Seth would eventually murder his lover, when he realized he was just her toy, a play thing that she’d been amused with after a family vacation in the flatlands, east of the mountains. Seth didn’t understand what he had with the woman was just a fling, he believed it was love, and the realization that she was playing him for the foolish farmer, made him angry but the additional knowledge that she was sleeping with other men, instead of true to him as he had been to her, would drive Seth to insanity.
Jack hated it when his characters became violent. It made Jack feel dirty after writing the horrifying scenes where the anger and the madness climax but that is what the voice inside told him to write and Jack couldn’t tell a lie.
Jack typed the rest of the poem, which Seth was writing by pen in the drafty loft above the barn, to the glow of a single bulb hanging on a string, the smell of manure and feed prickling his nostrils.
Lonely are the seasons
Lonely are the years
So lonely am I, that it brings tears.
Lonely is this place
Lonely is my life
Lonely am I, that I reach for a knife
Lonely is this court room
Lonely is my sentence
So lonely am I that I ask for repentance
Seth wrote this while wincing at the muffled screams from the corner stall far below, a teardrop fell on the page from the sound and the cries of his angry, betrayed heart. Seth closed the journal before grabbing the real knife and heading down the steps of the loft.
Jack wrote out the scene as fingers flew to the keys on the board, everything vivid and clear, so much so that Jack should have been alarmed, but he wasn’t because he had little choice in the matter. He’d learned long ago not to contradict or to take his own path because it didn’t work, he couldn’t write without the voice. Even now, under the whisky headache and too little sleep, the voice was clear and demanding.
Ten harrowing pages later, an alarm sounded from Jack’s phone.
The cheerful tune filled him with irony after writing such a morbid piece of literature and Jack released his hands from the computer to silence the alarm. It was time to leave for work.
That’s the way it was for Jack, most days, because the option of not writing, even though most of his stories lay incomplete in a folder on his laptop, would be to choose insanity. The voice wasn’t quiet when he didn’t write, instead it became louder. The only way to lower the voice to a tolerable muffle was to allow it breath on a sheet of paper and release it from it’s mental captivity, otherwise- Well, Jack didn’t know what would happen otherwise, actually. And he didn’t much feel like trying to find out what would happen because part of him knew that he was in danger of becoming the characters he wrote about. In some small way, every person that filled his pages was a piece of himself, seeds of his own thoughts and sometimes the fruit of those seeds was not something you’d want your parents to know about, or anyone for that matter.
Another tone, a single bell, chimed from Jack’s cell. He reached for the phone and smiled a bit at the notification on his lock screen.
A new message from a girl he’d been chatting with on a dating app for the past couple days.
Most conversations on the dating apps would fizzle out before they even began, Jack had learned, and it was normal to match with someone after a few minutes of precarious and well intentioned swiping – left for no, right for yes – but often the actual messaging part lasted as long as a ‘Hello’ and maybe a ‘How are you?’ before it died shortly after.
Jack used to get annoyed by this. It made the whole act of trying to use this format of finding a suitable mate as boring and pointless as it was exciting, and mostly it was just confusing. Confusing because it was so different, like shopping for a girlfriend online; with only a few less than professional photos – most girls smiled with drinks in their hands and Jack never understood why, were all girls low key alcoholics or was that the only time they were ever comfortable enough to have a photo taken? – a banal line or two about themselves, their obligatory location, and possibly where they worked. No sounds, no movement, no catching each others eye from across the room. No sweaty palms or terrible opening lines that you had to think up fast because the girl might leave before you get a chance. Instead, you got to inspect the prospect without them looking back and there was all the time in the world to think up something clever to tell them before pressing the send key.
It was strange and fucked, if you asked Jack, extremely fucked.
Jack sighed.
Even though it was what it was, Jack had few better ways to find a date. It could be exciting, sometimes.
Jack unlocked the screen and read the message.
It was from Sara, a sweet girl with a kind face and brunette hair, also a nurse which Jack admired. She was an avid reader, which Jack always looked for in a woman, and dabbled in poetry, even winning a local competition a year back. To Jack, she might as well have been published because, even though he wrote voraciously, he had not actually entered his work into anything other than the folder labelled ‘Writing’ on his laptop.
They had sufficiently passed the boring phase of ‘how are you’s’ and moved on to planning to meet, which was this evening in fact.
sara: I love the Bookstore! 7 works great for me. Here’s my number.
Jack smiled. He smiled in spite of the fact that this same scenario had played out dozens of times in the past year and, regardless of the temporary joy, it had yet to bring any lasting establishment to his life.
Beggars can’t be choosers, Jack thought. But the image of watching a homeless man sifting through trash somewhere along 1st Ave flashed across his mind and Jack recounted the phrase. In no way does a beggars take everything he’s presented with, a beggar retains his humanity by exercising his right to choose, even if it’s between a moldy piece of hamburger or a half eaten corn dog. Jack also remembered one time he was in Belltown, walking to his bus stop with leftovers from a very nice restaurant in his hand, when a rough and luckless appearing beggar confronted him with a cup, asking for change. Jack didn’t carry change or cash of any kind, it simply was poor ethics, but instead, presented with an opportunity to do some good, offered the delicious leftovers to the man with the cup. The man with dirty fingers looked at the bag warily, Jack elaborated which restaurant it came from and that it was steak, mashed potatoes, and macaroni, but the man, annoyed, simply glared back at Jack before turning his cup toward another person who was approaching.
So, yes, Jack thought, Beggars are choosers. Humans are choosers. And its been his choice to continue this mild level of madness that dating has turned into, especially when you’re in your late twenties, as Jack is, and his decision to meet with Sara tonight.
Jack saved the number. Wondering if he should text her before the date or if he should simply wait until after or if for some reason she was late. It was always confusing to him, this narrow timeliness of things, that there was a ‘too soon’, a ‘too late’, and somewhere in the middle was the absolute perfect time to contact someone. But Jack did as he always did, because he really didn’t care, and texted her directly. Mostly for fear that he would forget in the course of the work day. It was easy to forget about someone you met online.
Jack: Hey it’s Jack! See you at 7 🙂
Jack typed out the words, cringed slightly, then deleted the entire thing. A few seconds later, he typed the exact same message again, sans the smiley face, and pressed send.
He locked the screen, grabbed his jacket, and hoped he wasn’t late for the number 3 bus.
Whether it was the impending date or the morning writing, Jack completely forgot that he was supposed to meet Reagan tonight, not Sara.
Adam Ramer 