The Roof

The Roof

 

 

Jordan, in turn, had begun a ceaseless attempt to off himself.
    Mark had first discovered his brother’s latest form of teenage rebellion on his way to the front yard for the kind of fresh air that ten square miles of abject solitude could provide. Something – that voice, that Divine Sense that something was about to go down and it might be a good idea to pause and take a look; God, as his mother called it – halted him and turned him around. Jordan, somehow, was standing on the roof of their two-story house, a hand shading his eyes. He’d gone to the trouble of stripping himself to his modest white briefs and he stood quite defiantly on the edge of the house. He might have been more appropriately accessorized with a smuggled beer or cigarette, but those vices were to come later. For now it was simply partial nudity and death wishes.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Mark yelled as he stood beneath his brother’s waning shadow.
    Jordan scratched his balls and flatly responded, “Defying mortality.”
    “In your skivvies?”
    “If a man’s going to go,” he announced, removing his hand from his crotch and lifting it towards the sky in an over-dramatic, Cesarean manner, “he may as well be naked as he entered.”
Lately Jordan had been working his way towards a nudist lifestyle, lounging around the house whenever possible in his bleached briefs or, when feeling a bit more daring, a solitary bath towel. He had wanted to return to a purer state of being, he’d once claimed. Mark had a feeling the next step was purchasing multitudes of gratuitous pornography, which would no doubt be excused away as honoring and exalting the female body in its most natural form. Mark hadn’t quite yet gotten into honoring the supple female form, and, for the time being, preferred pretending to be somewhat offended that publications such as pornography existed. God bless that awkward stage between latency and hormonal exuberance. 
    Mark scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, but you’re not, you know, naked.”
    “Close enough.”
    Mark watched as his brother rested his hands on his waist and remained perfectly erect, staring into the distance. “So, what?  You’re just going to…stand there?”
    Jordan broke his stare with the horizon and looked down at Mark. “No, I mean, I’ll jump eventually. That’s kind of the whole point.”
    “…Right.”
    “Right.”
Either one of two things was possible. First, he was likely to slip, catch his gangly briefs on the gutter or, if fate was not on his side, on the bushes on the way down landing him bare-a*s naked in the grass. The briefs would likely be hung on the guilty nail or gutter, dangling in the early-fall breeze until someone bothered to look up, notice them, and take them down. Mark had every intention of leaving them there for as long as possible, until Jordan realized that when winter came, naked roof posing would no longer be a luxury. Second, Jordan might actually have been a jackass enough to jump off the roof, which would only result in some combination of broken bones and scratches. And then, of course, Mark would actually feel guilty about provoking his brother in this sorely misguided act of declaring his immortality. Abigail, the mother to end all mothers, would no doubt blame him for Jordan’s injuries and he would yet again perpetuate his reputation as the worst brother on the planet next to Uncle Aaron. Either way, Jordan was getting off the roof and either way, Jordan would probably be walking away, nudity entact, a little more arrogant than he was before for having survived.
    Mark pulled his hands out of his pockets and, for a brief moment, did what he came outside to do. “Am I supposed to talk you down? I mean, I’m not going to because you won’t listen anyway. And how did you get up there in the first place? I don’t see a ladder anywhere.”
    “Crawled out of the bedroom window,” he answered matter-of-factly. “That tree’s a lot flimsier than I remember it being. Kind of wobbled a bit when I got onto it, and look, man, I’ll be fine.” Jordan tossed his head and glanced back up to the tree line. His hair was getting longer now, and from the backdrop of the setting sun, Jordan’s silhouette could have easily been mistaken for one of a very flat-chested woman.
    “All right. You just…you look like an a*s up there.”
    “Probably.” Jordan shifted his weight, slightly to the left, back to the right, into the center, before deciding on a classic controposto.  “Hey, what’s for dinner?”
    “Country-fried steak, I think.”
    “Eh, really?” Jordan grabbed himself again. “Yeah, I’ll just stay here.”
    It was a valid response. Abigail’s plat-du-jour featured a breaded, deep-fried ground meat dripping onto a side of buttered mashed-potatoes and reeking of heart failure. It had been rumored that the “steak” in the name was used to disguise the fact that what lay beneath the curdled, brown fried dough was actually a) healthy; b) delectable; c) meat.
    “You want me to save you some?”
    “I’ll pass. Too greasy, man.”
    Mark dug his hands into his pockets. “Right so...I’ll just tell Mom that you’re…?”
Jordan lifted his head a bit higher. First his jaw twitched: “Don’t tell her anything,” then his fist tightened, “Just say I’m preoccupied. Pondering the universe. Defying mortality.”
    “That you’re standing half-naked on the roof, face-to-face with God? Good. I’ll, ah, see you tonight then?” Mark asked, one eyebrow raised in that every-other-gesture-would-be-wasted kind of way.
    “Yup.”
    “Super,” Mark muttered under his breath as shoved his hands in his pockets and passed back into the house.