It was midnight. The gentle pitter-patter of rain outside the blue tinted window was enough to soothe anyone, especially January. The cold air radiating into his room from the thin glass panes was harsh; so harsh, it was warming. As he sat alone in the dark corner of his den, he pondered life, the universe, reality in its entirety. Could such a brilliant plane of existence have formed by what seems to be nothing more than a random chance, or was it perhaps the creation of a higher power? I’ll never know, he thought. Humanity will never know.

The rain and thunder had suddenly become harsher, as if God himself were threatening him not to question His plan. January opened his curtains and peered out into the stormy netherworld that had overtaken the yard in front of his complex. The grass, matted from unrelenting rainfall, rustled with the intense downpour. The sky occasionally flashed, cracking and booming. January wondered silently to himself if Zeus and Hera were fighting again.

He glanced at his rusty old Timex watch – 12:03 AM. I’m tired, but then again I’m always tired, he thought to himself. Going to sleep is out of the question for him, however, as he had aggrandized insomnia. That’s what his general practitioner Dr. Michaels told him, anyway. Aggrandized. That meant that not only was it impossible for him to sleep at night; he could never sleep at all. His body simply didn’t allow it.

His watch’s internal alarm quickly beeped four times. It’s 12:10. That meant that it was time once again for him to take his pills. If he didn’t take them when he was supposed to, bad things could’ve happened. A few years ago, something happened that caused him to need medication in the first place. Until that point, he had been a perfectly healthy young man. This was always obvious to him, since Dr. Michaels constantly reminded him of it.

Here’s what happened. One morning, he woke up outside his apartment, lying next to a dog that had somehow been torn in half. Nearby was an angry policeman complete with paddy wagon and several backup units. A fire truck and ambulance idled across the street.

He often reminisced about the unfortunate German Shepherd and how he, after averting his attention from the dog, looked up and noticed that his apartment had been burnt down. He had no insurance. He had nothing. He didn’t know whose dog that he had apparently ripped in two, how he managed to do it in the first place or why his house, along with most of his possessions, had been burnt to the ground.

He didn’t “wake up” because he was asleep, of course. He could still become unconscious; his body was merely limited to being physically unable to force him into the sleep state. Restorative properties in his medication replenished his body with the nutrients it required to replace the process entirely. Anyway, he had either forced unconsciousness on his own behalf with a blow to the head after realizing the destruction he had plagued himself with, or someone else had accomplished the task for him.

He had no memory of anything that had happened. In fact, he was diagnosed with a mild case of amnesia soon thereafter. During the inevitable trial, his court-appointed attorney advised him to plead insanity. He did, and was released into Greatwood Estates Mental Health Plaza, which was a nuthouse of sorts. This is where he stayed for several months.

At first, none of the doctors or other medical professionals had any idea what was wrong, even after he had told them that he never slept. Initially, they didn’t believe a word he said and dismissed it as lunacy. They just shrugged him off as another crazy mental patient without a sane neuron to speak of. He agreed with them for quite a while, too. He didn’t think any other alternative was possible. Eventually, after importing a few medical professionals from Japan and South Korea, the problem was finally acknowledged and officially diagnosed – aggrandized insomnia. He was the first (and only known) case to suffer from the life-altering disease. Bummer.

January clenched the bottle of pills in his hand. It was time for him to take them. He couldn’t take pills with liquid for some reason (he had complained of a gag reflex). This was especially hard in his case since the pills in question were the size of ping pong balls. Acknowledging his predicament, Dr. Michaels (to whom his diagnosis was referenced) offered a similarly-sized suppository alternative. He shuddered at the mere thought. The idea of putting a ping pong ball into any orifice besides his mouth didn’t particularly appeal to him. He would rather take his chances swallowing a dry ping pong ball.

As he hesitantly downed the huge pill, a thunderclap detonated outside, that time so near that he heard the window panes rattle. It was always stormy in Riverbrook, though. Always. It hadn’t fazed him in years, however. Once again, he looked outside. A lightning crack struck the earth in the distance. Almost an instant after a bright blue glow emanated from the horizon, the lights in the house flickered briefly, and went out.

Not this again, he thought.

Virtually the entire city had campaigned to the local government to put the power lines underground. This happened all the time. The local populace had made it clear that they were willing let their taxes be temporarily hiked in order to supply the funds necessary to fix the problem.

January began thinking to himself about why he never played croquet anymore when he realized he’d misplaced his pills. He placed his face into the palm of his right hand and wondered to himself, “Why I’m not still in the care of the hospital is beyond me. I guess they figured that he could at least be responsible enough to keep track of a single bottle of pills. Evidently, they chose the wrong guy.” But even if he wouldn’t have found them in time for his next dosage, he had a button they hooked up to his wall and linked directly to the center’s emergency office that would instantly call over units in case something had gone awry. They’d claimed that the medication was 99.997 effective, so he figured that it wouldn’t hurt them to have a backup plan. After all, his last home was completely lost because of a lack of medication, so there’s no telling what that potential could bring in the future.

Quiet. The thunderstorm had temporarily subsided. When that happened, during those precious few minutes, he liked to go outside and revel in the cold, refreshing air. Being cooped up in a house all day takes its toll on your mind, especially when it’s not even sane to begin with. At least, that’s what he always said.

In a moonlit but otherwise completely dark den, he stumbled over to the entrance of his apartment. He slowly opened the door and stepped onto the standard tenant ‘welcome’ mat. His feet were soon soaking wet, but he didn’t care. He raised his arms triumphantly as he roistered charismatically in the night’s cold heat. As he breathed, puffs of vapor were visibly expelled from the depths of his lungs and into the frozen air. This was his paradise; this was his heaven. This was how he coped - he knew no other way to do it. Fresh, searing cold night air was his means of escape, his vice. He could never have lived in a warm, humid place. The unrelentingly harsh weather there sustained him, and he’d never have had it any other way.

After being ostracized from society because of his admittedly freakish appearance and overwhelming amount of involuntary twitching (at one point even being arrested under suspicion of pedophilia, which turned out to be a childish prank), he had eventually come to terms with being a hermit. He had what he called a “ragsnaggle” look, and in fact, there may very well be no better way to describe it. He was about 5 feet 11 inches tall with incredibly messy black hair drooped around his head like a mop. He rarely shaved, so his face was covered in stubble. His mouth was open much of the time, and he always had purplish bags under his eyes.

Over the course of months and years, he tried finding ways to cope with his twitching and intimidating appearance. The obvious thing to do would be to make friends or pick up a hobby, but the first option never seemed to have worked in the past, and one would be surprised as to how little they are able to do when touching things is essentially impossible without dropping or throwing them.

The twitching was a side effect of the pill, the only real side effect he suffered. Before he was medicated, he didn’t twitch at all; there’s really no greater mystery behind it.

After reading (which failed miserably, for obvious reasons), television was his first real attempt at finding a vice that could deter him from the perpetual torment of being alone. One time in particular, though, he was put off by television forever when it started displaying his thoughts on its 13-inch, dust-caked screen. Now, it’s all too obvious what you’re thinking. He was just some crazy guy who couldn’t differentiate his own thoughts from a television screen. It’s just another side effect from the dope. You may very well be right. After all, would a sane person claim things of this sort to be true? Perhaps a scrap of insanity is required to see the world for what it really is. Suffice to say, the ordeal with the television forced him to destroy it. Eventually, trial and error led him to take solace in the cold, wintery air.

He felt perfectly content with occasionally going outside during the gaps in between storms, but he needed something else, something more. Something that briefly stepping outdoors didn’t supply him with.

He stepped back inside and closed the door. The wind outside caused the door to slam and knock over a vase of marigolds he had picked earlier in the week. With a long, drawn-out sigh, he began to clean the mess. He forgive the wind, since it had helped supplied him with such glorious sustenance the past few years.

He glanced over to the rickety old counter nearby. Alas, he had found the pills. HYAK! In a forceful knee-jerk twitch, he heaved them out the closed window, shattering two of the thin, shabby panes. Great, he thought. “Oh well; I can just press the button any time today and get some more pills delivered.” January had been getting a free supply of the medication since he was first checked into the clinic around three years ago. He didn’t know exactly why, but he didn’t care. They knew he didn’t have money. The emergency personnel never have anything better to do, so they might as well make themselves useful and deliver him pills, he thought.

His landlord had slipped an order under every tenant’s door that as of January 2003, it had become the responsibility of the tenant to repair tattered apartment miscellanea like broken windows, and that they had a maximum of two weeks to do so before “further action” were to be taken. It’s not that he couldn’t live with cold air constantly blowing into his den. After all, he embraced the cold. However, he simply didn’t have the money.

His mother died when he was very young from what the doctors described as “complications from schizophrenia.” She was very wealthy, and January inherited all of her money. Her estate went to his father, who abandoned him soon thereafter. His mother’s estate was in Malibu, so as far as January knew, his father was still there. He hadn’t heard from him since the night he decided to dump him onto the street. He was never close to his father.

His mother was a wonderful woman. She had lavished him with only the best infant products money could buy. She could never give anything less to her sweet little baby boy. He remembered from when he was little that he went on a plane trip from across the ocean. He didn’t know where he came from, but he wasn’t about to ask his father.

After 19 years, the only thing January distinctly remembered about his father was that his name was Dmitri and that he had always called him a freak. Now, freak was not an insult to January. The boy was very content with his appearance and disorder, along with the fact that he considered ‘freak’ to be a simple denotation of ‘interesting.’ No, the problem about what his father constantly parroted to him was that he said it so menacingly, so tenaciously, as if he abhorred the mere presence of his son.

January didn’t have money. At least, not as much you’d think. Probably because of his father, at least to an extent, he became a very untrusting person. He didn’t trust private establishments with things like money. He never put it into any kind of bank. He simply had every cent of his forty-five million dollar inheritance stuffed into his closet in bill form. This, of course, was in his old apartment. Hopefully you are able to tell where it is I’m going with this. The money that wasn’t burned beyond legal use had been the only thing keeping him going financially.

On the topic of not being able to trust people, the boy quite literally had to be knocked out and dragged into Greatwood Estates for treatment. Since he had no insurance, he had to take out a mortgage on what few items remained, so he was left with nothing but the scorched money he had hidden away. After all, he didn’t want the treatment in the first place, so why would he give them every last cent?

But when he was rich, why did he live in an apartment when he had almost fifty million dollars to lavish himself with? January was a simple young man. Unlike most, he didn’t need material possessions. He didn’t feel compelled to collect them. They won’t do much good once you’re dead, he’d always say. He maintained sort of a classical Buddhist philosophy on life in many respects. The concept of birth, life, death and rebirth had always been a staple of his mindset.

Although he lived by a similar philosophy, he wasn’t a Buddhist. If he had to classify himself religiously (which he hated), he’d say that he was an agnostic polytheist. On one hand, he deeply believed that nothing is entirely provable because everything had the potential to be disproven at any time. To him, the concept of God was no different. “The truth is, no one knows for sure if God exists or not. Atheists are adamant that He doesn’t, whereas theists will not be convinced of such blasphemy. Although they know it to be true in their hearts, neither side had the courage to say that they don’t know. I can honestly admit to this fact, the fact that there is no true way of knowing.” But many strange events in his life, especially recently, had led him to full heartedly believe that there was something more.

As for the polytheist aspect, January didn’t think that there could possibly be one omniscient, all-powerful God. In his mind, there seemed to be far too many imperfections and evils in the universe for one perfect God to exist. “That’s not to say that he doesn’t, but this is what I’m able to infer from my surroundings,” he said. “Some of the things I’ve experienced in my life, in my mind, can only be directly attributed to the supernatural. Everyone had their own opinion on the matter, however, and I must respect this.”

You may be wondering just what experiences he’d had in his life that he could only have explained through supernatural phenomena. Keep in mind that he was not a religious person in the least. He didn’t pray, he didn’t fast and he honestly didn’t even fully acknowledge the existence of a higher power. He thought that palm readers and psychics and astrology and telekinesis and the plethora of related mediums were a huge crock of garbage. But as he’s said himself, “One can never be entirely sure of anything, and to say they are can potentially misguide their entire life.”

Many things had happened throughout his life that had caused him to join this school of thought. One example of this is the fact that he had somehow acquired the ability of double vision. No, not the kind where you get knocked out and someone asks you how many fingers they’re holding up. What he had meant being able to see from the perspective of someone else. He didn’t know what triggered it, but he had been able to see the viewpoint of other people. He didn’t know if it was a live broadcast or if they were simply past visions, or even if the person he was seeing had ever actually existed. As far as he knew, he couldn’t choose who he wanted to see from or how long the vision would last. The conclusion that he was crazy constantly haunted his psyche. It’s probably a side effect of the drug, he always thought. But to him, it was reality and he had gotten used to it.

Sometimes, he saw this girl. Somehow, he knew her name is Ira. It’s such a beautiful name. He occasionally saw her through his double vision. Hers was the only one he was able to see in a third-person view. He didn’t know how he knew her name or what the significance of seeing her constantly may have been, but apparently she was in his mind quite often.

Another time, he bought a big, hardbound biography on René Descartes. It was the only kind he could have had any hope to read because he could set it on a surface without worrying about it closing on itself. Turning pages, however, was an entirely different matter. Every time he was finished reading the page on the right-hand side, he turned it (as is the norm). Curiously, however, after every page he turned, a violent twitch involuntarily forced him to rip it out. Frustrated, he ripped out a lot of pages. Upon observation of the newly-torn sheets, he saw that they were no longer paper at all. They had all become floating beads of water, suspended in the air near his calmed hand. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief and noticed that they were in pain. He didn’t care. Similar to the television incident, he could see his thoughts, his dreams and his past in the water droplets. However, he saw something else.

In what looked like a first-person perspective, he saw his apartment. Mind you, this happened recently enough to take place in his newer apartment. The vision in the water was different. It projected to him what looked like his old apartment, with everything intact as it was before the fire. However, something about the vision deeply troubled him. As he was walking through his apartment in the vision, he looked down. Below him sat a German Shepherd, panting and wagging its tail.