The Whirling Man

By David Niall Wilson

The little man spun, whirling forward and back, trapped in the center of the rubber band between Mason’s fingers. The two little handles could be pulled further apart – tightening the twist, speeding the motion. Just as the molded plastic features would come into focus, materializing from a red blur, Mason’s wrist would flex and the dance began again.

His apartment dripped with a thick coat of suggestive shadow. The small shaft of moonlight slicing beneath his drawn shade pooled in the contours of a discarded food wrapper. Down the hall the soft glow of a single lamp shown from the crack beneath the bathroom door.

On the wall, the slightest shiver of shadow reflected from the whirling man, its efforts to gain recognition competing with the plastic man’s chances of escape in a battle of futility.

Mason’s mind was a million miles away. Another time, another life, rooms with sunlight and garbage that made its home in cans, not strewn across the horizontal surfaces like a rotting carpet. A world with sound and color, voices and faces whose names he knew from more than the evening news or a stolen magazine.

The words wouldn’t let him go. Jesse’s face haunted each corner of his mind and prevented him from escape. Her lips moved – were always moving – but her voices were myriad, blending and warping to those of others and back.

“It’s not you,” she whispered, “it’s me.”

Mason yanked violently on the rubber bands, spinning the whirly man into a frenzy.

“Your brother needed the money for grad school, son,” she explained patiently, in his father’s stolen voice, eyes dead and not really watching him at all. “Maybe next semester we can get you in…but he does so well…Bud down at the garage is looking for someone…”

The room spun, the little man danced, and Mason could feel the paper tearing, again, and again could see the words art and school splitting down the center. The two halves floated beside Jesse’s haunted half-smile, held in mirror sets of Mason’s own hands and torn, multiplying and tearing again until his mind rained confetti and he jerked the whirly man into another helpless jig.

In the shadows to his left, the one ordered space in his personal chaos, were the notebooks and the sketchpads that chronicled his life. Each was different – either the size or the color, the binding or the paper. They were lined up like a demented too-thin regiment – one notebook for each sketchpad. Words and form. Life.

Mason’s mind flickered into the present and he glanced down at the pad sprawled in his lap. He could just make out the carefully etched text. Uniform. What had his father said so often?

“Each thing has a form. Each form has a perfect state. Each time you recreate the form, you redefine the thing.”

His father had been full of shit, but the words still haunted Mason. He couldn’t form a letter or a complete word, without painstakingly comparing them to those that had come before. The words were his life, and he couldn’t bear the thought that as he wrote them, he was recreating himself. He didn’t want to recreate the insanity, only to explore it, and record it. Exactly as he lived it. Exactly as it happened.