Portrait of the Autist
#1 of Biographical Stuffs
First submission, a pretty pretentious introduction
The coldest winter never bit so coldly at the young man's flesh, as the winter in his heart did. The organ most often associated with love, compassion, and life was to him, at least, devoid of that symbolism. A whirlpool raged calmly at the open confines of his skull. A whirlpool made of words that hadn't dropped from his lips, which burned ice-cold against his numb and tingling tongue. Nine and ten years weighed gently on his shoulders, and smooth creases marred his perfectly imperfect face.
For as long as he remembered, the whirlpool had raged. It began weak, a gentle current that rippled the deep, inky black waters of the mind. It grew in strength as he grew in body. He had always feared the day that it would swallow him up, break his frail, strong form and drown him in a mire of happy failures. Already he felt the clinging tendrils of shame and regret clasp about his wrist. Yet when he looked, and looked again, the soft skin bore no mark of restraint. His wrists displayed no scars he himself had willingly placed there, for he was too cowardly and brave to put blade to skin. He had often felt the warm chill of blood, though. He had drunk his vitality and loved the disgust he felt for himself.
His heart and mind wrestled like Abel and Cain, but neither would gain ground. Every contradiction ran through his mind as he sat upon his chair, which was as ragged as he felt. Perched before his paint-stained desk, with Joy Division prodding his weary mind to listen, he sighed.
The breath was feeble, but heavy with fetid sorrow. It stank of whiskey, stolen and forced cigarettes. It reeked of spiteful words and choked-upon pride. It was a taste commonly unique. Sunken, dead eyes, full of life, gazed at the wall. Chipped paint revealed the plaster beneath. The wall of the tiny bedroom may as well have not been there. He gazed inward, and stared long into the abyss. And as is said, the abyss stared back.
Inside an old cinema, surrounded by a swirling, whirling wall of water, the young man sat on a stool, on a stage.
Outside, the night caressed the earth. Families slumbered and couples dreamed. Young children, ensorcelled by their wild imaginings, slept on. But he remained awake. And the longer he stared at himself, the longer he felt he was unable to take off the mask. It was not a real mask, a pantomime piece of costume. It was an imagined mask, one made of a flawless mould of his face. It was the mask the world saw, and he could not recall or convince himself that any had seen behind it..
He felt that the mask was the only thing that kept the whirlpool inside. When he felt the mask crack, the mould shift, he also felt the whirlpool leak. It seeped from his eyes, his nose, his mouth and ears. Like ichor, it burned him, and aided the mask's crumble. But he was strong in his weakness, and he forged the mask anew.
This was the arm of the whirlpool, he knew, this state of mind. The edge of it's hungry suction. The outer edge of it's influence buffeted him with phrases and ideas that bobbed like bloated corpses. Dead, never knowing release upon his voice. The mask kept the whirlpool in. But it also let nothing else out. He was happy to wear it, but he was also sad. He felt strong behind it, but also frail. Glad that no hand reached to tear it away, miserable that it was never removed.
This contradiction and this duality was now his very identity. But it had not always been like this, or at least, he liked to tell himself that. Under the whirlpool, in the eye of the storm, fuzzy film reels played. One day, he wanted to play these reels for another. But the cinema was always empty. The one man show drew no audience. And the masked young man sat alone on the stage, under the spotlight, and the whirlpoon turned.
A few times, the seats in the cinema had been occupied. One or two at a time. Dust would billow and fly free through the musty gloom. But when the reels turned, and the hazy, neglected projector played, the attendees would half-stand. And when the young man's scarred, unblemished fingers began to peel back the mask, they fled. Fear and confusion made them run. But the young man felt as though the whirlpool had pulled him away, also.
In the cinema alone, behind the mask, comforted by the whirlpool, he tried to understand. He tried to do what they had given up on. Comprehension never came easily to him. These strange beasts they called humans were as unintelligible as apes to he. They may as well have been aliens, with their foreign notions and customs. Yet he tried, still. And as he tried, he felt that maybe he was going about all this the wrong way. He was still sat inside the cinema. The eyeholes of the mask only afforded him fleeting glimpses of whatever lay beyond the doors of the old hall, when the fleeing forms set the doors a-swinging. The whirlpool tried to root him to his seat, but he stood, regardless.
He hobbled through the aisle, spore-clouds of dust puffing around his shod feet. The mask-face began to change. The new face was the same as the old one, but different. It was slightly elongated. Whiskers flanked a sensitive nose. The skin was replaced by flesh. And the young man, solitary performer that he was, costumed himself.
For outside the cinema doors, which he threw open for the first time, he had seen gambolling figures provide each other with company. Some indulged their carnal needs and wants. Some sung, others wrote sweet poetry, and still more played the most beautiful instruments, and all of it made the young man want to applaud. Groups of various sizes sat around standing, furred and scaled forms. He looked down, to shield his eyes from the dazzling beauty and wonder of what lay before him. He felt unworthy and out of place. The air, fresh with promise and potential, was too sweet for him. Too long had he scented only wasted promise, ruined potential. The figures continued on with their revelry as he stood on the threshold of his cinema, separated from them, suddenly, by a wall of water. The whirlpool thrust wet fingers down his throat and make him choke. His lack of breath, stolen by the chill, left him unable to call out to the figures that populated this new place.
It didn't need to say anything. He knew as well as it did. He remembered now. He had left the cinema before, without his mask. It didn't take long for him to be cast back inside by those who dwelt outside. They had deemed him ill-suited for their world, and shunned him. They had cast stones and turned their back, and he was not sure which had injured him more. He recalled the distant caretakers of his cinema, the ones that had birthed him, and he saw them briefly outside the water. The hole that had been his place was now filled by others. One younger and one older than himself. On the other side of the water, they welcomed the replacement children.
The costume he wore, let alone the true skin beneath, were not welcome outside the cinema. The young man was at a loss. He had not even a clue how to take the costume off. He dearly wished to, but he also knew that the whirlpool would provide him with another. There was always another mask to wear, for outside the water, one mask at a time was the limit.
Frustration filled the hole his soul had once occupied, and sullied as he was by the label tagging his mind, he allowed it to. He retreated inside the cinema and the doors closed. Locks clicked and bars fell into brackets, on both sides. The young man was angry with himself for leaving his safe haven, his prison. But he was so sick of this cycle, the way that the whirlpool turned and turned, disgorging him onto the same desolate shore each time.
One day, though, in his deepest hiding hole, he let his mask slip away and he faced himself, for the first time. He did not see a boy, like him. He did not see anything at all, really. He saw a blank. He saw a nothingness. And he did not understand. And then he realised. The young man faced an empty page. It was the next page of the script. But he did not want to write on the page. He had written his story for so long, he had wearied of it. There was no progress to be made in his script, no story, and most certainly no happy ending. He no long enjoyed looking at his future as he created it.
And so he despaired. He had failed to understand the outside, he had failed to understand himself, and he had failed to try again. A shudder ran through the old cinema, and the water began to pour in. The young man poured himself a drink, and drank, as he waited to drown.
As the water rose to his neck, though, he felt panic. He did not want to sink. He did not want to lose himself amid the whirlpool's embrace. The water rose to his lips and he pressed them tightly together. The cycle was to begin again, he knew. But he did not want to die.
Soon, the water began to drain away, and the young man wondered what he had saved himself from. Death, that much was certain. But he wondered whether it was death he was running from, really.
The young man rose from the abyss and smirked at himself acidly. He felt contempt for himself as he tore himself from his misery-induced soul-searching. In the real world, the whirlpool was nine and ten years of confusion. The mask was his hobby becoming his sole way to keep from losing himself, and the cinema was the run-down and weary body that housed him.
He opened a file on his computer, with the intent to hide from his self-pity, and unzipped his jeans. With a stern crack of his wrist, he reassured himself that if he could ignore his pain a bit longer, then it might get better. And then he started to masturbate to a smutty story that he had downloaded.
When he was spent, he cleaned himself up and then paused. Beyond the smut, there was a story, indeed. So he read it. And as he read, it struck a chord with him. Some of the characters offered up for his entertainment were quite similar to himself. At least, their trials were. The young man observed them as they paid for their happiness with pain and lamented how their scales at least, were balanced. Depression hugged him close for the second time that night, and he wept. He wept into his whiskey as he drank it, seeking to scorch away the tears. But as he came to the end of the story, something changed. As jealous as he was that this author could write so fantastically, how sick with himself he felt when he realised that fictional people in a sex story were more interesting than he was, he felt oddly soothed. He could not explain why. He could, however, say that he felt the endless sea of regret recede from him. He stopped obsessing over his past mistakes and what he had suffered. For a short time, he felt normal and sane.
The feeling passed as quickly as it came, though. But even though this had happened many times to the young man, he had an idea how to make this time different. He would preserve this moment in words. The same words he could never speak past the block in his mind and throat and heart.
So he opened up the word processor on his computer, and he typed. He typed long into the early hours of the morning, till dawn began to break. When his labour was finished, he looked it over, and he bit his lip. If reality was the same as in his mind's eye, he would be standing outside his cinema again, but without a mask. No costume. Just open doors, and rolling film. He decided that it didn't really matter if anyone stopped by to watch the show. What mattered was that he performed it.
If you don't perform, you can't be watched. He hoped this time would be different. He knew that yes, he could survive if he was shunned and ignored again, and retreated inside of himself, but he wanted this time to be the time that he stopped saying he would change himself, and did so.
And the best place to open his cinema would be, he reasoned, where the sex story that provoked all this resided. The doors are open, everyone is welcome to watch. The only entry fee is an open mind