He has been living on the edge of the desert for nearly fourteen years. There is very little to distract him. A truck stop and a gas station, about a mile down the road. A small strip of shops a further mile in the same direction. North of there, nothing for a good four hundred miles. In the evenings the wind is calm and sounds like loneliness, but isn’t.
He has a small workshop, full of shavings, coffee cups, piles of dust, tins of paint. Behind it a larger, less sturdy warehouse, stacked full of the same object, over and over again.
It takes him anywhere between a morning and a full day to finish a piece. The size, which used to vary, is now a constant, as is the shape. A small, flat disc, raised in the middle to perfect proportions, smooth as polished stone. Every day he makes one or two.
In the beginning – years ago – he produced so many, a dozen a day at least, rough-surfaced, lop-sided, sometimes too fat in the middle, almost always disproportionate, badly-painted, asymmetrical. They lie stacked on top of one another at the very start of the warehouse. Sometimes, often at the end of a week, he goes to see them, as a reminder of who he was, how far he has come.
To think he used to do one in an hour! The thought shames him.
He is not an immodest man, but he is convinced of his gift, and feels assured of his future celebrity, which will be activated (he has told himself) by the expiration of his beating heart. One day they will come, from all around, to see the treasure he has built up. Sometimes, as he takes a break and drinks a coffee, he imagines the fights that will take place once he is gone, the memorial schemes people will propose, the small galleries and museum sections that will bid for his legacy. He thinks of the people who will claim to have known him. He thinks of all of this as he sips his coffee.
The confidence comes from his pursuit of perfection. The early attempts, piled in unsightly heaps at the front of the warehouse, he sometimes considers destroying. Their misshapenness, their disjointedness, irritates, even depresses him. But every time he thinks of their annihilation, he thinks of the place they have in his history – the path they show to what he has become.
From his window he can see people come from afar. They never stop. The car appears as a dot, then a buzzing shape in the distance, then a growing, growling rectangle of life, until it whooshes past and fades into the huge lake of nothingness on the other side.
There is only a nephew who drives out to see him, once a month. Someone he has explained all of his theories to: why the discs are exactly this wide, this thick, curved in this precise way. The meanings behind the measurements, why it is so important to repeat this, relentlessly. The nephew is the only one who doesn’t laugh. Each time he takes one or two home, wrapping them carefully in a beach towel and placing them on the back seat.
His sister says the nephew makes jokes about him at home after every trip, mocks his obsession, but the craftsman knows better. People don’t drive five hours, once a month, for no reason. The nephew says things like this give life shape and meaning, but he is never quite sure whose life he is referring to when he says this. Last year he visited them for Christmas, and was silently surprised to find only two of his pieces in the house. He did not have the courage to raise the subject, but spent the entire drive home wondering where they had gone.
That winter, the craftsman feels terrible pain in his left side, just above his groin and into his midriff. A sharp streak of pain, the sharpest, most acute pain he has ever felt. He drives a two-hour drive to the nearest city to learn he has a gall-stone in his bladder. The pharmacy has the medicine he needs – while he waits for them to find it, he wanders into a gun store across the road. At the back of the shop, in a section entitled “Trapshooting”, he finds a whole stack of his creations, piled together clumsily against the wall under a sign that says, with no apparent irony, “Targits”. Each piece costs a dollar.
The craftsman continues for a week, then stops one morning. He goes outside, smokes a cigarette. A series of rippled clouds stretch out over him in the sky like the steps to an enormous, floating palace. He considers destroying every piece he has, but the thought is too big for him, too much for him right now. He tells no-one what he saw in the gun shop, but when the nephew comes again at the end of the month, he pretends to be out. Through the lace of a window he spies him walk around the front of the house, puzzled. On the ground lie a dozen of his most recently-finished pieces. He watches his nephew pick one up, run his hands with pleasure over the smooth, contoured curve of its rim, flipping it over once to appreciate its weight, its symmetry, its sacred uniformity.
Arthur Mandal is a writer based in Eugene, Oregon (but grew up in the UK). He has published over 30 stories in The Barcelona Review, december, 3:AM, The Forge, Southeast Review, Los Angeles Review, The Stand, The Summerset Review, Bending Genres and others. He also has a chapbook with the acclaimed Nightjar Press. www.arthurmandal.com
Euphony Journal 