"The Paper Man" by Patrick Dundon
You wake knowing things will be better. There are four birds on the tree across the street and that must mean something, right? You thought you could make it go away, the slow effacing of meaning, which is why last night you drove forty miles to sit on a stranger’s chest. It was hairless and smelled like baby shampoo. After you came you lay naked on his bed, your knee touching his, arms folded over your stomach. He talked about origami. He told you that a mathematician at Princeton had proven that, with a single cut and infinite folds, a sheet of paper could be made into any shape. A galaxy. A peony. A parking garage. It sounded too good to be true, which is why you chose to believe it, to drag your index finger along his forearm and say, wow, cool. It isn’t until later, laying in your own bed, eyes closed, trying to force sleep into your mind like a chicken into its coop that you realize his bedroom had no windows. How could he live like that? How did you not notice? For a moment you consider that maybe his body was like a window, something you could see through to a world outside the self. Like those four birds you stare at now. And so the part of you that requires windows is satisfied, and you wonder if he has that too, the window-needing—don’t we all?—and what, if anything, satisfies his need while he lays there, naked, alone, this man who can see a window where there is none, who can lie in the pitch dark and know there is light. Or maybe he doesn’t have the window-needing part, and does that make him some sort of sociopath? Maybe he’s content to sit in the dark confines of the self, mistaking it for the whole world. How could you sleep with such a person, come on his chest and moan like you’ve just taken a bite of chocolate ganache? No. He needs windows too, you assure yourself, why else would he know so much about origami? Anyone who makes a thousand paper cranes and hangs them in his bathroom could not be a sociopath. He said he made the cranes in order to make a wish, though he didn’t tell you what it was, only that it didn’t come true. He had windows in his living room, three of them in fact, and from them pointed out all the sights of Omaha—the pedestrian bridge, the concert hall, the skyscraper that looked like Rockefeller Center—as your arm touched his at which point you knew you would fuck. What you didn’t know is that, as you lay beside him, your cock limp on your thigh like the tongue of a dead animal, you would imagine his body made of paper, the most elaborate origami shape you could think of. If his theory is true, that, with a single cut and infinite folds, anything could be made from paper, then he could too, right down to the tiniest details: the mole on his hip, each hair of his beard, the spooned out hollows of his cheeks. It horrifies you, this paper man, your lifeless little doll. And then you get a text, Hey, thanks for last night, let’s do it again sometime, and the brightness you felt as you straddled his chest returns, a faint echo, so you start to draft a reply—yeah for sure; thank YOU; <3—which you delete, deciding instead to wait before handing the brightness back. When you look up from your phone, the birds are gone, and you don’t even care where they went.
Patrick Dundon is the author of the chapbook The Conspirators of Pleasure (Sixth Finch Books, 2020). He holds an MFA from Syracuse University, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Witness, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, Copper Nickel, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR where he serves as an editor for the Burnside Review.
