Almost as soon as he started walking he started spinning out of the control. An hour of sanity left, and then his brain started to fray at the edges and he started spinning, spinning, spinning out of control. His personality, his self, his being is slipping away and he tries desperately to cling to it but it spins away, spins away like a top off of the table, crashing onto a brother's head and into the fireplace. It's burning up and still spinning, and if he reaches in and grabs it he will get it back but he doesn't know if he's willing to get burned.
And then his second self, the one he showed to his parents and the one he used when he went to church and the one he used at family gatherings, that begins to spin away too. This time it spins onto the ice of the frozen pond in the backyard and this time he decides to go after it but the ice breaks and he freezes, he freezes and he's trapped behind a thick layer of ice because nobody's going to find him before he drowns. The fucking pool will freeze over before they even start looking for him, and all because he wanted to stop spinning.
He waits behind the ice, waiting patiently for someone to come chip him out, for someone to save him for Chrissake. An angel passes by him and he wants to reach out but the angel goes to the devil and ignores him and he realizes that he won't be saved. So he waits. And he waits. And he waits.
And an unlikely savior comes to him, chipping away at the ice and his mouth begins to thaw and then he can speak again and he knows what he has to do. He can feel the last of him spinning away and this time he decides to spin with it. He spins right toward the half-track and he spins with the bullets and he spins with the pain and he spins with a sort of sick pleasure as he notices that goddam deep-voiced devil puke his guts out, but that's just because you're holding your guts in your hands, uncomprehending of what this means, but you're still spinning and just before you spin right off of that table and into the flames
i did it wrong
i just listened to olson's death on the audiobook
i wasn't ready
