I looked at where my hands had been, weeping — my wrists not me. The carpet was new and still out-gassing that smell of new carpet.
My mother won a ribbon once on the simple strength of folding cloth, crimping napkins into the shapes of birds or pineapples or a kind of cotton geyser spouting from a glass. I'd watch her hands fold the flat fabric into a life. It seemed such a shame to watch my own hands undo all that work, leave the used-up napkin a balled-up fist on the plate, the wad expanding as we watched, another kind of life. It was etiquette, she'd always say. The right and proper thing to do, to use up the art, to put the art to use.
Still, she has her taste is all I'm saying, and she keeps house.
Rescue found me in the sunken bathtub sunk in, my handless hands, my arms up above my head, my head light-headed and turning lighter. There was new carpet. I'll be in the tub, I told 911. Spinning overhead was a border of hearts near the crown molding she had trimmed with the small pointed brush. The hearts like fruit on vines, entwined with them, pulsed and looked like pulses on those machines on doctor shows. The wallpaper was a readout, spikes and valleys, and as I followed the track around and around, the lub dub I could hear in my own ear I could see pictured on the graphed paper papering the wall. I followed my heart around the room, a cartoon caroming from corner to corner to corner to corner.
They found me, they said, in the bathtub in a bath of my own blood, fit inside the ceramic shell, all pith, a kernel's germ, a soaked organ in a cracked-open chest. And the carpet spotless, as good as new.
HEALTH
The sign says that I should wash my hands for health. The doctors put them back together, my hands, as best they could. They even used some toes. The skin is a patchwork jumble of patches of my skin from all the other parts of my body, like my mother's quilts, the crazy kind. Who knew I was made up of such shades in color, grades of grit, like sandpaper, the differences in each tuft of hair?
I have to look at my hands now to know what they are doing. They are attached but not connected, the wiring all frayed and shorted out so that when they move they don't send to me, to my brain, a signal that they are moving. I have to watch them. I have to say to myself — well, not to myself but to the hands—“Look,“ I am watching. Do this, do that. “Look,“ they are moving.
It is hard this way to squeeze and slip the bar of soap around and around in my hands, working up a lather, bubbles. It had been so effortless, a simple task. I never thought about it before, how the fingers work together, one after the other, to get the cake of soap to spin on its own thin layer of melting. Now, I drop it a lot.
I am in the bathtub where they found me. I put my hands in the water to search for the soap. The surface of the water cuts my hands off at the wrist and they drift beneath the surface, twitching wreckage, a sore coral reef. It is not like they can feel anymore either, that sense all whacked and warped. I feel both the losses of my hands — the phantom limbs, as if I had lost them altogether, and the overloaded feedback of having these trumped-up hands after all. So, maybe, I am feeling too much. Feeling and feeling that feeling of how it used to feel, all that memory of what feeling felt like before. Before. It doesn't stop.
I can drive the combine. My new cobbled hands perch on the wheel of the big machine. It power steers. I think of them, these hands, as machines now too — all gears and guy wires, cables and sprockets. The machine I am driving takes apart the corn I am picking. The various operations of separating the grain from the cob, each kernel — cut clean and polished — collected in the bin. It happens all around me, the shutter of the massive sieves and augers, screens and belts. The combine is painted red. It's a dumb machine, but it knows what it is doing and it does what it does effortlessly.
When I pray, and I still pray, I crash my hands together in a mangled ball. Where did that come from? Who thought that up? Palm to palm, like that, that says you are praying. When I pray, I thank the Lord for the miracle of microsurgery and the mechanism of the whirlybird and the chemistry of soap made up of ash and fat, the leftover parts put back together to make us clean and new and better.
Leap Years
ELEVEN DAYS
She always said that she just wanted their one night together. One night, that's all I want. She wrote this in notes to him. She said it once or twice each time they talked on the phone. She wrote it on a postcard. We will have our one night together. They had been together in the way they were together for many years now. Both spent nights in different cities, with other people. There had been times they had been together but not one whole night. Rooms that lasted an afternoon, or a morning or an evening. A day rate, the hotels called the arrangement. Someone else would have the night in the room. The housekeeper arriving, shooing them out as they were leaving. There had been the lunches and breakfasts, the brunches, the buffets and dinners, the drinks at bars, with other people and alone. The conversations on couches in lobbies, airport lounges, train station waiting rooms. On sidewalks. In hallways passing each other. In his car or hers, driving or stopped or parked. Or outside of cars, in the shadows of parking decks, the expanse of parking lots, the moon off in the distance struggling to rise. Waiting for a bus, standing in the subway, riding in cabs, the cab that one night. There were rides in empty elevators, empty but for them, a few seconds between floors to embrace, their hearts racing as the car stalled to let on someone else. They had been together, but not one whole night. She added up all this time together — the seconds, the minutes, the hours or two she remembered being together — and figured it accumulated into a semblance of a few patchworked days — a spotty night or two, perhaps, cobbled together a week of such fractured moments made up of hours, minutes, seconds. Catch as catch can. She was good with numbers. But none of the moments were sustained long enough, false continuity, into one whole night, a night long enough not to simply sleep with one another but to really sleep with each other, together, to fall asleep, to waste the time together in that luxurious unconscious proximity. No, that had never happened. She wanted that, that one night together. But on all those other nights when she stayed up thinking about this dilemma, stayed up alone, her husband asleep beside her, wanting that one night together with this other man, late those nights she let herself wonder if even that would be enough or if that one night would be too much. In the night, in the dark, she thought of all the nights divvied up to her, the nights she had already spent and the finite number of nights not known to her yet that she would have to spend on this or that, another night without being together. It added up. Awake she thought about the falling asleep with him, and then falling asleep she thought about the waking up with him there. That would be some kind of leap, that one night of being together so that they could be apart, to have, finally, the time, some time they could skip over together — they would be there and not, suspended out of time. Out of time, at last, and out of time, outside of it. It made no sense late at night. The time distorted her sense of time. She remembered that the world still ran on two calendars, an old and new one. She thought of the time when the new calendar began to replace the old, of the eleven days the world gave up to switch from the old calendar to the new one. Everyone went to bed one night and woke up eleven days later, a chunk of an October missing. And history would record nothing happened on those days, that those days never happened. It didn't matter if one used one calendar or the other — both erased those days, lost them. She imagined how it felt, this artificial eclipse, the world both standing still and, still, jumping forward. This happened years before movies, before time-lapse film that sped very fast to record in very slow motion the explosion of a flower or a bullet flowing through an apple. A fortnight of still pictures gave the illusion of movement. In the theater, they sat in the dark to see the light. They watched a movie together, holding hands in the dark, another part of a night. It flickered and skipped, the interrupted image. In this dark, with him next to her, trying to put together the images, she imagined a night eleven days long, eleven days of night to be together.