The Human Hand

Imagine a human hand.  You don't have to imagine it.  It's there, barring deformity, somewhere along the length of your arm, maybe even at the end.  It can caress and choke and flex like a five-winged butterfly.  Imagine, though, a hand detached, reframed in noteworthy context.  This hand shakes itself like an Escher drawing, skittering listlessly across the street, like tumbleweed.   That one nestles its wrist under your chin, flipping up to stifle a yawn or yank your lower lip when you move in to kiss a pretty girl (bad hand!).  This one, spaced and spry, terminates in a bomb, palm veins smoothing out into the gloss of a deadly weapon, so keenly imitating the size and shape and sheen of a bowling ball.  Since we're imagining it, you're standing anywhere – a wheat field prickling with wind, a room wrapped in pudgy padding, however else you'd imagine yourself lounging around the inside of your own mind – and the bomb-hand fingerwalks its way to you, meekly.  When you shake it, you feel behind it an anchored heft; when you let go, all of its fingers knot together, a tension drenched in coiled, puppy-eyed guilt.

Imagine we are mixing our metaphors (imagination, of course, being the finicky dandelion that it is).  The bomb could be an onion, shaving itself away in black, granite-like peels, reddening near the core, sniffling and weeping.  The bomb wishes dearly to preach its philosophies on destruction: how it is a complex, many-layered thing, not at all evil or singular but refreshing, too, life-giving, like a Phoenix, except the bomb keeps snorting its words back up, garbling them, what with all the weeping and such.  It has already peeled away to an ant, carrying many times its own weight – a kingly ant, in fact, having conquered and hoisted a mechanism blessed with opposable thumbs.  And imagine the ant's surprise when he learns he was only a figurine, a miniature David, lending no relevance to your life but for a lingering reminder of bored intellectualism, a token of stored knowledge, to be recalled and referenced only as proof of culture.  You're always moving onto the next thing – that word, "relevance," it's a word you taste.  Imagine yourself imagining the end of the hand, gathering these amorphous forms that take root at the helm of its tendons, rolling them around like apples in a bowl, trying to discern which of them is the crispest.  What is really on the end of the hand?  The hand could be your girlfriend, and the bomb could be your girlfriend too.  Then what?  Tragedy, that's what.  Think about it too long and the bomb could become marriage.  Or shake it from your mind, and move on to the next apple, then the next, and next again, and on and on until you are full.

It's not as simple as all this.  You haven't released the handshake; it's warm but throbbing in your grip, and you squeeze so hard it splits into two doughy globs.  For once, you're not sure what to make of this, and waiting doesn't change it.  They look like faces, in a base sort of way.  Remember when you contorted your knuckles in front of a light to make shadow puppets on the wall?  It's like that, but without the shadows.  Squat, pudgy, under-featured faces.  One of them speaks.  "I'm apart," it says.  

You say, "sorry I spliced you apart."

It says, "That isn't what that word means – you don't splice one thing into two.  You splice two things into one.  When you break things apart, that's splitting."

You're inside your mind again, really in there: it's a room.  It's one of those lab rooms, with a hatch in the ceiling for blanket-white scientists to drop in food and toys and whatnot. They observe your every move and record the results.  Now halves and quarters and chunks and flecks of hands come tumbling in, some with mouths and eyes, or featureless but clutched into a rigid claw; some sweaty, some jittery, and some with their fingerprints smoothed away.  The sensible thing to do here is to match them up – this castaway middle finger onto that hand with the fourth digit missing – a compromise, but functional, at least.  These fleshy bits are small enough to mold together, like clay, into an entirely new hand, and those front and back halves fit together perfectly, although they're slightly off-color.  To splice: you already misused this verb once, for which you feel a residual guilt, and now should be the time you're driven to correct your mistake.

Instead, you can't help but eye the hatch, judging the distance – maybe fifteen or twenty feet above your head.  You wonder whether the waterfall of hands will keep coming, whether they'll ever pour in enough flesh to build a pristine ladder, or else a mountain of digits.  Imagine: you're pulling yourself up over the lip, swiveling your head in the darkness, until your eyes adjust.  You see what's up there, up in the real world, past the edge of the hatch where the scientists bemusedly scribble notes. Then you narrow your gaze and look beyond.