by Peter Wild
Whatever its origin, surgical or accidental, it was dropped into a waste basin in the hospital operating room, transported to a disposal bag, then tossed by mistake into a dumpster rather than into the big incinerator which disposes of medical waste materials. In times past, we have collected or concocted horror stories about that incinerator and the narrow red-brick chimney that towers over the hospital. It spews the faint high smoke, we suppose, of aborted fetuses, cast-off spleens and tumours, bags of bloody bandages and the endless toxic detritus of illness.
So, the hospital theorists say, this hand lands in a dumpster by mistake and one of the local dumpster-browsers finds it wrapped in plastic and carries it off. These thinkers apparently ran dry before fully developing the dumpster-to-park process.
Anywhere else in town we might speculate that a prowling dog could have accomplished the same thing, snatching the hand out of hospital trash, carrying it to the park. But, in this quarter, the dogs do not prowl. They are as well bred, pampered and meticulously groomed as the local children. Actually dogs far outnumber children among the young and ambitious who live here. Dogs are always leashed. Roaming free is not an option. Even the homeless keep their mongrels tied close because a loose dog would quickly be hauled off to the pound and the vulnerable owner jailed or at least fined.
Besides, a dog would gnaw, would chew. Unless it were one of the soft-mouthed retrievers, a Labrador or golden, and they are not as popular now as in times past. They have been replaced by terriers suitable to apartments and by heavy Rottweilers and wolfhounds, which have supplanted the old-fashioned Dobermans and shepherds as bodyguards. Besides, John, the meek master of the dainty terrier Daisy, would surely have noticed any obvious bite marks or chewed areas on the hand.
A rival but similar scenario traced the hand back to the pristine courtyard of the funeral parlour. Say, for example, a corpse arrives in pieces–a traffic victim whose separated bits are tossed into the body bag at the scene and delivered on a gurney.
One sophisticated version combined the hospital with the funeral premises and the street denizens. A man whose hand is being amputated dies on the operating table and the hand is included for symmetry’s sake when the remains are carted off to the mortuary. Careless morticians transfer the body to the work table or cold storage, but the hand remains in the zipper bag, and the bag lies by the loading door to be sanitised later.
Then a prying wanderer–one of our panhandlers, for example–peeks in a door left open for the last summer air, and finds the prize, carries it off, swinging it merrily by one finger…The intent would be entertainment. A prop for ghost tales. A memento for gloomy pondering over a jug of Mad Night beneath the bough. Or a gleeful prank to slip into some crony’s ragged blanket, to prop by his face as a surprise for when he wakes. And when he does wake he hurls the thing away on to the grass and chases after the joker, furious, to thrash him. Exeunt clowns down dawn streets, gibbering.
We do not know which hand it was, right or left, because we are all afraid to ask John, who considers us ghouls.
But suppose, said someone else, that it was an accident victim found in the mountains days after a fatal fall, or perhaps it was a drowning. The body decaying out of doors or in the river would account for the bloated flesh. Then suppose this was the left hand and there was jewellery–not a watch because that could be unbuckled or slipped off easily, but say a bracelet, a heavy gold chain too tight to slip off over the swollen, disfigured extremity. The swelling may have extended up the arm, burying the bracelet in the wrist.
Perhaps some sub-mortuarian has been humiliated by the funeral director. Say this brooding tech spies the gold and uses a handy funerary tool to sever the bulky hand and slip the bracelet off the wrist…but then why would she take the hand away with her? To disguise the loss. No, ma’am, she might say, that hand must have been lost in the wreck, he arrived handless, as you see him, and if any bracelet were attached it must be lying in the brush of the gorge, or the bottom of the river. Terrible, terrible…
One of the proponents of this theft theory declared that it was equally applicable to the shadier levels of the hospital staff. The actual doctors and many of the nurses and technicians live in the neighbourhood. They are slim, like the other residents. They drink high-octane coffee in flavours at the outdoor cafés. They shop for aubergine and endive, pilaf and focaccia beside us at the grocery. But this affair of the hand triggered a resurrection of vile, old aspersions about the habits and hygiene of the wider people in green work pyjamas who arrive and leave the hospital on buses. They are seen to buy microwaved lunches at the convenience store across the street from the employee entrance. They are thought to empty bedpans, change filthy sheets, scrub tainted surfaces and pump the gas jets beneath the chimney.
These green-clad wage invaders from across the river have incited our suspicions before–most notably during the last labour contract dispute when their striking pickets were wrongly associated with several late-night bricks through the plate glass of boutiques on the avenue. An ill-timed spate of ferocious rhetoric ended when the brick hurlers were found to be a larking trio of our own cosseted adolescents.
Some at the café tables that night recalled this old embarrassment and objected to targeting the hospital workers. Accusations of blatant classism erupted, and the resulting scornful exchanges threatened to halt the game entirely with a series of flouncing or stomping exits.
The freelance web designer rescued us from our bitterness by flippantly hypothesising that a bird flew over and dropped the hand. Others seized on this immediately, proposing that it could have been one of the many gulls thriving this close to the river. The voracious and indiscriminant gull has both the appetite and the size to carry a substantial hand.
An Audubon member reminded us of the pair of turkey buzzards frequenting the crest of the hill behind us. If a gull or a buzzard were involved, the relieved theorists proposed, the hand might have come from anywhere–a collapsed cemetery in the hills, oozing open in the heavy fall rains. Despite the presence of Hennessey, Gooch & McGee’s esteemed funeral parlour, there is no cemetery within miles of our neighbourhood.
The bird image captivated the gentler among us, including our lone witness, John, who we ambushed as he passed by with Daisy. Bribed with hot chocolate, he agreed to perch briefly at a table as we demanded his opinion. He confessed a preference for this bird explanation. He seemed soothed by the notion that it must have been a far-off and long-dead person, not a local sufferer who lost the hand.
A tall dentist with a distracted air reminisced about the high white towers of India where certain Hindu sects expose their dead to be picked clean by birds. The dentist drank straight espresso from a paper cup as he stood rocking slowly from heel to toe in the shadow of a deep blue awning. He segued predictably to the Tibetan method of disposing of the dead. He lingered over the impatience of the waiting vultures, hopping and flexing their wings and necks just out of reach of the priests who crush every bone and chop the corpse into bird-bite morsels on that wind-stripped plateau.
These reflections inspired John to tidy his side of the table, wipe a spill with his paper napkin, shove the napkin into his paper cup and rise with the cup and Daisy’s leash in opposing hands. He was leaving again before I could ask him for details of the hand’s appearance. Excusing himself, he tipped the empty cup in farewell before depositing it in the sidewalk waste bin.
The dentist took John’s empty but still-warm chair to hear the Audubon volunteer explaining why the gull, having carried the hand so far, might abandon it. A midair attack, perhaps by a rival gull. Now that she thinks of it, there is a crow clan nesting in the taller firs in the park. She’s seen crows ganging up on the local hawks to drive them away from the rookery.
Once dropped, the thing was quickly found at dawn there in the park amid the sleepers and joggers and walkers of dogs. The birdwatcher pictured the gull pacing at a distance, anxious to retrieve its titbit but stymied by gawking humans, harassed by
diving crows.
A flurry of muttering from two tables down ended with one voice breaking out with the news that a bird wasn’t absolutely necessary. There were other beasts.
The speaker had seen a whole family of opossums parade down an alley just the night before. Big Possum leading, then middle-sized followed by three identical kits, all in a row, tails high.
Several nods agreed that if the hand was misplaced at the funeral home a possum could have carried it the short distance to the park.
Someone else proposed raccoons, reminding us of the noisy pair who play their shriek-and-chase games over the roofs and building marquees. Questions of raccoon and possum diets were raised and disputed.
Inevitably, the topic of rats surfaced. So close to the river and the docks, our rats are impressive and bold. Dark tales of rodent encounters followed, so it was a relief when one of the hill folk spoke up for coyotes.
The expensive-view houses on the hills behind us had been under siege for years. Too many reports of bloody cat fur smeared in the shrubbery or pooch carcasses gutted on front lawns meant the hill pets were kept locked indoors. On still nights even here on the low ground we hear coyotes yipping to each other up above.
Their range is much wider than the coons’ and possums’, of course. None of us was sure that a coyote couldn’t or wouldn’t carry a hand all the way down from the cemetery. We all laughed when somebody said coyotes were so smart they’d take a bus. It seemed close to true.
‘You’re forgetting the blood,’ said a woman who had been so silent I hadn’t noticed her. ‘There was a trail of blood leading away on the sidewalk next to the grass. John said so.’
I don’t know her but others at the table called her Margo. She had a weathered leopard face and a grey helmet of hair. Her voice was low, a courteous purr.
‘The blood was liquid,’ she said. ‘It had to be fresh.’
She ignored us as she spoke, staring into the cup in front of her.
‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘a homeless guy. A beggar and wine addict. He hurts his hand somehow, an accident, a fight. The bones are fractured and infection sets in. Or it’s just a scratch from rooting in the garbage, from sliding through the brush at night looking for a place to curl up and sleep.
‘But it doesn’t heal. Blood poisoning, or staph infection, then gangrene. The pain is agonising. But there’s a reason he summers under the bushes and winters in a crate beneath the railway bridge. He hates hospitals, doctors, police, social workers, all emblems of authority.
‘He has a heavy knife. Maybe even a hatchet,’ she said. ‘He scrapes enough change for enough booze to bring his blood level to .307, the brink of unconsciousness. Then he hacks off the hand. He wraps a rag around the stump and staggers away. Or he persuades a booze buddy to do it for him.
‘Picture two of them dressed in layers. Shirt over shirt over shirt. Their beards short and scraggly from poor nutrition. The hairs break off rather than growing in full. They are familiars of the street. We see them and look away. They squabble often, but stick together. The one injured and in pain. The pal offended by the growing smell of the wound, the delirium of the wounded, his cries in the dark.
‘The friend takes less than his share of the bottle that night, so the wounded one will be stupefied. He wraps a belt in a tourniquet above the limp elbow as though they were going to shoot up. Well meaning, he props the arm against the metal of that meaningless sculpture. He waits for the steady snore. When he strikes, the blow is sharp and clean. He lifts the gasping, blinking body with anxious care and staggers away with him, or wheels him, rattling in their shared shopping cart. They are hiding somewhere in the neighbourhood. Some rarely visited basement or some stand of weeds abandoned at the end of an alley.
‘Or maybe,’ she said, ‘the hand’s owner has actually died by now from shock and blood loss. The friend has emptied the pockets, taken the shoes if they fit or are swappable, appropriated that valuable shopping cart or fled on a southbound freight as befits the lateness of the season.
‘Maybe the corpse is lying one handed beneath a thin cover of leaves, or cardboard, or at the bottom of a dumpster. Maybe the dumpster has been emptied already into one of the huge trucks that shatter our sleep before dawn. Maybe his flaccid, colourless form is already deep in a landfill to be unearthed by some archaeologist of the future who will consider this one-handed skeletal remain a fair representative of our time, and of us.’
The tables were emptying before she finished. No one offered a comment but brisk head-shaking accompanied their caffeinated strides. She didn’t seem surprised, just lifted her cup and looked into it.
As far as I know hers were the last words spoken on the subject of the hand. The intrigue died overnight. By the next morning the grocery clerks were rolling their eyes over a parking bribery scheme. The million topics of the population swept back to separate us. My own regrets have to do with the game ending just as I caught a faint glimmer of the rules. I say nothing, of course, only asking, as if casually, the names of certain dogs. Perhaps the others have not forgotten but are, like me, waiting to hear.
bull in the heather
scott mebus
Unlike most of the authors in this book, or the majority of you reading this right now, I actually don’t know all that much about Sonic Youth. I love them in theory, of course. Who doesn’t? But when it comes down to practising that love, I find I never really got around to it. I know that makes me a horribly uncool person, but being uncool has been my cross to bear for quite some time now, so I’m used to the pity. Only one Sonic Youth song can currently be found sitting forlornly in its own lonely playlist on my iPod. And that is the song whose title I have stolen for my story: ‘Bull in the Heather’. Why? Because when it came out, I had never heard anything like it. I was a mainstream guy, and when this video popped up on my mainstream MTV, it was as if someone had slipped me a mickey. I was totally unprepared. I still hear the atonal chorus in that mocking female voice ringing through my head. It’s annoying, and I kinda like it that way. So I carry the song with me, a little nugget of musical nonconformity intimidating the rest of my downloaded music with its bad attitude. That’s why I’m giving you a story that’s a little different from what I usually write. In honour of that damn mocking voice that won’t leave me be.
Sue Carlyle was shopping for a penis. Not for herself, of course. God knows she had no use for one. It was a gift. A little surprise for her good friend Heather, a girl so beautiful it made her heart hurt. Lately Sue had become increasingly worried that Heather might be longing for one of those ridiculous creatures and, like the good girlfriend she was, Sue was determined to give her baby what she wanted. Not that Heather had come out and said anything, she was too classy for that, but Sue prided herself on knowing her lover’s mind and over the past few weeks something was on it and Sue was terrified it might be a penis. Hence the shopping trip.
Sue didn’t know a thing about penises. She had never seen one, not even her father’s. She knew about the general shape from seventh-grade health class and the graffiti on the subway, but beyond that she was blind. She considered asking Ty, her make-up artist, for a quick peek, just for a frame of reference, but neither of them wanted that. So instead she decided to follow her usual game plan when shopping (which she hated to do) and just hope for the best and keep the receipt. She did ask Ty for some store suggestions and he gladly sent her downtown to his favourite spot. But beyond that, she was on her own.
She supposed this type of adventure would be best undertaken at night, but she had no patience for theatrics. So the sun hung high in the sky as Sue made her way down the narrow side streets of a part of town mostly asleep at this hour. She stumbled across Ty’s store almost immediately; Wildly Suggestive, the sign above the window read in playful pink letters. Behind the glass beneath the sign a small scene had been arranged depicting a mannequin couple dressed in leather clothing directly opposed to their plastic genitalia (or lack thereof). The man/woman stood abo
ve the woman/man with a large vibrator in hand in what could be construed as a menacing gesture, if not for the total blank expressions on both their plastic faces. Instead, the effect was of an unorthodox Tupperware party right before the sale. Sue ignored the display, set her shoulders and stepped into the store.
The small space within overflowed with merchandise. The walls, already close, pushed bright red and pink boxes right up alongside her, each promising a transcendental sexual experience unachievable by organic means. Thin strips of gauzy material topped with limp plastic bows hung off hangers above her, threatening to melt off their wearer’s body at the first touch of sweat. Over-endowed women in bottle-blonde hair struck lascivious poses on the walls, their lips bulging out like collagen blisters. Sue imagined Heather up on that wall, her features puffed up as if attacked by a sex-crazed Photoshop imager, her beautiful skin mummified in shiny black latex, her lovely dark hair drained of life and colour, her winsome face arranged into a clown’s vision of lust. Was this what Heather missed? Being imagined like this? Being assaulted like this? Sue was out of her depth.
Sue moved farther into the store. Now the merchandise surrounding her began to replace crude photos with grinning cartoons. Sex became a joke as huge-breasted cartoon women peddled candy garters and cherry-flavoured edible condoms (a particularly senseless item, to her mind–how many babies came about because of that snack? she wondered). Small wind-up penises with large, improbable feet hopped about in front of boxes of breast-shaped pasta. ‘Novelty’ was the word plastered everywhere. Sue hated that word. Love was not light hearted; it was no game. Love was deep, so deep, and did not involve cartoons or wind-up toys or, least of all, novelty.
