The Lost Hand

It has been two weeks since I lost my hand. I had angrily cast aside yet another failed drawing, consigning it to the shadowy recesses underneath the table-saw I used to cut stretchers for my canvasses.  What had started as a study for but one small part of a self-portrait had become an obsession. I sat surrounded by piles of crumpled sketches; from the one pool of light at the studio’s heart I looked over them, unable to tell which patches and smudges were shadow, which charcoal. The crumpled forms had become corporeal, and seemed to crouch in every corner, climbing over each other to fight for light and air.

“Look!” I shouted at myself.  “Just look!  Can’t you do that anymore?”  For days now, I had been trying to draw my hand, but whatever talent I possessed had escaped me.  So familiar, yet it refused to be captured on paper.  Scowling, I kicked over my stool, scattering one of the heaps of creaturely black hands.  My attention drifted to the other hand, my drawing hand: here was the real culprit.  It wasn’t that my left hand refused portrayal, but that my right refused to portray it.  I crumbled the stick of charcoal I found in it, letting its remnants fall to the floor.

“Use your eyes,” I said to myself, merely muttering now.  I studied the patterns of blackening on this hand: the way it caked under the nails, and collected in the furrows and folds of the palm.  I could not tell you now how long passed—long enough that the sun would reappear—but the familiar become strange, then disgusting, and finally disturbing.  The lines of ligaments across its back seemed alien mechanisms built for unknown purposes.  The chapped knuckles became miniature landscapes, desert mountains with wind-blown drifts of salt on their slopes.  Eventually all I could see were the greens and purples and blues obscured beneath the skin, colors not of living flesh, but disease, even rot.

I flexed the hand, and it became a dreadful swastika of a weapon.  I fractured its form into a rolling arpeggio, one finger after another, and a hideous crab was birthed.  All I wanted to do was look away, but I couldn’t—studying this creature, my eyes refused even to blink.  They watered; my vision blurred.  I let out a low, abject moan, and just when I thought I could take it no longer, it—the crab, my hand—was simply gone.  

I dashed around the studio, turning on every light.  Racing to the window, and then outside, I tried to look at it in the sun’s healing, natural light.  I desperately pawed with my remaining hand through the piles of discarded drawings, looking for it among them.  “Where’s my hand?  Hand!” I shouted, as if calling it home.  “Hand!  Hand!”  I repeated the word until it was reduced to a meaningless sound, a mucoused shape in my mouth.  Nothing.  My arm trailed off into indeterminacy.  Still today, whenever I try to look at my wrist or my forearm, my eyes are pulled into the vortex that is the absence beyond them.

For these long days and nights I have not been able to pay attention to anything but this blankness at the end of my arm. Weak with hunger, I sloppily eat with my left hand, food missing my mouth as I hope to regain a glimpse of my right. Exhausted, I pass out for a few hours on the stained couch, but my dreams are no respite, and I always wake to find my gaze pointed directly into that void. I cannot think about, cannot look at, anything else.

But today I have a plan. I just need to distract myself, and it will come back. I have been looking for it, at it, so long that I have seen through it, beyond it.  It is still there, just hidden from me.  If I can force myself, with greater pain and horror, to concentrate on something else even for a moment, it will come back, and all will return to normal. The circular blade of the saw whirs to life. Pinning one end of a cord to the table with my right elbow, I use my mouth to pull it into a tight tourniquet around my left wrist. The saw’s siren song calls out.  My left hand might not be guilty, but it is the sacrifice necessary to restore my sanity, my livelihood, my right.