Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (8 page)

The Bottle

Last summer, a bronze sculpture was stolen from the Square, a pedestrian mall at the center of our town. The sculpture, a full-scale rendition of a mother nursing her baby, had been bolted to a wooden bench that stands beneath a dogwood tree, and for some time had served as a lunch-hour companion to downtown office workers, a plaything for children and a symbol of our town’s perception of itself as an open, nurturing community. At least once a year the sculpture appeared in the local newspaper half-buried under snow, or covered with fall leaves, or basking in the dappled sunlight of spring.

Though it was quickly established that the theft had occurred between the hours of two and four on a weekday, no one reported having witnessed the crime, and the investigation quickly fizzled out. How the thief managed to remove the sculpture in broad daylight, when the Square was filled with people, remained a mystery to police.

A year passed, during which most townspeople grew accustomed to the sculpture’s absence, and many forgot about it entirely. Then, one recent morning, the sculpture reappeared. Police told the newspaper that they had narrowed the time of its reappearance to somewhere between nine and eleven, again when the Square was filled with pedestrians; and again no one claimed to have seen the thief. But no one could mistake the change that had been made to the sculpture: the baby, once chastely giving suck to the mother’s breast beneath a fold of her blouse, was now quite clearly portrayed as drinking its milk from a bottle.

Police interrogated everyone in the area who had access to a bronze-casting facility, but none would admit to having altered the sculpture or could offer any suggestion about who else might have done it. Several of the artists questioned did admit that they admired the chutzpah of the thief, despite their disapproval of his stunt. The mayor’s office quickly issued a statement supporting breast-feeding in general, and local mothers’ right to perform it in public. The original artist, now dead, has been honored with a commemorative postcard. And the police have declared that anyone with information about the crime should contact them immediately. Soon, however, the incident will be largely forgotten, and few will remember that the sculpture was ever different.

The Hydrangea

We took many photos on our summer trip to a popular vacation spot, and when we returned, we brought the film to a processor to have it developed. At home, looking over the photos, we realized that they belonged to someone else: a plump couple in their thirties with two small children. They too had gone on vacation, and could be seen engaging in various recreational activities, gamely smiling at the camera.

As we were putting the photos back in their envelope to return them to the processor, we noticed something familiar in one of them: a curving stretch of beach that ended in a distinctive craggy overhang. On closer examination, we realized that the photos had been taken in the same oceanside tourist town we had ourselves visited.

We wondered if the chubby family had been there at the same time we had. Excited, we scanned the photos for evidence. One was of a large white coastal hotel that we recognized as the very one we had stayed in.

My wife reminded me that our balcony, which faced the beach, was for some reason the only one with a potted hydrangea sitting on it. The plant had obviously been forgotten by the staff, and we watered it daily to keep it alive. This hydrangea, with its large white blossoms, was easy to find in the photo, and to our astonishment, a thin, tall man wearing white socks and a red shirt could be seen pouring water into the plant from an ice bucket. It seemed certain that the man was me.

We returned the photos as planned, but kept this one for ourselves. When we were given our own photos, we searched them for the now-familiar other family, but they were nowhere to be found.

A Dream Explained

As a child, and until I was a young man, I was plagued by minor infections and common colds that sometimes persisted for weeks and, especially during the winter, seemed to follow on each other’s heels with almost no healthy days in between. Occasionally a fever would accompany one of these illnesses, and if the fever lasted into the night I would invariably have the same dream.

In it, I was standing alone on an undulating desert or beach. The sand below me was brightly illuminated, but the sky itself was utterly black, with no apparent source of light. I bent down and picked up a single grain of sand, and as I examined it, it fell from my grasp. When the grain hit the ground, every grain of sand was instantly transformed into an enormous boulder several times my size. I realized then that it was my job to find the grain of sand I had dropped, a task made all the more difficult now that the scale had changed, and as the dream ended I began the arduous climb over the endless field of gray boulders.

I seem to remember a hill as well, but my suspicion is that the myth of Sisyphus, which features a hill and a boulder, has tainted my memory of the dream.

A possible explanation of the dream is a trip I took with my boy scout troop when I was very young. We were to go to a place called Ringing Rocks, and were each instructed to bring along a hammer. Ringing Rocks proved to be a field of boulders, much like the one in my dream, except encircled by trees. The boulders were supposed to contain an unusually high percentage of some metallic ore, so that they rang when struck.

I remember being terribly disappointed. I’d expected the rocks to peal more sharply than they did, and I was not convinced that they were any different from ordinary rocks; so far as I could tell, most of the ringing was coming from the metal heads of the hammers.

The image I most powerfully recall is that of my fellow scouts, fanned out across the boulder field in their green uniforms, monotonously pounding, and the dull sound they made, like prisoners in a quarry with their pickaxes.

The Manuscript

A local poet of considerable national fame completed a new collection of poems that had, due to a painful and scandalous series of personal problems, been delayed in editing and publication for some years. When the revisions were finally finished, the poet typed up a clean copy of the manuscript and got into his car to bring it to the copy shop for reproduction.

On the way, however, the poet was pulled over for running a red light and was subsequently found to be drunk. Due to a new and unforgiving drunk-driving law in our state, his car was taken from his possession and his license revoked.

Upon regaining sobriety, the poet realized that his poetry manuscript was still in the car and asked the police to return it to him. The police, however, maintained that the contents of the car no longer belonged to him, and refused. Their refusal resulted in a protracted legal battle, during which our beloved poet died, leaving uncertain the fate of the manuscript.

But the poet’s publisher, eager to issue a posthumous volume, struck a bargain with the police department: if someone at the station would read the finished poems over the phone, an editor could transcribe them and issue them in book form without the manuscript changing hands. After all, the publisher argued, even if the manuscript legally belonged to the city, its contents did not, as they were devised outside the poet’s car. The police agreed to this scheme, the phone recitation took place and the book was issued to great acclaim, assuring the poet a place in the literary canon that he had not enjoyed in life.

Eventually, however, the poet’s estate won its legal battle against the city, and the original manuscript was recovered. We were shocked to learn that it bore little resemblance to the published book.

It was not long before a city policeman confessed to having improvised much of the manuscript during its telephone transcription. His only explanation was that he saw room for improvement and could not resist making a few changes here and there. Almost immediately the policeman was asked to leave the force, and the acclaimed book was completely discredited. The true manuscript was published in its entirety, to tepid reviews.

The policeman has continued to write poetry. Most agree that it is excellent, but few will publish the work of someone known to be so dishonest.

The Belt Sander

With our mail came a thick personal letter addressed to our neighbor. I might have acted immediately, dropping the letter into his mailbox while he was not at home. However, I had, some weeks before, lent him thirty dollars, which he had promised, and failed, to repay by the week’s end, and which I wanted back as soon as possible; so, intending to visit him in person to ask for the money, I held on to the letter.