Unpossible (26 page)

His wife, Judith, could not seem to understand what had happened to him, even though he tried repeatedly to explain. "I’m down here," he told her, waggling himself to get her attention. He could not move his arm because of the cast that covered him from palm to shoulder. He’d broken his wrist, sent a hairline fracture along his ulna, and torn his rotator cuff.

Judith looked distraught. "It’s the stroke, Franklin. I told you you were working too hard. Now you’ve suffered a stroke."

Perhaps that was the case. He’d been standing at the top of the stairs, reaching out to the banister, when suddenly he felt dizzy. Sometime later he awoke, face down on the parquet landing, his arm trapped beneath him. He felt suffocated, as if he were buried in an avalanche. When the EMTs rolled him onto his back, he moaned in pain, but at the same time experienced a profound sense of relief when his hand came free. Daylight! Air! Though of course he’d been breathing perfectly well the entire time, and he could see fine. What he could not decide, even now, was this: had the accident caused the shift in consciousness, or had he become dizzy because his self was on the move down his arm?

"Don’t tell the doctors," he said. "They’ll think I’m crazy."

She patted the back of his hand and he flinched. "I won’t if you don’t want me to," she said. Her fingers were stubby, which she tried to disguise with long, brightly painted nails. Liar’s hands.

That afternoon, the doctors stormed his room to interrogate him. They shone pen lights into his eyes, wheeled him off to MRIs and CAT scans, tested his vision, speech, and cognition. Except for some awkwardness rearranging wooden blocks during the motor coordination exam, the fact that his self was now nestled 30 inches southeast from its old location seemed to make no measurable difference. He was perfectly capable of performing from his new mental home.

"Let’s see if the feeling persists," the most senior doctor said, and handed Judith a dozen prescriptions to fill. "Call us if you experience anything odd, such as—" And here he rattled off a list of alarming neurological and physiological symptoms.

"The important thing," he said to Franklin, "is to avoid stress."

After eight weeks, Franklin returned to the hospital to have the cast removed, and then returned again a few days later for the first of a several physical therapy sessions to restore motion to his shoulder. His therapist’s name was Olivia. She had lovely hands. She kept her nails trimmed, but they were painted with a clear gloss with white tips—a French manicure. Her long, delicate-looking fingers were quite strong; when she dug into the knotted tissue of his shoulder she could make him cry out. Whenever she touched his left hand, however, she was exceedingly gentle, which convinced him she’d been told about his mental condition. But on the third visit, when he worked up the courage to mention, casually, that his consciousness had migrated to the peninsula of his index finger, she seemed genuinely surprised.

"You feel like you are ... " She nodded toward his hand. "There?"

"The funny thing is, I’m not even left handed."

She frowned, not disapprovingly, but in a curious, scientific way. "What’s that like for you? If you don’t mind talking about it."

There was nothing he wanted to talk about more. Judith found the topic distasteful. "Close your eyes," he told Olivia. "Imagine yourself as one great finger. Picture a long arm extending from your back that stretches up to a gargantuan body."

She closed her eyes and he watched her, moving his gaze from her white-tipped fingernails, to her face, and back again. The image was transferred from his retina to his brain, and there down his arm to his pulsing index finger. He curled against his palm, suddenly embarrassed by his thoughts.

"And up there," he said, "at the top of the body, is a huge, remote head like a planetoid. A bony house for the computer of your brain. It tells you things, but it’s not you."

She concentrated for a few moments, and then opened her eyes. "I wondered why you kept looking at my hands."

"Sorry about that."

"It’s all right." She lifted one finger, flexed it, and laughed. "Hi there."

He raised himself up and waved back.

She said, "Does it feel ... odd in there? Cramped?"

"It feels like the most natural thing in the world," he said. "I’d always been a person who lived in my head, who kept his feelings contained. Now I can’t imagine living any other way. I feel free."

He was worried that his confession might alienate her, but at the next session there was no strangeness between them. As they worked on his muscles he talked easily of his new life, the new insights he’d gained. "Have you ever noticed how careless people are with their hands?" he said during one visit. "The other day my wife grabbed a pan from the oven, burned herself, and then she stuck her finger in her mouth. She didn’t even wash afterward." And: "I wonder if Helen Keller was hand conscious?"

He wanted the visits to go on and on, but his insurance ran out after only three weeks. At the end of the last appointment, he said, "You’ve helped me so much, I’d like to thank you somehow. Can I buy you lunch? You said you liked Thai food." Ever since she’d mentioned her love of pad Thai he’d been thinking of chopsticks moving in her fingers.

"I don’t think that’s a good idea," she said, not unkindly. She glanced down at his hand. "You’re wearing a ring."

"But she doesn’t—" He wanted to say, She doesn’t understand me like you do. But that was going too far, extending himself in a way that would only lead to embarrassment for both of them. "She doesn’t like Thai food."

His wife entered his study without knocking. On his computer screen was an ad for a ladies Rolex. Judith looked disgusted. The hand modeling the watch was beautiful, though a little too perfect for his tastes: the wrist was improbably narrow, the fingers obviously airbrushed. Fortunately, a few months ago he’d found an internet forum where people exchanged pictures of the best hand models.

"I’ve made an appointment," Judith said. "With a specialist." He told her he wasn’t interested, but she would not be refused.

They drove to a clinic only a few blocks from the hospital where Olivia worked. The doctor wasn’t a psychiatrist, as he’d feared, or a neurologist, but a family practice MD who’d written a book about alternate states of consciousness. He was bald except for a gray ponytail, as if his hair had given up on general coverage and decided to specialize. The doctor seemed inordinately excited by Franklin’s condition. "We must nudge the mind out of its cul-de-sac," he said emphatically, "and return it to its former home." He rambled on for some time before Franklin realized that his proposed solution was to amputate.

"It’s the only way," the man said. "Sudden Egotic eviction."

"Are you insane?" Franklin said. "You could kill me!"

"Your hand is up in the air again," Judith said. And then to the doctor she said, "He does that whenever he feels defensive."

"Marvelous," Dr. Ponytail said. "May I see your hand? Your finger looks inflamed."

"Get the hell away from me!" He curled into a fist and charged out of the office. He did indeed feel hot, like a lawn mower engine revved beyond its specs. Outside he uncurled and saw that he’d turned red as a thermometer, his self-finger seeming to pulse like a rubber bladder. He cried out.

"Franklin? Are you all right?" It was Olivia’s voice—Olivia! He spun his arm to reach out to her, and then the world continued to spin, and he collapsed to the sidewalk.

When he awoke, he was alone in another hospital room, and the feeling of suffocation he’d experienced on the stairs months ago had returned. He looked down, and saw that his left hand was encased in white bandages, from wrist to fingertips. His other arm was restrained by IV tubes, but he bit and chewed at the bandages until his fingers were free.

The index finger was still there. It had turned pale and shriveled, as if it had spent too long in the bathtub, but it was whole.

Something was wrong, however. The finger looked utterly unfamiliar to him. Had he really thought that he’d been in there, in that pointer? More alarmingly, the suffocating feeling had not dissipated.

At that moment, Olivia and Judith came into the room. They were holding paper cups of coffee, and it looked as if they’d been having a heart to heart discussion.

"It’s all right," Olivia said, "You’re safe now. You just passed out."

"Try to calm down," Judith said. And then she saw the scraps of bandages and frowned. "I suppose you’re still ... "

"No!" he said. "That’s over! I’m—" Where was he? He was drowning, and he could feel his giant body above him, his voice thundering from far away.

"What do you need?" Olivia asked.

He closed his eyes, concentrating. This little piggy went to market, he said to himself. This little piggy stayed home. And this little piggy ...

"Here!" he said, kicking up at the sheet. "For God’s sake, get this sheet off of me!"

The women pulled up the linens, and at his pleading, removed his socks. He lifted his right foot into the air.

There he was. Third toe from the right. He was slender, with a thick, healthy nail. A single hair sprouted from his knuckle in a Superman curl. Yes, just a middle toe, but at last he felt completely at home: surrounded, supported, unstubbable.

Message from the Bubblegum Factory

T
he guards, Dear Reader, are kicking the shit out of me.

The first few steps of my plan for breaking into the Ant Hill were simple: Drive through the outer gate in my rented Land Rover, brake to a halt well short of the second gate, and then step out of the car. I thought that once I’d assumed the posture of absolute surrender—prone, hands on the back of my head, stillness personified—that they wouldn’t feel the need to stomp me like a bug.

Unfortunately, no.

The subsequent intake process, however, is everything you’d expect of the world’s only Ultra-Super-Max prison. They carry me under a half-lowered blast shield that looks nuke-proof, then through a vault door, and finally into a series of cold, concrete rooms where I am fingerprinted and photographed, palpitated and probed, swabbed, scanned, and scrubbed, deloused and depilated. They keep me naked. My head throbs from the pounding I took at the gate, and my stomach feels like it’s been turned inside out.

The paperwork is stunning. They even make me sign for the lime green jumper they throw at me.

The warden comes in as I step into it. Judging by the demeanor of the guards and the way one of them cracks me in the ribs when I don’t zip up fast enough, this is an honor of some kind. One millionth customer, maybe.

The warden looks like a ... does it matter? He is the warden. Supply your own visual.

He frowns at me. "You’re the mascot."

"That’s kind of offensive."

"The sidekick, then. The nut job who went crazy on TV last year."

"Now you’re just being mean."

He looks me up and down, taking in my skinny arms, my puffy eye, my pot belly. He shakes his head in bewilderment. "How the hell did you think you would get in here, much less out again? Look at you. You’re out of shape, you have no weapons, no powers—" He gives me a hard look. "Do you?"