On Monday, June 28th, you have both your hands.
"Actually," she begins cheerfully, "it's kind of a funny story."
You were watching bustling scrums of people through two panes of heat-warped door glass when you saw her and her magnificent stump. She was deep in conversation with a friend. You immediately want to believe that this woman she's walking with was a perfect stranger until the spectacularly horrible "incident" occurred. Your mind's eye, in it's swift, pathological glory, conjures up curled stop-motion glimpses of dancing hedge-clippers run amok and possessed jewelry-eating garbage disposals. Like morbid vacation slides, they hang askew in your brain.
Her right hand is missing, and that's cool. But the truly remarkable part is that it's missing, with virtually no sign that one ever existed. There is no prosthetic rubber mock-up, no bundled bandage, no complicated bracing system. Just a wonderful, tan, forearm that ends at the wrist in a straight plane, as though she reached into a parallel dimension and it was simply gone.
It reminds you of the dough-tubes that plop out of the Pillsbury canisters. No scarring, no visible imperfection. You are mesmerized by the fashion in which she keeps gesturing with her arm to emphasize her words, even though an entire hand and all its digits are missing. This leaves the gestures merely implied, like a sentence with all the vowels inked out.
Well, hell. Now you've got the door open and your hanging out, mouth agape, so when she turns around to pick up a dropped napkin, (with her left hand, obviously) she looks right at you looking right at where her hand should be. You are suddenly very conscious of the distance between your upper and lower jaw and you clack them shut audibly. When she approaches, you stagger "I'm sorry. It's just so perfect."
She cocks her head and smiles and you are in love with her.
She raises the incomplete limb in front of her. She could be positioned, waiting for you to trace your fingers slowly down her life line. Or, she could be giving you the finger.
"Umm....how....um. Well." You are an idiot.
"How did it happen," she ventures. She sounds compassionate, as though she will happily walk you through the awkward ordeal of discussing her disability. She is divine.
"Actually," she begins cheerfully....
On Sunday, June 27th, you take crippling doubt and unjustified hubris for $800.
Kassy just texted you. [MIND GIVING ME A WAKE UP CALL AROUND 5? THANKS KASS] Tomorrow is the first shoot day of what is, at least for now, your last shoot in the film and television business. After this week, the advertising world awaits your conflicted entrance. Lengthy debates over late 80's cartoons by the craft service table will be replaced by business lunches. Remarkable interpersonal volleys of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino quotes by warring cola taglines. Nineteen hour days in front of the Liberty Bell by eight hour days in an office, at a desk, surrounded by recycled air and fluorescent lighting.
It's a Colonial Penn life insurance commercial with Alex Trebek, he of the divine pronunciation. You have to wake before dawn, but you're still up fretting over various things beyond your control.
We've managed to convince ourselves that it's alright to let go of 'things beyond our control,' whatever that means. But why let go? We only use 97% of our brain, or something like that. What if nothing is beyond our control, and, in what would prove thousands of years from now to be a huge cosmic joke, it's found that we can direct our lives like a film if we just think about it hard enough?
Ugh. Screw everything you've heard. The human condition is rationalization.
[We cannot be wrong. We cannot be judged. We are in control.]
On Saturday, June 26th, you go jogging.
It's just after six in the morning when he calls. Your phone erupts, a hummingbird death-rattle, shattering the dream you were having about your dead mother, who was on the verge of telling you something about something that seems vaguely important. You put it on vibrate last night before you and Megan had "the talk", so when he calls just after six in the morning, before the goddamn break of day has even started pissing sunlight into everyone's eyelids and cereal bowls, you have to maneuver your deadened arm from under her naked torso and grab the buzzing fucker off the cherry nightstand to stop the noise. Caller ID says it's Chazz. It also says it's just after six in the morning. The thing is still quaking like a refugee and you're half-tempted to hurl it across the room.
"What is it?" you rasp.
"Ok, listen. I know it's early, but I need you to promise me something."
"What?" Your eyes hurt. Focusing on this conversation hurts.
"If anyone asks where you were between four-thirty and five o'clock this morning, you were out jogging with me in Valley Forge park, ok?"
You goggle to yourself. "Why was I out jogging with you at four-thirty in the morning? [Pause] I mean, jesus Chazz, you smoke three packs a day."
"Just promise."
Acquiescing to the surreality of it all, you say, very deliberately. "Alright. I promise."
The line goes dead. ['Call ended'.] You close the phone and replace it on the nightstand. Your arm finds its way into the small valley, still warm, under Megan's body. Sleep finds you quickly.
You never reconnect with your dead mother, and the sensation that you may have missed out on something strangely vital by waking prematurely that night will never entirely fade. Because it never fades, you will always remember Chazz's phone call. And when you ask him, years later, what that was all about, he will deny the conversation ever took place and swiftly start talking about the commute to his new job. After an afternoon wasted picturing various grim activities taking place somewhere outside of Philadelphia between four-thirty and five o'clock in the morning, you finally manage to sweep the whole conundrum into that vacuum we all have inside us, where we store all unfinished emotional detritus - and you do this knowing it will have company with your dead mother, the reasons Megan and you couldn't make it work, and a million other what-ifs, should'ves, and I-wonders....
Page created, designed, maintained, and periodically sharpened by Beau Kegler. Copyright 2004.