Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (7 page)

My friend eventually came to believe his father’s explanation, but he says that the memory of the severed fingers remains clear in his mind, and is all the more disturbing to him now that it appears to be false.

Plausible

I got up once in the middle of the night and went out to the street in my robe, where I saw giant yellow machines, bought by the city for the purpose of clearing wet leaves from the gutters, slowly trawling the curbs with their red lights flashing. Their engines made a throbbing noise, and if I closed my eyes I could imagine that they were tanks, occupying our town at the close of a long, hopeless war.

As they passed me I peered into the cabs and was surprised to discover no one was driving them.

On a break at my office the next day, I called the department of public works and asked if there had been street cleaners at work during the night, and I was told there had been. But when I asked if the machines had possibly been operating without drivers, I was promptly cut off.

The only other unusual thing was that it was early December, and bitter cold outside, and I recall being quite comfortable without a coat, and the sidewalk warm beneath my bare feet. Otherwise, the dream was entirely plausible, and I am still not certain it didn’t happen as I remember it.

Lucid

Our dinner guest, a self-taught expert on so-called “lucid dreaming,” which refers to those dreams so sensually detailed that they are indistinguishable from reality, and which, at least in our friend’s case, can be created and controlled at the whim of the dreamer, arrived with an ashen face and his right arm in a cast. During the meal, we asked him what had happened, and he told us, his eyes tired and voice heavy, that he had quit the dream-experimentation for which he had become so well known.

When we pressed on with our inquiries, our guest recounted his story. He had dreamt that he was in line at the post office, waiting to mail an elephant-shaped package wrapped in brown paper. As he waited, a circus clown came dancing in
the door, followed by a monkey wearing a fez and carrying a concertina. The clown distributed balloons to all the postal clerks, and then the monkey played the concertina while the clown sung an unintelligible song.

Lucid dreamers, our guest interrupted himself to tell us, have a standard “reality test,” which they use to assure themselves that they are dreaming: the dreamer passes his hand through a solid surface, and this impossibility confirms the dream-state. When he reached the counter, our guest administered his reality test, plunging his own hand into the hard countertop. The impact broke two of his fingers. As it happened, he had not been dreaming; in fact, he was mailing a stuffed toy elephant to his niece, and it so happened that one of the postal clerks had that very day turned forty, and the others had hired the clown and monkey to perform a birthday song in German, a language, they explained to our pain-racked friend, often used by the clerk for comic effect.

The incident had convinced our guest to give up his beloved pastime. However, his lucid dreaming has persisted. Only the control he once exerted over the dreams has been lost. Consequently, he has no means to escape what have become terrifyingly realistic nightmares, and his sleep has been profoundly unrestful.

When another guest asked him why he wasn’t certain that the entire experience of his disenchantment with lucid dreaming was not itself a dream, a wild look came into his eyes, and he thrust his bandaged hand into the dining table. The remainder of the evening was spent in the emergency room.

Virgins

The brief hysteria that overcame our town last year began when an elderly churchgoer, emerging from a morning mass, noticed that the colorful knitted scarf draped around the neck of a passing homeless man seemed to bear, in its variegated threads, the image of the Virgin Mary, and that, furthermore, the Virgin’s two crudely stitched eyes appeared to be secreting tears. The homeless man was quickly surrounded by amazed parishioners, and interrogated about the origin of the scarf.

It seemed that the man had been given the scarf by its creator, a plump, middle-aged woman, during the weeks before Christmas, though she had not told him her name. A search was promptly mounted for the mystery knitter.

But before she could be found, new Virgin sightings were reported: a weeping face chiseled into the weathered serpentine of a campus building; a sad, wizened countenance growing among the knots and twists of an old sycamore, its eyes dripping sap; a sobbing icon revealed in the whorls of ice that covered the lake. Indeed, Virgins seemed to be popping up everywhere, to such an extent that, according to rumor, representatives from the Vatican were on their way to confirm the miracles.

Before they could arrive, however, the scarf-knitter appeared and insisted that she had woven no Virgin Marys into the scarves she distributed to the region’s homeless over the holidays. The tears, she reasonably theorized, could easily have been melting beads of snow or ice. And as for the other sightings, she suggested, you could find Virgins anywhere, if you looked hard enough.

This seemed a cynical position to many, until a competing gallery of Jesus Christs was discovered and documented, and then a series of Moseses, and finally a suite of Donald Ducks. For some time now, townspeople have been reluctant to take anything at other than face value.

Twins

In college I knew a young man and woman, twin brother and sister, remarkable for their affinity: they were both slight, blond-haired and handsome; spoke with the same emphatic rhythm; walked with the same confident, long-legged stride; and liked the same music, food, art and film. They finished one another’s sentences and were adept at games of pantomime, during which it sometimes seemed each could read the other’s mind. The two were inseparable, and could occasionally be persuaded to tell the story of how their birth parents were killed in an auto accident, and how they came to be adopted by the dean of our college and his wife. They had been a campus fixture since their infancy, and were well known and loved by students, faculty and staff alike.

When they were about to graduate, the twins were gravely injured in their own auto accident. Though they survived, it was discovered in the hospital that not only were they not twins; they were not even related. Repeated blood tests confirmed this fact, and the story briefly became a national news item of the “strange but true” variety. After a few years, however, the story vanished, as did the twins.

Many years later I learned, from a mutual acquaintance, that the twins had married. They invited most of their closest friends to the wedding, but few came, or even responded to the invitation. According to my acquaintance, who did attend, the dean and his wife were not there either.

Though my acquaintance saw nothing morally wrong with the twins’ union, she reported that their first dance together after exchanging vows was a shocking sight, and one she would never forget. The twins danced face to face, holding each other with passionate intensity, the line between them like a mirror that reflected everything but their gender. No one joined them on the floor, for that dance or any other.

The twins send out a family newsletter every year, complete with photographs and news. They have adopted a number of children of various races and nationalities, but have had none of their own. There is no consensus among their former friends about whether this is due to some fertility problem, or if it represents a final taboo that not even the twins themselves dared break.

Indirect Path

For many years a large table stood in the center of our dining room, blocking the most direct path from the living room to the kitchen and necessitating the development of an angled walking route that, over time, came to be visible as an area of wear in the dining-room rug. Recently we discarded the old rug and, since our children have grown and moved away and we now eat our meals in the kitchen, transferred our large table into storage. The dining room has been turned into a study, with bookshelves lining the walls and a narrow desk facing the front window.

Despite these changes, we find it nearly impossible to take the newly created direct path through the room, and continue to walk around the edge as if the table were still there. When occasionally one of us must enter the forbidden space, either to sweep the floor or to pick up a dropped item, we find that we wince in discomfort, as if anticipating a painful crash into the missing table.