“Yeah,” I said. “Hi.”
She smiled, a nervous little smile, and handed me a burger. I hunched forward as I bit into it so the juice would drip into the grass. When I straightened up again, Lou and Mary Ellen seemed to be in the middle of a pantomime, which they quickly dropped. Mary Ellen shot Lou a look, and he cleared his throat.
“We’re going out on Saturday night,” he said. “Maybe you wanna join us?”
“Bowling?”
“No.”
“I don’t want to be a third wheel, Lou. Thanks anyway.”
“It’s not really a date,” he said.
Mary Ellen leaned forward and put both her hands on my knee. Her fingers were trembling. “It would be nice if you’d come along,” she said. She had a quiet soprano voice, as sweet and grainy as a sugar cube.
I knew that if I didn’t go, I’d spend the whole weekend at home with nothing to do, meditating on the feel of Yvette’s tongue against mine, slightly dry from the pot, remembering the way she had stared at me before she left.
“Sure,” I said.
* * *
—
I woke up at six o’clock the next morning to the doorbell ringing incessantly and rushed to answer it, wading through a half-dream of Yvette standing there, hands and all, smiling wryly at me. Instead, I opened the door and found myself standing in my boxers with my belly dangerously close to the viscous surface of two Masters. They both slid back a few inches.
“Howyadooin,” the one closest to me said, not as an actual question, just as preamble. They tended to start conversations that way. “We’re lookin’ for this woman. Ya seen her?”
The other Master extended an appendage that was looped loosely around a small pixel frame showing a head shot of Yvette. It was an old picture, from about the time when I’d first known her. She looked like she was considering biting the cameraman, whoever that had been.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where’s she at?”
“I don’t know. At home, I guess. The last time I saw her was days ago.”
“Ya haven’t seen this woman since then?”
“No,” I said. “No, and I haven’t talked to her either.”
The Masters whistled back and forth a bit, and the one with the pixel frame said, “This woman is wanted for re-handing evasion. If ya see her, ya must report it immediately.”
“Evasion?”
“She has failed to show up for her appointment. This is her last known location. Ya sure she ain’t here?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’m sure.”
The Masters talked to each other again, and then the nearer one said, “Seeing as how we’re already here, ya might as well come wid us.”
“Come with you where?”
“To the centah,” said the Master, producing an appendage and extending it toward the car they had both driven up in. “We don’t have no more evasion appointments today, so we might as well take you for re-handing.”
I stood with my hand on the doorframe and didn’t say anything. A cold wash of adrenaline hit me and my brain was ticking so fast I thought I might pass out. I wanted an excuse, any excuse, even if it would buy me only one more day.
“I haven’t had a draft card,” I said. “It’s not my turn yet.”
“Nah, it don’t matter,” said the Master holding the pixel frame, retracting the tendril-like appendage back into itself, so that its body swallowed up Yvette’s picture, frame and all. “Everyone will get a card soonah or latah. We can enter it into the computah when we get there. It won’t be no problem.”
“But I’m supposed to be meeting someone,” I said. “I’m going to visit a friend in the hospital. He’s very sick. And anyway, I’m not even dressed.”
“Yeah,” said the Master, moving toward the car. “It won’t take that long. We’ll tell them to put you first.” The other one advanced toward me, closer by inches until I took a step away from the door, toward their car. The Master flattened itself until it was almost a plane and slid behind me, so that I had to either step forward again or touch it, and began shepherding me toward the car.
“I just don’t think this is a good idea, doing this out of order,” I said.
“Yeah, okay, it’ll work out just fine,” said the Master behind me, manifesting an appendage and opening the car door for me.
* * *
—
When I got to work the next day, Bea was sitting at her desk, with her nose practically pressed to her computer screen.
“What’re you watching, Bea?”
“Shhh,” she hissed at me, and motioned me over without taking her eyes from the monitor. I stood behind her and watched a group of surgeons gather around a shrouded table.
“What is it?” I said.
“That is the new revolution, if you ask me,” she said. “Pretty wild stuff. And this video has about a billion hits already. It keeps getting taken down and then someone else reposts it, and then people post responses, and it’s all over Chatterbox and VolkBytes. There have been riots, even. There’s this woman, right, and this team of surgeons is operating on her—”
“Maybe another day, Bea,” I said, and she immediately turned around in her swivel chair, looked me up and down, and pulled my arms from behind my back. Beatrice doesn’t miss anything.
She stood up and folded me into a hug. “I’m sorry, I really am,” she said, at which point I started to cry, something I’d had no inkling of doing before that moment. I had spent the previous night watching TV and trying not to look at my forks, drinking gin from a paper cup because the sound of the tines on a beer bottle irritated me, eating pizza with my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to see them. I had told myself several hundred times that it was normal, that in fact the forks worked fine and it was happening to everyone and it was no big deal, but Beatrice made it impossible to believe any of that. She turned off her computer monitor and grabbed her box of Kleenex, and shuffled me into the supply closet, where, as I leaned my head against a ream of copy paper and cried, she pulled out a stepladder, climbed it, and popped the battery out of the smoke detector. When she climbed back down, she fished a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and jammed two of them into her mouth, side by side, so she could start them both before handing one to me. I accepted it and took a movie-style drag that left me hacking and gasping for breath.
“Such a Boy Scout,” Beatrice said.
I held up one fork with the three middle tines raised. “Thrifty, loyal, clean, kind, and obedient, ma’am.”
“Those bastards,” she said. “We should soak them all in napalm and toss them a match.”
We stayed in the closet until she had finished her cigarette and mine had burned down to the filter, and then she straightened my suit jacket and swung open the door and we went back to our desks and got to work.
* * *
—
The next night my phone rang three times in an hour, and eventually Mary Ellen came over and knocked on my door. When she saw my forks her whole face scrunched up like she was going to cry, but a moment later she got hold of herself and said, “Come on along anyway,” and led me over to Lou’s house.
“Forked,” she said, and Lou looked down at my would-be hands and sighed.
“Let’s get going,” he said.
We got in Lou’s car and he started driving, out past the suburbs, into the exurbs. He turned onto a small street, and then down an alley. On either side of us were huge warehouses, most of which looked like they’d been empty for years.
“What is this?” I said.
“Just wait.” We were pulling up in front of a warehouse with a blue light shining from one wall. Two huge doors were open ahead, and when Lou drove through them we were suddenly inside a cavernous, dark room where lanes had been marked out using flares. He found a parking space a
nd led me to a door that took us into another alley, where we entered another huge warehouse.
The second building had been set up like a school cafeteria—row after row of folding lunch tables with people standing on top of them, small spotlights at their feet. All the people standing on the tables were what Lou would have called “hosts”—they had forks like anyone else who’d been “upgraded,” but they also had at least one pair of human hands attached somewhere on their bodies. There was one woman with a half-dozen pairs down her back, another with several pairs clustered on her hips like frills. One man was so covered in hands that he looked like a giant coral colonized by anemones, all those fingers waving in a current only he could feel. Some of the hands had the nails carefully shaped and painted, but there were workmen’s hands, too, large-knuckled and calloused, with grease and dirt ground into the skin. The whole place had the feel of a third-world street market, vendors crowded together and people wandering through testing the wares, eating snacks from the concession stands that had been set up here and there between tables, haggling, carrying gossip back and forth across the aisles.
Now and then you’d see someone step up onto one of the seats attached to the tables—those orange plastic seats where I had eaten years of tuna sandwiches in my youth—and touch the symbiotic hands, feel the texture of the skin and the strength of the fingers. Sometimes the person touching and the host would go off together toward the back of the building, which Lou told me was where they had set up a surgery for hand transfer.
“An hour and you’re done,” he said. “Most of the procedure’s automated at this point.”
“But what do people do without hands?”
“You can go to an Exchange Center the next day and claim that you had them removed yourself because you couldn’t stand them anymore. You get forks just like anyone else, and the Masters eat that shit up, like, ‘Oh, finally, this one has seen the light.’ They don’t get what we’re doing here.”
“I can’t say I entirely get it either.”
“Think about it. They’re like—like endangered animals, or something. We gotta keep them alive somehow. We can’t just let those blobs take ’em from us.”
“How the hell did you even find this place, Lou?”
He shrugged. “I know some people. Check this out.” He pulled me over to a table where a tall redheaded woman stood, wearing nothing but high heels and a black velvet choker. Her skin was so pale you could see her veins, and she had four pairs of hands—a chocolate brown pair blooming between her breasts like dark flowers, and another three pairs in varying shades that wrapped around her calves, all of them men’s hands from the look of them. Her forks were so covered in sparkling rings that you could hardly see the metal, but the fingers of all the human hands were bare.
The woman next to her had creamy brown skin and wore a yellow knit dress that hung low on her shoulders; around her collarbone a pair of ivory-white hands were clasped like a necklace. The two women on the table were talking to each other, not even paying attention to us. I knew I was staring, but so was Lou, and neither of us seemed to be able to stop.
“Can I touch them?” said Mary Ellen. She was so quiet it was easy to forget she was there, but now her rusty little voice cut through the din.
The two women stopped talking, and the black woman looked down at her. “First time here?”
“Yes.”
“Hold up your arms,” the host said, and when Mary Ellen showed her hands the woman said, “All right. I think they like a little touch now and then anyway.”
While Lou and I watched, Mary Ellen stepped onto the chair and up to the table. The host touched the hands that were growing around her neck, caressed the white fingers with her tines, so that they separated and stretched. They were delicate hands, the fingers tapered and graceful. I could easily imagine them playing the violin, or shaping clay into pots.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” the redheaded woman said. “They’re from a woman we used to work with at the Department of Public Health.”
“Where is she now?” Lou said.
“Still there, I guess. We haven’t been back since we became hosts. Too risky.”
The other woman nodded to Mary Ellen. “Go ahead.”
Mary Ellen touched one of the pale fingers tentatively with one of her own. Then she pressed her palm against the other hand’s palm, and the fingers meshed together and gripped.
“They feel just like real fingers,” Mary Ellen said.
“They are real fingers,” the redheaded woman said.
Mary Ellen stroked the backs of the symbiotic fingers with her free hand, and the black woman closed her eyes and sighed.
“You have a nice touch. Warm,” she said.
I wanted to climb up on the table and join them, but I knew I couldn’t, and I felt the same tightness in my chest that had ambushed me at the office with Bea. When Mary Ellen pulled her hand free, the fingers clung to her, as if they wanted to hold on a little longer. She turned to look at Lou.
“Well?” he said.
Mary Ellen nodded. “Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” she said.
The black woman hugged Mary Ellen, and the redhead pulled a ring off one of her tines. “Here you go, girlfriend. For good luck,” she said.
Mary Ellen climbed down off the table and took hold of Lou’s left fork, and they talked for a moment with their heads close together, glancing toward the back of the warehouse. Lou took his car keys out of his pocket and gave them to me.
“Here,” he said. “We won’t be able to drive afterward anyway, not for a few hours at least, while the anesthesia wears off.”
“Where should I meet you?”
“Go home when you’re ready,” he said. “Someone’ll give us a ride.”
I watched them leave, and when I turned around the two women were climbing down from the tables. I noticed several of the other hosts doing the same. From the center of the room, I could hear a swell in the general clamor of the crowd. The women headed toward the noise, and I followed them.
* * *
—
A long stage had been set up, a proper stage, not just another lunch table, with pink lights and a sound system. People were queuing up at one end of it, and then music came blaring out of the speakers and people began to walk across the stage.
The man next to me explained that they were all the new hosts who had accepted hands since the last meeting. Some strutted like they were born to be on a catwalk, and others were shy. I imagined Lou up there at the next gathering, Mary Ellen’s dainty transplanted hands cradling his gut. The audience applauded continuously, a mix of flesh slapping flesh and the tang of metal on metal.
At the very end of the line was a group of people wearing loose blue robes—choir robes, I realized. There were a lot of them, maybe twenty, and as they crowded together at the end of the stage an announcer finally appeared from somewhere to proclaim in a tinny voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, our special guest of the evening.”
The music kept playing and the din from people in other parts of the building rumbled on, but everyone around me stopped talking. The people with the choir robes climbed up on stage and disrobed all at once, and immediately I could see what had everyone so intrigued. These people had gone beyond hands; what they were hosting was an entire human being, carved into pieces and distributed among them. The symbiotic body—dark-skinned, female—surfaced and submerged across their bodies like the coils of a sea serpent breaking the skin of the ocean. Here a breast, there a set of toes, here a swell of flesh that could have been a calf or a forearm or the skin that wrapped the ribs. As I watched, they began to form clusters, to display whole sections of the woman they were hosting—a woman whose body, with each passing second, looked increasingly familiar. The hands had gone to a man who was standing near the middle of the stage
, and when I looked more closely I saw that they had long, shaped fingernails, painted a color that in the rosy light could have been blue or could just as easily have been green or lavender. One of the fingers curled and I swore I saw the twinkle of a rhinestone. The crowd around me began to stamp their feet and roar.
I turned away from the stage. Standing next to me were two girls who looked about sixteen. One wore a green tube dress that was too tight for her, and she was bouncing on her toes with excitement, screaming and stomping. The other was chewing a piece of her hair, winding another piece around her finger. I wondered when teenage girls would stop winding hair around their fingers. When the Masters would start forking children at birth, so that they’d never even know what it was like to have real hands, so that whole portions of their brains would remain dark and unused.
The girl in the tube dress noticed me looking at her and smiled. “Isn’t this just blazing? I can’t believe we’re here for this,” she said.
“I think I know that woman,” I said, even though saying it out loud kicked a wave of queasiness into my stomach.
“Which one?”
“That one.” I gestured at the lineup of hosts, still refusing to look. “The one that’s all of them. I think she’s my old girlfriend.”
The girl’s eyes got big. “No way,” she said. “Yvette Raymond was your girlfriend?”
The nausea settled deeper, but I nodded. “Do you know her?”
“Well, I mean, not personally, but she’s the reason we came tonight. I mean, her video is just incredible, and when she’s like, ‘We can’t submit, we have to do something’ and she lets those doctors just start cutting her up? I mean, my head pretty much exploded,” the girl said. “And she’s totally right. We outnumber those nasty slugs by about a thousand to one and we’re just sitting here?” She pulled her phone out of her purse and started recording the people posing on stage.
“They’ll never get her now,” the other girl said. “We can’t let them get any more of us.” She spoke quietly, without her friend’s percolating enthusiasm, but I could see in her face the kind of passion that made people lie down in front of tanks and smuggle refugees over borders in car trunks, that made them burn bras and flags and draft cards.
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