Left Hand

by Paul Curran

  At the bottom of the stairs, Paul went through another door that led onto the street behind the school building. He moved out of the shade and into the sun until he thought he was used to it then squinted at the brightness reflecting off cars that seemed to move without making any sound. He felt the asphalt melting between his toes. As he walked towards the center of town he looked at toys in shop windows. He noticed the hazy outline of men lying around under trees in the park and kids playing at the bottom of an artificial waterfall across from the beach. He sat down and watched the waves. The tide was up and the beach was mostly deserted. A couple of weird flagpoles defined some obscure space in the distance. The flagpoles were empty. They were made of bones that bent in the wind and cast long tapering shadows across the sand.

  ***

  Some men gathered near the bodies of Robert and Lucy on the beach. The men dug a pit and shoveled in coal. It took twenty minutes and a can of petrol to light a fire. They stood around drinking beer and kicking sand at each other until a truck arrived. The truck reversed onto the sand. The men opened the back of the truck and dragged out some dogs and chickens. They clubbed the dogs and chickens to death, wrapped them in kitchen foil and palm leaves, and buried them in the pit. The truck’s wheels got stuck when it was leaving and the men helped get it out. While they were waiting for the dogs and chickens to cook, they hacked up bamboo stems with cane knives. They arranged the stems in parallel lines on the sand and tied them together with palm-leaf fibers.

  It was almost dark when the men reopened the pit. They were drunk on fruit-juice wine and playing karate games. One of the men landed too close to the pit and tumbled onto the coals and then scrambled out and ran into the sea to cool down. The other men wouldn’t let him eat with them after that. They threw bottles at him until he went back into the sea and sat where the waves drained out. He watched the others hungrily as they stuffed chicken legs and dog ribs into their mouths. They also forced some of the food into Robert and Lucy.

  “What are you doing up there?” said a boy to Paul.

  “Did you get the stuff?”

  The boy climbed on top of the bunker. “Do you want to be seen?”

  “Who cares?” Paul grabbed a paper bag off the boy.

  When the men had finished eating, they threw their scraps into the pit and pissed on the coals. They lifted Robert and Lucy onto the raft and decorated it with flowers. They poured petrol over Robert and Lucy. Most of the flowers got washed off but a few stuck. As the dim light from the pit flared up, the men dragged the raft down to the waves and formed a semicircle around it. Someone sang a song about the impenetrable mysteries of love. Someone delivered a speech about the fleeting nature of existence. The ostracized man pulled out his cock and masturbated. Others joined in. All the men laughed at the masturbating until they realized the raft was floating away. Someone lit a torch from the pit and then swam out and set fire to the raft.

  “Did you kill your friends?” said the boy.

  “Maybe I’m dead as well.”

  “We’re all dead if you think about it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re from another planet.”

  “You know, the best thing about being dead would be shooting up as much of whatever you like and getting totally fucked up and never overdosing.”

  “But it wouldn’t be as exciting without the risk.”

  After Paul and the boy had taken all the drugs, they lay on top of the bunker and talked about alternate reality theory. They tried to fuck each other but didn’t get far. The boy’s cock and ass were too small and the wounds from Paul’s operation were too raw. When it was light enough to see where they were going without falling over each other from laughter they climbed down the rocks on the other side of the beach and washed themselves in the ocean.

  Paul followed the boy along a secret track through scabby trees and sloping over a hill to a different beach. The boy moved much more quickly than Paul and came back every now and then to tell him to hurry up. Paul kept looking over his shoulder at where he thought the bunker was but it had gone, obliterated in the sunlight. The boy said he could hear voices telling them to keep going. He said his hearing was better than most kids because he had grown up in the wild instead of around the buzz and clatter of late capitalism. Paul said that was bullshit. He said capitalism had been dead for as long as he could remember and every sane person heard voices. They were telling him to rest. The boy cut across the beach and ducked under some palm trees. He swung on vines and climbed over rocks. He sang and whistled songs that Paul didn’t recognize. The boy said he made up the songs himself. Paul said no one else would.

  “Do you like being tortured?” said the boy.

  “Does it really matter if I’m already dead?”

  “What if they cut off your limbs?”

  “So what?”

  “And bury them vast distances apart?”

  “Who cares?”

  “And they’re impossible to find?”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “You’ll be forever compelled to search in order to reestablish an integrated body image. It’ll drive you crazy. You’ll wish you were more than just dead.”

  “Do all your friends talk as much bullshit as you?”

  The boy kicked seaweed at Paul and then ran along the beach. Paul ran after him but couldn’t catch up. The angle of the shoreline and the texture of the sand made Paul slip. He couldn’t remember the last time he had run. He yelled at the boy to slow down but the boy didn’t slow down. Paul found a bottle and threw it at the boy. It hit him on the head but he kept running. When Paul caught up with the boy he was under some trees and holding his bleeding head and saying they can rest now. Paul sat down next to the boy, wrapped some leaves around his head, and secured them with vines.

  “How much further is it?”

  “Not much.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “I have to make sure no one’s following us.”

  “No one’s following us.”

  “I have to make sure you don’t remember the way.”

  “I don’t remember the way.”

  When they got to a clearing, where the beginnings of an asphalt road peeked out and then reverted back to sand, the boy made a noise halfway between a whistle and a scream. No one responded except some birds taking flight through the trees surrounding several buildings that looked like a school. The boy called it a tourist development abandoned when mining in the desert proved to be a more profitable industry than leisure. Tools and machinery sat rusting in long dry grass beside unfinished foundations. No-entry signs had been painted over so many times the words had vanished. Fences indicating some last line had been re-posted until collapsing into the ground. The boy said the builders had stripped the place of anything worth selling to make up for losses, and the vines had taken over to finish the job in their own random way.

  Paul followed the boy behind the largest building. If the front of the compound looked uninhabited, an ancient history textbook waiting to be written, then the back was an endless morning after the final exam, a patio stacked with shitty furniture, empty bottles, and rotting garbage covered with maggots and flies.

  “What do you think?” The boy waved his hand around like a singer.

  “It reminds me of Disneyland.”

  “You’re not the first genius to make that comparison.”

  A different boy’s face appeared at a window. He was scratching welts and drooling. His eyes were gone. He was wearing a blonde platted wig and some kind of makeup. The boy with Paul picked up a beer bottle and slung it at the other boy’s face. The boy grinned wildly and ducked. The bottle went through the ripped fly-screen. Something on the patio made a guttural moan. Paul looked around. At the end of the patio a scrawny girl was curled up in a shopping trolley converted into a padlocked cage. She was covered in dirt and infected wounds. Her hair was matted and chunks were missing. She had no arms and no legs. She had no
teeth. Her tongue had been cut out.

  * * *

  Robert glanced at Lucy’s ass. She turned on the shower and stepped into the tub. After adjusting the temperature and soaking her hair, she asked Robert for one of those cute shampoo bottles by the sink. He found one and handed it to her. The water pressure in the shower dropped out when Robert flushed the toilet. He shook piss from his cock. He rubbed gel across Lucy’s stomach, over her breasts, and down to her cunt. She squeezed his hand until he moved it back to her breasts. She said she was saving her cunt for her boyfriend. He said he thought her boyfriend was dead. She said she wasn’t talking about that one. He leaned his chin on her head and pressed his cock against her ass.

  “None of this flesh is that special,” said Robert.

  “Maybe not to you.”

  “Whatever keeps you sane, I guess.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with sanity.”

  “Don’t talk to me about love.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Lucy spread the fingers of both her hands on the tiles. She put one foot on the edge of the tub to give Robert a better angle.

  Paul leaned against the bathroom door and listened to Robert’s flesh slapping against Lucy’s flesh. Or Lucy’s flesh slapping against Robert’s flesh. He wasn’t sure. The sound mixed with the slosh of water coming from the shower. He tried to imagine what they could be doing apart from fucking but all he could think about was different positions and facial expressions. The images seemed really dumb and pornographic but were the only ones with any life. He told himself she was only fucking someone else to make him jealous. Paying him back. It was one of her games. She wasn’t enjoying it. She was too stoned. It was just her ass. It wasn’t her cunt. She was saving that for someone special. He realized he was thumping his forehead against the door. Robert told him to fuck off back to school. Lucy said she could take a shower with whoever she liked.

  * * *

  Paul felt sand under his feet but when he looked at his feet it was as if the things his eyes saw didn’t belong to him and the movements they were making weren’t of his volition. He knew he was moving away from something, and had to keep going, but he wasn’t sure what he was moving away from or where he was going. A relentless force was driving the limbs and organs attached to his body. It was as if every part of his body had been transplanted from somewhere else during a string of experimental operations that had permanently shattered any previous sense of integrity and was unlikely to congeal into a new one.

  Sometimes as Paul walked on he noticed shells, pebbles, driftwood, bones, and flesh. Creatures peeked from holes and then scuttled out of the way. He contemplated how much existence there was under the sand. He wanted to sit down and watch the ocean and the sky, but he couldn’t stop his body from moving, and whenever he looked up, the sun was too bright. It reflected off everything.

  Climbing around the edge of a point and onto another beach, Paul wondered how many beaches there could possibly be. This one had no footprints on it. Maybe he was walking in circles and the tide was washing them away. He noticed a bottle rolling down the sand with a wave going out. Another wave coming in rolled over the bottle and made it disappear. A voice told Paul that this was important. He stood at the water’s edge and waited for the bottle to return. When it seemed the bottle wasn’t coming back he turned around and looked further along the beach. Thousands of bottles were scattered among a tidemark of seaweed and crushed electrical items. Paul held a bottle up to the sun. The dull glass barely glowed. He put his thumb in the bottle and shook it next to his ear but couldn’t hear anything. He smelled the bottle but couldn’t smell anything. He tipped up the bottle and glugged out a mix of sand and sewerage.

  * * *

  A teacher leaned across the desk and whispered something to the girl playing the judge. The girl playing the judge nodded along with the teacher’s words and drank some more water. She washed a mouthful back into the glass and then there was blood and pieces of skin in it. Some flies circled the edge of the glass, one creeping inside, until the teacher handed the judge a wire coat hanger. The judge slapped the coat hanger on the table a few times. She smiled at the teacher as if to say she knew the coat-hanger was an exhibit and not a gavel. The teacher opened a door and then went out. The jury sat silently looking at the empty chair in the middle of the courtroom.

  “Does the accused wish to speak before we bring in the witnesses?” The judge pointed the coat hanger at the empty chair. “I take that as a no.”

  “Sir,” said a jury member, raising his hand. “May I say a few words?”

  “Yes, of course,” said the judge. “Go ahead.”

  “Must we really proceed with this if we already know the outcome?”

  “That is a good question. But apparently not one for me to answer.”

  “I want to go to the toilet,” said another jury member.

  Paul leaned on the chair in front of him. He looked up at the fan. He tried to count the flies crawling around the ceiling but soon gave up. The teacher playing a journalist beside Paul was pretending to smoke his pen. Half the students had already left. A different teacher led Robert and Lucy into the classroom. Lucy was unsteady on her feet but Robert helped her up. Her blonde hair was more messy than usual and she was wearing a torn sarong that she held wrapped over her breasts. Robert was dressed in ripped jeans and no t-shirt. Neither of them wore shoes. The teacher pointed them over to the witness chairs. They flopped down with their arms around each other. They confirmed their names when the judge asked them to confirm their names. They grinned at the jury until the judge told them there would be plenty of time for grinning once the jury had reached a verdict. Lucy snickered as Robert stroked her face. They kissed each other for a while. Some of the teachers clapped. A boy took a photograph. Paul thought the flash made everyone look like skeletons.

  “How long have you known the accused?” said the judge.

  “We’re at the same school. This school.” Lucy chewed gum as she spoke, and laughed nervously, as if unsure whether or not this trial was real. “Robert’s finished now but still hangs around for the drugs and the pussy.”

  “Can’t get nothing like that in the outside world,” said Robert.

  Some of the jury snickered until the judge glanced over at them. “How did you feel when you read the things the accused wrote about you?”

  “We just thought it was pretentious shit,” said Robert. “I mean we didn’t actually read it or anything because we didn’t see the point.”

  “Would you like me to read some now?”

  “I think that would be very useful,” said one of the jurors.

  “I don’t think I asked you,” said the judge, peeling back some pages of a soggy pile that a teacher had dropped on the table. Some of the pages disintegrated in the judge’s hand. She pushed the disintegrated pages onto the floor until finding one she thought was acceptable.

  Lucy was nodding off on Robert’s shoulder. He pushed her upright and scratched his jaw. “We don’t care,” he mumbled. “Whatever.”

  * * *

  Lucy heard herself screaming at the blood pouring from her shoulders, face, and neck. Somewhere. Everywhere. She wasn’t sure where it was coming from. She saw it dripping sticky through her fingers. She couldn’t see anything beyond the blood. Everything was getting blurry. Turning black. She was steering all over the road. She knew she had to stop the van, but she couldn’t feel her legs.

  Somehow Lucy found the brake and pulled over. She couldn’t tell if she had done it or if some higher power like on TV had helped. It couldn’t have been Robert. He was on the floor in the back of the van. He had his fist raised about to punch Paul in the face but then saw his eyes were already dead so instead threw him out of the sliding door.

  Lucy hit the accelerator again. Some broader recognition about what had happened rushed in. Her blood was spread across the dashboard and the windscreen, and anger replaced panic as her leading response abstraction. But altho
ugh she could see better than before her driving was even more erratic. Paul was holding onto the passenger door frame and running alongside the van, and Lucy was trying to shake him off like an insect caught in a summer dress. Robert was pressing a soaking beach towel to Lucy’s wounds. He was also helping her to steer, yelling at her to pull over, and trying to hammer and claw Paul’s fingers away. Lucy was screaming things like, “Jesus, you should have smashed the little bastard when you had the chance.”

  Paul knew he couldn’t hold on much longer but didn’t know how to let go. His feet were torn apart, dragging, and then off the ground. He let go. He slipped under the van and between the back wheels. He scraped his spine and cracked his head on the road.

  * * *

  Smoke clouds from the mine formed patterns in an unknown language across the sky. The shapes could have represented a plea for help or a call to war or any variety of things in between. They could have been love letters, philosophical tracts, political slogans, abstract expressions, or nothing at all, just a pretty coincidence witnessed by no one. A small car came along the road and slowed down when it got near the van. The car went past the van and then stopped. Heat continued to pour from the car’s exhaust pipe.

  A man got out of the car and took off his cowboy hat. He fanned himself or shooed away flies as he walked towards the van. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a filthy rag from his back pocket. He stooped next to a pool of blood, petrol, and broken glass. He dipped the rag in the pool and sucked on it. When his tongue confirmed what the pool was made of he looked around to see if anything was watching him. The smoke clouds had thinned out, their source a single explosion whose reason for occurring would have been lost on anyone witnessing the last traces of those suspended particles. Everything about the land out there, where the beach met the desert, was so dry and brittle it wouldn’t take much friction to destroy the whole place. The man walked to the front of the van and looked inside. A black and white bird flew away from the shattered windscreen. The bird landed on a fencepost and sat there watching the man. The man watched the bird. The man put his hat back on like he was defeated and walked back to his car. He got in his car and kept driving in the same direction he had been going before.