Dax Zimmerman

A Finger Here, A Finger There

     My favorite sinus valve, my gun, sneezed and now I have one less supernumerary digit. Guiltlessly I can wail on guitar now, and the kids at school, you should have seen their reaction, yanked from their facile facades, their eyes and mouth agape like designs on my wooden door, ghoulish. They're not playing for second fiddle anymore but can compete squarely. Only I'm informed by girlfriend Sheila whose grateful hand I would entertain by intertwining and have something left over to paw her knuckles with, that the specialness is now gone. The more of me is now less and so equal toall.

     Other women speak of Sheila's eyes. They're brilliantly blue, dutchy. My friend Teri fawns over them, calling them aqueous, lounging on the first syllable, teasing it out as if the word itself is an additional glory. But eyes are like seat belt tickets.You can't get pulled over for not wearing a seat belt, but once the cop gets you for a busted tail light, he can also give you a citation for not wearing a seat belt. That's how I see eyes, andI'm the cop.

     After the shot my head buckled. My thumping eyes followed the blood gushing from my hand--a great chunk of gnarled flesh, naked and vulnerable--to the finger. It lay on the newspaper that I had put down, and since I had shot from directly above, the blood from my hand dripped onto it as blood also oozed, slow and pompous, from the forlorn finger--the log in the waterfall of blood. I hadn't known it then but later learned that the finger had retained most of its form because I had shattered the metacarpal bone and not any of the finger's phalanges. The emergency room doctor told me that he would have had to remove the extra metacarpal--if I hadn't already thoughtfully done so, he added lamely and sardonically--to retain flexibility. He went on to explain to me that I should have plastic surgery so that the new pinkie could be shortened and rotated, but I have no further intentions to normalize my hand.

     At the talent show two weeks later (the fingerectomy had been ducked for such a long time--it had been scheduled for weeks ago but I'm chicken hearted--that my hand still wore its scuffing plaster sheath), mop-headed John Preacher was up first, dancing to some maudlin Irish pop, epiphanically singing, 'I've foundsomething to dance to, to dance to...' He was guiltless now,spiritual, excavating the X on his map of innocence--topical dance music somehow beneath him with its insinuating gyrations and indistinguishable beats, but not this sentimental Gaelic syrup, curiously germane to an amendable American. And next the ubiquitous crowd-pleaser, "Wild Thing," standing ovationed, of course. Then my neighbor, dexterous and balding manipulator of strings, peerless wielder of the whammy bar, who dazzled too little and confused too much. And finally me, a little anxious with this new equipment and more so following that muddled virtuoso on the same toy. Just before beginning I realized for the first time that I couldn't perform my trademark insouciant gesture, that extra mutational digit wagging, showboating my disinterested control and cheerful panache, now reduced to a vestigial ache like homesickness, a consideration which tossed me into choppy water. I bucked up, though, inspired to win one for the martyred finger. I played a classical instrumental to obstreperous applause. Girlfriend was the first to greet me backstage, hugging like a Greco-Roman wrestler. "You're better," she said. "I thought you'd lose your power, but no, now you doubly tragic." And she wept tangy tragic tears, which I followed with my tongue on her cheekbones, licking and swallowing her joy.

     Family legend has it that upon arrival my extra finger wasalready mature and hanging onto the umbilical cord as if I was rappelling down the birth canal. My parents considered how quickly legends descend from lofty worthy speculation into a sort of low-class freakishness when proven, and so decided against memorializing the moment. (The only surviving momento is a hand-stitched blue baby mitten which has one extra finger sheath, three times the size of the other five.) But still, my parents arethe prime factors of my rubbery, ambivalent sense of self. The story goes that my aging parents--they were already 65 and 55 when I was born--had never confronted physical deformity, and immediately, through some wildly inductive speculation, decided I was some prophetic vessel and refused the doctor's entreaties to snip the manly digit. So they taught me nothing, awaiting genius to emerge from my eleventh finger like they awaited their own reincarnations.

     Confronting taunting schoolboy faces--hideously malformed then out of projected fear and subsequently grotesquely chiseled somewhere in my brain--I managed only wobbly thrusts with my overburdened right and weak stabs with my girlish left. JimMcManus, a hoary haired early developer, liked to grab my little finger and littler finger with two hands like he was battling over a wishbone. He'd close his eyes and make a wish, chanting out Diane Schale's name three times before snapping the extra digit. It would hang limp, beaten. Jim would continue to hold the winning finger as if he were a referee holding up a victorious wrestler's hand. This battle happened on four occasions, and each time the finger would gradually heal, crabbing a bit more each time.

     Sheila said she wanted the finger. I took her back to my dorm room and we scoured the garbage can for it. I thought I had put it in there wrapped in toilet paper, but I may have just left it on the floor amid the mounds of dirty laundry and desiderata. In eager response to her aphrodisiac smile, I attempted to take her there on the soiled clothes, but she resisted, intent on locating the finger. Just then my roommate Chuck and his new girlfriend, my ex, bustled in. Lara rushed up to me and hugged me, exclaiming how I had once again mesmerized her, transporting her into a "hazyopium den," her mouth winking with each word.

     I was still uneasy around these two since Chuck had stolen Lara from me three months ago while I was asleep. Lara and I had been lying in my bed when Chuck brought a girl into our dorm room.He had started to strategically sulk and whine as he was denied his goal. Lara and I were giggling at Chuck's chicanery when the girl whispered something inaudible. Chuck chucked himself back into his bed, disgusted, saying, "Well, can't you satisfy me somehow?" The girl obliged, and, two days after that, I awoke to find Lara snuggling up against Chuck's broad, lacrosse-playing back. For an hour I had stared at the purple mangrove of veins on her eyelids until she stirred. Her fingers sleep-herded some stray hair that had fallen across her cheeks, forming a curlicue that hooked into her nose, and steered them back to their proper position behind hersleepy ear. Then she gave a shake--a delayed reaction to the tickling hair as if during sleep your nerve messengers are alsosluggish--and bolted upright, or rather, tried to. Chuck's arm was draped around her waist, his pinkie finger resting in her navel.She finally removed herself from his grasp and sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, head in hands, hands massaging scalp.After a minute or so of pensive hair grabbing--the fingers combed up through her hair until the blond hair stood up on her head, and then they traveled back, mashing the hair down--the fingers' direction and speed creepily confluent with the pitch of Chuck's rising and falling stertors--her face hid behind her hand. Then Lara looked at me between her fingers and grinned.

     "Are we interrupting any tomfoolery?" Lara said. She was an escaped belle, intent on preserving some Southern charm and apostatising Southern chastity in this eastern college, all the while subsisting on an educational diet of sex ed and a degree in nursing. She smiled absurdly and persistently, reminiscent of my aunt's recent face-lift.

     "We're trying to locate Tom's good luck charm," Sheila said.

     "Oh!" Lara said, clasping her hands together in mock horror.But still, --what stamina!-- she smiled. "He doesn't need it anymore, does he?"

     "No," said I, "but Sheila does."

     "Whatever for?" Lara asked.

     "Nostalgia," Sheila answered.

     While Sheila and I lay bone-white in her bed, black lace scrimmaging on our bodies as branches swayed across the moon, we balanced the shredding finger above us in our hands, not wondering or caring whether there was a statute of limitations on nostalgia.Sheila held the finger aloft, like an offering, contemplating it with cocked head. Finally she said, "All of us ought to lose a part of our bodies."

     Now that's religion, I thought. I couldn't argue with her nakididity. I reached for Sheila's nipples, and she swatted me with the finger. I grabbed for it, and we held it. It looked simply like our finger, accusatorily pointing at me, then her in turn. It was bony, and curled angrily. There were dark chocalatey teardrops garnishing the fraying skin, and the sheer flesh folded in on itself, exposing the middle phalange. When held by the tip, the horseshoe of negative space formed an airmoat around what was left of the proximal phalange.

     Sheila got out of bed and scraped off the skin, ligaments,and tendons with a sculpting knife. After an hour of work, the phalanges--distal, middle, and proximal--were shakily held together by a few thin remaining tendons. We super-glued the bones together and mounted the finger on the wall, aiming it towards the room, but because of its curl, it appeared to be falling.

     "What does it say to you?" she asked me.

     "'Hang coat here.' And for you?"

     "It disproves Occam's razor, " Sheila said. "His razor prefers the simpler theory out of those which can explain circumstances. It doesn't allow for superfluity, but you've gone and disproved it. You've done something magical."

     What really unnerves me is that I hadn't thought of Sheila. I wondered if a guitar's ideal sound necessitated someone having eleven fingers, but I hadn't thought of Sheila. Eager narcissism had squeezed the trigger. On occasion I have revelatory transcendencies, but they last no longer than the slap on the back that I give myself. They may be deep but they're not rich. I return to my dungeon of horrors anyway. I don't mean to go on philosophizing, afraid of my own shadow. I'm the kid who got bullied who should have a strengthened character. But I am. I'm afraid of my own shadow. I ache for those unsolipsistic moments all the other eonic minutes of my dulled-out life. Shooting off my finger was an expansion of my parameters, an affront to my existence. Sure, you can find a way to honor your limitations, but I've always been cursed with self-pitying sloth. I blew away a constriction just as someone else might have gone through years of therapy. But yet, off to therapy I went.

     The school therapist to whom the college sent me to asked me the same question over and over. "Why do you think you did this?" she'd say.

     "I told you; it was an accident," I'd say.

     "But still," she'd say, "why do you think it happened?"Apparently I'd appear angry, and she'd ask me if I was mad at the therapist. 'The therapist,' I sneered.

     I gave it to her. "I think it happened because I'd like to see more things standardized. All this predetermined variety's no good on man's psyche. Too many uphill battles. I'd like to see the playing field evened out, I guess."

     I watched as the therapist's pencil jigged.

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Dax Zimmerman is a graduate of Temple's Creative Writing program.

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