I remember grey, a little like the color of paving stones, a little like the color of fear. I remember wishing I could grow a few inches to see beyond the leather interior of the car. If the incident had occurred within my sightline, this whole thing would be different. Maybe it would be something not worth writing about. I recall observing my father like I had never seen him before. He seemed alive in a way I had never perceived, even at my young age. It was because it was the first time I saw him dealing with the unknown. It was written in his gestures, on the outline of his face. He looked more alive that day. I must have been seven or eight at the time but I could distinguish my father dealing with the unknown. It is still that way. The incident contained more than a little of the unknowable. It is cloudy both in recollection and in morality. I remember it must have been England because of the grey skies in my memory. No country has such foreboding constant grey. We moved around a lot. This is why I have to pause to locate it in space and time.
There had been an accident. We had been in a car
heading somewhere and our route was now blocked. My father had got out to see
if he could help. There was a crowd of people that I could not see. A
pedestrian had been hit. A driver had fled. A story was happening nearby. We were
now stuck in the situation, halted by traffic. There was nothing to do but shut
the engine off. We could wait or inspect. My father chose to inspect. My father
hated inaction. He needed to get to grips with something he did not yet
understand but felt that he should. Maybe there was something he could do. All I
could distinguish was overcast skies, the sleeve of my own brown corduroy shirt
that my mother had me wear, the face of my brother sound asleep in the backseat,
missing the whole thing. My mother, in the front seat, craning her head so that
she could see through the obscurity. It was no use. The car was positioned in
the opposite direction. Backs of people and slabs of concrete blocked our view.
Whatever it was my father was experiencing beyond us. We knew it was a question
of meters but it seemed like he had stepped into another dimension. There were
a few words between me and my mother. Mostly me trying to guess what it was he
was up to. My mother tried her best to answer the way that mothers do, trying
their best to be assuring, when underneath there is no hiding that she did not
know any of the answers.
Finally I heard the door handle click before I saw
him. My father got into the car again in one complete action. I studied him actively
for clues. It was like he was in the middle of a conversation with himself…. “the
boy’s missing his hand” said my father. The traffic was beginning to clear. He started
the engine again and finished his sentence... “There was a boy out there. It’s
an accident in the intersection. The boy had a hook for a hand and now he’s
lost it again. It must have been knocked free again in the accident. He was
calling out: give me my hand he said. Where is my hand?” My father spoke in a
kind of rapture, like he had been chosen to see something not many people had
been blessed to see. I felt jealous. That was the feeling more than anything
else; jealousy. I wanted to peek too. I knew it was tragic but it somehow was
magical as well.
We pulled away from that intersection and we never talked about it again but it incubated in me for years. This was the cruel and unusual tragedy of a young man without a hand, forced to lose it again. Years later the callous side of me was allowed to concoct further images, my cruel self running wild with fresh images: a hook under a tire, a mechanical hook lying flat on the pavement. These were the so material facts that had to be there, at the scene of this accident. Why do we do this? Why does the human mind strive for details? Because there is comfort in them. Abstraction drives us to despair. In absence of any concrete sense experience, the mind needs to reconstruct. I do not know his hair color, his stature, his tone of voice. I do not recall a single physical detail as I have only my dad’s reporting to reconstruct, but in some ways this is more potent for I continue to imagine to this day, him crying out for comfort, longing to reunite what had once again been taken away. Forearms stretched toward the sun that was nowhere to be seen in a mass of dreary English cloud cover. I picture the boy’s posture arranged like I wanted it to be arranged, like those children from the war torn photos. The metal that replaced what was once his flesh was still sacred to him. Perhaps even more so than flesh and blood? Perhaps even in the trappings of this moment, he realized that the moment had a mythological element to it. Perhaps he was conscious of the meaning, the event marking itself in a kind of involuntary allegory. This was the kind of factoid that if you didn’t know better, you would assume it was fiction: the hand of a boy that had been lost not once but twice. Can you believe it? It feels like a joke, if the punch line wasn’t so existential. Was god laughing? If you were apt to call yourself religious, was this a message? Someone trying to tell us something?
It’s a half finished story, an anecdote that ends with
an impression, not a conclusion. This was one young boy who was unlucky enough
to find himself lying in an intersection on a cloudy day with a public around
him that could take in his misfortune. I was not even there but even I am
capable of musing on it years later. Because the essential is here. That thing
that keeps us enraptured. The unknown. The sense of circumstance. An accident
that feels like fate. A young boy in my own imagination reaching out for the
missing part of himself that fall day, not for the metal hook that was his
hand, but for the part that can never be replaced. This is the version I want
to believe. This is the meaning I give.
Comments