Hands
An old man told me this at a bar, so keep that in mind. An artist at the end of a career that had been a failure decided there was only one way to be sure he could be remembered. He would produce a piece he would call, “Clock.” He would take an old clock like the ones hung above the door in classrooms for the sole purpose of torturing kids and in place of its hands he would place his own. He asked his son, with whom he had had a falling out years before, to cut them off for him. Of course his son refused, and, what’s more, decided to have his father committed so he wouldn’t try to do it himself. There was a bandsaw in the garage. Though, even if he managed to cut off his own hands, he would still need someone to help him mount them on the clock, the hands of which he had already removed, so that it looked like the full moon rung round with roman numerals. I noticed that the man telling me this story used his hands a lot as he talked, as if they were visual aids by which he could better convey the story. Anyway, what happened, he told me, was that this man was placed in an institution, where all the clocks had hands, as if in mockery of his idea, hands that moved so slowly he became convinced that the doctors had had them slowed down on purpose. As for his hands, they held each other often, as if in gratefulness for not having been cut off. They fed him against his will and wrote letters that always came out slightly differently from how he had intended them to read. At night, while he slept, they whispered to one another where they lay on his chest, like prisoners plotting their escape, though they dreaded the day he was let out. They didn’t want to be pinioned to a clock, to have to tell patrons the time in some gallery, though more likely the piece would be destroyed as soon as it was found. By this time, I was beginning to become a little uncomfortable. I couldn’t stop looking at the man’s hands. It seemed to me they had lives of their own, attached to the man’s wrists like frail fruit trees grafted onto hardy rootstock. It was like were trying to tell me something he wasn’t going to tell me, like the Morse code a prisoner of war will blink on the propaganda video to let his country know he has yet to be broken.