The Back of my Hands Read online

  My hands—Derrick’s hands, really—were trembling as I reached out to touch something...for the first time...with someone else’s hands.

  I picked up the paring knife I had used to cut and peel the skin. Turning it back and forth, I hardly noticed the light reflecting off the blade because I was so entranced by the way the skin on the back of my hands shifted with every subtle movement.

  I can’t tell you how excited I was, but I stopped myself because I knew I had other things to take care of, first.

  Unrolling my new skin gloves, I carefully laid them aside while I cleaned up. It took a bit of doing, but I scraped most of the flesh off the bone before grinding everything up in the garbage disposal. The bones knocked around some, making quite a racket, but I made sure it all washed down completely. Then I took my new hands—because that’s the only way I could think of them—and went into my work room.

  I tell you, I was so excited I was dizzy. I felt like I was drunk or tripping or something as I pulled the skin gloves back on over my own hands and wiggled my fingers to make sure everything fit perfectly.

  Custom made!

  Once I was ready, I picked up a pencil, tacked a clean sheet of drawing paper to the drawing board, and began to draw.

  At first I couldn’t stop staring at the back of my hands. Just like when I was a kid, I watched the skin shift and slide across my muscles and tendons as I drew. I was amazed how the skin still felt supple and alive. I could almost feel it bonding with the flesh of my own hands—my less talented hands.

  This is it! I told myself—the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life! I’m going to draw what I see inside my own bead with someone else’s hands!

  But it didn’t work out quite as I’d planned.

  The sketch I started working on that night still seemed flat and uninspired. The spark wasn’t there. I had to remind myself that I was too excited, that I was distracted by watching the way my new hands moved; but deep inside, I started to feel this gnawing worry that I still didn’t have it. The picture still looked like it was being drawn by...

  Me.

  It’ll take time, I told myself, hoping I could calm down enough to concentrate.

  That made sense.

  Right off the bat, I couldn’t expect to be able to feel and touch and control things the way Derrick did. I had to adapt to this new way of feeling and manipulating the world. Everyone’s hands are different.

  After all, art doesn’t happen overnight.

  After trying for an hour or so, I carefully peeled the skin gloves off my hands. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them afterwards. I knew if I left them out, they’d rot. I wondered how to go about drying them out, maybe tanning the skin like leather so they would retain their suppleness.

  While I was wondering what to do, the phone rang.

  It was Alice, calling from Florida. She had just gotten a call from the Maine State Police, informing her that someone had broken into the house and killed Derrick. The gardener had found him that after-noon. I tried my best to sound upset and supportive when she told me she was flying back in the morning. I even told her I’d pick her and the kids up at the airport.

  What a guy, huh?

  After I got off the phone, I toyed with the idea of wearing Derrick’s hands when I picked up Alice and the kids at the airport. I was curious to see if she’d recognize her husband’s touch when I hugged her, but I decided that wouldn’t be such a good idea. I had no idea what else to do, so I put Derrick’s hands back into the freezer for the night so they wouldn’t rot.

  The next few days were tough if only because I had to act a lot more upset about Derrick’s death than I actually was. As expected, the cops came around and asked me all sorts of questions about how Derrick and I got along, about where I was the day he was killed, and was there someone who could corroborate my whereabouts—things like that.

  I held up perfectly, I must say.

  One time, a couple of days after Derrick died, when I was heading down to the police station to be interviewed, I did wear Derrick’s hands. I was a little self-conscious about them, but no one even noticed.

  But every night, when I put them on and sat down at the drawing board, I started to get some pretty unusual sensations. My drawings didn’t appear to be any better than before, at least not to me, but there was a feeling inside the gloves, inside my own hands when I was wearing the skin that was...well, strange.

  I had finally come up with a method of preserving the skin. Every night, before I began to draw, I would take fifteen or twenty minutes to rub hand cream into the skin. I didn’t scrimp, either. I bought the most expensive kinds of hand cream available, and I spent a lot of time, working it into the thirsty pores. Over the next few days, I learned a lot about emollients and whatever. Night after night, it seemed as though the new skin—my new hands—became increasingly supple and sensitive. Touching things—anything—became a thrill. Vibrant ripples of pure energy tingled from my fingertips, up my arms and neck, all the way to the center of my brain.

  Let me tell you, it was exhilarating!

  I could barely concentrate on my drawing because I

  spent so much time simply touching things...feeling them as if for the first time.

  And that’s what it was like.

  For the first time in my life, I felt like I was really feeling things. It was just a matter of time before I could translate what I felt onto canvas and paper. Soon, I would have it. all—my brother’s talent...maybe even the fame and money I deserved even more than he did!

  But gradually—and I’m not sure when, maybe a month or so after Derrick died—something happened. It seemed as though my own hands inside the skin of Derrick’s hands were changing. At first, all of the sensations were pleasant—warm and moist, comforting, almost as if this new layer was my real skin; but after a couple of nights, the feelings turned more intense. The gentle warmth got steadily hotter until it began to feel like there was a slow-burning fire, smoldering deep beneath my skin. Every time I flexed my hands, watching the veins wiggle beneath the extra layer of skin, I gloried in the way the outermost skin—and I no longer thought of it as Derrick’s skin—stretched and pulled.

  One night I had been drawing, lost—as always—in watching the way the skin on the back of my hands moved, when suddenly my hands felt like they had burst into flames. At first I tried to ignore the pain and keep drawing. Then I tried to endure it. After a while, though, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put my drawing pencil down and started to roll one of the gloves off, the one on my right hand. Over the past few weeks, the skin had been treated so well that it usually rolled right off. This time, though, when I lifted the top edge, the skin caught. When I tried to pull it down, the skin on my own wrist started to rip.

  Let me tell you, I panicked.

  It took a great deal of effort to sit back, take a few deep breaths, and then try again. I sure as hell didn’t want to damage the hands. Where was I going to get another pair like this? I thought maybe it was just a matter of decay, but when I took the edge of the skin on the other hand and lifted it up, I once again felt my own flesh lift with it.

  This can't he happening, I told myself.

  Someone—I think it was that lady shrink I talked to a while ago—told me that I was imagining all of this. That Derrick’s skin had rotted away by then, and I was pulling at my own flesh. I listened to her, but like all that transference stuff she’d been talking about, I think she was wrong.

  I lowered my drawing light and shined it straight down onto my hands, looking closely as I tried several times to peel back the skin. Each time I got the same result. The skin wouldn’t roll down. It was fused to my own skin. Hell, I can't deny it; it looked like it had become my own skin.

  I’m telling you, I was some scared at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to accept it.

  This ain’t so bad, I told myself. In fact, isn’t this exactly what I’d wanted all along?

  Why have
hands that I have to put on and off like gloves?

  Why not make them permanent?

  Didn't I want to feel the way Derrick had felt, and be able to control my pencils and brushes the way Derrick had controlled his?

  I had wanted Derrick’s hands, had coveted them so much that I was willing to kill him to get them. So what was so wrong if his skin was permanently attached to mine?

  We’d been twins in the womb! We shared everything else right down to our chromosomes. Other than the women in our lives, there wasn’t anything we hadn’t shared!

  The only problem was, no matter what I did—whether I massaged hand cream into them or held them under a steady flow of cool water or held them inside the freezer—I couldn’t make that burning itch go away. It penetrated all the way to my bones, bringing tears to my eyes. I told myself that I’d eventually get used to it, that this was just a stage as Derrick’s skin and mine fused, but I didn’t sleep much that night.

  The pain—oh, the pain!

  It was a pure, silver singing inside my hands, and it never let up!

  That next morning, a couple of weeks after Derrick’s death, I was supposed to be at a memorial service being held in my brother’s honor at one of the art galleries in Portland. I forget the name of the gallery, but I’m sure the invitation is still on my desk, back at my apartment. Everyone was going to be there—a lot of important people in the art community as well as Alice and Derrick’s kids. I’ve been trying to feel bad for them, losing their father like that, but pity just doesn’t seem to be inside me.

  When I got out of bed that morning, hardly having slept a wink, I considered calling the gallery and canceling. I was supposed to say a few words about my brother, but I hoped Andrew—the gallery director—would understand that I was still too shattered and couldn't cope with doing it.

  Before I dialed the gallery, though, I started thinking about how suspicious canceling out might look. Sure, the cops had stopped asking me questions, apparently satisfied that I’d had nothing to do with my brother’s murder, but I couldn’t be sure. They might still think I had done it, and they might just be waiting for me to slip up so they could nail me.

  Maybe they even recognized Derrick’s hands!

  So I determined, no matter how bad the pain in my hands got, I’d go through with this farce of a memorial service.

  The problem was, I had no idea how bad it could get.

  Even before I walked into the gallery that morning and saw how many people had gathered to honor my brother, my hands were clammy with sweat and trembling deep inside. I shook hands with as few people as possible, but couldn’t help but notice the startled reactions most of them gave me when we clasped hands.

  Being one of the guests of honor, as it were, I had to sit in the front row along with Alice and the kids. Every wall in the room was adorned with Derrick’s paintings. None of them were really very good, I thought. I would do much better.

  Andrew spoke first—a bit too long, I thought—about how he had been one of the first people in the “Art world” to recognize Derrick’s extraordinary talent, and how we and all of humanity have suffered a great loss in such a senseless, brutal act of butchery. I could hear people sniffing back their tears, but I hardly paid any attention to them. I couldn’t stop looking down at my hands. They felt like they were on fire.

  I tried rubbing them, scratching them, folding my arms across my chest and pressing them against my sides—anything, but nothing would relieve the pain and burning itch. It got so intense I thought I was going to scream.

  I didn’t notice when Andrew stopped speaking, but after a moment or two, I noticed that the room had fallen silent...a hushed expectancy. I glanced around and realized that everyone was staring at me.

  A boiling blush raced up my arms and across my face. My heart was slamming hard inside my chest when I realized that Andrew must have introduced me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, preparing to stand, but I wasn't even sure my legs would support me, much less carry me all the way to the podium.

  The crowd was utterly still.

  A steady, low, throbbing sound filled my ears as I inhaled and held my breath. I took a single step forward. My shoe, scraping across the carpet, made a sound like the rough scratching of sandpaper. Cold sweat broke out on my brow and trickled down the sides of my neck.

  I wanted to scream, I tell you, but as I made my way up to the podium, I noticed a glass pitcher and several clean glasses on the small table beside the podium. The pitcher was filled with ice water.

  That gave me an idea.

  With each halting step forward, the agonizing sensation in my hands grew steadily worse until it became intolerable.

  I had no idea what to do with my hands, whether to shove them deep into my jacket pockets so no one could see them, clasp them behind my back, shake them wildly above my head, or claw at them and start screaming.

  That’s what I wanted to do—scream.

  The thought crossed my mind that if I fell completely apart, everyone in the room would think it was simply an outpouring of my grief over the loss of my brother. They would all react respectfully, with sympathy and understanding.

  But my throat was closing off. My chest and lungs were so constricted I could hardly breathe, much less scream. I was suddenly afraid that, if I opened my mouth and tried to say a few words—something about my dear, departed brother--deathly cold hands would clasp around my throat and begin to choke me.

  I had jotted down a few notes of what I wanted to say, only because I was afraid of what I might say if I started rambling. The problem was, the sheet of paper with my notes on it was in the breast pocket of my jacket, and I didn’t dare reach for it. I was suddenly fearful that I would no longer be able to control my hands. The skin—Derrick’s skin—had long since dissolved into my own hands, fusing with my hands.

  It had become me.

  I glanced down at my hands and was suddenly quite convinced that I didn't even recognize them.

  They were someone else’s hands!

  They really were Derrick’s hands!

  I know it isn’t possible. You’re not the first person to tell me it was all in my mind; but even if it was, it was nonetheless true!

  The silence in the room continued to pulsate. When someone toward the back of the room cleared his throat, it sounded like distant cannon shot. Somehow, though, I made it to the podium. Leaning forward and gripping the edge of the podium with both hands, I forced a smile, but I could tell by the way the skin stretched around my mouth that it was more of a grimace. As if moving by its own volition, my right hand reached up and inside my jacket, and clasped the sheet of paper in my pocket. The heat inside my jacket was intolerable, as if I had just reached into a blazing furnace. I almost cried out. Bone-deep tremors shook my body as I unfolded my notes and, without looking at them, spread the page on the podium.

  Glancing to my left, I once again saw the pitcher of water. I wanted more than anything to plunge my hands into that icy water to soothe the pain, but I stood there, immobile.

  I could tell that the audience was getting restless. It was awkward for them to see me so obviously distraught, but it was just as obvious—to me, at least—that they didn’t see the real reason why I was so upset.

  I nearly fainted when I lowered my gaze and looked down at my hands, holding the sheet of paper in place. The backs of my hands were discolored a sickly yellow. They were wrinkled like an old man’s hands. Fora dizzying instant, I felt as though I was looking at my hands through a huge magnifying glass. Every hair, every pore and blemish, every vein and tendon stood out in stark relief. The feeling that these were not my own hands—that they were Derrick’s—grew terrifyingly stronger. I thought that—somehow—maybe Derrick was still alive and standing behind me, reaching around and manipulating things for me.

  I tried to push these thoughts away, cleared my throat. With great effort, I began to speak.

  “I want to...thank you all for...being here today,” I said,
forcing my grimacing smile to widen.

  I locked eyes with Alice, sitting there with her children in the front row. Her expression as she looked at me was soft and sympathetic. I could see that she was on the verge of crying, but she nodded to me, offering her silent support.

  The choking sensation in my throat was growing steadily stronger. When I reached up to loosen my collar, I was suddenly fearful that my hands—Derrick’s hands—were going to clasp me by the throat and start to squeeze until they choked the life out of me.

  I lowered my eyes and shook my head, taking a moment to compose myself. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, but it was like striking a match against a sunbaked sidewalk. A line of flames seemed to erupt across my brow.

  It was intolerable, I tell you!

  I wanted to say something—anything—just a few words about how much I mourned my brother, what a tragic loss his death was to me and his family and friends, but I couldn't focus on the few notes in front of me. All I could think about was the burning pain that was flaming inside my hands and spreading up my arms.

  I looked again at the pitcher of water and knew what I had to do. You see, I knew then—or if I had known it before, I finally admitted it to myself then—that these really weren't my hands.

  They truly were Derrick’s!

  His dry, desiccated skin may have rotted away, but some part of my dead brother had fused with me, and this small part of him—the one small part I thought I could possess and control—was not under my control.

  Maybe I would have been better off if I had killed myself, had strangled myself right there in front of that crowd.

  It would have ended it all, and maybe the people there would have thought that I had been unable to contain my grief and had finally snapped.

  But that’s not what happened.

  I didn’t plunge my hands into that pitcher of ice water, either.

  I had tried that before, and I knew that it wouldn’t work.

  No, what I did—well, you probably read about it in the papers, but what I did was take the water pitcher and smash it against the side of the podium. I don’t remember hearing the sound of breaking glass or feeling the cold dash of water. I sensed some reaction from the crowd, but not much. I was lost inside a cocoon of silence where there was just the raging roar of my breathing and the unbearable burning knowledge that my hands were not my own.