William Gass - Eyes - Novellas and Stories

I’ve noticed you do move your hands about.

I don’t do it. God does. God moves my hands. I speak that way on his behalf.

This conversation had been so painful for Paltry that each previous word had felt pulled from him like an embedded cork, but now almost every function ceased: his throat clogged, his face burned, so his blood must have rushed into his cheeks. They are both mad, he thought. Since he was able to make such a judgment, his mind must be operating. But he wasn’t breathing. Never had he heard anything so preposterous, but such a statement, made to his face and meant for him, was like a blow to his chest.

I know that what I say must seem surprising, although our good President Muffin was ready to entertain it. However, I have become merely an instrument of God’s, or rather, not I, but my hands have become an instrument of God’s. They do his bidding and, when he’s speaking, will not mind me. Since they often make their moves while I am speaking as I am speaking now to you, some people have concluded that they are accompanying me. Two fingers pinched and lifted the loose skin about the knuckles of his left hand. I have thought you might be one of those. The musical connection, you know.

Devise’s pause made his statement a question. Paltry could not answer. He began to think, though, of what he might possibly say to this man who had become a threatening stranger — humor him, deny him, sympathize, chastise him, return the subject to his daughter’s wayward ways? say I don’t want to hear another word, bolt the room? Paltry’s weight shifted. This was sensed. One of those hands touched his arm.

As if released, Paltry stood up. He thanked God he had grown a beard, and in that moment realized who it was he had invoked — already a ghostly presence if this testimony could be believed. Always a presence according to doctrine. He might perhaps ask how Professor Devise presumed to know that the gestures he involuntarily made were those of some other spirit than his own unconscious, but this would prolong a conversation he wished had never begun. Well, there was no conversation since he hadn’t said a word. Maybe he shouldn’t aid or abet it. He would just go.

I can’t make out the signs they are sending; I cannot read their code; I just know; and I was never a believer either, before my wife was so terribly killed. Devise’s smooth firm features looked to be dissolving in a solution of sorrow. He was swimming in tears, that was it. When I told Dorothy what had happened to my hands, she became hysterical. She accused me of leaving her as her mother had, though, of course, I hadn’t, and I assured her that my mind was clear, sane through and through like — you know — paper that’s one hundred percent cotton.

Paltry found this comparison almost as unsettling as his colleague’s revelation about his hands. The man was mad. Did his hands heal? He had been touched but was it the King’s touch? He had some warts…perhaps if…He had shaken this man’s hands. What happened then? The man was mad. I shall wash my hands of him, Paltry thought. He has the whole world in those hands. They certainly were idle, but why was it only his hands? If he were a puppet, his legs should move too. When his head tilts, his eyes should roll. The madman…Why was he — Joseph Paltry — a person who endeavored to stay in the background — why was he always the accosted one? the falsely accused? the rudely confronted? After all, he had only backed around his office desk, keeping his moral distance, with Dottie in salacious pursuit; and then, rid of her one more time, all he had done…well, he had locked up all his temptations in a steel cabinet and fled to this squatters’ hole, a place forsaken by all until now when a crowd seemed to have assembled. The chairs were standing guard, the coffeepot was listening. No comment from the mug but steam. Paltry noticed that there were only six checkers left. Mostly reds.

I’ve endured the shame of her nymphomaniacal imposture; I’ve put up with all the jokes—

Jokes?

That I’m only going through the motions.

I—. Ah…Oh.

Professor Paltry, my friend, if you complain of her, we shall have to move on again, and we are running out of places to land.

I despise imposture, Paltry found himself saying.

I thought you might understand imposture very well.

Paltry did not reply because he was suddenly frightened. What was meant by that? Was there a threat? what sort? from what quarter? Devise had been last seen smothering his mug with both hands. Perhaps he was making a joke about the quality of its — what did one say? — mud. Led by his beard, Paltry retreated toward the door. Keep your eye on the hands, he implored himself. Keep an eye on.

I mean it is very hard to be honestly what we are. A finger, rooted in a fist, popped free.

Well, she better not. Dottie. Dottie better not imposture me. She crowds me, even in corridors. Where everyone can see. Paltry cracked the door and slid through. And from the building, he ran out.

Perhaps, after this, the man who spoke with his hands said less with his hands than before. Perhaps he kept his arms loaded with books. Perhaps he chose to participate in fewer social gatherings or to plan fewer accidental encounters. It was hard to tell. But for a time, at least, Dottie did nothing in class but cross her legs, and nothing after class but bob when he was carried close by circumstances.

Professor Paltry said nothing with his eyes or mouth, or evidenced anything in the way he walked, or gave his own hands leave to stray into oratory. He kept mum about God and God’s signals; he kept mum about Dottie’s — well — devices; he kept mum about his fears. Before the morning mirror he made certain to be clothed.

But he did practice flicking crumbs from the dinner table. Flick, that’s gone, he would say his hands said. Get thee to a nunnery. Flick. As if it were a picnic and there were ants on the cloth. Flick. Let the air eat you.

If it is possible for a member of the faculty to drop out of school that is what Arthur and his daughter did. He disappeared and left his colleagues with four classes adrift like bottles in mid-ocean. Rinse decided to bus one bunch to Oberlin for the Fauré Requiem and regretted the ride. Buses, when a stranger occupies every seat, can be cheap, convenient, and restful ways to travel. Unless the bus careens over an embankment and tips, the bus gives the hits, the bus does not receive them. But when a bus is transporting what is called a group, there is likely to be singing and other forms of merriment — jokes, nips, makeouts, disorderly glee — and a weakening of the leader’s position. It was unlikely that the man who spoke with his hands left by car because he didn’t seem to drive. Perhaps his hands were too busy with their obedience to God’s will. Perhaps he took a bus to Columbus and the train from there. Perhaps he had his goods shipped, whatever they were. His flute. His piccolo. His recorder. Dottie’s clarinet.

The last time Professor Paltry saw Professor Arthur Devise the man was sitting on a campus bench like an ampersand. Paltry studied, from a safe distance, those hands, but what he saw was a very ordinary clench.

Breast. Twin orbs. Check.

When I was ten I had a tin train that ran on juice. Juice was dad’s word for it. The juice came out of the wall like pus from a pimple. The juice came out of the wall if you knew where the right places were, dad said, where light sockets lit eye sockets lit valleys and hills. Then you needed to squeeze those places until you forced juice to run inside a wire — a wire that was wearing a rubber protective suit — until the wire razzled across the floor in a frenzy of energy, and, in an electric ecstasy that all the same must have hurt like hell, forced juice to speed into a weighty little black box that was otherwise filled with the darkness of closets. And there it grew, dad said, like mushrooms in a cave, on stale air and mystery; there it hung on old clothes and weary metal hangers; there it mustered its resources until it showed it had some of t