Patrick Lazurite

It was a five-inch Nakiri knife from Chefland. The blade was only five inches of steel. My arm was a thick intricate piston designed in heaven. I had been working it swollen at the warehouse, pushing and pulling.

Things went wrong at night. I would wake up screaming out of pain. My hands would be palms up and my dominant side, my right one, would be waving to me in horrific flutters. Each twitch it made throbbed an angry mocking dance. I was coming apart, so I ordered the knife on employee incentive making it forty bucks from a customer’s eighty.

I clocked the mileage to the hospital. I stuck my right hand in a jug of frozen mushrooms until I couldn’t feel then tried to go about my day. I dropped a pallet on my foot snapping the nail on my big toe. When I yelled, Max, my boss told me to go home and shake it off for a couple hours. He called me smart guy. When I came back after sitting in my car using acupuncture needles from eBay to make my hand a cactus there was a note in my box. It was from Max and required my signature to authorize a $95.99 dollar deduction from my next paycheck, the exact cost of the big tub of mushrooms.

When it came it was wrapped once in bubble-wrap and taped closed, no sheath, no plastic safety tip, nothing. I was mortified. I opened it and ran my fingers along the Damascus layers of steel patterned like tree rings on a stump. It was quality there was no doubt, okay no fancy case, no hubbub, but the reality of the situation was I had just bought the thing to cure my illness. It wasn’t until I had the Nakiri in my hand that I realized I was sick.

**

I used it that night to cut an onion and it went through like butter. It felt like air. I knew I would have to sort of hack through my wrist but still I was calmed at knowing it had an edge. The polycarbonate cutting board I was using had deep parallel ruts in it afterwards. Okay, okay, I am from Mars.

I called in sick at seven o’clock on a Thursday night. Max answered and although he liked to work with me on things, he was pretty firmly against my request for a three-day weekend. I liked Max and decided the hand could wait. That night at around midnight I woke up and my right hand was singing in sharp cycles of cramps. I walked into the bathroom and with my left thumb I flicked the light on. There were purplish black bruises around my knuckles and the hand was bucking wildly. The smudges looked like boxer scars but I had never been in a fight. I went to my computer that was dormant and moved around the mouse. The hand seemed to like the circular motion and it lovingly fell around the mouse, resting its nails on the gel pad. The Rx site I chose had won some awards for accuracy and, on its homepage, it had an artful wallpaper of neon brains against a black background. My symptoms led me to a thing called Rabidus-Manuumitis. It was a wasting disease that stemmed from a black spot in the brain caused by a severe loneliness. I could not believe what I was reading. It said “The afflicted area of the brain will begin to produce a hormone that negatively affects certain areas of the body. Patients have experienced said reactions from Rabidus-Manuumitis in their hands and feet as well as in their knees and elbows. Although very rare, there have also been accounts of patients having hormone bursts sent to their facial muscles causing severe discomfort and disfigurement.”  There was a picture of a woman with short waxy black hair smiling in a horrible stretchy way. I pressed the screen off.

The next day Max told me times were tough at the old homestead, that his wife was leaving him. I consoled him and explained that now we could be men about town together. I really got a kick out of the idea of us two paling around. “I got kids,” he said. No worry I said, I’m great with children. I had my arm around his shoulder to comfort him, but he looked to me in horror and my hand was clinching his polo viciously. ‘I mean, I’m not going anywhere with you’ he said. He walked over to a deck of pallets and impaled them with the pallet jack. I didn’t move until he had pressed the stack of wood against the dock wall and turned and yelled “What?!”

That night I did it. It was Friday. I watched the news. Some bad stuff was going on all over but a tax break was on its way. I went to my car and put the keys in the ignition and left the door propped open. Upstairs I laid out some wax paper on the counter and had the Nakiri gleaming with Barkeeper’s Friend. I had a last minute thought and I called the emergency room. I hung up though when the voice answered and they didn’t call me back. I called a couple other numbers and listened for a while. I called Max, he answered drunk or drugged and started screaming after like the third “hello.” I wept for him and imagined the black blob growing in his brain and wrenching his face sideways. We would be the twisty-face boys at the dock, all wacky hands and feet. Then I got the eggplant I had frozen two days ago for practice, placed one hand behind my back and cut. I decided to start with a slashing chop giving some weight behind it and to my shock that’s all it took. I got happy. I ran the diamond honing steel against each side of the blade and placed a silicone trivet in my mouth. I placed the sad hand with the dark wormlike marks on the cutting board, it turned to wave bye but I had already swung. It took two swings, the first landed on the ball of the bone. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought, but getting to the car and to the hospital was a chore.

When I got back to the house two days later the blood had dried brown on everything. I cursed myself for not using painter’s tarps. The Nakiri was tarnished in several places and having served its purpose, I merely put it in the dishwasher to rot. The problem was the hand was gone. I looked high and low in my studio apartment but no hand. There wasn’t even a trail of blood (as if the thing could walk) but still there wasn’t one.

Max grew more and more morose and talked to me less. I was consumed with the whereabouts of my severed hand so much that I was caught twice that first week just dozing off. Max would get right in my face and snap his fingers. When I awoke he would storm over to his office and rearrange the place.

I wore a cast for three months and then a prosthetic plastic cap on the nub. The doctors said it was for protection against infection. One night after I’d already got the cap put on, I was in bed at home and there was a faint tapping on the plastic end of my prosthetic. It sent little phantom lightning strikes up my arm. I dreamed for awhile that it was my hand laying next to me telling me it’s finally home, that oh man it could tell me some stories, but when I opened my eyes it was Max. He was trying to strike a match on it and failing every time. There were twenty broken matches lying around me. Finally he got one going and I saw his face and it was a melty distortion of the man I’d known. He had wildly large eyes and his eyebrows were dancing in opposite directions, his nostrils flared and relaxed, his ears winked at me.

I shoved off the bed and ran to the bathroom. Smoke from what smelled like a pipe came from under the door in waves. It smelled good, like Dad was home. I turned the light on and when I opened my eyes it was just me standing there with one hand.