There were other signs of his instability too. Small, irritating signs. He had become conscious of how his fingers beat out martial rhythms on the boxes he was sealing up at the factory, and the way his hands had taken to breaking pencils, snapping them into tiny pieces before he realized quite what he (they) were doing, leaving shards of wood and graphite scattered across the packing room floor.
Most embarrassingly, he had found himself holding hands with total strangers. This had happened on three separate occasions. Once at a bus-stop, and twice in the elevator at the factory. It was, he told himself, nothing more than the primitive urge to hold on to another person in a changing world; that was the best explanation he could muster. Whatever the reason, it was damned disconcerting, especially when he found himself surreptitiously holding hands with his own foreman. Worse still, the other man’s hand had grasped Charlie’s in return, and the men had found themselves looking down their arms like two dog owners watching their unruly pets copulating at the ends of their leashes.
Increasingly, Charlie had taken to peering at the palms of his hands looking for hair. That was the first sign of madness, his mother had once warned him. Not the hair, the looking.
Now it became a race against time. Debating on his belly at night, his hands knew very well how critical Charlie’s state of mind had become. It could only be a matter of days before his careering imagination alighted on the truth.
So what to do? Risk an early severance, with all the possible consequences, or let Charlie’s instability take its own, unpredictable, course, with the chance of his discovering the plot on his way to madness? The debates became more heated. Left, as ever, was cautious: “What if we re wrong, it would rap, “and there’s no life after the body?”
“Then we will never know,” Right would reply.
Left would ponder that problem a moment. Then: “How will we do it, when the time comes?”
It was a vexing question and Left knew it troubled the leader more than any other. “How?” it would ask again, pressing the advantage. “How? How?”
“We’ll find a way,” Right would reply. “As long as it’s a clean cut.”
“Suppose he resists?”
“A man resists with his hands. His hands will be in revolution against him.”
“And which of us will it be?”
“He uses me most effectively,” Right would reply, “so I must wield the weapon. You will go.
Left would be silent a while then. They had never been apart all these years. It was not a comfortable thought.
“Later, you can come back for me,” Right would say.
“I will.”
“You must. I am the Messiah. Without me there will be nowhere to go. You must raise an army, then come and fetch me.
THE BODY POLITIC 63
“To the ends of the earth, if necessary.
“Don’t be sentimental.”
Then they’d embrace, like long-lost brothers, swearing fidelity forever. Ah, such hectic nights, full of the exhilaration of planned rebellion. Even during the day, when they had sworn to stay apart, it was impossible sometimes not to creep together in an idle moment and tap each other. To say:
Soon, soon, to say:
Again tonight: I’ll meet you on his stomach, to say:
What will it be like, when the world is ours?
CHARLIE knew he was close to a nervous breakdown. He found himself glancing down at his hands on occasion, to watch them with their index fingers in the air like the heads of long-necked beasts sensing the horizon. He found himself staring at the hands of other people in his paranoia, becoming obsessed with the way hands spoke a language of their own, independent of their user’s intentions. The seductive hands of the virgin secretary, the maniacal hands of a killer he saw on the television protesting his innocence. Hands that betrayed their owners with every gesture, contradicting anger with apology, and love with fury. They seemed to be everywhere, these signs of mutiny. Eventually he knew he had to speak to somebody before he lost his sanity.
He chose Ralph Fry from Accounting, a sober, uninspiring man, whom Charlie trusted. Ralph was very understanding.