At her side Charlie moved in his sleep. Just his hands, twitch mg away. She looked at his face. He was positively cherubic in sleep, looking younger than his forty-one years, despite the white flecks in his sideburns. She liked him enough to say she loved him, she supposed, but not enough to forgive him his trespasses. He was lazy, he was always complaining. Aches, pains. And there were those evenings he’d not come in until late (they’d stopped recently), when she was sure he was seeing another woman. As she watched, his hands appeared. They emerged from beneath the sheet like two arguing children, digits stabbing the air for emphasis.
She frowned, not quite believing what she was seeing. It was like watching the television with the sound turned down, a dumb show for eight fingers and two thumbs. As she gazed on, amazed, the hands scrambled up the side of Charlie’s carcass and peeled the sheet back from his belly, exposing the hair that thickened toward his privates. His appendix scar, shinier than the surrounding skin, caught the light. There, on his stomach, his hands seemed to sit.
The argument between them was especially vehement tonight. Left, always the more conservative of the two, was arguing for a delay in the severance date, but Right was beyond waiting. The time had come, it argued, to test their strength against the tyrant and to overthrow the body once and for all. As it was, the decision didn’t rest with them any longer.
Ellen raised her head from the pillow, and for the first time they sensed her gaze on them. They’d been too involved in their argument to notice her. Now, at last, their conspiracy was uncovered.
“Charlie. ..” she was hissing into the tyrant’s ear, “stop it, Charlie. Stop it.”
Right raised index and middle fingers, sniffing her presence.
“Charlie she said again. Why did he always sleep so deeply?
“Charlie…” she shook him more violently as Right tapped Left, alerting it to the woman’s stare. “Please Charlie, wake up.”
Without warning, Right leaped; Left was no more than a moment behind. Ellen yelled Charlie’s name once more before they clamped themselves about her throat.
In sleep Charlie was on a slave ship; the settings of his dreams were often B. de Mille exotica. In this epic his hands had been manacled together, and he was being hauled to the whipping block by his shackles to be punished for some undisclosed misdemeanor. But now, suddenly, he dreamed he was seizing the captain by his thin throat. There were howls from the slaves all around him, encouraging the strangulation. The captain-who looked not unlike Dr. Jeudwine-was begging him to stop in a voice that was high and frightened. It was almost a woman’s voice; Ellen’s voice. “Charlie!” he was squeaking, “don’t!” But his silly complaints only made Charlie shake the man more violently than ever, and he was feeling quite the hero as the slaves, miraculously liberated, gathered around him in a gleeful throng to watch their master’s last moments.
The captain, whose face was purple, just managed to murmur “You’re killing me before Charlie’s thumbs dug one final time into his neck and dispatched the man. Only then, through the smoke of sleep, did he realize that his victim, though male, had no Adam’s apple. And now the ship began to recede around him, the exhorting voices losing their vehemence. His eyes flickered open, and he was standing on the bed in his pajama bottoms, Ellen in his hands. Her face was dark and spotted with thick white spittle. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth. Her eyes were still open, and for a moment there seemed to be life there, gazing out from under the blinds of her lids. Then the windows were empty, and she went out of the house altogether.
Pity, and a terrible regret, overcame Charlie. He tried to let her body drop, but his hands refused to unlock her throat. His thumbs, now totally senseless, were still throttling her, shamelessly guilty. He backed off across the bed and on to the floor, but she followed him at the length of his outstretched arms like an unwanted dancing partner.