Lending a Hand

Lending a Hand

I’ve been sitting in this airport for almost two hours now. My flight has been delayed, the child behind me keeps screaming, and my ass has fallen asleep a long time ago.

Oh, and I also have a human hand in my suitcase.

Perhaps I should back up a little bit.


It started on a Sunday morning. I had no plans of waking any time before noon, despite the fact that I hadn’t been to church in over two months. If God were truly as benevolent as my parents had led me to believe as a child, I figured He would take pity on me and not expect me to venture far from bed with a hangover as bad as the one I was experiencing.

Rapping at the door woke me up. The sun that was leaking between the cracks in the blinds seemed to be supernaturally bright for nine in the morning, like God Himself was standing outside my window, planning a personal smiting as punishment for my lax church attendance. The noise at the door continued, becoming increasingly more frantic as I twisted myself loose from the rumpled comforter. The rapper was not, as I had hoped, a Russian prostitute who had come to the wrong door, but instead my friend Kyle, his left eye swollen and purple like an overripe plum, carrying a small cooler.

Kyle shoved past me, yammering what might have been an explanation for his presence but may just as well have been a prayer in Hebrew for all I could understand. He dropped the cooler and began pacing my apartment, making jerky chops with his hands and clutching his forehead as he continued to babble.

“Just because he landed a lucky punch doesn’t make me a pussy, ok? I couldn’t let him get away with that, man, you know? Someone had to teach him a lesson, right?” He continued on his runaway train of questions without pausing to give me the chance to respond. I was debating going back to bed and seeing how long it took him to notice I was gone, when he finally deflated, collapsing on the couch.

“Are you done?” I asked, not bothering to hide my irritation at the unexpected visit. Kyle tugged at his short, greasy blond hair with both hands before replying.

“Yeah, I think so. Look, can I leave this with you?” He gestured to the cooler.

“What is it, beer you stole from Drew’s fridge?”

“No, it’s something else. If I tell you something, you gotta promise not to go all nuts on me, okay?” Kyle looked up at me, both hands still on top of his head.

Kyle wasn’t exactly a friend. He was the guy that I saw often enough at parties to warrant a “Hi, how the hell are ya?” when I saw him on the street, or when he came into the gas station at night when I was working. But it was unlike him to come to me for a favor, and my curiosity was enough to override my desire to crawl back into bed for another four hours or so.

“Well, sure, what’s up? You didn’t kill anybody did you?”

Kyle just stared at me for a minute before he leapt back up and resumed his frantic pacing.

“Look, I was at this party last night, and I ran into Ethan. Remember him?”

Ethan was the lucky man my ex-fiancé chose to cheat on me with. Yeah, I remembered him.

“Well he was drinking, and he started mouthing off about how I owed him money because of that poker game last Saturday. And yeah, I lost like two hundred, but it was all in fun, right? But now he decided he wanted his money, and he just wouldn’t get off my back about it. Followed me around talking shit about how I was trying to cheat him, rip him off. Like I had something personal against him. I just didn’t have two hundred to fork over right at that second.

“So finally I get sick of him running his mouth – he just would not leave me alone – and I told him to back off me. Except I wasn’t that polite about it. I might have called him a couple names – hell, I don’t remember. But he started yelling, and I started yelling back, and finally he hit me.”

“Ah. Is that where the black eye came from?”

“No, he hit me in the stomach. The eye is where I hit the table when I doubled
over. It was sort of embarrassing, man. He just knocked the wind out of me.”

Ouch.

“So…” I hated to interrupt a good drunken fistfight story, but I had to ask. “What does this have to do with the cooler?”

“I was really mad that he hit me. I mean, okay, I may have called him a syphilitic moose’s dick, but the violence really wasn’t necessary. I believe in talking things out. If he had just given me a couple days –”

“Kyle. Dude. What’s in the cooler?”

“You know the watch Ethan always wears? The one his parents gave him when he got into the university?”

Everyone knew Ethan’s watch. Those who met him knew the price and the brand of the thing before they learned his last name. For Ethan, the watch was just another symbol of his personal superiority. Don’t you know, a six-figure timepiece told you the time much more effectively than a Timex.

“Well I came up with this great idea to get him back. When he passed out later that night – and it was obvious that he would, he was already two-thirds of the way there anyway – I would steal his watch, sell it, and use the money I got for it to pay him back, and pocket the rest. It would have been the perfect revenge, plus it would have solved my problem of how I was going to pay him back what I owed him for the poker game.

“So I found him later passed out in the guest bedroom. I went to get the watch off, and I couldn’t get it. It was like the clasp was, like, welded shut or something. I tried to pull it off over his hand, but it wouldn’t work. His hand was just too big. So now I’m drunk and pissed off, and trying to save some dignity here, and thought how much easier it would be if I could just take his hand off.”

I barked out a laugh. “You what? How hard is it to get a watch off? Yeah, if only his hand was detachable, it your petty little revenge plot would have been so much easier.”

“Exactly! See, this is why I came to you. I knew you’d understand. So I went out to the garage and grabbed this hand saw that Ethan had, and I went back in the room.”

I froze at the word saw and stared at Kyle. “You… you grabbed a saw? Kyle… what’s in that cooler?”

“Ethan’s hand.”

My head felt as if someone had just smacked me in the back of the skull with a blunt object. I grabbed Kyle’s hand. “This isn’t funny. You didn’t really take his hand, did you?”

“Well, what was I supposed to do? I mean, he probably would have come and taken my hand if I didn’t get that money to him. And I couldn’t let him get away with humiliating me like that.”

“You cut off a man’s hand!”

“Yeah… but he hit me!”

I snatched the cooler from where it had been sitting beside the wall, reached for the lid, then dropped it hastily back to the floor. I didn’t want know. I was still asleep. Too much cheap vodka made for some crazy dreams; I knew from experience. This was just another rotten-potato-juice nightmare that would vanish when my alarm went off in the morning.

Until I woke up, however, I really, really did not want a severed hand in my living room.

“Kyle, what the fuck, man! Get it out of here! Take the… just get it out of my apartment!”

“So you’re not going to help me? Come on, I thought we were cool.”

My vision began to blur, and I wasn’t sure if it was nausea or rage. “You sawed off some guy’s hand when he was unconscious and then you come to me for help? Tell me, what leads you to believe I could offer you any words of wisdom in this situation?”

“I figured with that shit that happened between you and Ethan and Haley back in the fall, you would sympathize. I mean, didn’t he sleep with her like five times?”

“That doesn’t mean it’s okay to mutilate someone!”

“Look, can you just, like, take this for awhile? I don’t know what to do with it.”

A true friend is the man who will agree to help you hide the severed limb you drunkenly sawed from your old enemy. Unfortunately for Kyle, I was not his true friend.

“Hell no! Get it out of my apartment!”

“You can bet the cops are going to come looking for me. They’re going to
hink that just because Ethan and me argued in the same night that someone cut off his hand, that I’m the one who did it.”

“You did do it!” I was getting a little hysterical.

“Exactly. Which is why I need to get rid of this.” Kyle picked up the cooler and thrust it into my hands. A half scraping, half rattling noise came from inside. Jesus, he had gone through the trouble of putting the thing on ice. “Just for a little while. If they can’t find the hand, they can’t prove I did it. Isn’t that the way it works? Just keep it for a few days. Maybe a week.”

“No! Hell fucking no, man! Just bury it or something!” I threw the cooler back at his chest like I was passing a basketball.

“I can’t do that, some dog will dig it up. Besides, you know how hard it is to get a person’s hand? Sawing through bone isn’t easy, you know. I had to bash him a couple times when he started to wake up. Plus you have to watch how much he bleeds. I didn’t want to kill him, you know? I just wanted his watch.”

“And did you get the watch?”

“Well, no. I was so freaked out about what I was going to do about the hand that I forgot it.”

This conversation was too much to handle on less than three hours of sleep. I grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. “Get out of here!”

Kyle began to protest, but stopped, his mouth freezing open as his gaze slid from me to the doorway. I turned to see what he was looking at.

Standing outside my door were three of my neighbors, balding Mr. Crowley from next door, Mr. Rickman wide-eyed behind the frames of his bug-eyed reading glasses, and Mrs. Wilson from two doors down, her hair still in curlers. Their facial expressions, ranging from horror to disgust to morbid fascination, suggested they had been there for awhile.

“Alright, fine, I’ll go,” Kyle said, shoving past our audience. “I’ll catch a flight to Tibet or something for a few weeks. Come back when this has all died down. I bet Ethan will have forgotten about all of this in a month or so. Maybe he’ll even like having only one hand. It’ll make his other hand stronger.”

As he spoke, he backed down my hallway quickly until he came to the elevator. He jammed the button as he continued to babble, slipping between the doors before they even finished opening all the way. They slid closed, entombing him and leaving me with three horrified geriatrics to deal with.

“We’re rehearsing for a play,” I told them. “Sorry we woke you.”

I turned back into the apartment, closing the door behind me, and breathed for the first time since Kyle had first mentioned grabbing a saw. Then the breath stopped in my throat, and I started to choke.

Kyle had left me with the goddamn cooler.


Walking through the city streets carrying a box that contains a human limb is an interesting experience. Part of me was convinced that every person who walked by and glanced at the cooler knew exactly what was in there, and exactly what my dilemma was. Another part had a strange desire to snatch the hand up and wave it in the face of the jogger and his dog, or the middle-aged woman pushing a stroller, just to shake up their lives a bit and see the looks on their faces. I guess it’s similar to the desire to grab the handle of the emergency exit door on an airplane.

I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I was looking for. Probably just hoping something would jump out at me as the perfect place to stash a stolen human hand. Or maybe I’d be attacked by a pack of rabid dogs, and tossing them the hand would stop them from attacking me, and get rid of the thing. I’d be left with a greater appreciation for life, and would be back to my blissful existence where my greatest problem was the hangover – one which had still not abated.

The green and white Starbucks sign, glowing like some celestial body on the corner of Broad and 9th street seemed like an ideal place to ponder my misfortunes. A couple of my friends swore that enlightenment could be attained after a mere 8 Frappuccinos, but I’d had yet to test the theory.

The line was long, but I was in no sort of hurry. The scrawled equations of
coffee jargon covering the chalkboard behind the cashier’s head provided a welcome reprieve from real thoughts. Grande or venti? Mocha or macchiato? Would anyone notice if I tried to flush the hand down the toilet?

“Hi, what can I get for you?” the cashier asked me pleasantly.

“I’ll have – ”

“I’m sorry, you can’t bring that in here,” the kid interrupted, looking down at the cooler in my hand. “No outside food or beverages.”

“It’s not food,” I told him.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I don’t make the rules. You’ll have to leave the cooler outside.”

“Could I at least get a quad espresso macchiato to go before I leave?”

“Sure,” the kid replied. “Long night, huh?”

“The night was too short,” I replied. “It’s the morning that’s been the problem.”


3OO-plus milligrams of caffeine later, I was making my forth lap around the city with no new ideas of what to do with the cooler or its contents. I’d entertained the idea of throwing the hand into the river, but as it turns out, human limbs float. One learns something new every day.

Kyle’s mention of Tibet popped into my head, and I thought that a change of scenery wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe a few days in Cabo San Lucas would help to clear my head. I was at the point where I had consumed more shots of espresso than hours I had slept, which seemed like a dangerous ratio. Surely I was blowing things out of proportion. My situation wasn’t too bad. Plus, burying the hand somewhere in Mexico seemed like a better plan than trying to dispose of it somewhere in the same city as the man from whom it was separated.

It was a bit last minute to be buying an airplane ticket, but I managed to get one for a flight that was departing the next morning. In the meantime, there was nothing else to do but return to the apartment and kill time, trying not to picture the cooler lid sliding open, pushed by a dead blue finger, stiff with rigor mortis but irate enough at the indignity of being thrust into a 5 quart Rubbermaid ice chest for the better part of the day that it would seek to reattach itself to a warm body with a steady flow of rich, nurturing blood. Specifically, my warm, blood-rich body.

Back home, I set the cooler on the kitchen counter, the now-melted ice within sloshing. I wondered if I should get some fresh ice for the hand, and shuddered at the thought of actually having to look at it. Instead I went to the living room to watch television and hopefully take my mind off the day’s events. The set blinked on to an infomercial, something home shopping network-esque, in which the screen was filled with the elegant wrist, hand and fingers of a woman modeling a diamond bracelet. Her hand twisted to show off the sparkles of the halogen lights focused on the piece of jewelry, but all I could picture was a hand saw biting its teeth into her skin, tearing the flesh of her wrist and releasing a stream of blood as the model continued to flex her manicured fingers gracefully.

Maybe I should just take a nap.


I didn’t know how much longer I was doomed to sit in this airport, the cooler wrapped in a bath towel and jammed into my suitcase next to a couple pairs of boxer shorts and T-shirts. It was hard not to wonder whether or not I’d be able to wear any of those clothes again.

“Flight 528 to Puerto Vallarta now boarding,” came the ghostly feminine voice over the loudspeaker. My knees creaked as I straightened my body and headed to the rotating belt, waiting to whisk my luggage off to wherever. Watching the river of luggage – duffel bags, suitcases, backpacks – disappear into the hole in the wall, I stopped. The idea of tossing the suitcase to be carried off into a black hole sounded infinitely promising.

Looking from side to side, I reached down and yanked the identification tag off of my suitcase, removing my name, address and phone number from the bag and its contents. With a heft, I set the bag down on the belt next to a kid’s Dora the Explorer suitcase embroidered with the initials S. A. H. It looked surprisingly normal among the rest of the current of baggage. The suitcase floated with the rest along the belt until finally it disappeared with the rest of them, removing itself from my existence until time came for me to retrieve it when the plane landed.

I turned and shuffled quickly out of the airport, planning to stop at Sears on my way home to pick up a new suitcase. And a couple new pairs of boxer shorts.