Chapter 14: Two Hands
Six years in that place will take one thing away from you that nobody warns you about, and it is not what you would guess.
It is not sleep. It is not touch. It is not even privacy, exactly.
It is the ability to do two things at the same time.
Everything in there is single file.
You walk single file. You eat when it is your unit's turn. You shower in your fifteen minutes.
You are counted standing still, four times a day, doing nothing else.
Nobody in six years ever asked me to do two things at once, and by the end I had lost the wiring for it.
I found this out in the first week at Vega.
The phone rang while I was fanning a stack, and I put the stack down to listen to a phone I was not allowed to answer.
Marisol said something from the front while I was reading an index card.
I heard the sound of her voice and none of the words, and I had to ask her to say it again, twice.
She looked at me the second time. She did not say anything. She said it again slower and that was worse.
At the house it was the same.
Yolanda would ask me to pass the colander while I was drying a plate.
Both my hands would stop, like a machine waiting for the next instruction.
Roxy noticed before anybody.
“You go blank,” she said one night on the porch. “Somebody talks to you while you're doing something and you go blank.”
“I know.”
“How long you do?”
“Six.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Nineteen months and I still can't watch TV and eat.”
So I worked on it, deliberately, the way you work on a wrist after a cast comes off.
I made rules for myself, because rules are what I have instead of confidence.
Rule one. Radio on in the back room at low volume, every day, whether I liked it or not.
I did not like it. For eleven days it felt like somebody standing behind my chair.
Rule two. Answer out loud while my hands keep moving.
Even if the answer was one word. Especially if it was one word.
Rule three. Carry two things up the stairs at Bertrand House. Not one thing twice.
Rule four. Learn one number a day that was not about me.
That last one sounds like nonsense and it was the most useful of the four.
The price of a gallon of gas at the station on Route 6. The bus fare change coming in June. How many days the garden center said before seasonal hiring.
Anything that was a fact about the outside of my own head.
Money that month, since I have said I would give the numbers.
First check was three hundred twenty-one dollars and eight cents, net, on a Friday.
I could not deposit it, because I had no account, because I had no ID.
State ID was eighteen dollars and required a birth certificate.
The birth certificate was twenty-three dollars, from a county office open Tuesdays and Thursdays until three.
I took a half day I could not afford and got both.
The woman at the counter typed my name wrong the first time. I caught it and made her fix it before she pressed print.
Check cashing on Third Street took three percent.
Ninety-five to Ivy. Forty-two for a monthly bus pass. Twenty-two for shoes at the thrift on Anselm that actually fit and had laces the right length.
Thirty-four ninety-nine for a prepaid phone, plus fifteen for a card.
That was the largest thing I bought that year that I did not strictly need.
I needed it. Nobody hires a person with no number.
What was left went into a sock in the metal locker, under the certificate, on top of the six envelopes.
I want to say what the sock had in it, because it matters later.
By the last Friday in May the sock had nineteen dollars in it.
The two-hands thing came back on a Tuesday in the second week of June, and I know the day because I wrote it down.
I was stapling a set of copies at the counter with my right hand.
Marisol dropped a folder off the edge of the desk behind me and said my name in the same second.
My left hand came out and caught the folder against my hip without my head having anything to do with it, and my right hand finished the staple.
I stood there holding a folder I had not decided to catch.
Marisol said, “Nice hands.”
I said thank you and put the folder on the desk and went back to the scanner and ran two hundred pages without stopping.
Thirty-one days.
That is how long it took to get back a thing I did not know I had lost until I had lost it.