Sitting in the auditorium, I watched Dougie’s hand flex.
Just stop.
An Anthro Grad student droned on about Yanamamos at the lectern as Dougie's hand shot out. Between thumb and forefinger, it snatched a long copper-red tress from the girl sitting in front of me.
I wrenched the thumb back, forcing the hand to release the hair. As she turned, I grabbed my left wrist and pulled Dougie’s hand under the little flip-down desktop. The hand didn’t like being subverted and it flopped around, making a terrible racket.
None of the other students seemed to notice, except for the redheaded girl who almost lost some hair. I always sat near the back of the big room just in case the hand started acting up. Like now. She had to go and sit right in front of me.
The chick looked back and shushed me, like she really wanted to hear this lecture. I smiled helplessly. What could I do? It wasn’t my hand. I mean sure, it was on my wrist, but it wasn’t “mine”.
You see, it’s really complicated, but I was a twin. I wasn’t born a twin; my brother, Dougie, he died in utero. My Mom didn’t agree. She had assured me there was no Dougie. Never had been. She tried to convince me that I had been the only occupant of her uterus. She even showed me faded copies of ultrasounds to prove that I was a singleton. They didn’t convince me; he could have been hiding. Dougie was shy. I think that’s part of why his hand acted out so much.
Overcompensation.
Her weak proof and incessant insistence aside, I'd always known the hand on my wrist wasn’t mine, but instead belonged to my twin. It wasn’t until I was six, sitting in the library with a big picture book of circus sideshow performers—freaks they called them—that I figured out how. There was this one grainy picture of a guy with his twin sticking out of his own torso. There was no head on the little body in doll clothes, but there were these little hands and feet. That’s when I realized how Dougie’s hand could be on my body. We were conjoined twins and part of him ended up on me. No idea where the rest of him went, I just got the hand.
It dug into the denim over my leg. It’d done this before. I had dozens of scars as proof. I pushed the hand down and held it with my thighs. Risky. The last time I’d done that, it had gotten hold of a testicle and I had to go to the emergency room. Imagine trying to explain that your brother’s hand had squeezed your left nut almost to popping. ER doc didn’t believe me. Of course, Dougie’s hand had behaved then, giving a cutesy little finger wave.
Sometimes I really hated my brother’s hand.
I slipped my belt off and wrapped it around the offending wrist. The denim was taut against my leg, the nails clipped short, so all it could do was make loud scratching sounds. The redheaded Princess got up, gave me a nasty look, and moved across the aisle. I guess it looked to her like I was going for a really good sphincter scratch. How could I explain that it was my angry dead brother’s hand acting out?
I continued to wrap the belt around my wrist. It took too long to slide the belt through the buckle and pull. I just wrapped tighter and tighter, making an awesome tourniquet. When it slowed down, I could tell the hand was going numb.
Finally, it stopped and I tried to concentrate on the lecture.
The hand hadn’t been this obtrusive in over a year. When I was young I could keep it under control. Until I went through puberty, then there were some really embarrassing, borderline incestuous, public episodes. I tried to explain to my parents about how it was the hand. Dougie’s hand, not me.
I thought they understood when they agreed to take me to a specialist. I was thinking I’d see someone that specialized in conjoined twins, but Dr. Schlesinger was a psychiatrist.
How in the world could someone trained to deal with the human mind get Dougie’s hand under control? Hands don’t have brains. I pointed this out to him at our first session, and several sessions after. I tried everything, showing him how Dougie’s hand didn’t look anything like my hand. The pinky finger on Dougie's hand was two-thirds as long as mine. And if that wasn’t proof enough, I showed him how all the lines on the two palms were different lengths.
The hand behaved through every session with him though, and went nuts on the drive home after.
Schlesinger first told my parents I was lying to cover my impulse control issues. I spent three months sitting around a hospital rec room with a pack of chronic masturbators. I learned a lot, but it didn't help me with Dougie's hand.
Then he said I suffered from Body Integrity Identity Disorder. I suppose that conclusion sounded simpler than mine. But I didn’t have any symptoms like the BIIDs-kids in my new support group. I didn’t ‘want’ to be an amputee or lust after cut off limbs. I just had this hand that didn’t belong to me, and I wanted it to behave.
The hand didn't behave when I was prescribed the anti-psychotics either, but I was real mellow about it. Schlesinger kept asking why I named the hand Dougie. I explained that Dougie was my brother's name. The hand didn't have a name; it was just Dougie's hand. What else could I call it? That's when I realized you don't have to be smart to be a doctor and decided to go pre-med in college.
Schlesinger switched to apraxia, alien hand syndrome, often caused by brain damage. I said "Bullshit!” It was my dead brother's hand and that was all there was to it.
MRIs showed no aneurysms, embolisms, or strokes. No indication of progressive neurological disease or trauma. In short, no physical evidence for my alleged apraxia.
But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, is it?
I got SSRI's, and then back to anti-psychotics. A cocktail of both seemed to help me get Dougie's hand under control. The drugs never made me feel like it belonged to me, but it behaved. Until my second month away at college, that is.
This month.
I’d gone off the resperidone because it interfered with my freshman year love life. I mean, dorms are all about hooking up right? But not with Mr. Flaccid they aren't. Chemically-induced limpidity sucked.
Walking through the crowded corridor, I looked at the blue extremity. The only earthly remains of my dead twin brother.
I gave the hand a shake and pulled the rabbit's foot out of my pocket. Schlesinger told me to have Dougie's hand hold something and it wouldn't act out. I used to use a pen but it made me feel like a Bob Dole wannabe, so I switched to the rabbit's foot. I think it was really a forefoot, so if the rabbit were a person, it would be a hand, not a foot. Dead Dougie's hand holding some dead rabbit's hand. Freaky.
“Behave, Dougie’s hand.”
It didn’t respond so I unwound the belt. The hand was thoroughly limp.
I stuffed the belt in my pack and closed Dougie's fingers around the lucky charm.
I left before the lecture ended and pushed out into the cool fall air to ponder my quandary. Go back on the drugs and no wood. Stay off the drugs and spend all my time explaining about the hand.
It started to twitch. I stopped and pulled an oven mitt out of my pack and stuffed it over the hand. I pulled out the roll of electrical tape and peeled enough off with my teeth to get it started around the base of the mitt. It looked hella-stupid, but usually helped.