On his back in the withering grass, Lefty watched the sun slam through the home layer. Thin to the point of vanishing. Everything.
And the chant was growing louder.
Sweat pushed into the fabric of Lefty’s tunic – for years already stained – and into the mesh confines of his wrong glove. He began to massage the glove’s imprisoned fingers with his other hand. Thumb at the base knuckle and rotate: eight tiny circles. Then, the thumb slides up the finger and clicks. Maybe it clicks again. Finish with ten depressions of the palm.
Now the drums.
And Lefty lay with his questions.
The creaking weight of them. It wasn’t easy to shift his mind from the presence. The present. And that’s really what a person needs. But distraction won’t be told. Distraction does what it wants.
So, Lefty lay in suffocation beneath this new presence: a sneaking suspicion that everything he’d been led to believe was a lie. And the questions. One question more than any other: why could he feel his right hand?
Only thirteen and he could feel the ache. Most people didn’t awaken to their right hand until they were scheduled to be sent home. Lefty looked back up at the sky, letting the sun do its incendiary magic. He closed his eyes.
Sensations in his right hand for months; and to Jojo, last night, a whisper, “I’m bending…”
It had seemed the only thing left to do. They already knew anyway.
And how did they know? This sort of thing developed secretly. Like a daydream behind the eyes. An unspoken word. Many didn’t even know until the black light lifted them home. Indeed, Lefty had barely known himself until he’d placed the cue ball.
It had been one of those nights. A handful of squares stolen from the dispensary, then the drift of unscheduled hours, and finally the rhythmic allure emanating from the center of Commune One – the Oratory House – promising tantalizing festivities, impossible to resist. So, Lefty had joined a game and with the crescendo of imitation ivory crackling throughout the hall, he’d felt his pulse rebel. Not worried, though. Not yet. The speeches never started until midnight anyway, and there would have been time to let the squares wear off beforehand. He wouldn’t have let words give him away.
He wouldn’t have the chance. In the end, it was his body that betrayed him, as it was and is and always will be, human bodies being fueled by opinion, the undiluted self. For Lefty, all of this expressed in the sudden decision of his right hand.
Of course, as soon as he’d lifted the cue ball in his wrong glove, everything had gone off the rails. The other guys, Jojo among them, had stared, then laughed, then stared again.
And Lefty hadn’t even noticed the weighted silence until the ball was settled on the felt of the table with the dexterous precision and sensitivity of the wholly bent.
And now the drum line crested the hill. Lefty turned his head, to rest his cheek against the scorched grass. He could see the green of the hill, and their masks rising above it into sky. Idols on a ridge, blurred to holiness by the heat. He didn’t try to lift his head; there was nothing to be done. He knew they would surround him, that others were already on the other side of the hill too. All sides.
Well.
Lefty elbowed his way into a sitting position, his legs stiff and meaningless. There would be no running. The circle around him was nearly complete. The chant entered its final lines, and then it was over, and the drums were the only sound for another breath, and then all was quiet.
The words of the chant coalesced in Lefty’s mind:
bent is broken,
bent is wrong,
bent was right way all along
He knew he should stand. He knew he should say something in his own defense. Others before him, the ones in the histories, had argued with words. It was through reading their language and their ideas in those early weeks that he’d finally begun to understand the ominous power of his right hand – the power and its ramifications. Now, no words would come.
Inch by inch, the circle compressed; the figures cloaked and masked in the violent white of home. Lefty sat like a fallen toy with his legs out in front him, his head bowed, and his hands resting palm up on the ground, until the shadows appeared from above, flickering along the length of his body. The shadows of arms and hands and fingers reaching for him.
And then the black light pulsing from the sky above, emanating from a new tear in the home layer. But it was more than a tear, of course. It was a doorway of sorts. It was Lefty’s goodbye. The black light dripped, sluggish and ravenous.
In the end, it was his body, again, that betrayed his better judgment; his treacherous hand sought justification. Wriggling in the wrong glove. Bent. Bent is broken, bent is wrong. He was bent. Whatever they did to him next, he deserved it.
Right?
And then before the black light dropped those final meters, the hand decided. Beneath the beckoning shadows of the High Priest’s greedy fingers, Lefty’s rebel hand reached out and took hold of the weapon, a gun – something he’d only ever read about. Still shackled by the wrong glove, his fingers couldn’t catch the trigger, but with a thrust into the stomach of the High Priest, Lefty now had their attention. The circle shuddered, and Lefty jammed the gun deeper into the folds of flesh and tunic, and the High Priest squealed.
“Use it not! A moment – ” the man cried, and Lefty certainly considered it, even as he twisted his hand below the grip and fired, thumb squeezing the trigger, the gun held like a glass aloft and the blood like wine, spilling down his right hand, arm, shoulder. First silence, then the howling of the company and staggered steps backwards. And no time to waste. The present disintegrating into distraction.
Decision reestablishing direction.
Because every broken second is the start of something new.
Lefty was standing and pushing through the circle which had grown three rows deep, leading with the gun in his right hand, jabbing at faces behind masks. He broke out and stumbled heavily to where the hill began its steepest descent, and he spun around, switching the gun into his left hand and aiming.
Behind him the black light had landed, and the last thing Lefty saw in turning was the body of the High Priest drifting up through the tunnel of darkness, a demented puppet rid of its strings. Most of the crowd crouched or kneeled with their hands over their heads, and some looked over their shoulders to watch the corpse rise home.
And some did neither, but stood instead, mute and gazing at him from behind their veils, and it was at these that Lefty fired a final time before turning to run.