The Perversion of Hands

I first learned to shuffle cards during a brief hospital stay. A windowpane by my sick-corner showed the sky perfectly clear. The sun was doubled in pain. Nothing moved in the room but the cards, nothing sounded but the flat slap of cards in perfect rhythm. Supine, I managed to choreograph the slip of fingers and the pressing of palms until the cards defied gravity. Now I can shuffle cards on my back, over my head, upside down- it makes a great party trick. This perversion of our hands must be played with, a triumph of the tactile against an endless sea of surfaces.

I taught myself to shuffle because I was bored and my bruise was bored, a brackish pool of listless blood, anxious under my skin bruise. The shuffling came from passivity, because I had learned to prefer the kind of time that we find through touch: A driver thumbing his matchbook, a cup held aloft, a pencil placed in the hand, a sleeping dog swallowing against your touch. Between the rounds of one sleep or another, deck kept itself pressed between my hands. My fingers parted the cards even before my eyes could open and spent my waking hours shuffling the deck.The tide of the desire to touch carried me to wakefulness, my fingers coaxing the deck into lightness and movement. Shuffling for me became the twitch of blood when my body was dragged in from the ceremony of dreaming. The lip of injury reddened at its horizon, a good sign, the light flushed and swelling. In a flicker of carpals, I felt myself solidifying, returning to the carbon of what I lived.

The doctor says the pain will disappear and in time you won’t hear the wind calling from inside the bruise for more, begging for more over and over. The doctor says, “are you up are you rising are you in pain upon waking?” I wanted to reply, “imagine how your hands will change in a lifetime, innumerable folds, all the objects pressed between them.” Staring out the window and shuffling, I remember thinking : this square of outside is my only belonging, other than a deck of cards. Even though these layers, leafless branches against the sky will not save anyone from the catastrophe ahead, as a possession it is a kind of special knowledge. If touching involves knowing, you can collect the future in the dark by running your fingers along the edge of a table, a banister, a door frame, some shrubbery.