I startled awake and became immediately aware of a few things all at once: my mouth and throat felt like they were made of sandpaper and I wasn’t able to sit up because something was holding me down.
“Whoa there, Tay,” said a voice and gentle pressure of a hand on my chest. Then to someone else, “Go grab the doctor and tell him Taylor’s awake!” Back to me: “You’re okay, Taylor. You’re okay…”
“Why—” I started but my voice felt like fire coming up my sandpaper throat. I coughed.
“Shh…”
“Maj?” I croaked out.
“You got it, Tay. I’m Marjorie. Take it easy. You’ve been out a while…”
I heard people enter the room. “Good afternoon, Mister Nichols,” said a voice I didn’t know. She sounded confident, though. “Do you know where you are?”
I took in all the clues my mind had been processing during these first minutes of consciousness. I sniffed and smelled… myself. Eew. But also antiseptic. And… was that the annoying beeping of a heart monitor? “Hosp—” I coughed again, swallowed roughly and tried again, “Hospital?”
“Excellent,” the new voice said. “Do you know why you’re here?”
I thought hard and just shook my head. I tried to think past the thick fogbank that obscured anything in my brain. Maj and I were going somewhere in my car… “Acc…accident?”
“Do you remember the accident?”
So there was an accident! Crap! “Maj?!”
“I’m right here, buddy,” she patted my shoulder. “I’m okay.”
“What… happened?”
There was a pause – I didn’t like that pause. It said there was something no one wanted to tell me.
“We were T-boned,” Maj said. Even though I had no memory of it, I involuntarily winced. “Yeah, pretty bad. Driver’s side…” another pause. “Your side,” she said, her voice cracking.
“You’ve been unconscious for a while, Mr. Nichols. There was some swelling in your brain that we were most concerned about. You’re still pretty heavily drugged, but we removed the breathing tube yesterday and we’ve been easing you back.
I nodded but couldn’t process that the words pertained to me.
“We’ve been waiting for you to come around, buddy,” Maj said, patting my right shoulder.
I reached up to pat her hand back… but I couldn’t. My heart beat faster. Why couldn’t I move my arm? I looked towards my left arm, and I heard Maj’s breath catch.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “Your arm was crushed in the accident. We couldn’t save it.”
I was aware of the beeping heart monitor machine speeding up even as it started to sound fainter for some reason.
“Tay?” Maj said from a great distance away.
“He’s going under again,” the doctor said.
The next time I woke up I still didn’t remember the accident, but I remembered the conversation. They must have really lightened the drugs because my brain felt less foggy. I opened my eyes and noticed it was dark – well, as dark as a hospital room ever gets. I was alone. I moved my right arm and was gratified to feel the tactile blankets and side of the bed – actually feel them. So, my right arm was still there. There was an IV line in it, but it was still there. I groped around and felt a bedside table and found what I was looking for – my glasses. The hospital room comfortingly resolved in my bespeckled vision. But after a quick look around at my surroundings, my gaze fell on the mass of bandages just below my left shoulder. I couldn’t look away. I don’t know how long I stared, but I must have fallen asleep because I woke blinking away the sun streaming into the room.
A nurse drew the curtain and then noticing I was awake said, “Good morning! Glad to see you’re awake! I’ll let your doctor know,” and quickly left.
I looked down at the bandages around my left shoulder and gasped – the bandages were still there, but my arm was there! I tried to flex my left hand but nothing. I tried to bend the arm… but nothing again. But it was there. My arm!
The doctor came in and I didn’t wait for her to say anything. “My arm!”
“I know, Mister Nichols, it’s hard to adjust to the idea that—”
“It’s there!” I said, pointing to it with my right hand.
A puzzled look came over her face for a moment, and then realization. “Mister Nichols, there’s something called ‘phantom limb syndrome’ where sometimes when we lose an arm or a leg we have the feeling that it’s actually still there even though it’s not.”
I looked to her, then back at the very corporeal arm. “But… it’s right there!” I said. Then, as if cued to movement I watched as my left arm bent and flexed my fingers experimentally, then the hand rotated around and the fingers contracted. Well, most of the fingers. My hand just flipped me off.
The next few days were a blur – no, I mean seriously, I was still on some pretty heavy drugs. But what I remember very clearly was my damn broken ribs. Wow, those hurt right through the drugs. But aside from the broken ribs was the arm. After getting the bird from an appendage you thought had loyalty to you, I realized it wasn’t actually my arm. And, honestly, flipping me off was one of the kindest things it did. In those following days, the arm, in no particular order, tried to choke me, slap me, poke my eyes Three Stooges-style, tried to knock over a full glass of water, grope Maj regularly, and once reached very angrily towards a butter knife – how did I know it was angrily reaching for the knife? I just knew. I just knew. But none of those attempts came of anything because this wasn’t a phantom limb, after all – it was a ghost limb.
I was discharged from the hospital, but that just meant recovering at home. I talked to my boss and HR and we talked about long-term disability and my job still being there, all the while I stared at my ghost arm making jerking off gestures and twiddling its thumb. When the call ended I said to my arm, “You know twiddling one thumb looks really stupid.”
It flipped me off.
“Wait, you can hear me?”
It made gesture that I could only assume was supposed to be a light bulb moment. The fist nodded in a surly way. Then the hand started moving, the finger tracing something in the air.
“What are you doing? What’s that… Is that an ‘I’?”
Thumbs up.
“M…J…U….S…T…A…N…A…R…M…. I’m just an arm? Yeah, obviously!”
The fist clenched angrily.
“Oh, you’re not done.”
The fist shook negative, then started drawing letters in the air.
“M…Y…B…O…D…Y…I…S…O…U…T…T…H…E…R…E. Your body is out there?
The hand pointed far away.
“Ah, like out in the world somewhere?”
The fist nodded.
It took a lot more spelling, but the arm told me that he lost his arm, too – duh, right? But unlike my me, he bled out.
“Wait, so you lost an arm, died… and now I have your arm, but your armless ghost is stuck here, too?”
It spelled out “I’m not armless. I’ve still got one arm, dipshit.”
“Really? You needed to spell out ‘dipshit’?”
It flipped me off again but was dancing the middle finger around in glee.
“Great,” I said, “You’re very disarming.” I started laughing. The arm tried to stick the finger up my nose.
I explained the situation to Maj, and then I explained it again more slowly. And then she checked my prescription bottles to make sure I wasn’t taking too much, and I explained it all one more time. She finally came around to the idea that we were going to have to find the arm’s body, but it would still be another week before I felt well enough to ride in the (rental) car. During that time, the hand signed everything it knew about where we could find its body.
When I finally climbed into the passenger seat of the car, I’ll admit I was feeling pretty nervous – less about taking a ghost arm to search for it’s one-armed body like some weird spectral version of The Fugitive and more about going out in the car. I was pretty drugged up on the way home from the hospital, so this was my first real outing since the accident. I still didn’t have any memory of what happened, but I had seen the police photos and just being out brought the liminal images of the crushed cars into my brain – like phantom memories, almost. The arm, maybe sensing my apprehension, tried patting my leg comfortingly. I mean, the hand passed right into my thigh every time, so that was weird, but it was a nice gesture.
Maj drove us through town to the industrial area, past idling trucks at loading docks. The sun was nearing the horizon and most of the sprawling parking lots were deserted of their daily occupants. As we started to get closer, the hand started pointing right and left. I called out to Maj and she turned the appropriate way until we found ourselves at a non-descript cement block of a building, the gray stone finish streaked with years of dirty rain and smog. The arm pointed wildly towards the back of the building. I directed Maj and we found ourselves by the back loading dock.
I don’t know if I saw him first, or the arm did – I mean, I guess the arm was seeing it through my eyes? I’m not really sure how that worked, but I saw a figure searching near the enormous dumpster. Only as we got closer, I could see it wasn’t exactly a dumpster, it was an industrial-sized trash compactor. And the figure was missing an arm. I didn’t need the arm to spell this one out for me…
“Maj, he’s here,” I said.
“He?”
“The arm’s owner. Handler?”
“Handler! Ha! I see what you did there…”
The arm tried to slap me.
I opened the door and started out. The ghost looked up and our eyes met. We walked slowly towards each other. We stopped a few feet apart. He was staring at the arm – his arm.
“I don’t know how, but I managed to end up with your arm.”
He looked up at me and nodded. We were silent for what seemed like a long time.
“I’m sorry, I don’t really know what else to say. Should we finish this, err, arms deal?”
The ghost rolled his eyes.
The arm reached out and the man reached out with his right hand. When the two hands met, I felt something like a deep electrical shock right in the bandaged left arm socket. At the same time the space around the man lit up in brilliant, shimmering light. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the man smiling, holding his now-attached left arm with his right hand, flexing the fingers of his left hand and grinning broadly. He looked up at me and mouthed “Thank you” before the light flared blindingly and then winked out completely leaving the area seemingly darker than before.
“What the hell was that?” Maj asked coming up next to me.
“You know,” I smiled, “Just arming a ghost.”
“Ugh,” she groaned. “I think I need some of your drugs!”
We started back towards the car. “Are you saying you can’t hand-le this?”
“Keep going, Tay, and I’m personally going to take off your other arm.”
She was joking, but the thought made me think about my missing arm for a moment. It felt… gone. I was sad for the loss of my arm, of course, but I was glad that I wasn’t feeling the phantom limb.
I’d had just about enough of phantom limbs…
