His finger tips were black.
They had bandaged his hands and given him the all clear to leave the hospital, free to roam the streets again. I would imagine it to be a terrifying sense of freedom. Not the kind that leaves you capable of growth and possibility. Rather, a sense of freedom that abandons you, leaving you increasingly aware of your smallness in a world that only seems to expand. Like groping in the dark for a wall you know will give you direction but, somehow (you can’t figure out how;why), it keeps escaping you.
To know this freedom is to wander a world filled with an agonizing wonder. Not the Disney kind of wonder, but the Stephen King kind, where you can’t be sure of where the fright will come from, but you know its coming.
When he approached me on the street--wearing all of the formal regalia of vagrancy--he was slow to speak, his voice recalcitrant in his throat. He identified himself with a name and a tattoo. His name he stated hurriedly as if he knew it was insignificant. The tattoo was the identifier that he thought most important for our meeting.
A permanent symbol on his neck meant to memorialize, commemorate, and demonstrate his unwavering commitment to military service--Semper Fi--, his marker highlighted the irony of a life commitment to a project that was never meant to protect people, just property.
The bandages on his left hand fully concealed the appendage. His right hand, oddly wrapped, exposed three of his finger and a thumb. I’d never seen fingers so black up close like that. On tv, sure. In museums where mummy’s fingers, toes, or noses were protected for our benefit, sure. But seeing it in real time and space, right here before my eyes...The whiteness of his fingernails proved the fingers to be human in fact not fiction.
“Did you go to the hospital?!” Why did I ask that...
“I went to ------, they bandaged me up.”
I felt silly for asking. The clean bandages and gauze already made that abundantly clear. What proved to be clear instead was that I was incapable of offering any real help. A man who’d purportedly protected the country from threats foreign and domestic will likely lose the fingers he used in service to me, and I’m standing here asking him if he’d done what is blatantly obvious. And he takes it because he has to--you know, beggars can’t be choosers. He needs someone to look out for him and he’s forced to settle for Captain Obvious.
I want to forget his fingers, but I can’t. They haunt me. A gross inquietude. I was happy before I saw his fingers. I want to forget his fingers, but I can’t. If I forget his fingers will I forget him? It seems the last thing he needs is to be forgotten.
“Thank you for stopping”, he said. The gratitude for my attention suggested a sincerity of his need for a limit to his freedom. He didn’t want to be forgotten.
Freedom isn’t free they say. He took up arms for freedom and it left him exposed to a cold that consumed his flesh. Amidst a thriving metropolis his struggle for freedom left him exposed, vulnerable, and unprotected.
I want to forget him, but I can’t. Freedom won’t let me.