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When I was told someone wanted an interview with me, I was anticlimactic in my acceptance. My schedule had been sparse that week, so it was easy to squeeze in David McHammon, a man known by his friends to value sanity and find comfort in placid normality. In fact, it was for this reason that he wished to play twenty questions with me on his show.

"Well, it's more accurately my network's show, they set up everything. I'm just a TV and radio personality, but lately they've been throwing crazies left and right at me. You'd think I could have more say against a producer who looks like Spock," he gave the Vulcan hand wave from the old TV show, "but there I was sitting with this bizarre person with an even more bizarre name that was just a string of words associated with the letter 'p'." David calmed a bit as I offered my polite attention. It felt to me as if he was the one being interviewed (although I asked no questions) in that cramped little street-side café over coffee and pinkish bits of what resembled herring. It was a quiet morning.

"I'm just glad I have the opportunity to do a traffic report here and a news bulletin there. I just want to maintain my integrity, you know?"

"Well," I crossed my arms, "Jerry Springer showed us that society no longer favors integrity or modesty. He once interviewed politicians and the sort, but now he entertains teenagers with his fraternity-quality humor. Of course, one theory is that from politicians, his new guests are a step up." We chuckled.

"Yes, but now he's just a kitschy TV show."

"In the history of human existence, he has just as much significance as Henry Kissinger or my postman." David nodded in reply, and then it was down to business.

Even though the chair was plush, I felt a stifling discomfort on stage as I began to answer personal questions in front of a faceless audience. "Of course, once you've seen one pop-culture college, you've seen them all. I transferred out of John's Hopkins to a community college just outside Toronto, much to the chagrin of my professor-teachers."

"How perplexing. Just why would you make such a decision?"

"I wanted an education, not a degree emblazoned in gold stamped across my chest. Besides, it doesn't matter now that I'm in my life's work anyway."

"Ah, yes, you have quite the hard-working resume behind you. Your experience ranges from veterinary medicine to gynecology. But what is it you do now?" He already knew the answer, this was for the audience.

"I am a manosurgeon, a doctor who specializes in hands." The interrogation was pricking like pins and needles at this point. I was uncomfortable having to strain to keep hold of my modesty.

"Ah, that's quite interesting as well, that you went from more medicinal practices to a type of cosmetic surgery."

"Actually cosmetics is barely part of it. Hands are humanity's most complicated and vital tools. There is a lot of mechanical intricacy that factors into it, even more so than something as elementary as neurosurgery.

"In fact," I continued, "there is more to do with our chromosomes and intrinsic personality in our hands than our brains. Hands hold the key to our minds as well."

"Can you explain?"

"'The toils of our hands'," I began with a quote, "make us who we are. According to all of our society's governing institutions, we hold intrinsic belief that our actions define our very being."

The audience seemed to buzz with disagreement, and it felt like the floorboards were coming loose under me. I could feel that my answers were starting to worry the interviewer. Luck favored me, however, since I knew it was unfair to continue, and left hurriedly as the interview ended. It was another distressing example of how evil I was.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Faolan Fabrizio Faulk.

The night was deafeningly mute.

Eric had no name. His two hands had names. Righty and Lefty, he called them. Righty and Lefty twiddled their thumbs with ambidextrous mobility as Eric hid in his dead rosebushes, awaiting the morning paper.

"It's so late this morning! Could the government be onto me?" Eric spoke aloud.

"Gee, I don't know," replied Righty.

"Not you, I was asking Lefty."

Eric's hands spoke to him, and whenever they did, his fingers curled to touch the tips to the base of his palm while his thumb extended to the side of his index finger and swung like a jaw to mime its speech. It was an odd quirk, but so far Eric had been successful in hiding this with the aid of tin foil hats, constructed with special antennae so that the government would not discover his awful secret, oh no. He even had ten tiny tin foil hats for each of his ten fingers. However, he did not wear his homemade hats at this time, because it was so dark, and any light reflecting off of them would be noticed easily. Eric knew he had to be covert, and this was a secret he even kept from Righty and Lefty.

At a quarter past five in the morning, the black Ford Prefect (why such an obscure car had been chosen to be imported by the driver was unknown) finally drove past, and a loud thunk was heard against the passenger side window. The car screeched to a halt. The window rolled down, and, correcting his mistake, the driver tossed the newspaper out the window. The projectile ended up shattering a bowl of cat food left out on Eric's front stoop generously for the neighborhood tabby. Kitty munchies spilled out over his porch steps as Eric grinned.

The other reason why Eric did not have his tin foil hat on was because he needed his helmet on. He was proud to declare that he addressed all the safety regulations of plastic scooter transportation. Strapping on his goggles and a toothy maniacal grin, Eric took to the scooter and gave chase to the vehicle as it pulled away. The game was afoot!

With a dull thump, Eric clunked into the rear bumper of the car, sprawling over its back as the vehicle slowed to resume chucking newspapers. His hands were agile, however, and they pushed his body off from the car so that he could stealthily avoid the driver's confused observations. Continuing his accident-prone journey, Righty and Lefty steering with ambidextrous dexterity, the hour stretched by until Eric discovered his prey's ultimate destination.

The car drove up a steep street which looked to be in a state of disrepair. The edges of the crowded brick buildings were surrounded by rubble and bore the signs of where stairways had once been, like scars. The Ford slowed to a halt outside of a building that was squished between a tiny, unpopular arcade and an antique store that was going into liquidation. A small, lanky figure stumbled out of the car and hobbled jerkily through the center building's door, the bell's jingle pouring into the deserted street. Eric tried to decipher the sign above the door, but it was still too early and dim out to make out much else besides the words "Task Force".

Forget the sign, now was a time for haste. The door was swinging shut. Lefty swung out first, then retracted as Righty darted forward to the door jam to prevent the door from shutting completely. "Like a fox!" whispered Eric as he slid through the doorway.

"Or a squirrel," chimed in Lefty.

"I was speaking to Righty."

"Oh, hello there." Eric jumped as if from static shock at the voice that came from neither hand. He glanced up, down, and around, feeling the panic coming to a boil within him, Eric's feet beginning to dance erratically. "You must be the one sent over from east of the river, correct?" The voice spoke again, and Eric was astonished to see a tall, slightly older man standing a few feet directly in front of Eric. His face was decorated with a bushy mustache and a tired, fathomless expression (the older man's face, not Eric's). "What is your name?" Think fast, hotshot!

"I have no name," Eric smiled inanely at his own brilliance.

"I'm very sorry to hear that you have no sense of self," came the mustached man's reply. "But that is not necessary for this task. You see, I am the boss here, and I wish for you to undertake a personal request from me. An associate of mine will be hosting a party in just a week, and I would like to purchase an item for the occasion. It is a simple task. I will give you thirty-six dollars and forty-four cents. You will not need to pay additional tax. Once you have acquired the item, I would prefer you to deliver it to me at my address within the week, in time for the party. I will appreciate your promptness, as I do not expect anything short of a cataclysm to postpone the upcoming event. Thank you."

Without ceremony, Righty grasped firmly onto several bills and coins while Left took a hold of the man's business card. It had been a mistake to come in, Eric realized. This man has mistaken me for one of his workers and now Eric had to get out.

The panic attack subsided and Eric stopped dancing as Eric hopped back onto his rusty scooter and was taken down the pouring hill by sheer momentum. Velocity built to extremes, the squeaking rear wheel screaming like a doomsday siren as Eric took wide, threatening turns around the sharp and hilly, empty roads of the dawning city, on his way back towards the residential neighborhoods. Eric's mind drifted, floating away from my hands as I smiled and took in the chilling, early morning breeze, ready to spread my arms and fly, fly away, joining the roosters and the herring and the wolves in the sunrise's freedom but the scooter was wobbling and it bucked Eric forward over the handlebars, depositing him onto the front lawn of someone who was apparently an early riser.

"Are you going to buy something or just loiter there?" Eric looked up, upsidedown, at a man with two very prominent and darkened eyebrows, one quirked slightly above the other. At least his helmet had protected his brain (Eric's brain, not the thick-eyebrow man's).

Dr. Faulk dragged his feet across the linoleum of his office. He didn't even glance to his secretary as she greeted him "Hello, Doctah F," and he knew she would not return his glance, which was the story of her life. She functioned much like a voice mail message box, but lately she hadn't spoken to him much. Because we haven't had a client all week. We haven't had a client IN weeks. In months, in fact. It was all such a waste, as Dr. Faulk slumped in his office chair, listening to the constant pounding of the drums of the clock, the cat's tail swung pendulously back and forth.

"I went to that interview last night," Dr. Faulk called out the door, half aiming his announcement to his secretary.

"I saw, Doctah F," was the delayed response he had been waiting for.

"It seems I'm getting on in years. Heck, I'm not even forty yet and I'm already going senile. Do you know I almost told an audience about my latest breakthrough? And it angered them that I was telling them about such things. It was a shame, the host seemed like a nice man." Silence. "I told them about my studies, about how what people do creates who they are. I told them about hands, and about how historically it was expensive to paint them, and about Napoleon's identity crisis and about a man who lost both hands and had them replaced with hooks and lost his sense of identity afterwards. But they didn't want to learn something new." Silence. "I didn't tell them about my new experimental surgery, however. About a special kind of hand transplant. I didn't bring all my writings about the matter with me. I didn't tell those philistines about my greatest plan." Silence. He might as well have been talking to his own hands. On stage, people had disapproved of his ideas, and now here where nobody would take offense there was nobody to listen. I feel like I'm losing my whole sense of self. I can remember when I didn't believe in such a thing, but life just seemed easier when I said that I did.

"'The toils of our hands, spin the world like swirling sands, causing mischief where e'er we go, blaming those we refuse to know.'" Dr. Faulk was quiet again, thinking about that poem. He had read it in an ancient text. It sounded, in a way, corny to Dr. Faulk, but he could never forget that single poem comprised of those four lines. Ridiculous or not, they always stuck with him, and the book which was their source had been lost. What mattered now was not who wrote them, or if they sounded particularly poetic or dramatic, but that he remembered the words. "And so are we to continue this silent madness?" Dr. Faulk groaned and covered his face in his hands, but it was to this question that generated a reply.

"Eric will be here promptly at eight o'clock, Doctah F." The despondent secretary's lilting voice in between smacking chews of gum awoke Dr. Faulk.

"Eric...? Oh, yes! This is going to be it, the patient I've been waiting for!" Dr. Faulk sat up and thumbed through his schedule, to the appointment he had almost missed. He closed his eyes in meditation, trying desperately to recall the exact words to the conversation he had had with Eric a week ago.

"My name, which is Eric, is wholly unimportant. My problem is that my hands err. Sometimes when I'm typing, I make little tpying errors."

"'Tpying' errors?" Dr. Faulk remembered wondering if this was some sort of crank call.

"Typing errors, that's what I said! I will meet you at an undisclosed day next Thursday, at an unprecedented time at eight in the evening. I must hang up before the government traces this call goodbye!" The slam of the receiver was the last thing Dr. Faulk heard from the other end.

Eric looked at the kettle. It had a cute, kitschy appeal to it. The handle was red and bumpy, the spout was yellow and pointed like a beak, and feather-like extensions jutted upward from the opposite end. The circumference of the kettle was etched with a pattern of roosters facing alternating directions. In the rising sun's light, the metal glinted and shone as the sun shone.

"It costs fifty dollars." Eric turned to look at the heavily-eyebrowed man. Righty crumpled the bills and fished for the coins. While he may have unintentionally tricked that mustached man, he felt as if it would be only fair to complete the task which he had been mistakenly assigned.

"I'll pay you thirty-six dollars and forty-four cents." Eric pulled out the wad of money and handed it to the thick-eyebrowed man.

"It's a deal." As Righty stuffed the kettle into an old lunch bag, Eric thought to himself that for a tea kettle, even with an amusing rooster motif and being an item at a garage sale, it was awfully expensive. Eric navigated out of the strewn piles of old merchandise and began to return to his street on foot. His scooter was bent and twisted from impact with a sturdy fence from the earlier accident, but Eric did not mind as his house was only a few blocks from here.

On his way home, Eric spotted his landlady, Mrs. Mendelbaum, who was busy working in her yard to put up a birdhouse. "That should keep those woodpeckers happy. Oh! Hello there, Eric! It's pleasant to see you!" Mrs. Mendelbaum smiled jovially as she spotted Eric, and Lefty gave her a brief wave. She always seemed to have a pleasant demeanor. She was middle-aged, of middle weight, and middle stature. She was a middle lady, and the closest person to a friend Eric had.

A noteworthy hobby of hers was her onion garden. She had a knack for growing onions right out of her yard. Her garden was well kept, but at the moment she was focusing on her second past time: lawn décor. Many people might feel that lawn ornaments are tacky, but even they might be assuaged with the talent Mrs. Mendelbaum possessed at arranged ornaments that fit so snugly and freely as if they had coasted there from down a steep hill. At this grey and cold time of the year however, her lawn ornaments were often covered in mud, and she had to resort to washing them off with her hose.

For these things about her, Eric felt so at ease as well as welcome to live next door to her as her tenant. "Why don't you come in for tea?" she offered. Eric already made himself comfortable at the circular wooden table in Mrs. Mendelbaum's kitchen. He could smell the peach cobbler which rested on her counter as she searched for the tea. His eyes focused on the glint of a shiny paperclip which lay in the center of the tabletop. As he tapped his fingernails rhythmically on the tabletop, Mrs. Mendelbaum poured hot water into two mugs. Eric considered letting her use the rooster kettle which lay in a brown paper bag on the floor between his feet, but he worried that the mustached man would find it inappropriate that the gift had been used by the person who was supposed to simply deliver it. Remembering his intended errand, Lefty pulled out the mustached man's business card, but the ink had smudged, so all that Eric could read was the older man's address.

Lefty fumbled about in Eric's pocket, but Eric himself was calm. As Righty raised the mug to his lips, Eric savored the feeling that everything was normal as he chatted idly with Mrs. Mendelbaum, having conversations he never knew he could have. However, his hands grew impatient with him. They began to shake terribly. Not here, he begged in his mind to his sentient limbs. "Yes, here," whispered Righty. "Anywhere we please." Eric quickly slapped his hands together, smiling sheepishly at Mrs. Mendelbaum, trying not to reveal the dark secret he was hiding.

"Eric, are you feeling alright?" Mrs. Mendelbaum's motherly instinct soothed Eric's trembling hands, but they weren't just trembling, they were in a seismic uproar now, and Eric could not will them into suppression.

"They'll be alright, Mrs. Mendelbaum. They just...feel a little funny, that's all." Eric's mouth stumbled with the words. He was slowly losing control over his own body. How long until I lose it completely? Mrs. Mendelbaum patted his hands, and they grabbed a hold of her hands in response, firm at first, but they soon became gentle.

"You just reminded me of something I saw on the television last night. I told you about Dr. Faulk, right? He was in an article in the paper last week which talked about how he once modeled for glove magazines and was voted having the world's most beautiful hands. Well I saw him speak on TV, and he was certainly different than I expected. I told you he was a manosurgeon, correct? A doctor who specializes in hands. Maybe you should go see him." Mrs. Mendelbaum was smiling placidly, but Eric stood up quickly.

Had he been found out? No, no, she was just making a harmless joke. She couldn't have known. Eric thanked her for the tea and left to wait out the rest of the evening. He hadn't remembered until that moment that he had indeed made an appointment last week to meet with Dr. Faulk, the manosurgeon for this very night. The other thing he remembered was that his goggles were still on.

Dr. Faulk had sent his secretary home early that night, and she predictably had not given him a single look as she left. At exactly the eighth hour with zero minutes and zero seconds on his swinging kitty-tail clock, Dr. Faulk rose to the sound of someone at the door. He accepted the visitor with a sweeping gesture, and Eric walked shakily into Dr. Faulk's office. They greeted as though they had been old friends, even though they were meeting face-to-face for the first time. Dr. Faulk followed Eric inside and sat down across the desk from him. They could get right down to business.

"Tell me, Eric. What is the matter with your hands?"

"They...they talk to me. They tell me to do things," Eric explained.

"Continue."

"They are evil."

Silence. Dr. Faulk mulled this thought over in his mind, his hands pressed against each other in a contemplative posture. "Evil. There are plenty of evils in the world. There is anarchy and hedonism, evils so terrible that humanity has sought to expel these instead with a ridiculing self-loathing."

Eric sat, staring at his shaking hands.

"However, evil is born from goodness. Do you understand, Eric?"

Eric shook his head.

"Without the opposite of evil, evil cannot be defined. Definition cannot be obtained with a counterintuitive understanding. This is the glitch of the human mind that haunts us all. We cloud such things with mere confusion and disorderly chaos."

"Oh, of course, I get that. But it seems like a kind of digression."

"I am ambidextrous too, Eric." Dr. Faulk leaned forward and touched Eric's hands, which were a bit larger than Faulk's, and rounder, as well as looking bumpier. Dr. Faulk's own hands were sleek, the joints angled to perfection when he pointed, and his skin smooth as the fur of an animal, rather than oily or covered in sweat. "Let me make things clear to you."

"I'd like nothing more." Eric stared at Dr. Faulk's hands.

"I'd like to help you." There was a brief pause.

"This evil that humanity has created, the single evil of self-loathing and ridicule, destroys something precious," Dr. Faulk explained. "This evil encompasses all governing institutions of our society. It destroys our concept of self, which is a purely evil act. I could go into it, but the confusion of varying institutions which lie to you with promises of being able to save you only detracts from the simplicity of which I wish to offer you. My words may be no different than something an evil person might say, but the act which is to come, whether it is evil or not, is completely different."

Eric stared at Dr. Faulk. He began to realize his own confusion.

"I'm not selling you an answer like society would, Eric. I wish to save both of our selves." Dr. Faulk took Eric's hands into his own.