The pictures were as she remembered, digitized black-and-white photographs of an exquisite pair of hands. They belonged to a woman who had lived in Oklahoma. The fingers were almost normal, though strangely tiny compared to the palms. They were delicate and fine, like precision instruments. The thumbs jutted out almost perpendicular to the fingers. At first she thought the thumbs were short, but they were normal length, simply embedded too far into the hand, as if attached to the bones of the index fingers. She studied the pictures, six views and a navigable X-ray, carefully. The text fields were cluttered with jargon that her two years of anatomy classes couldn't penetrate.
When the image had formed in her mind, more solid there than in the flat pictures, she closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, quickly, and it began again. The pain, though contained in her lower arms, was sharper than usual. It struck suddenly, with a blinding flash of red behind her eyelids. It felt like someone was pulling her thumbs back relentlessly. The bones inside snapped, rejoined, and snapped again. She let out a cry, and there was a brief moment of panic. Perhaps she had gone too far too fast in her impatience. A familiar thought occurred to her: there were no doctors who could fix her. She remembered her mother's horror when, as a child, she would bend in impossible ways. "You'll get stuck that way!"
She had quickly learned to curb her transformations and to practice the slow-developing art alone and in secret. Now she calmed herself with the memory of those slow, erotic experiments in which she had first changed her shape, her face, her sex. In a quiet, flashlight-lit closet in her mother's apartment, feeling her bones and organs dance as if they were just tardily developing muscles.
Gradually, panting and with eyes screwed shut, she gained control again. Her instinctive sense of her hands' shape came to match the image in her mind. The hands throbbed with dull pain, but they felt whole. They flexed smoothly, but with a queer feeling, as if the skin were stretching in an unfamiliar way. She opened her eyes.
She liked them better than the Oklahoman's hands. Their deformity was not twisted or bizarre, merely alien. The fingers flexed with a kind of liquid motion, like the legs of an upended tarantula. The thumbs were articulated in three places, the fingers syndactylic, a web of skin between them taut when she splayed her hands. The hands ached dully. She filled the sink with cold water and soaked them in it, wondering at their new shape. She had experimented with ugliness before and with shapes that simply hadn't . . . worked. But never had a deformity seemed so fit. What was a mutant called in biology? A hopeful monster.
When the pain subsided, she dried the hands. The everyday motion had to be reinvented. She washed her face, suppressing a shudder as the hands first touched it, and primped in the mirror again. She blew herself a kiss, borne on an alien palm.
The elevator wasn't working, as usual. She preferred to avoid it anyway. The other tenants in the project might eventually wonder how many people lived in her apartment. It was only ten flights, and exercise helped to break in a new body.
The stairway was crowded. Kids were playing tag in it just above her floor. Halfway down, an old white couple rested with a full grocery cart, their eyes quietly sad. Below them, a Hispanic mother scolded her son, who had a tubercular cough. She wondered if they had seen her hands. There was no reaction from any of them. Of course, little was shocking in the projects. The wall of the ground-floor stairwell was blackened where a small fire had been set.
The pavement outside still radiated heat. White dust was falling: burn-off from the HARD plastics plants in the Bronx Free Enterprise Zone. They said it couldn't hurt you. It was just fancy carbon. HARD plastic was inert; that's what made it hard. But she had heard a woman on TV, a senator, say it wasn't that simple. The dust was accumulating in the pavement cracks like the first flakes of a snowstorm. She smiled. Real snow hadn't fallen as far south as Manhattan in four years.
She walked along Delancey toward the river. Silent cars swirled the dust in the gutter as they passed.
Her club of choice was called Payday. It appeared every week or so, always at a new location. The door workers, the DJs, and the crowd were the same, but the site of the club might be a warehouse, a wealthy patron's loft, an abandoned subway station. She felt a kinship with Payday. It maintained its identity without being trapped in a single unchanging shell. Tonight, Payday inhabited a crumbling amphitheater in East River Park.
The park snaked along the eastern coast of Manhattan, bounded by the FDR Freeway and the river. It faced demolition to make way for a light-rail line, a project that had been stalled by the usual protests. The friction between the park's homeless inhabitants, their extremist advocates, and the police had drawn Payday to the spot.
After a ten-minute walk, she reached the pedestrian bridge that spanned FDR. From its center she saw the amphitheater toward downtown. It was bathed in pink light, Payday's trademark. On the shoulder of the freeway, a parked city bus was half filled with sleeping police officers. The saurian shapes of heavy construction equipment slumbered in the dark wreckage of a baseball field. Uptown from the machines, the concrete, earth, and trees of the park were a twisted ruin. She crossed the bridge and entered the baseball field hesitantly. A few yellow ribbons that read POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS fluttered from the construction machines. As she passed through them, a mercury spotlight sprang to life high in one of the machine's cabs, finding her. A police radio popped. She waved one of her strange new hands, tried to smile, and kept walking hurriedly. She reached a row of orange cones softly glowing with chemical light, past which the grass was untouched. The spotlight wavered and disappeared.
Beyond the border of destruction's arrested progress, the PWHs and their defenders were encamped. There were several circles formed around fires set in rusted garbage cans. The People Without Housing kept together, away from the protesters. Except for a skinhead beating a plastic box to the rhythm of an aimless chant and a group of women passing a bottle, the camp was asleep. Past them was a dark no-man's-land and then Payday. It seemed safe enough to cross the lightless expanse to the amphitheater. Payday didn't usually manifest in so forbidding a locale. She was starting to wish she had taken a cab.
Trees and a few benches populated this part of the park. A few bodies, almost lifelessly still, lay on the benches. She assumed they were sleeping PWHs who didn't like the company of the radicals in the camp. The pink light from Payday cast long, soft shadows through the trees. The city's silhouette was smeared by the orange mercury-vapor glow lighting the dust-fall. The only other visible lights were those of the Domino Sugar factory across the river.