Hands

"The presence of God is the finest of rewards."

-- Yann Martel, Life of Pi

--

After taking an evening doo, I went into my bathroom to wash my hands. As I pumped the little green head on the little green bottle, I saw that the soap level was low. I would have to replace it soon, but since I'm moving apartments in two weeks, it seems like a petty purchase. The soap dispenser has lasted since I moved here in August.

An image of my time in this room: a soap dispenser, slowly dispensing, slowly emptying.

My girlfriend was in the other part of the room, sitting on the bed. I called to her, "Guess what? This--" I came in, holding the soap bottle "--has lasted since August. Isn't that crazy?"

Without giving the bottle a second glance, she said, "You don't wash your hands enough."

That made me think. I tried to remember a time when I didn't wash my hands after using the toilet, and of course no such instance came to mind. On the contrary, I went through a hand-washing kick about two months back, manically sudsing up my fingers and palms every time I had the chance. It seems odd that the single bottle has lasted so long, and even more that my girlfriend thinks I don't wash my hands enough.

--

I'm reading Life of Pi, and the narrator has just described his first encounter with a real-life Muslim. They are sitting in the man's shop, eating unleavened wheels of bread, when the call to prayer plays. The old man excuses himself, rises, goes to another room for a prayer mat, unrolls it, stands on it, and performs a bizarre yet unmistakable ritual of Islam: the thumbs on the lobes of the ears, listening to the Divine Voice; the repetitive kneeling and rising; the right-left check of the head, a silent homage to the Eastern city; the incessant, inaudible mumbling.

The narrator is intrigued, even convicted for not displaying his own zeal.

He recalls two moments in which he feels connected to God, after this event. In one of them, he is riding a bicycle, and in the other, he is walking in the woods after a snowstorm in Canada and he sees the Virgin Mary in a white and blue cloak, superimposed on Nature herself.

--

The Roman ruler turns his back on the crowd, confiding as cowards do with criminals, muttering his disgust, hiding his ambivalence. Disappointed, he turns his face to the crowd, and symbolically washes his hands.

--

I see that my hands are clean, but there are many hands I leave unwashed in my life. I don't fold all my clothes after I do laundry, and shirts crinkle in baskets filled with socks. I don't take out the garbage near the door as often as I should, and now, the spent Kleenexes following a week of sickness burst from the plastic can like clouds from a well. I don't clean my room when it is dirty, opting instead to shift around messes, swapping scatterplots for piles and stacks for heaps. I have ironed one shirt in the last nine months, and it doesn't even belong to me.

I call my sisters when I want to bitch about work. I call my parents when something has gone magnificently wrong or right, and never to ask about how the day feels eleven hours away. It usually just comes up, the right things at the wrong time. Like plants in sidewalk cracks, insects in paninis, or prayer in school.

I find myself too angry in the evenings to think about God. Work has become a chore and a bore, the silver talents waxing dull in my clumsy--but clean--hands.

Images of my time here: Soap slowly leaving, snotted Kleenex multiplying in a corner, coins gathering moss.

--

I do not have a direct pipeline to God, a pump to fuel the soul, but I ought at least to drill.