The Polydactyl

The Polydactyl

‘My father named me Autolycus; who being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’

(William Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale Act IV scene iii)

Autolyca stared at the dog-eared black cover of the notebook next to the rusted boiler, just as she did every morning. When she was a baby—long before memory had become the parasite of the everyday, feeding on the nutrients of the passing moments—her mother wrote down her fears and dreams in those precious pages. She could tell where her mother’s fingers had failed, where the need to stay awake just one more day, had smothered any kind of grace. Now Autolyca was just as old as her mother had been when she gave birth to her, a Janus-faced girl who felt trapped between youth and worry over the next meal. Now her mother had been in the dead earth in a Potter’s Field for half as long as she was old.

The sunrise memory of her mother winked at her with amphetamine eyes. Autolyca winked back. Just as she always did, Autolyca used her thumb to count along her fingers until she reached the ‘five’ of her pinky. She nodded at the number and headed out of the basement and up into the streets of Brooklyn.

Winter was a time when modified gloves hid Autolyca’s gift. Six wool fingers on both hands, even with the tips cut off for dexterity, failed to garner notice. But when the linden trees were in bloom and made her block smell like honey, her bare hands could have been neon signs announcing her mutation.

One Night Only: The Polydactyl

~The Twelve-Fingered Girl~

Autolyca clenched her hands into fists but the honey-smell failed to calm her nerves as she headed down, down towards the East River. There, the idyllic skyline of Manhattan, so overused in cinema, dumbed down the tourists who were already dazed from the gluttony of the night before. It continued to amaze her that people were so astounded to see something in reality that they saw on screen, as if the world were some kind of projection and movies and television shows were the source.

Autolyca had made it a rule to herself never to steal from the locals. Besides, the moment she was branded a thief amongst her own, all twelve of her fingers would be ‘as useless as a classical guitar without strings’, a phrase she had lifted from her mother’s writing, words from the precious black notebook. While she strode down the street with her hands in her jeans pockets, Autolyca looked like just another girl enjoying the spring after a hard winter. She had learned to live with half-truths, even if the true half of it was the worst.

Thirty-something men and women pushed strollers along the sidewalk, where bodegas abutted yet another boutique coffee shop, or children’s book store. Joggers trotted by in groups while checking their smart watches and missing the world. Pure-breed dogs or the occasional smiling pit-bull, pissed and pooped on their respective spots, knowing full well their distracted owners would still manage to pick up the pieces with a plastic-bagged hand. Hipsters and old Polish men nursed hangovers separately, with green juice or tall boys of Budweiser. Precocious toddlers zipped by on scooters with the words of yesterday’s child psychology appointment drowning out their parent’s perfunctory pleas to slow down. Autolyca passed through them like a neutrino heading relatively North.

There was something simply brilliant about the names of the streets of Greenpoint. Just as she counted her fingers every morning, Autolyca would name the streets in her head starting from Newtown Creek, the edge of the end of the world of her neighborhood: Ash, Box, Clay, Dupont, Freeman, Green, Huron, India, Java, Kent… While the purported mathematical precision of the grid system of Manhattan had its virtues, the emptiness of numbers shined through every time for her. Here, random names in alphabetical order, instilled a moment’s peace that there was some kind of esoteric meaning to a place, order with a bit of mischief. But the feeling passed as soon as she turned left on Huron and towards the ferry dock.

The wind off the East River reminded Autolyca of the long winter. While it was April according to the tilt of the Earth in accordance with the sun, February lingered in the rushing waters of the river. Her empty stomach cringed as she wiped a little stream of snot from her upper lip with the back of her hand and scanned the concrete dock leading to the ferry. Her appointed place was open, a space between a row of raised gardens bearing parsley and green shoots of summer flowers to come. Autolyca thought of herself as a limpet trudging back to that place that would shape her for the rest of her life, a place that was waiting for her before she was even born. But unlike the limpet, she would not wait for her next meal in patient silence.

Autolyca, singing:

Concrete hard as winter’s chill

Plane tree mottled as pickle dill

Fingers sixes as a polydactyl

Look and see and laugh at the fact til’

Your face as red as drunkards noses

Sorry I cannot stand those roses

Do not pity this hungry lass

But if you do you’re not an ass

Take a picture with this singer

For a star, I’m a dead ringer

Come smile with me, come smile!

As Autolyca continued to sing—lyrics coming and going like fingers scribbling in a black notebook—she watched as the ferry passengers passed, on their way to gawk at approved graffiti and drink ten-dollar beers at bars made to look like outposts from the 19th century. She smiled at passing smiles and winked at those who gawked at her many fingers. When the intrigued crowd became as unruly as a wind-tossed sea, Autolyca began to dance.

Hunger devoured everything, even the self-self-consciousness of a teenage girl. Of course, the first season of her performances were wrought with failure and embarrassment. But now, in her fifteenth year in Brooklyn, Autolyca danced and sang, knowing everyone was watching. She swirled amidst the half-conscious crowd as witty lines made them laugh and her limber grace bewildered their eyes. She brushed the shoulders of men and women, she flipped and high-kicked to the delight of the children. She played with the nuances of notes in her four-octave range and sank into false melancholy when the laughs were too great. People watched as the ferry departed, forgetting whether they had come, or had forgotten to go. Autolyca held her outstretched fingers to her face and smiled between the twelve, one spectator asking another: ‘How many of those does she have?’ Amidst the song and dance, somewhere between where her jeans met her stomach, a collection of trinkets was filling the space where the food should have been. Wallets and watches and earrings and purses, another leap and all would be revealed.

“Encore!” A middle-aged man yelled, nudging his wife a little too hard.

“Yeah, encore!” Others yelled, as a good portion of the crowd was dispersing.

“Thank you, thank you all,” Autolyca sang. “And I beseech you, I am only here to bring a little mischief to your day. I bid you, adieu,” she smiled, bowing.

“Wait! Here’s a little something—“ The middle-aged man mumbled.

“No, no. I’m just a spoiled rich girl, just trying to do something kind,” Autolyca laughed pensively, backing away.

“Where the hell?” The man mumbled, patting himself down. “Sweetie….you got my wallet?”

“No,” his wife said. “It’s always in your back pocket. You just had it. I just saw it.”

“I just had it,” he said, still patting himself down to his ankles.

“My earrings!” A young woman cried. “My diamond earrings!” She shouted, pulling at her earlobes. “I know what you’re doing! Mutant polydactyl!” She pointed, as she pulled out her phone. “I’m calling the cops! Filthy city! I wanted to go to the Bahamas! Well…someone frisk her! Do I have to do everything?”

Just as the wind can die and turn a sailor’s joy to sorrow, so the spectacle on the dock had turned from wanton entertainment to abject anger. As another ferry drifted into dock, Autolyca tightened her belt and ran. Her legs bound like they were blessed by the winged-heels of Mercury. As two of the male spectators pursued her, the purloined wallets flopped against her stomach, while the earrings and watch were tucked away in her strategically tight underwear. In spite of the awkward ballast of treasures shifting and poking her, Autolyca ran with a seeing abandon towards the beginning of the alphabet of Greenpoint, to the A of Borges’ Aleph, the little place that held everything at once, at least for her. She felt in her bones that if she made it to (A)sh Street, she would be free.

Concrete became asphalt and she soon found Huron when two pairs of pursuing steps became three. When she reached Green, she looked back and saw five men in pursuit. Freeman, Eagle, Dupont somehow failed to appear and Clay became Box. Another glance back revealed a cadre of men in pursuit, as if the ferry had been some kind of pirate ship and Autolyca was the town and treasure to be plundered. As Ash Street unfolded, Autolyca ran through a patch of manicured grass tended by pigeons and saw the end. The toxic waters of Newtown Creek loomed over the aluminum railing marking the edge of her world. A dozen men stomped to a halt as they heaved the morning air.

“Gimme’ my wallet,” the first man said, panting.

“My wife’s earrings,” said another.

“My youth,” said a third.

“And my hair,” said a balding man.

“And my wife,” said an unseen one.

“My lost dog.”

“My cigarettes.”

“My hope.”

“My sex drive.”

“My black notebook.”

“My—“

As Autolyca searched within herself for the lost things being named to her, she found herself pressed against the railing above the creek. With every cry for something lost, the group of men took another step closer to her. It was a Broadway musical without a soundtrack, a dance with only one step. She half-expected them to start snapping their fingers before the chorus joined in. But demands for all the things life carried away, like flotsam, kept spilling from the men’s mouths as they drew closer. Somehow, she had become the synecdoche for that Nameless thing that stole things away. The men’s eyes burned like dark stars as they carried on without blinking. When one of the men was close enough for Autolyca to smell his breath, she began to sing softly:

Have you lost your watch or wife

Either way, you still have life

Hair is thinning, dog is lost

At least you are not tempest tossed

Rhymes are fleeting, I speak truly

Take it back, don’t want your jewelry

Now get you gone, you pirates fake

I only took what I had to take

Now turn around and walk away

For life is brief as the buds of May

Over the course of her song, Autloyca emptied herself of the trinkets and wallets. The men’s slow march halted and they listened. Clasping the railing with all twelve of her sly fingers, Autolyca watched as the group of men became a collection of individuals wondering how they had gotten to the edge of the end of Greenpoint. Trinkets were gathered and wallets doled out before one man departed and was followed by another, in some kind of hidden custom. By the time the last one had taken a right on Box Street, Autolyca let go of the railing and counted her fingers with her thumbs. All of them were still there but between the two pinky fingers of her left hand, there was a check flapping in the river breeze. She knelt down to look at it, while she sang softly to herself, with a playful lilt to her tune:

Twenty Thousand Dollars today

Never thought it’d come this way

Says its for the songs and dances

Please forget the angry glances

Spend it towards your dreams they took

Wisdom lives in that black notebook

END