The hand tapped three times before I accepted that it was asking for something. At first I had blamed the vibration from the generator. The table was old and its legs were uneven. I pressed my own hand flat against the table until the tremor stopped. The severed fingers continued their patient rhythm. One nail had a crescent of blue paint beside it, left from an ordinary job he had expected to finish.
Then the index finger pointed toward the head.
I had completed the work an hour before. The tools were put away. I had changed my shirt and wrapped the clean cups in newspaper so they would not break during the drive home. There was a place for everything in the van.
I was paid to make a man easy to transport. I had done it. The difficulty was that he had not stopped being there.
His eyes opened when I went near him. The mouth moved without enough breath to produce a proper word. From another part of the room came a faint answering sound, as if the voice had been divided from the place that understood what to say.
I put the hand beside the face.
The fingers touched the cheek. They moved gently over it, finding the familiar hollows. I had been looking at separate parcels. He was finding himself by touch.
"There," he managed.
I waited.
"Leave it there."
The person who hired me called at eleven. I had not given him my private number, but that had never prevented him from using it. He asked whether the containers were ready.
"There is a problem."
"Tell me."
I described the movement. I kept my voice flat, as if reporting damage to packaging. He listened without asking me to repeat myself.
"Good," he said. "Make sure the eyes are open."
I looked at the hand resting against the cheek. The thumb had begun stroking the skin below the eye.
"You knew."
"I knew what I ordered."
He reminded me where I had been staying. He mentioned the woman who rented me the room, although she had no part in my work and believed I serviced agricultural machinery. Then he asked whether the containers would fit through an ordinary doorway.
I said they would.
After the call, I tried to finish the man's dying. What I did only made more places from which he could feel. The hand gripped my sleeve when I approached it again. I did not try a third time.
He asked me whether there was light outside.
There was. The shed had no windows, but a line of sun showed beneath the door. It was a clean morning, the kind when people put washing out before leaving for work. I told him it was raining because I thought that might make the shed less cruel.
He knew I was lying. His eyes moved toward the strip of light.
"I left a book open," he said.
The words reached me slowly from their different places. I had to lean close to understand them.
"At home. On the chair. I didn't want to lose the place."
I asked whether someone would find it.
He looked at me for a long time. I had offered him an errand-sized question because I could imagine completing an errand. He understood that better than I did.
"Put me together," he said.
I told him that I could not.
"Near. Then. Put me near."
There was room on the table. I could have arranged him so that some of the pieces touched. I could have opened the door, left the address with someone and driven until I reached a place where my employer had never heard my name. I considered these things in the same practical way I had considered the dimensions of the containers.
Then I looked at the time.
The collection vehicle was due before noon. My employer's money had already reached my account. Returning it would not return me to the person who had stood outside this shed the previous evening.
I gave him one minute with the hand.
I did not announce it as a kindness. He would have recognized the insult. I simply stopped moving and let the fingers travel over the face. They found the forehead, then the line of hair. At last they settled over his eyes and gently closed them against the overhead light.
When the minute ended, I lifted the hand away. It held the edge of the table until I made it let go. The eyes stayed shut.
I remembered the instruction from the telephone. The recipient wanted to be recognized.
The man understood what I was about to do. His mouth began trying to form a word I had already heard from him several times. I waited until he stopped. Then I opened his eyes and turned his face toward the doorway, where the strip of morning had become wide enough to reach the nearest container.
