The Largest Room

THE LARGEST ROOMIMichael Byers IT WAS MARCH, SOMETIME late in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and the spring wind blew gusts of rain theatrically against Mark Horton's single, unopenable window, which gave only a wan light to his cramped and cluttered office, casting a gray veil over the computer , the stacks of paper, the empty bottles of water, the thin brown carpet of this very small room where he'd been working, programming, for an untold number of days in a row. Actually he couldn't remember the last time he'd bothered with a day off; he'd been writing and figuring and thenjogging at all hours, too, when he felt the need, running on the concrete path across the mud flats behind the engineering building, past the oily river as it went sliding through its greasy banks, then into the gym shower quickly and to his desk again, where he kept on, sometimes sleeping here, sometimes driving home not knowing for sure whether it was dawn or dusk. It was a life he'd never imagined for himself, but he'd come to enjoy it, the desperate last-days feel of it, and everyone knew this latest bad spell was temporary, really, another week or so and everyone could go back to normal, take a weekend off even. The rain increased now, the bare tree outside the window scrabbled its long black branches, and Mark went on typing, heedless. Then, all at once, without warning, and as the rain continued its maniacal flailing, Mark Horton's hands went numb. He batted them together but felt nothing. He was alarmed. He turned his wrists, examining one side of his hands, then the other, two squarish and peculiar fish. He hadn't really looked at them recently, he thought, their dry and puckery knuckles, the chewed-down cuticles spotted here and there with dried blood, the blond hairs all waving one way, like grass on the beach, as if they, too, like everything else, were subject to the wind. He walked next door to Alistair McCauley's office and pushed the door aside with his shoulder. "My hands," he said, "I've lost the feeling in my hands." Alistair McCauley, a homeopath in his spare time, not yet forty but in Mark's eyes an oldish man who drank green tea instead of coffee, was bent eagerly into his computer, as though it were feeding him, his long, rapier-like nose following white text as it scrolled up the screen. McCauley paid him no attention. "My hands just went numb," Mark said. McCauley said, "What?" The Missouri Review · 9 "My hands." Mark flapped them. "Repetitive motion does that sometimes." McCauley dug into a desk drawer and took out a wrist brace. "Numbness and pain." "No," Mark said. "Not pain. Just nothing." He flapped them again at the ends of his arms, forcing himself to look at them. "Just numbness ." McCauley stood up and took Mark's hands in his own. McCauley's long, bony nose was pitted with scars, but his teeth, behind narrow lips, shone a brilliant, almost artificial white and were perfectly even, like cigarettes in a pack. "No feeling?" He pinched one fleshy thumb, then the other. "No nothing?" "No." McCauley took a pen from his pocket and began poking Mark's palms. Little blue dots appeared here and there. "Nothing?'' "No. It just happened. Just suddenly." "Well, I don't know what that is. That's not like carpal tunnel." "No." His hands hung heavily, loosely, from his wrists, as though attached with string. McCauley regarded him with some seriousness. "Could be a brain tumor, that sudden loss of sensation." He rubbed a dirty finger under his nose. "Though I doubt it. Dizziness? Double vision? Nausea?" "No." "I can look it up when I get home. Maybe you're just going crazy. Psychosomatosis. Been under any unusual stress lately? Any major changes in your life situation? Death? Divorce? Loss of a job?" "I have to go home," Mark said. "Oh, lucky man." McCauley shuffled back to his computer. "Take notes and tell me what it's like." Mark went back to his office, maneuvered himself...