The Dark Where Your Hands Are

The lights went out in the middle of the card game, and Maya did not stop dealing.

"You can't see the cards," Soren said.

"I know," she said. "I'm just dealing them. Feel where they land."

The whole house was black. Not dim. Black, the kind where you wave your hand in front of your face and nothing arrives. Maya's mom called up the stairs that a transformer had blown and the whole street was out and to please not break anything.

"Flashlight's in the hall closet," Maya said. "I'll get it."

Soren heard her stand. He could not see her stand. He heard the soft thumps of her crossing the room, heard her bump nothing, heard the closet door open.

"How are you walking?" he asked.

"What?"

"You can't see your own feet. You can't see anything. How do you know where your feet are?"

There was a pause in the dark. Maya stopped rummaging.

"Huh," she said.

He knew that huh. That was the sound of her finding something she hadn't been looking for.

"Close your eyes," she said.

"They're already closed. There's no point in opening them."

"Then touch your nose."

Soren lifted his hand in the dark and touched his nose, first try, dead center.

"Did you find it?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"How?"

He sat with that. His finger was still on his nose. He had not aimed. He had not felt around his face. His hand had just gone, the way your hand goes to a doorknob you've used a thousand times.

"I didn't look," he said slowly. "I didn't even reach for it. My hand just knew where my nose was."

"And where your hand was," Maya said. "In the dark. With your eyes shut. Two body parts found each other and neither one of them could see."

The flashlight clicked. A yellow cone lit the closet, lit her face, lit the absolute ordinary hallway. She did not look relieved. She looked annoyed, the way she got when something simple turned out to be enormous.

"Turn it off," she said.

"You just spent a minute finding it."

"Turn it off. I want to try something."

Click. The dark came back like water.

"Hold your arm straight out," Maya said. "Anywhere. Don't tell me where."

"Okay."

"Now touch your fingertip to your other fingertip. The two pointer fingers. Make them meet in the middle."

Soren brought his hands together somewhere out in front of his chest. His fingertips touched. Not slid past each other, not missed. Touched, pad to pad, like they'd planned it.

"Did they meet?" Maya asked.

"First try."

"Me too." Her voice had gone quiet and fast. "Soren. We have no idea where our hands are. There's no light. But the hands know about each other. Something in here is keeping track."

"Keeping track of what?"

"Of all of it. Every part. Where my elbow is right now, where my knee is, which way my foot is pointing." He heard her shifting in the dark. "I'm pointing my foot right now and I can feel that it's pointed even though I can't see it. There's a whole map."

Soren reached out until he found the wall, then sat against it. He wanted to think with his back against something.

"It can't be your skin telling you," he said. "Skin tells you when something touches you. Nothing's touching my elbow. But I still know my elbow's bent."

"Bend it more."

"It's bent more."

"How do you know."

"I just—" He stopped. He bent his arm slowly and felt the bend report itself, a steady inside-feeling, like a dial turning. "It's coming from inside the arm. From the muscle. Like the muscle is telling on itself."

"Telling who?"

"I don't know. Whoever does the map."

They sat in it. Somewhere downstairs Maya's mom was lighting candles and humming, no help at all, perfectly content in her own pool of business.

"Try this," Soren said, and now his voice had the careful sound it got when he wanted to be sure. "Stand up and walk to me. To my voice. But I'm going to keep talking so you only know roughly where I am. Watch your feet do it."

"I can't watch my feet. It's dark."

"That's the point. Feel them do it."

He kept talking, counting numbers, and Maya walked. She felt each foot lift and place itself, felt her weight shift, felt her knees decide how high to come up so she wouldn't trip on a floor she couldn't see. She wasn't thinking about any of it. It was happening underneath her thinking, smooth and certain, a thousand tiny adjustments she never ordered.

Her knee touched his.

"Found you," she said, and sat.

"You walked across a black room," Soren said. "You didn't fall. You didn't even slow down much."

"Because the map never turned off. The lights went out and the map stayed on." She let out a breath. "It's always on. Right now, in the light, when I'm not thinking about it at all, something is reading my whole body. Every joint. Every second. My whole life. And I never once said thank you because I never once knew."

"There's a part of your brain for it," Soren said. "There has to be. Something that takes all the muscle reports and builds the map. We just can't feel it working. We only feel that it worked."

"That's the part I can't get over," Maya said. "It works best when you ignore it. The second you try to feel where your hand is on purpose, it gets weird and slow. It only flows when you trust it."

They sat against the wall in the dark, not reaching for the flashlight.

Maya lifted both her hands somewhere in front of her, where she couldn't see them and didn't need to, and slowly, in the black hallway, touched one fingertip to the other, again, and again, and again, never missing once.