The Map That Wasn't to Scale

The clinic smelled like rubber bands and lemon cleaner. Maya's cousin Priya sat at the low table, trying to pick up a button with her right hand, the one that had been numb for three weeks after the accident with the car door.

The button slid away from her fingers. She laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that wasn't really one.

"Try the big ones," Soren said, pushing the coat buttons toward her.

"The therapist said small," Priya said. "She said the small ones wake up more of the brain."

Maya stopped sorting buttons. "More of the brain. Why would small buttons wake up more brain than big ones?"

"She didn't say." Priya managed to pinch one between two fingers and held it up like a trophy. "She just said hands take up a ridiculous amount of room up there. More than my whole back."

"That can't be right," Soren said.

"That's what she said."

Maya was already looking at her own hand, turning it over. "Your back is huge, though. Compared to a hand."

"I know," said Priya. "That's the part that doesn't make sense."

Soren pulled his notebook from his jacket and found the poster on the wall, the one with the body drawn over the brain. He squinted at it. "There's a picture here. A little man lying along the top of the brain. But he's wrong. His hands are enormous. His lips are enormous. His back is this tiny little smear."

Maya came to look. The figure on the poster was a monster, all mouth and fingers and a thumb the size of his leg.

"That's a mistake," Maya said. "Somebody drew it wrong."

"It says homunculus," Soren read. "It says the size of each part shows how much brain is assigned to it. Not how big the part actually is."

Maya looked back at Priya's hand, the one struggling with a button the size of a pea. "So the brain doesn't care how big something is. It cares how much it has to do."

"Test it," Soren said.

"Test what?"

"If the hand really has more brain than the back." He pulled the rubber bands toward him. "Priya, close your eyes."

Priya closed them.

Soren touched two pencil tips to her back, an inch apart. "How many points?"

"One," Priya said.

"It's two." He moved them wider. "Now?"

"Still one. No. Maybe two."

Maya leaned in, watching. Soren spread them almost as wide as his hand before Priya said two for certain.

"Now her good hand," Maya said. "The fingertip."

Soren touched the two pencil tips to the tip of Priya's left index finger, barely apart.

"Two," Priya said immediately.

He pinched them closer. "Now?"

"Two. They're close, but two."

Closer. "Now?"

"Two." A pause. "Okay, now one."

Maya sat back hard on her heels. "Her back needs them a hand-width apart to feel two. Her fingertip feels two when they're almost touching."

"Same two pencils," Soren said. "Same person. Same eyes closed."

"It's the brain," Maya said. "It's not the skin. The skin's just skin. The fingertip has way more of her listening to it."

Priya opened her eyes. "Do it again. I don't believe my own back."

They did it again. Three times. Soren wrote down the distances, the wide one for the back, the tiny one for the finger, his pencil scratching. The numbers came out the same every time.

"That little monster on the poster is true," Maya said quietly. "That's actually what you'd look like. If your body was drawn the size of how much brain is paying attention to it."

"I'd be all hands," Priya said.

"You'd be all hands and mouth," said Soren, checking the poster. "And your back would be a thumbprint."

Maya was holding her own two hands up in front of her face now, spreading the fingers. "There's more of me in here than in my whole spine. Right now. There's more brain spent on my fingertips than on my entire back."

"Why, though?" Priya asked. "Why would it be built like that?"

Soren stopped writing. "Because of what hands do. You can't tie a knot with your back. You can't thread a needle with your shoulder. Everything we ever made, we made with these." He looked at his own hand like it belonged to someone else. "The brain gave the hands the most room because the hands earned it."

Maya turned to Priya. "That's why the small buttons. The therapist isn't training your fingers. Your fingers are fine, the muscles are fine. She's waking up the part of your brain that's supposed to be huge and went quiet."

Priya looked down at the pea-sized button. "So this is a brain exercise. Not a hand exercise."

"It's the same thing," Maya said. "That's the whole point. There's so much brain in the hand that the hand is half the size of the brain's idea of you."

Priya picked up the small button. It still trembled between her fingers. But she held it.

"Smaller," she said. "Give me a smaller one."

Soren searched the tray and found the tiniest one, a shirt button with four holes. He set it in front of her.

Maya did the thing she always did when something rearranged the world. She stopped talking. Then she said, "Soren. Try to feel the four holes. With your eyes closed. Just the holes."

He closed his eyes and pressed the tiny button against his fingertip. His face changed.

"I can feel them," he said. "All four. The little edges. The space between them."

"With your back you couldn't feel two pencils a finger apart," Maya said. "With your fingertip you can feel four holes in a button."

"That's not the same body," Soren said, eyes still shut, the button against his skin. "It feels like the same body. It isn't."

Maya looked at the poster again, at the monster with the giant hands who was, it turned out, the most honest drawing of a person she had ever seen.

Priya had the four-hole button now. She turned it slowly between her thumb and finger, feeling for the holes, finding them one by one. Soren opened his eyes and pressed the tiny button against his fingertip again, and again, counting the four holes out loud each time.