He shouted after her, and her footsteps returned briefly to the door but neither said anything. Eddie’s heart leapt into his neck and choked him.
It sounded to Eddie like someone unsheathed the safety, squeezed the trigger, and the wave-shaped teeth on the circular blade emitted a low whir that soon blasted up to a high-pitched whine. With the saw held aloft, the person seemed to approach the barn doors with nearly ceremonial slowness, punctuated by a slight stumble and a recovery. At the edge of the door frame, the person holding the saw paused; Eddie imagined him making some technical adjustment. A voice he could not quite identify—he thought it was Tuck’s—shouted over the noise and asked about his readiness. Beneath the blindfold, the sleeves of the garment tight behind his ears, he closed his eyes and nodded, stoically barking the words, Go ahead, get it over with, hoping to have yelled it loud enough for everyone to hear him over the noise of the saw and through the thick cloth that covered even his mouth. He leaned his torso aside and held his wrists away from his chest to provide better access to the cutter. Tentatively, the buzzing teeth descended toward the cables and chains and cuffs that held Eddie captive to the doors.
Get me out of this, Lord, he prayed. Let me get free.
The first kiss of the saw buzzed against the hairs at the base of his left hand as the blade tore through the sheathed cable and uncoiled its copper and nickel wires with an insistent grinding noise. Cords snapped and frayed and the sheathing flew away toward Eddie and the ground where he had folded his knee underneath his body to brace himself. The unraveling cooled his hands and the circulation returned to his palms.
The blade had not yet pierced his skin, and the worker pulled back for a moment. Hope lingered—since the saw had destroyed the cable, perhaps it might cut through the chain and the cuffs as well, sparing Eddie the loss of his hands. But when the saw touched the metal chain, the pitch of the grinding immediately rose to an unbearable squeal, then a sickening screech that seemed to thread through him like a giant needle, and after a moment or two, the ferocious rotation of the saw stopped entirely. Then the machine made as if to start up, but stopped again with a defeated clunk. Eddie imagined some of its teeth curving in new directions, blunted or jagged. The chain, meanwhile, had not lessened its grip around his wrists, nor had the handcuffs.
Urgent muttering sprang up around him, voices of group members confirming the mutilation of the saw, trying to decide on an appropriate, expedient action. Eddie allowed himself a few moments to get comfortable moving his fingers again; some blood and sensation had come back into his capillaries, he stopped imagining that his hands would soon turn black and that severing them would make no difference anyway. In the darkness behind the sweatshirt blindfold, he opened and closed his eyes and could see no light. A deep shadow appeared dotted with ghostlike greenish lights and vague shapes that he guessed must correspond to objects he had recently viewed; or perhaps they formed a map of the stars in some unknown corner of the galaxy.
The voices around him did not utter complete sentences; instead they communicated with barely audible whispers and soft, nudging grunts, some of which seemed to mean agreement, and others disagreement. They spoke among themselves, someone manipulating the saw, possibly knocking metal tools against it. Eddie had ordered a replacement blade, he recalled, but UPS would take several more weeks to deliver it.
After a time, Eddie permitted his mind to wander. He pictured the days ahead with great fear, making a list of activities he assumed he would no longer be able to do. He remembered rotating a tiny screwdriver between his thumb and index finger to tighten the hinges on Elmunda’s eyeglasses, reassembling the circuit board on the Fusiliers’ computer, picking up grains of rice that he’d accidentally spilled on their kitchen floor, removing a staple jammed in the business end of a stapler. The many times he’d opened soda cans and held pens and cutlery and turned the pages of a newspaper whizzed through in his head like images in a flip-book; he grew more despondent at the thought of the myriad items whose surfaces he would never get to caress, starting with the female body, then his own body, angora cats, corn silk, the pointed hairs of one of the Fusiliers’ Persian rugs, a sack of seeds, cool running water. It didn’t comfort him much to imagine that he would still feel these things with other parts of his body; idly touching the bristles of a shaving brush like the one that had belonged to his father did not seem possible or desirable without fingers. Then he thought about the pleasures of the fingers themselves, about instruments he would never learn to play, about snapping and clapping and flipping the bird, about making silhouettes of animals on bright walls, about carrying and drumming and cooking, and about the sign language he would never learn—and as these losses mounted, he changed his mind. There had to be a way to leave Delicious without having to go through with this. Sirius himself had done it.