Originally from London, David M. Herman lives in the Netherlands, where he works as a translator and writer. His flash fiction piece “The Growing” was published by Thin Skin. He is married and has three children and several guitars.
Despite the cool weather, the young psychiatrist, not for the first time, is wearing white cotton trousers and no-show socks inside a pair of immaculate espadrilles. He has deliberately frizzy hair and a pencil moustache. His curated appearance bothers me because it signals a preoccupation with things other than his job, which is to help our teenage daughter Susan. I would prefer a dour, experienced professional with a crumpled button-down. Someone who remembers what it was like to be a wild-eyed teenager before the internet age. Unfortunately, given our finances, we must make do with a freshly graduated fop who endures my maternal concern like tinnitus.
Dinner. Susan, encased in noise-cancelling headphones, stares at her phone. Hyper-focused, thumbs curled into the palms of her hands. I semaphore to get her attention, point at my ear. She pauses her device. We’re eating, I say, no screens at the table. We agreed.
You agreed, she says.
In an attempt at détente, I ask her what she’s watching. She shows me: a video of Marcy Byrne addressing the European Union’s Committee for Medical Ethics.
Why do you think it was white European men who invented the thumbscrew? Marcy asks. Marcy is twenty-five years old but her delivery has the smooth cadence of a seasoned orator. Why do you suppose this despicable form of torture was used on so-called witches? A few committee members, perhaps imagining the pain, attempt to secrete their hands under tables and thighs. Marcy lets the accusatory implications ripple through the chamber. Exactly, she says, the word falling like an auctioneer’s gavel.
Susan says she is studying Marcy’s speeches for a citizenship essay. She says Marcy is a human rights activist, a courageous freedom fighter. Susan is star-struck. Infatuated with a glorious, brazen celebrity proffering radical liberation from her ignorant, coercive parents.
She shows me another video. A protest gathering.
A thumb is not essential for hitching a lift, Marcy bellows into a megaphone. In some countries, people point their index finger at the road. Works fine. Makes a lot more sense too. Fuck thumbs! Her sympathisers, some wearing four-fingered gloves, cheer and nod fervently in agreement. Others echo her words and chant Fuck thumbs! A steamy, excited camaraderie unites Marcy’s audience in a heave of collective arousal.
Susan tilts her head and raises an eyebrow.
See?
I nod patiently. I have studied Marcy Byrne’s videos, scrutinising every frame for the hook that latches into Susan’s eye. All I see is snake oil. The lure of an alternative to accepting the yang with the yin. The promise of a life without ambiguities, uncertainty or frustration. Or in Susan’s case, a blissful existence free of the thumbs that fill her with such visceral disgust.
Susan has always had a sharp, inquisitive intellect, but the compartment in her brain that deals with all things pollical, enforces a strict cognitive apartheid. Talk about any other matter – history, science, art – and her mind actively engages, attempting to understand, critique, empathise. But that particular digit-centred section of mental real estate remains hunkered inside its own circle of wagons, with orders to shoot on sight.
When I was Susan’s age, my friends and I delighted in baiting self-proclaimed sensible grown-ups with catnip such as outlandish mascara and revealing tartan skirts. Each adult had a specific trigger, the flicking of which provided endless amusement, like pulling legs off spiders.
I have the sensation of drowning, as I understand how impotent my own parents must have felt, watching me mock their benevolence. As though we are all condemned to play out scripted generational melodramas, in which there is no ad-libbing.
But thumbs?
Ultimately, all I really have at my disposal is love.
I want to implore: Please, there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re beautiful and perfect the way you are. Your body’s changing and it’s weird, I know. You’re feeling confused, that’s all, but it’s okay, it’s totally normal at your age. Believe me, you’ll grow out of it.
Instead, I smile and swallow back tears.
She grudgingly turns off her phone.
Here’s my thinking, says the boy-clinician, leaning back in his swivel chair with the casual air of someone who has not yet faced unfair setbacks in life. Studies have shown that fluctuating hormone levels during pregnancy can influence the unborn child’s future attitude to its thumbs.
What studies? I ask. Could you email me some links? He squeezes a condescending smile. Too late, I perceive the diagnostic trap. Whatever you say may be interpreted and used against you in a court of psychiatric dogma. He construes my concern for Susan as something it isn’t. Something he has memorised from a textbook. An anxious attachment style, perhaps. An overprotective parent afraid of being abandoned by their child, maybe. Authority issues, potentially. But I don’t have attachment or abandonment or authority issues, I have mother issues. In the plain sense that I’m Susan’s mother.
We learn that a girl in Susan’s class hacked off her left thumb with a cleaver. She had been following an online tutorial. The ensuing sepsis has resulted in her entire hand and forearm having to be amputated. We vaguely know the girl’s parents from the occasional chat outside school and on parents evenings. Kind, unassuming burghers. Open-minded liberals like us. Now they are on the news, tearfully blaming themselves for not having been attentive enough to their daughter’s suffering, for having unwittingly colluded with the pollexarchy. Their fraught, penitent testimony flays me.
The other day I warned Susan about the psychiatrist. This man doesn’t care about you, I said, not in the deep, forever sense that we do. He’s pursuing a career. He will move on as soon as he identifies a position more conducive to his personal and professional advancement. He might even switch careers entirely, leave his wife and become a tour guide in Nepal after finding his soulmate on a life-threatening trek through the Himalayas. He will forget all about you. Sooner than you imagine. I never will.
He’s not married, was Susan’s flat response.
Marcy appears on a current affairs show, slapping the studio table in rhythmic accompaniment to her combative rhetoric. Just because we evolved opposable thumbs, she says, doesn’t make them okay. It’s thumbs that encouraged some groups of humans to lord it over others. At base, all oppression can be traced back to our thumbs. The camera zooms in on Marcy’s scar, her badge of honour, reminiscent of the knurled oval where a knob of ginger has been snapped off a larger root. And, Marcy continues, look at how phones have hijacked people’s attention and possessed their minds. These devices have been deliberately designed so that people have to use their thumbs to type. Think about that.
I offer the youthful doctor a different perspective: Susan might be going through a phase. After all, she’s fourteen years old. Who doesn’t feel confused about their thumbs at that age? Next to me, I hear Susan huff.
She has no right to tell me what to do, says Susan. As if I’m not in the room.
Instead of evoking nosological curiosity, her belligerence is rewarded with a reassuring bat of the clinician’s eyelids. I hear the conceptual wrecking ball whoosh towards our conversation, smashing every sensible parameter in its path. Their alliance labels me the wrongdoer. My scalp tingles in fear.
Marcy is on the news in the wake of another botched intervention, this time carried out by a band of her more radical followers who have defected and formed their own movement. This splinter group has adopted the cleaver as its emblem. Their slogan: If they won’t, we will! She rebuffs accusations that she is encouraging vulnerable, impressionable youngsters to harm themselves. She distances herself from the perpetrators, but refuses to condemn them. Instead, she reminds the viewers that all change is painful.
Say what you like about Freud’s attitude to female sexuality, but at least his consulting room bore witness to a wide-ranging interest in culture, society and mythology. To his acknowledgement that we live in the real world, but are simultaneously embodied in ancient and modern stories. By contrast, the public facility in which our mental health czar holds court is bare, unimaginative, institutional, fungible. Identical rooms exist in identical clinics up and down the nation. All straight lines and smooth, symmetrical vacuity. The lack of curiosity and imagination reflected in such instrumental design sets my teeth on edge.
My patience gives out. I recognise Susan’s distress, I say, but the cure seems patently worse than the ailment. I don’t believe she will benefit in the long run from the removal of her thumbs. She is certain to regret the intervention when she is a little older. You are a medical professional, I say, perhaps first do no harm is a value you might want to consider here.
Am I telling him how to do his job? the neophyte wonders aloud.
Astute.
I specify: I know my daughter a lot better than you do. I love my daughter in a way you can’t comprehend. To you she is a client. To me she is everything.
A humiliating silence follows, during which I attempt telepathy, as if I can will Susan to perceive my protectionism for what it is: an expression of unconditional, visceral love. As if I believe in telepathy.
The physician inhales noisily through his nose and shifts on his chair. My challenge has prompted him to deploy a plan he has prepared in advance for precisely this contingency. He acts swiftly, pre-empting any potential disruption of the framing he and Susan have settled on.
Susan would like to make an appointment at the hospital, wouldn’t you Susan? he says, his diction basted in triumphalism. He has orchestrated this scenario and I have unwittingly given him his cue. I observe my daughter’s panic as her puerile fantasy threatens to become a concrete, adult reality. Like a child daydreaming of flying and waking up in freefall.
My bowels clench. A strangled cry escapes me. I push my chair back and get to my feet. I almost tumble, dizzied by the lack of common sense in the air.
Outside in the car park, I stop, my arms dangling limply next to my exhausted body. I close my moist eyes and invite the cold winter sun to stroke my face. I hear Susan approach and halt next to me. After a moment, her fingers and thumb creep tentatively around my hand. I glance at her standing there like a flower turned towards the light, her eyes closed in imitation of my pose. I return to my shut-eyed sun salutation. Our hands gently clasp each other, reassurance and affection flowing in both directions.
Maybe we’ll stop for ice cream on the way home.