The Suspect Arm

Abstract

The room was pitch-dark, seemingly nonexistent, as he opened his eyes. Not even a trace of the dawn had yet made its way through the louvres. ‘That’s weird, for I got up so early,’ he thought. The entire right side of his body had gone numb, especially his arm, which appeared paralysed. ‘See, that’s what I get when I lie on my right side.’ He was always afraid of sleeping on the side of his heart, in case something happened and he never woke up again. And he liked thinking, in a somewhat smug way it must be said, about his desire to experience his own death. ‘There’s nothing more humiliating than to die while asleep,’ he had once written in a diary that he kept. ‘Kept’, in a manner of speaking, for the diary was a battered, 100-page exercise book which he remembered three or four times a year, and then he’d take the opportunity to put down on paper some of the thoughts that occasionally crossed his mind.The numbness had in some measure diminished. But what really sickened him lay in his mouth, which had the taste of a decayed piece of peel. ‘It’s best I read a little, that’s the only way I’ll fall asleep. Because if I’m late in the morning how will I handle the department head blowing his top.’ He switched the lamp on, and as he was now lying on his left-hand side, he leaned over with his right hand to grab a book from the bedside table. It seemed somewhat strange to him that he was struggling to make these movements. It was as though his arm was no longer obeying him. Eventually, after a few attempts, he took hold of the book, but as he went to lift it, it slipped from him and fell on the floor with a loud thud. He then looked at his arm. Had he not lost his voice from the shock, he would surely have screamed so loud that he would have woken up all the neighbours. His arm was scrawny, much shorter than his other arm, and furry all over. As for his fingers, they too had grown thin and were hideously bent like hooks at the end. He immediately thought: the arm of an ape! He tried to smile. ‘I must still be asleep. I must be dreaming. My dreams are always like that, nightmares, luckily I forget all about them in the morning.’ He switched off the lamp and closed his eyes. ‘You idiot. How can a human arm be transformed into the arm of an ape? You’re obviously asleep, or else you’re hallucinating.’ It was this latter alternative that he preferred. ‘Clearly it must be something like that, a mere hallucination which will disappear in time. Remember? It’s happened to you once or twice before. At one point, for an entire evening, you thought you were the head of the bank. You got up and looked in the mirror – you looked exactly like him. But when you sat down and rationally analysed the causes, you made the following discovery: you were envious of his position, of the esteem in which everyone held him, of his mien of respectability, whereas you were an insignificant accountant of the third rank. That’s what brought about the substitution. You got up in the morning perfectly well, you went to work and no one ever found out anything. Another time you thought that a dead woman was lying next to you in bed – even though you had gone to bed early all on your own. You investigated and again came upon the solution: all the women you had slept with – most of them prostitutes – had never given you what you had hoped to receive from them. You lay down on the bed in which you made love and got up from it with the same intolerable feeling of emptiness. That’s why you then saw the dead woman beside you.