The Hand

They drew up the papers the same day. It was the first contract in my life that I read all the way through. Including the finest print.

Credit where it's due to the company's bureaucratic machine — the document was put together astonishingly fast. The only thing slowing the process down was my own excessive thoroughness.

I spent a comparatively long time, some two hours all told, honing the wording of my requirements for the island I was to receive.

In the end, about thirty non-negotiable conditions were set down. From the presence on the island of a naturally occurring source of fresh water, to the suitability of the island's soil for growing an agreed set of crops.

As I recall, I demanded that a colony of flying foxes live on the island, permanently and without fail. It had occurred to me at the time that flying foxes are a good sign of a strong ecosystem.

The fate of my current work assignment was settled as well. It was resolved that I would see the product design through to the end and assemble a team to carry it out. For this I would be paid my usual salary.

Under the new contract I had the right to work from any point in space with an internet connection. Being within half an hour's drive of the office was no longer required of me.

Beyond that, I promised to keep an eye on the project until its completion. But no longer as the lead developer — only as a consultant and supervisor.

So around seven in the evening, escorted by an employee from the company's security department, I arrived at my home, where I deleted the agreed code and article from the hard drive of my computer, and from cloud storage as well. The employee filmed the deletion on his phone camera.

At last I was alone. My mood was as though I'd just been orally raped and then, by way of consolation, handed five thousand dollars. I felt humiliation and astonishment at once — at so high a price paid to me for so trifling a sacrifice.

The stylish, expensive folder with the company logo lay on the table. The contract was inside it. I sat down again and reread it carefully. The contract was simple and clear. Within the coming month I was to become the owner and sole inhabitant of a piece of land surrounded on all sides by water.

The next tranche, due to arrive in my account on the customary fifth of the following month, October, would come to 8,333 US dollars and 33 cents. Two such tranches a month I would now be receiving. One on the fifth, the other on the twentieth.

My monthly income would come to almost three times my salary at the time. And this sum would be paid to me not for working, but for undertaking to refrain from a certain something.

I felt like marking such an astonishing occasion somehow. The ideal solution would have been to get stoned in the company of a close male friend. But that was precisely the kind of friend I didn't have in Seoul.

I suddenly realized how solitary my life had been these past few years. At that moment I had a girl who'd become my lover literally the night before. There were two ladies I'd already parted ways with, because I never did learn to stomach Korean drama series. There was a bartender at an expensive, Japanese-style place nearby. With him I would now and then have drunken late-night talks. Mostly we talked about the military history of Far Eastern civilizations. There was also a pair of elderly Scots, gay alcoholics, with whom I'd get sloshed on whisky every year on St. Patrick's Day. All these people were too incidental to share with them the extraordinary situation that had swept me up.

I decided to get seriously high in complete solitude. On the occasions when I smoke alone, I usually get three or four half-liter cans of beer. It lets me "slide off into sleep," avoiding the "whitey," the "paranoia," and the "spins." And I set off for beer at the nearest 7-Eleven.

The store was right at the exit from the grounds of the condo where I was living then. A big, glossy, metropolitan 7-Eleven, with a pharmacy, a coffee machine, and a long table along the window where you could drink coffee and eat ice cream.

Outside, a drizzle was falling, and the glass was all fresh, romantic rivulets and drops. I went out without an umbrella. Just pulled the hood of my hoodie up.

As I jogged across the luxurious courtyard with its fountains and ornamental ponds, a bitter feeling pricked at me. I remembered how, not so long ago, I'd moved into the new condo anticipating a different, beautiful life. I'd thought I would sit in that stunning courtyard on a bench in the evenings and read Edward Whittemore in the original, unhurried.

But no. I never once sat down on a single one of those luxurious benches. And "Nile Shadows" I still haven't read to this day.

I walked up to a cast-iron bench in the French Art Nouveau style, wanting to sit on it at least once, after all, before my departure into a new, inconceivably lovely and comfortable life. But the bench was completely wet. All over with large drops sparkling in the lamplight.

I stood for a long time in front of the store's glass wall, looking out at the damp and noisy Asian street drowning in colored, wet, furry lights, and considered how many cans of beer to get. Three or five. Getting four cans was not a possibility for me. The number four carries far too many mystical connotations for me not to strive to avoid it in my situation.

Not that I was a superstitious man. I was simply sensitive to numbers. I always preferred prime numbers to all others, say. Beyond that, even numbers provoked in me a literally physical irritation. A kind of smarting pain in the forehead.

When I'd moved into this condo, the agent had offered me a choice between the apartments numbered "23" and "22." I chose number "23," despite the fact that the television in number twenty-two turned out to be a more recent model.

Letting the present go into the past had always been agonizing for me. Especially if a great deal remained unfinished and unfulfilled in the present.

Once, back in Moscow, I was given a compact disc with a licensed edition of the game "Fahrenheit." Before sitting down to play, I read all the criticism of that game available online. I wanted to prolong the sweet anticipation as much as possible before sitting down to the game.

Unexpectedly, friends came over. A married couple I was very close to in those days. It turned out it was my friend's wife's birthday. I felt terribly ashamed that I'd forgotten the date. I had no gift, of course. To hide my forgetfulness from my friends, I pretended I'd bought the "Fahrenheit" disc as a present. And I gave it to them without even unwrapping it.

The feeling I had on the way from my door to the "7-Eleven" strongly resembled the aftertaste left by that long-ago gift. It was a feeling of bitter, shameful awkwardness. A bewildered sense of the absurdity of my own existence. A sharp awareness that almost never in my life do I do what I want. I only get ready to do something desired. I anticipate it. I anticipate it in pornographic detail. But I almost never actually reach the coveted act itself.

Amid this difficult meditation, in the thick of a bitter, twilit, autumnal melancholy, I came up to the sunglasses rack. It occurred to me that if I was soon departing in the direction of eternal summer, a new pair of dark glasses wouldn't go amiss.

I put on one pair. Didn't like them. Tried another. They turned out to be prescription. The focus of my gaze suddenly landed a little past the triangular mirror above the eyewear rack. By the force of the optics, my gaze focused on the magazine stand. On a single magazine, to be precise. It was the latest issue of GO | Korea.

The entire cover of the magazine was taken up by a huge, very detailed and sharp photograph of the right hand of that same Mariana-Trench deep-sea bandito-looking man I'd been able to observe that day in my supervisor's chair.

It was not a similar hand. It was precisely his hand. While he'd been staring at me, I had studied the tattoos on his fingers and remembered them well. And the fingers themselves were utterly unforgettable.

The thought of touching such a hand aroused a squeamishness so acute that, somewhere at its far limit, it turned into a sexually tinged desire to touch that hand. I was literally engulfed, over my head, by a stifling, sweaty, childish, mystical terror.

When I surfaced from the nightmare, I decided not to smoke anything today, and not to smoke anything at all until I was outside Korea. Instead of five bottles of beer I took twelve that time. I bought the magazine too. I don't know why. I still have that magazine to this day. It's something like a talisman.

I drank all night. Listened to music. Opened books to a random page in order to muse at length afterward over a chance quotation. Watched clips from some films or other, in which I imagined vague hints at my circumstances.

I meditated intensely, feverishly. I built conspiracy theories and tried to explain all the nonsense happening to me by way of some borderline science. Now and then it seemed to me that I suddenly grasped something and immediately forgot what. Many times I took out the cherished little box and the pipe, but hid them away again.

Around eight in the morning I did finally step out onto the balcony with a tightly packed pipe. Below stood a luxurious BMW, belonging, by all appearances, to the lover of my gay neighbor. By all appearances my neighbor was preparing to leave for a long time, or even moving out altogether.

By the car stood four large suitcases, which my neighbor was diligently and laboriously shoving into the trunk and onto the back seat. My neighbor's gender was closer to the feminine. So the fact that his lover hadn't come out to help him seemed strange. And that was when I noticed the hand.

The hand was sticking out of the front right window of the car. I ran into the room. Found a clip-on telephoto lens. Attached it to my phone camera. I photographed the hand, went back into the room, and compared the photo with the photograph on the magazine cover. There was no doubt. It was all one and the same hand.

That, I suppose, is all. This is how the situation we now find ourselves in came into being. Tomorrow, if you like, I'll give you a small tour of the island and at the same time tell you about our life here.

Our community didn't come about in a single day. It has some sort of history…

Perhaps questions have arisen for you about what I've already told. I can try to answer those questions.