The Interrogation

Amit Majmudar

When they leathered his arm to the armrest and began

like manicurists in a nail salon

he says that he "retreated" from his hand

until the part of him that dwelt there once was gone

and heard no news from his own outer reaches.

In his memoir of those years, he sketches

the tricks he used, one of which was "vision."

Maybe it's better we present his version:

"I imagined my arm as a slope I had to scale,

shaft of the humerus as smooth as shale

but white like bone and giving way like sand

wherever I set foot. I couldn't stand,

couldn't take a breather, or I'd ride my own

disintegration down and end up on

the shore -- which was my hand, my fingernails.

I crested my shoulder, rested on its knoll.

I looked down then and saw the pain as men

charging uphill to where I hid my sense

of pain. At once I stomped a foot to see

the whole arm crack, calve, crash into the sea,

disarticulated, part of me no more.

I did this for the other arm and for

my feet and testicles and eyes until

I found myself on a Pacific atoll

that had no latitude, no longitude.

I built a hut, I scuttled the one canoe.

I saw a sun that weighed a kiloton

and the power cord by which it swung."