He had the thing with his hands, he would say, which started at an early age as a persistent tremor, which was sort of pleasant, he thought then, to feel the world through the scale of vibrations, each object further illuminated by the intensity of its native hum. He favored car engines that were approaching hot, angry death and would, in his twenties, ask friends to invite him over when a car stalled or suddenly acted as if wrestled to the ground. He put his hands up to the hood and leaned in while a friend turned the key, and he detected in the microdrama of pistons a loudly failing nature he could not adequately describe to his friends, who were maybe insulted at his delight, which was cosmic—they were fucked and he was in a distant, enchanted sphere. Lately the tremor had quit, which stabilized things so finely that he had to run a hand over a surface to be sure he hadn’t misperceived it and dodged it perfectly. Mostly he had.  Meanwhile on occasion his hands would mystically seize and then unseize as muscles would around the horn of a bull. This last time, at a work Christmas party, he held a glass full of macaroni and cheese, and as it tumbled out, inconstant cheese interacting with the carpet in a final, indelible way, he saw the fibers in the carpet, so dynamically stressed, achieve fluidity. He looked at the machine in the corner, a machine that made both coffee and tea, through which both emerged as queasy distortions. He looked at the wall on which the company had projected a soft, faintly derived idea of a Christmas tree and turned the image in his arctic brain until it resonated, and he thought very clearly about the cars, about objects in transition, halfway to a real destruction he didn’t know anything about. His head was full of undescribed space which was similar to if not exactly like being young and naked in an observation dome and so he started to cry. Coworkers observing the dangerous trend in him had placed bets on the exact spilled object and reacted with terror and a kind of remote pride as they rushed toward him, to ask what was the matter, what he had done, shaking.

He had the thing with his hands, he would say, which started at an early age as a persistent tremor, which was sort of pleasant, he thought then, to feel the world through the scale of vibrations, each object further illuminated by the intensity of its native hum. He favored car engines that were approaching hot, angry death and would, in his twenties, ask friends to invite him over when a car stalled or suddenly acted as if wrestled to the ground. He put his hands up to the hood and leaned in while a friend turned the key, and he detected in the microdrama of pistons a loudly failing nature he could not adequately describe to his friends, who were maybe insulted at his delight, which was cosmic—they were fucked and he was in a distant, enchanted sphere.

Lately the tremor had quit, which stabilized things so finely that he had to run a hand over a surface to be sure he hadn’t misperceived it and dodged it perfectly. Mostly he had.  Meanwhile on occasion his hands would mystically seize and then unseize as muscles would around the horn of a bull. This last time, at a work Christmas party, he held a glass full of macaroni and cheese, and as it tumbled out, inconstant cheese interacting with the carpet in a final, indelible way, he saw the fibers in the carpet, so dynamically stressed, achieve fluidity. He looked at the machine in the corner, a machine that made both coffee and tea, through which both emerged as queasy distortions. He looked at the wall on which the company had projected a soft, faintly derived idea of a Christmas tree and turned the image in his arctic brain until it resonated, and he thought very clearly about the cars, about objects in transition, halfway to a real destruction he didn’t know anything about. His head was full of undescribed space which was similar to if not exactly like being young and naked in an observation dome and so he started to cry. Coworkers observing the dangerous trend in him had placed bets on the exact spilled object and reacted with terror and a kind of remote pride as they rushed toward him, to ask what was the matter, what he had done, shaking.