hanging on hooks from the ceiling and these arms had plastic hands that touched my face as we passed and I pictured those arms connected to the bodies of dead Arthurian knights impaled and hanging from long spears in the ground and their hands were reaching out for help that August and I could not give because Lyle insisted we didn’t touch anything, not even the reaching hand of the great Sir Lancelot du Lac. I saw those arms and legs coming alive, reaching at me, clutching for me, kicking at me. That warehouse was the end of a hundred bad horror movies, the start of a hundred nightmares I was yet to have.
‘These are Frances’s boys, August and Eli,’ Lyle said, ushering us into Tytus Broz’s office at the back of the warehouse. August was the taller and the older so he walked into the office first and it was August who captivated Tytus from the start.
‘Come closer, young man,’ Tytus said.
August looked up at Lyle for assurance and an exit out of that moment, but Lyle didn’t give it, he just nodded at August like he should do what was polite and walk closer to the man who was putting the meat and three veg on our table every night.
‘Give me your hand,’ Tytus said from a swivel chair at a red-brown antique work desk. There was a framed painting of a giant white whale above this desk. It was Moby Dick, from what Lyle told me later was Tytus Broz’s favourite book, the one about the elusive whale hunted by an obsessive-compulsive amputee who could have benefited from having a Human Touch prosthetics and orthotics sales centre and warehouse in downtown Nantucket. I asked Slim soon after that if he’d ever read Moby Dick and he said he’d read it twice because it’s worth reading a second time, though he said second time around he skipped the bit where the writer goes on about all the different species of whales found across the world. I asked Slim to tell me the whole story from start to finish and for two hours while we washed his LandCruiser he told me that thrilling adventure tale so enthusiastically I wanted Nantucket fish chowder for lunch and white whale steaks for dinner. When he described Captain Ahab, with his wild-eyed face and his age and his thinness and his whiteness, I pictured Tytus Broz on that whale ship barking at his spotters high up in raging wind, demanding to see his prey, his white whale as white as Tytus Broz himself. Slim turned the LandCruiser into Moby Dick and the garden hose was the harpoon that he stabbed into the whale’s side and we grabbed onto the hose rubber for dear life as the whale dragged us into the abyss and the hose water became the ocean that would take us down, down, down to Poseidon, god of seas and garden hoses.
August offered his right hand and Tytus cupped it gently in his own two hands.
‘Mmmmmmm,’ he said. With his forefinger and thumb he squeezed each of the fingers of August’s right hand, moving his way along the hand, thumb to pinkie.
‘Oh, there is a strength in you, isn’t there?’ he said.
August said nothing.
‘I said, “There is a strength in you, boy, isn’t there?”’
August said nothing.
‘Well . . . would you care to respond, young man?’ Tytus said, puzzled.
‘He doesn’t talk,’ Lyle said.
‘What do you mean he doesn’t talk?’
‘He hasn’t spoken a word since he was six years old.’
‘Is he simple?’ Tytus asked.
‘No, he’s not simple,’ Lyle said. ‘Sharp as a tack, in fact.’
‘He’s one of those autistic boys, is he? Can’t function in society but he can tell me how many grains of sand are in my hourglass?’
‘There’s nothin’ wrong with him,’ I said, frustrated.
Tytus turned his swivel chair to me.
‘I see,’ he said, studying my face. ‘So you’re the talker of the family?’
‘I talk when there’s somethin’ worth talkin’ about,’ I said.
‘Wisely talked,’ Tytus said.
He reached out his hand.
‘Give me your arm,’ he said.
I held out my right arm and he gripped it with his soft and old hands, his palms so smooth it felt like they were covered in the Glad Wrap Mum kept in the third drawer down beneath the kitchen sink.
He squeezed my arm hard. I looked at Lyle, he nodded assurance.
‘You’re scared,’ Tytus Broz said.
‘I’m not scared,’ I said.
‘Yes, you are, I can feel it in your marrow,’ he said.
‘Don’t you mean my bones?’
‘No, your marrow, boy. You are weak-boned. Your bones are hard but your bones are not full.’
He nodded at August. ‘Marcel Marceau’s bones are hard and they are also full. Your brother possesses a strength that you will never have.’
August shot a smug and knowing smile at me. ‘But I’ve got great finger bone strength,’ I said, flipping August the bird.
That was when I spotted the human hand resting on a metal prop on Tytus’s desk.
‘Is that real?’ I asked.
The hand looked real and unreal at the same time. Severed and capped cleanly at the wrist, all five fingers looked like they were made of wax or wrapped in Glad Wrap like Tytus’s felt.
‘Yes, it is, in fact,’ Tytus said. ‘That is the hand of a sixty-five-year-old bus driver named Ernie Hogg who kindly donated his body to the Anatomy students of the University of Queensland whose recent investigations into plastination have been most enthusiastically sponsored by yours truly.’
‘What’s plastination mean?’ I asked.
‘It’s where we replace water and body fats inside the limb with certain curable polymers – plastics – to create a real limb that can be touched and studied up close and reproduced, but the dead donor limb does not smell or decay.’
‘That’s gross,’ I said.
Tytus chuckled. ‘No,’ he said with a strange and unsettling wonder in his eyes, ‘that’s the future.’
There was a pottery figurine of an ageing man in chains on his desk. The ageing man was wearing an Ancient Greek man dress, and had oil paint blood streaks across his exposed back. He was mid-stride, favouring a leg that was missing a foot and bandaged roughly.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Tytus turned to the figurine.
‘That’s Hegesistratus,’ he said. ‘One of history’s great amputees. He was an Ancient Greek diviner capable of profound and dangerous things.’
‘What’s a diviner?’ I asked.
‘A diviner is many things,’ he said. ‘In Ancient Greece the diviners were more like seers. They could see things others could not see by interpreting signs from
