The Writing Hand

I broke my pinky in Atlanta. The right one. The writing one, or at least the one that does the unglamorous supporting work on that side of the keyboard, and I have discovered over the past couple of weeks exactly how much a pinky is quietly responsible for. It turns out the answer is: everything on the right half of the alphabet, plus the shift key, plus a surprising amount of my dignity.

Here's how it happened. Every crash story is the same story, so I'll keep it brief.

We were in a hired car on the freeway, one of those enormous black Suburbans that ferry people to and from the airport in every city in America, driven by a guy who was doing nothing wrong. Atlanta traffic doing what Atlanta traffic does, which is congeal, stop, and occasionally decide the laws of physics are negotiable. It had been raining.

A car several lanes over decided, late, that it needed the same exit we did, and cut for it the way you do when you've run out of road, fast and hard and without much regard for anyone around it. The car it cut off braked. The car behind that one didn't brake in time, hit it, and shoved it sideways into our lane.

Somewhere in that chain of bad decisions and worse timing, the whole thing folded up, and we were in it. Shoved into the freeway wall on one side, T-boned into the car ahead of us on the other, the Suburban brought to a hard, ugly stop maybe twenty yards from the exit we'd been calmly rolling toward. Twenty yards. You could have walked it in the time it took everything to go wrong.

There's a very particular sound a multi-car collision makes, a kind of expensive crunch, and then a second of total silence while everyone in the car takes a quiet personal inventory. Fingers, toes, teeth. Am I okay. Is she okay. Is everyone okay.

Everyone was okay. That's the headline and I want it up top, because a wreck on a wet interstate a couple thousand miles from home is exactly the kind of thing that goes much worse than a broken finger, and ours didn't. A Georgia State Trooper appeared with the calm of a man who does this fourteen times before lunch, paperwork got exchanged, and the machinery of insurance and incident reports began its slow grind. Nobody went to the hospital in an ambulance. Everybody went home.

I just went home with a hand that didn't work.

Nobody prepares you for the logistics of a crash that isn't in your own car. When it's your car that dies on the freeway, you at least know the drill. But when you're a passenger in a hired SUV that is no longer going anywhere, you enter a strange administrative limbo. You are stranded, but you are not stranded with your own vehicle. You're a guest at someone else's catastrophe.

So what do you do? The trooper, a helpful man doing his best, suggested we just call another Uber. Which is a wonderful idea except for the small detail that no Uber on earth can pull over on the shoulder of a live interstate to collect two rattled passengers standing next to a crash scene. The app does not have a setting for "I am currently on foot in the middle of I-75." You cannot summon a car to a place cars aren't allowed to stop. The very convenience that put us there could not get us out.

What we actually did, because there was no other option, was walk. Off the freeway. On foot, along the edge of an active interstate in the rain, past the wreckage and the other drivers standing around in it and the traffic doing its slow rubbernecking crawl, one of us with a hand that was rapidly making its opinion known. There is no dignified version of this either. You just put your head down and walk like two people who've made a series of choices that led, inevitably, here.

The X-ray confirmed the obvious, after the particular indignity of a doctor gently telling you what you already suspect. Broken. Not dramatically. No compound-fracture horror, nothing you'd photograph for shock value. Just a small, stupid, thoroughly effective break in the one place guaranteed to make the thing I most like doing quietly miserable.

I'd been on a tear. More words in a couple of months than I'd managed in years, finally feeling like a person who actually does this. Which is, of course, precisely when the universe takes an interest. I'd been writing constantly, notes and outlines and the sitting-and-wrestling that turns a feeling into a sentence, more prolific than I'd ever been, and the universe apparently took that as a challenge and broke my hand. Not my leg. Not my arm. The hand. The specific tool for the specific thing. If that's not a note left on the windshield, I don't know what is.

So that's the state of things. The writing is going to be slower for a while. Everything's coming out one careful, lopsided keystroke at a time, at roughly the speed of a man defusing a bomb, because the pinky's job turns out to be load-bearing and it has taken a leave of absence. I'm hunting and pecking my way through sentences, resenting every word that lives on the right side of the keyboard, which is a lot of them.

Which is why, for the moment, I've mostly stopped typing and started talking. Whisper, the speech-to-text tool, has become my grudging new co-writer. I speak, it transcribes, and in theory this is a frictionless miracle of modern technology. In practice it means I now spend my days narrating my own inner monologue aloud, in my house, to a laptop, like a man slowly coming unglued.

There is no dignified way to dictate. None. Writing was always a private embarrassment, the stops and starts, the deleted sentences, the muttering, all of it safely hidden behind a silent keyboard. Now the muttering is the method. I say a sentence, hear how it actually sounds out loud, realize it's terrible, and say a slightly less terrible version, and my wife walks past the doorway wondering who I'm arguing with. The answer is a computer. The answer is always a computer now.

And it does not always hear me correctly, which adds a fun layer of collaboration I didn't ask for. I'll deliver what I'm certain is a beautiful line, look at the screen, and find that it has confidently transcribed something adjacent but insane, a small act of sabotage from a tool that is, on paper, trying to help. So now I'm not just talking to my computer. I'm talking to my computer, and then correcting my computer, out loud, in an increasingly stern voice, which is exactly the behavior that gets a person quietly moved to a facility.

I'll keep going. Slower, crankier, one hand doing the work of two and a machine doing the listening. The ideas are still showing up at their usual inconvenient hours, unbothered by the fact that their delivery driver is currently operating at half capacity. They don't care about my pinky. Nothing does, really, except me and the small blue cast I'll be wearing for a while yet.

I didn't type this. I said it, out loud, to a machine, one sentence at a time, correcting it as I went. Which means somewhere in a data center there is now a recording of me slowly losing my composure over the word "pinky."

See you out there. I'll be the one talking to himself.