The Germs On My Hands

 The Germs On My Hands

For eighteen years, I had taken the continental breakfasts, accepted the hotel suites, and lived within the climate-controlled air my mother provided like a freeloader. My sister had done the same for eight. A few days ago, in Tianjin, we were at breakfast. I sat her down. She reached for the food she had spilled onto the tabletop. I watched her fingers on the formica. And then it came, as it always did: the sharp correction, "the germs on your hands", my habitual predawn vexation rising. Later, the familiar shame settled. I might've failed again. Failed at brotherhood. Failed at the simplest thing. It is difficult to explain this cleanly. 

I hadn't meant it as a rebuke; it's just the way I was spoiled at a younger age, some healthy conditioning, I guess, being constantly reminded of the germs on my hands. I could argue they were everywhere, and the probability of them keeping my heart pounding instead of air, like it's just the way I was bred: my ill-fated yet tireless defiance to my mother's sharp reprimand that I parroted. Now I pass this trump card to my little sister, involuntarily, the needless reminders of something she's destined to get used to, like the germs on her hands.

It would be easy to say I was haunted by a low-grade mysophobia. You could think that, and I wouldn’t stop you. The way I talk about germs, the way I issue warnings, corrections, like some minor official of domestic hygiene. I remember walking the streets of Beijing as a child with my eyes downcast, scanning the pavement for stains, for spills, for anything that might suggest contamination. I avoided what could not be named. I thought this made sense at the time. I suppose now it only makes me wonder what strange rituals boys invent for themselves. Still, that wasn’t it. That isn’t it.

Take my room, for instance. It has been called a pigsty by my mother—more than once, more than just in jest. Filthy, some said. And maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I’ve never had much faith in order. I lose things. I stack, I scatter. I believe in instinct. I believe things will return when they’re needed. Or not. Sometimes what’s buried comes back. Sometimes what’s obvious disappears. That’s the rhythm, and I’ve stopped questioning it.

Like this glitch in my body: My hands have always been sweaty. This was never diagnosed, never treated, only noticed. By me, mostly, and by the plastic sheen it left on things: keyboards, glass cups, the steering wheel of my father’s car. I used to watch teenage boys on television, those scripted, stammering boys, and see how easily they became punchlines for the wrong kind of moisture. The laugh track never missed. Once, my mother, a nephrologist who speaks about the human body the way a mechanic might talk about engines, told me about a patient whose palms dripped so constantly that it was like “a faucet left open in a house no one lived in anymore.” Apparently, that patient suffered from what's called "palmar hyperhidrosis," and its roots are from the end-stage renal disease, which is my mother's specialty. There was something tragic in that, I thought. Not the leaking, exactly, but the futility of it. Still, I hate the fingerprints I leave behind. I hate that something so small, so unasked for, still insists on its presence. It's almost as if I have a thing for these snowflakes on my hands, reminding myself how unclean I am.

How long does it take for me to notice what's been lurking, invisible to the eye? What’s so peculiar about germs is that you never quite know whether they’re fundamentally good or bad—it depends on the time of day. I'm talking about an obnoxiously humane ability called second-guessing. What has been good for decades can turn into something insidious in the blink of an eye: whether your grandmother raised you with love simply because you were the first boy among all her grandchildren, or whether what you once interpreted as love was merely a way of treating you as a means to an end… Their meaning shifts. It’s circumstantial, a matter of timing, of proximity, of some private calculus you never fully grasp.

Something occurred to me a few weeks ago. Eighteen years late, or maybe not late at all. I used to think there was nothing to remember. But I remember this: mornings, the smell of steam rising from a basin, my grandmother wringing out a towel, folding it once, twice. Her hands were warm through the cloth. She would press it to my face, slow and careful, the way you might clean a mirror before looking into it. Once she pulled one of my lashes—those long ones she said were lucky—and she looked at me, a flicker of apology, said, “I could’ve been more careful.”

Fast forward, if that’s what we call it now: the long silences between her and my mother, always circling the same subject—what to do about a man who had to sleep through his life on a deathbed. The aunt, who kept her coffee in the fridge and her pills by the sink, who called on names, who slipped in and out of the same episode like it was weather. The talk of curses, then of genetics.

Somewhere in all of it, I started washing my hands. Then again. Then again. I started thinking about the things we touch. About what stays with us. About what we never quite get off.