A visual artist obsessed with hands confronts his own apathy.

SYNOPSIS:

Ibrahim trudges home. He is an urban Bedouin, shirt sleeves, tie, dress pants, shiny shoes, canvas bag, full beard, a glint in his eye. He has a thing. A thing for people’s hands. He notices a group of pretty girls, hands so perfect they are almost inhuman. They giggle as he passes them and he is flustered. A gang-member sports tats all the way up to his knuckles. Ibrahim looks at the moving pictures on his hands fascinated. As the hand makes a fist, his eyes travel upward. Suddenly he finds himself looking into the bull-necked face of the hands’ owner. He backs away, smiling. He walks quickly onward. The clouds above shudder and threaten to shed their load. Ibrahim hurries along with the street all around him. Umbrellas unfurl as the first drops begin to fall – Ibrahim notices white knuckles gripping coloured handles. A grocer spreads a tarp over his wares. A young lady pulls the window down on her small flat. An old lady hurries home, holding her grandchild’s hand. Still Ibrahim notices their hands; wrinkled; capped with perfectly manicured red finger-nails; wizened and clean with neatly rounded finger nails; small and perfectly formed. All of these hands are drawn into his sketch book as he curls into a seat by the window of his tiny apartment. He sketches zealously and contently. Around him are a few pictures of hands. Sometimes there is a picture of the person they belong to. Sometimes there are arrows pointing to scars, saying “Got cut playing basketball.” Some of them told him the story of their scars. His TV spat images at his empty couch as he remained, still encased in his work clothes, one sock still on, sketching happily. A news report on the famine comes on. Ibrahim looks up and looks down again. He looks up a few minutes later and there are hands, barely distinguishable hands, gripping a cup of food. He looks down at the hands he is drawing. He pulls over his leather chair, so old the stuffing is coming out of it and jumps into it. He had gotten it at a yard sale a year ago from a biracial couple who were moving out to the suburbs where they could rent a house because they were going to have a baby. He remembers their black and white hands intertwining in the sunlight. Rain lashes against his window and his potted plant shivers. He takes the images in silently. He also remembers. His father’s hand as he gripped the door-knob every morning. His mother’s hands floured from kneading dough, trying to catch him as he ran from her laughing. His grandfather’s hands. So old they were practically coming apart at the seams and the skin was so loose it looked like it might slide off. His sister’s hands so tiny and perfect they were like eggshells. His sister’s hands, cold, lifeless as they lay on the sidewalk, her head in his lap, tears streaming down his face, the carcass of the flipped over car looming over them. He has a thing for hands. He sculpts hands. He takes pictures of hands. To him, hands tell a story. He starts out of his reverie and begins to sketch. Then he prints…well into the gloom of the night. Piles of papers in his hand, he walks down the street, jabbing flyers at passers-by. He gets to a lamp-post. He labors long and hard well into the night. People begin to gather around him, mock him, throw things at him, but mostly just watch him, in varying levels of interest. Someone eventually calls the police. He makes a gigantic sculpture of two hands asking God for help. The cops come and arrest him. He presents his own hands, his face wet with tears. The sculpture begins to come apart and the papers they are made of begin to scatter in the wind. A passerby picks up one of them – it has a drawing of the emaciated hands of a child in Palestine and it tells his story – “Cut my hands running from soldiers.” Another paper has a picture of a Somalian child’s hands with this legend, “No food for my sisters and brothers.” Then the sculpture blows away in the wind all over the neighborhood.