Free The Throat by Peter Straub

and saw the books stacked on my coffee table,
the couches with their rumpled covers, the stack of papers that was
one-third of the first draft of a novel on my desk, the blank screen
and keyboard of the computer, the laser printer on its stand. Three
empty Perrier bottles stood on the desk. My kingdom was in order, but I
needed more Perrier. And I was still shaken by the dream.
    I was seated in a clean, high-tech restaurant very different from
Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant two floors beneath my loft on Grand
Street. (Two friends, Maggie Lah and Michael Poole, live in the loft
between my place and the restaurant.) Bare white walls instead of
painted palm fronds, pink linen tablecloths with laundry creases. The
waiter handed me a long stiff folded white menu printed with the
restaurant's name, L'Imprime .
I opened me menu and saw Human Hand listed among Les Viandes . Human hand, I thought,
that'll be interesting, and when the waiter returned, I ordered it. It
came almost immediately, two large, red, neatly severed hands covered
with what looked more like the rind of a ham than skin. Nothing else
was on the white disc of the plate. I cut a section from the base of
the left hand's thumb and put it in my mouth. It seemed a little
undercooked. Then the sickening realization that I was chewing a piece
of a hand struck me, and I gagged and spat it out into my pink napkin.
I shoved the plate across the table and hoped that the waiter would not
notice that I did not have the stomach for this meal. At that moment I
woke up shuddering and jumped out of bed.
    From the light that gathered and burned around the edge of the
curtain, I knew that the day would be hot. We were going to have one of
those unbearable New York summers when the dog shit steams like
dumplings on the sidewalks. By August the entire city would be wrapped
in a hot wet towel. I lay back down on the bed and tried to stop
shaking. Outside, in the sunny space between buildings, I heard the
cooing of a bird and thought it was a white dove. The dove made a
morning sound, and my mind stalled for a moment on the question of
whether the bird was a morning or a mourning dove. It had a soft,
questioning cry, and when the sound came again, I heard what the cry
was. Oh, it drew in its
breath, who? Oh (indrawn breath), who, who? Oh, who? It seemed a
question I had been hearing all my life.
    I got up and took a shower. In the way that some people sing, I
said, Oh, who? After I dried
myself I remembered the two red hands on the white plate, and wrote
this memory down in a notebook. The dream was a message, and even if I
was never able to decode it, I might be able to use it in a book. Then
I wrote down what the dove had said, thinking that the question must be
related to the dream.
    My work went slowly, as it had for four or five mornings in row. I
had reached an impasse in my book—I had to solve a problem my story had
given me. I wrote a few delaying sentences, made a few notes, and
decided to take a long walk. Walking gives the mind a clean white page.
I got up, put a pen in my shirt pocket and my notebook in the back
pocket of my trousers, and let myself out of the loft.
    When I walk I cover great distances, both distracted and lulled by
what happens on the street. In theory, the buckets go down into the
well and bring up messages for my notebook while my attention is
elsewhere. I don't get in my own way; I think about other things. The
blocks go by, and words and sentences begin to fill the clean white
page. But the page stayed empty through Soho, and by the time I was
halfway across Washington Square, I still had not taken my notebook out
of my pocket. I watched a teenage boy twirl a skateboard past the drug
dealers with their knapsacks and briefcases and saw a motorboat
clipping over blue water. One of my characters was steering it. He was
squinting into the sun, and now and then he raised his hand to shield
his eyes. It was very early morning, just past sunrise, and he