A foot was recovered from the inlet. Nobody was sure how long it had been there. A married couple from the city who had come to see what the tide brought in had spotted a dark shape along a sandbar not far from the shore. They alerted the authorities who, because of the late September fog, dismissed the foot as the remains of the old lighthouse and saw no reason for alarm. It was not until a small group of curiosity seekers rowed out to the sandbar that they realized it was a human foot.
The next morning a group of men from the public works department with proper equipment began to excavate the foot from where it was half-trenched in the shoal. A crowd of us watched from the mainland pier like a flock of filthy birds, waiting for the next ferry to carry us across the bay. We joined a few dozen other sightseers, all of us desperate for a closer view. When the mechanical crane hauling the foot finally succeeded in wrenching it out of a small tide pool we cheered. It was loaded onto a small barge. The crane then hoisted the foot into the air where it dangled for a moment before being dragged along the beach where it was positioned between two small sand dunes on an otherwise rocky shoreline.
We let out a collective gasp.
The foot was enormous. It was at least twice as tall as the nearest water tower, and as wide as a cluster of neighborhood streets. It was covered in a crust of sea slime and severed above the ankle. The foot smelled of ash and cardamom, lacking the odor of decomposition one might expect. It was a left foot and we wanted to believe this was significant. The fourth toe was badly mangled, but whether it had been broken from our dragging it ashore or devoured by sharks was uncertain. The only other visible damage was a circular wound in the heel fouled with sea waste and discolored by sunlight. Most of the foot was wreathed in seaweed. Many onlookers found it appalling and retreated from the beach, terrified at what else might wash ashore. The rest of us held our throats, unsure if the foot had fallen out of the sky or been belched from the ocean depths.
For the first few hours nobody dared disturb the foot. Several men from the city sanitation department stood near the heel, plotting the best way to dispose of the creature. The rest of us studied it from a distance. Surprisingly, rigor mortis had not yet set and we saw, with a playful horror, how the toes occasionally twitched. We assumed this was simple biology, but the more imaginative among us suspected it was an attempt at rudimentary communication.
Terrified by this monstrosity we walked up and down the shore. We kicked up sand. Later we stood erect, hands to our eyes to shield them from the sun, trying not to blink out of fear the vision might be taken from us. The foot’s beauty was equaled only by its monstrosity and we could not escape the feeling we were in the presence of a real Cinderella.
At high tide large pools of brackish water gathered around the foot, and the receding waves did their best to slowly pull the foot back out to sea. But the foot, as if sensing our curiosity, settled into the sand comfortably. As we admired the foot it seemed suddenly afflicted with a profound sense of shame. Nobody could say what horrors had led to its predicament, and such ignorance filled us with the deepest sympathy.
We exchanged speculative hypotheses. Some were fanciful and said it was from a sciapode mentioned in medieval nautical logs. Others suggested when the towers collapsed earlier this month the remains of some victims must have exploded out to sea. A historian among us was convinced it belonged to the Egyptian deity Osiris and we could expect more pieces to surface.
“When the cock washes up you come and find me,” one of the women sighed.
A timid circle formed around the foot. We wandered cautiously around it with a mixture of arousal and repulsion. There was a childish hope that so much walking might lure the foot into motion. We were at a loss for words. There were no antecedents for this sort of thing. Had it been an alien spacecraft we would have known the proper models of behavior. We would have panicked—set fire to buildings and thrown babies from the rooftops. We would have prayed for deliverance. We would have alerted the military to recover supplies of Agent Orange. Eventually, we would have submitted to our overlords of little green men. But this was a foot. We were quiet. We were confused. There were no protocols. This was no invasion—it was an unexpected alien visitation.
The foot had an infectious presence. More and more visitors arrived in their Sunday best.
As we approached the heel which was turned seaward we could not help but feel uneasy with the foot’s sheer size. Our own feet were sad facsimiles of this unidentified leviathan, and we marveled at how much distance such a foot might cover in a single step. We had long prided ourselves on the reach of our gaze, but not until now had we looked at our own footprints in the sand as those of travelers shackled to an inescapable gravity.
Nobody had been close enough to touch the foot when there was a murmur from the crowd. Someone shouted and soon all were pointing in the direction of the foot. We were surprised to see a child waving at us from one of the pinkie toes. He was an almost unnoticeable spot. Other children soon appeared. We called to them, but they ignored us, whispering among themselves. They pelted us with rocks.
A few hours later the children reappeared, this time on the tip of the hallux, and through a series of shouts and gestures we convinced them to climb down the web of seaweed clinging to the skin. We tried to persuade them to talk but they first pretended to be confused, then refused to cooperate. They claimed to be stowaways from a distant planet and accused us of trying to abduct them. Only after prying through their imaginative wall did they confess to having discovered the foot yesterday while rowing in the inlet. One of the girls had wandered inside the foot through a flap of skin and the rest of them, mistaking it for a crashed flying saucer, had alternated between playing games of hide-and-seek and trying to locate the navigational system in an effort to fly the spacecraft back to their home planet. The children expressed disappointment when we assured them they were all too human and still on this lousy planet Earth, but were obviously delighted to be escorted away by authorities dressed in biohazard outfits.
We arrived early the following morning. There had been some worry about what might happen to the foot during the night. Despite the makeshift rigging to secure the foot in place, there were no guarantees.
We were relieved to find the foot as we had left it. It stood motionless with the weary look of an insomniac. Our hesitation was soon replaced by an enthused curiosity. We continued to circle the foot cautiously, afraid at intimate contact but eager to plumb the depths of this tragedy. More and more people rushed forward, touched the foot, then hurried back to the crowd. This went on for most of the morning. There were cautions against such recklessness and a few of the older visitors chided the younger tourists, insisting that at any moment the foot might take a step and crush them. The teenagers ignored such warnings and indulged in their fascination, too young to be concerned by how the world makes Frankensteins of us all.
The tide changed and water pooled around the foot. Often the heel would sink into the wet sand, giving the impression the foot was moving of its own volition in half turns, but by low tide the sand had dried and the foot rested steadily in place. When it tilted to one side or the other we took advantage to study the arch which frustrated us with its vast anatomy.
By mid-afternoon the foot was littered with spectators. Many of these enthusiasts shouted at friends from their perch on the toes, while the more adventurous wandered inside the toenail that was mildly rancid with the first hint of decomposition. Occasionally, the muscles in the foot would spasm and the tremors sent people falling off the foot this way and that. A few were hospitalized with minor injuries. Most brushed the sand from their clothes and laughed before climbing back onto the foot.
The indisputable existence of the foot induced irrational fears that our own limbs might abandon us, but we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that it takes a lot of effort to make a body disappear, and even when it’s gone you feel it two steps beside you.
A handful of us decided to explore the uncharted regions of the foot. We started along the pinkie toe and made our way across the epidermal webbing before turning east and attempting to scale the instep. As we climbed we noticed several children had converted the instep into a slide. Climbing higher the seaweed was brittle and pulled away with ease. We huddled close to the skin and took note of the helix of blood vessels beneath the surface. One of the men in our company used a knife to open a fold of skin and gently slipped his hand inside.
“It’s still warm,” he smiled.
Walking along the foot was deeply satisfying. We walked with a new understanding of gravity, now more than ever before aware of the pettiness of our own feet. Near the peak where the foot had been severed from the leg the skin folded back and the bone became visible. We saw where the foot was knit together by tendon and ligament. It was the first time any of us had given any thought that our own bodies were an inexplicable maze that would never be solved. From our vantage point near the summit we could see a few hundred yards across the bay to the city. The buildings looked like strange appendages surging out of the ground.
We made it back down the foot and to the beach just before nightfall, just in to time to discover a heated debate among the crowds. Everybody had a theory about the foot. Some insisted it was an error of nature. The more religious warned us that when the devil is on the loose he goes barefoot. For the pathologists who had been commissioned by the city the foot was in irresistible specimen. They established a quarantine perimeter and circled the foot for hours making notes in their spreadsheets. We could not tell if they were performing an analysis or waiting to be acknowledged by the foot. They extracted samples for traces of typhoid and cholera, but the foot lacked any conclusive epidemiology.
“Disease is a strange magic,” they told us. “It is the one thing that will never disappear.”
Many of the pathologists had spent their careers in quarantine facilities where they had seen immigrants with feet ruined by various journeys. They related how the immigrants spoke dozens of languages but their feet, blistered and swollen and bleeding and twisted, told a similar story of pain and loss. Those with gangrene were sent to the surgical wing there they discovered amputation was the worst magic trick of all. The pathologists produced photographs from the municipal archives of crates full of severed feet destined for the furnaces.
The foot displayed no indication it was a migrant, but neither was it a native of anything imaginable. We wondered if the foot had at one time belonged to one of the migrants who once lived in a quarantine facility. Perhaps it had been amputated and accidentally pitched into the inlet instead of the furnace and over the years grew with rage and love until it finally returned, looking for the body it had lost. We wanted to believe this theory most of all.
Within a few days access to the foot became more difficult. Visitors required permits and tour guides monopolized the regulated public viewing sessions. Tickets were expensive. Children were frequent loiterers around the foot and orchestrated elaborate attempts to breach security. Many seemed hopeful it was not a foot but the flying saucer they had been waiting for. For as much as we admired their tenacity we could not bring ourselves to disrespect the foot with such frivolity.
More crowds appeared and they became more peculiar. Authorities removed a group of teenagers for stomping on the cuticle of the big toe in what was deemed a coordinated attack of attempted larceny. An elderly couple shuffled around the heel, pausing to compare their wrinkles with the wrinkles on the foot. And newlyweds necked on the blister between the third and fourth toes. Several young boys, removed from playing on the foot, perched on the dunes a short distance away and watched the crowds. They twisted their bare feet into the sand and shook their heads in frustration.
The first of many weepers arrived. These people stood a good distance from the foot and wept in its presence. They came to feel like victims. They had no genuine interaction with the foot beyond a simple touch. They never climbed the foot to its summit where the bone was exposed and looked down into the cavity that was deep, like a wishing well, and were horrified by the abyss of their own bodies. They wished for the foot to smother them in sorrow.
Through all these visitations the foot maintained its silent composure.
Just before sunset on the fourth day a woman pointed to the sky at the first sight of the egrets.
“Here they come,” she said.
With the arrival of the birds it became necessary to organize a task force of volunteers to clean the foot and preserve it from contamination. Scaffolding was erected and spotlights positioned so the labor could continue around the clock. They called us scabs. That is what we looked like to the spectators below—tiny, migratory scabs. It was a Herculean task.
We began by removing the seaweed and unidentified sea waste. Beneath this layer we discovered a crust of barnacles. Armed with chisels, we proceeded carefully. The scientists worried the scrubbing might compromise the foot’s integrity and accelerate decomposition. In the callused areas the barnacles had become stubborn. It was a delicate process: scrape too forcefully and the skin tore, too gently and the blade snapped. Some skinning was unavoidable. It was not uncommon for the flesh to gently yield and pockets of foul gas burst like miniature geysers. After scraping away the barnacles and other crusts, we washed the area with rags soaked in a mixture of Epsom salts and lemon oil until the skin appeared sickly white. There was nothing fetishistic about this. We took measurements and tissue samples. We made notes for the report and delivered these to the scientists. Then we proceeded to the next area.
Initial calculations were conflicting. Whereas before the pathologists had been confident the foot must succumb to the principles of cellular degeneration, the foot now resisted such easy biology. At a cellular level the foot appeared to be still alive: absorbing, reproducing, struggling to adapt to its new reality. Nobody knew if the rate of growth would outpace the rate of decomposition. It might turn to dust or it could fill the world.
We maintained the conviction that there was some form beneath the tangles of seaweed worth discovering. Our lives that had been so anonymous were suddenly qualitative and not merely quantitative. We could define ourselves in relation to the foot—as devoted servants our lives were subsidiaries of its absoluteness. We scraped barnacles and scrubbed the skin believing there was some connection between us and the foot. Did we not share a comparable anatomy? It was a tragedy just beyond our grasp, all the more attractive because at any moment we felt the foot’s fate might be our own. Its predicament did not seem the result of some evolutionary process, but a sociological error for which we must be the perpetrators.
There were many other hypotheses as well as records of what the foot did and did not do, which if we had written them down in the reports would fill a library.
By the end of the month we had finished our initial cleaning. There was no celebration. Almost immediately we made plans for a second cleaning as we realized the skin became coarse from sea breeze, a dull yellow the color of headaches. If we wished to preserve the foot it would require constant moisturizing. Nobody was upset. Like cheerful stone masons constructing the great pyramids, we felt part of a sublime and endless labor.
The skeptics said it was a pointless exercise. They ridiculed us. What had we discovered? The foot had eleven calluses, four bruises, six blisters, three dimples, and forty-seven scratches. But it remained a foot—a fat, grotesque, ungodly foot. We were nothing more than God’s pedicurists—six days a week in fourteen-hour shifts. For what? Even we were not quite sure, we only knew we must.
The foot continued to elude our understanding. Definitive conclusions into its character were disappointingly slim. It was a woman’s foot. Most likely late middle age. A small burn scar near the heel led us to believe she had at one time been a smoker. Other vices were indeterminate. The faint residue of orange nail polish indicated she was an impulsive woman, while her third phalange was both bent and longer than the hallux, the hallmark of a creative but troubled mind. All the toes were angled in the Egyptian style. She had properly cared for her toes and we found no sign of ingrowth in the nails. Perhaps it was the way the spotlights illuminated new regions of the foot, or just our familiarity with its presence, but we detected a subtle change in the foot’s demeanor. Stripped of the barnacles and seaweed the foot seemed naked. From this moment there was something vain about the foot, a kind of unapologetic decadence.
The exact nature of the foot’s demise remained elusive. We ruled out suicide. Natural causes seemed unlikely. With an asphyxiation the toes would have curled with greater intensity. If she had drowned the superficial epidermis would have been saturated. There was no indication of an infection or surgical amputation. We made no sense of the pattern of epidermal folds where the foot had been severed other than the possibility the injury was produced by an explosion.
Our inquiries were slow and meticulous. The foot demanded speculations. It demanded interpretations. It had to belong to someone. It had to be missed. It could not just be a foot. Could it?
Thankfully, we discovered a distinguishing feature: a freckle in the shape of a half-moon just above the ankle. It was a crucial detail as, suddenly, we remembered a girl with a similar freckle.
Her name was Ada. She had grown up in the orphanage. This was many years ago. She had a contagious smile. Before the orphanage she had been in recovery at the quarantine facility. Before quarantine she had sailed across the Atlantic with her brother as a stowaway. Both her parents had been blown up in the war. After looking at the plantar aspect on her brother’s right foot the last night on the ship, she warned him not to be the first one to see the coastline. Fearful of his sister’s foresight, the boy hid in the boiler room and accidentally slipped and got blown out of the steam stacks in a thousand pieces. Ada lived with the certainty that one day she would also be blown up.
“I can feel it in my feet,” she said. “You can’t escape genealogy.”
Ada dreamed of being famous, like the German actresses in old silent films. She wanted to perform in concert halls and opera houses. She wanted her name on billboards in faraway places.
The orphanage was a different kind of quarantine and Ada had the most infectious disease of all: she walked. She walked to the cafeteria for her meals. She walked to the small chapel where on Tuesdays the chaplain set up a movie projector. She walked out of her bed in the morning and into it at night. She walked on the bed. She was often found sleep-walking. It didn’t matter if she was walking down a hallway or shuffling circles in her room, there was something about the way Ada walked. She never seemed to be in a hurry or lost. She walked through doors and down hallways singing songs in a raggedy dress she refused to change because she liked the smell of boiler room smoke and ash. It was as if she had transcended the need for feet yet used them in a way never before imagined.
At night she told stories to her quarantined neighbors of the places her feet had taken her. Everyone listened spell-bound. Rumors started she had walked across the Atlantic. She let many of the orphans admire her feet. They touched her toes, or kissed the freckle on her ankle, or brushed the instep clean with their hair. They wanted her to look at their own feet. She told the orphans their fortunes like a trained podomancist. No chocolate on Tuesdays for you, she said to one. Never get on a bicycle in Boston, she said to another. Find love with a red-headed baker wearing a size nine but not the stockbroker with a size twelve, she told someone. Occasionally, a false promise slipped in here and there but this was to be expected.
“It’s a shame we were not born as yaks,” Ada said. “Hooves are more clairvoyant than toes.”
We were still cleaning the foot, daydreaming of Ada, when the lab reports returned and the freckle proved to be nothing more than a minor skin irritation that flaked away after weeks in the sun.
The newspaper rescinded its obituary of the orphan girl and the talk radio programs revived wild speculations about the foot’s potential identity. A sentimental, made-for-television miniseries about the foot aired to popular acclaim. There were very few conversations in town that did not devolve into debates about the foot.
Now that the foot once more lacked an identity people seemed anxious. When we believed it was Ada we had felt ourselves moving towards relief, towards closure. We were ready to return to our normal lives, to lives with just our own two feet and the ground beneath them, to lives without the threat of more appendages, more extensions of ourselves surfacing. We had felt as if very soon we would have our proper ending and the foot would either be reunited with its body or we would finally penetrate the mystery of its presence. We could nod our heads. We could breathe easy knowing it was just a foot and not something of the hereafter, not something tragic, not something else entirely. We looked forward to forgetting. Now all that was in doubt. Now we were forced to not just acknowledge the foot, but burdened with remembering the foot and remembering into the future of its past and its relentless lives which were passing or yet to come.
For months we waited anxiously for the foot to perform some genuine Cinderella transformation but our hopes ended in disappointment. We came no closer to penetrating its mystery. Any data collected merely pointed to a new set of variables and a bifurcation of hypotheses. The foot maintained a habitual silence, oblivious to our tired amazement.
And so the foot’s intransience exhausted our mental energies. We had other fantasies at one time, but now they were all eclipsed by this tower of flesh and bone. We began to see the foot everywhere. A child at the park limped behind the others with a swollen foot. At the hospital a woman miscarried a fetus whose only distinct anatomical feature was feet. There was a new car designed in the shape of a foot, and downtown a foundation pit for new buildings looked like enormous, geometrical footprints. At one time we might have felt refreshed by such permutations, but now any reminder of the foot only served to mock our inadequacies. The foot ached with anticipation, alive in a way we were not.
Our constant attention to the foot’s hygiene began to feel tedious. After months of hygienic ritual, we gave up. We had only succeeded in washing away a façade of beauty. Tours were canceled. Financing for a documentary feature on the foot fell through. Even the scientists, whose fascination was seemingly endless, lamented the foot was a mere appendage and not something more worthwhile. Most would have preferred an enormous vagina.
The crowds grew smaller and smaller. Visitors acted impatiently. A flap of skin was removed in the shape of the masonic compass. Part of a toenail was drilled away and rumors later surfaced it had been ground up and sold as an aphrodisiac in gated communities. Few were surprised when we discovered three harpoons lodged in the heel, no doubt the work of some professorial imagination who suspected it was the foot of Achilles.
Within a few months only the children were regular visitors. They climbed up and down and in and out of the decomposing leviathan with unbridled enthusiasm.
We asked ourselves whether we should have done things different. Should we have allowed it to decompose with dignity instead of this unnatural preservation that now faded to ruin? Should we have ignored it entirely and not burdened the foot with such metaphysical significance? Should we have been more respectful and wondered what the foot wanted instead of peddling our own desires? In a certain way, the foot’s unconscious existence was its greatest insult of all. It existed and did not exist simultaneously, haunting us in a way that could not be stopped.
When we stepped off the ferry one evening we discovered the receding seawaters slowly dragging the foot back into the inlet. A small crowd watched in disbelief. The water pooled under the foot and softened the sand which caused the foot to twist in half-turns. With each receding wave the foot inched into deeper water. Scientists hurried to collect tissue samples left behind on the shore. Many studied the footprint before the receding waters washed it from memory. We made no effort to summon the cranes to retrieve it.
The foot drifted across the bay. For a moment it appeared as if it might sink, hidden beneath a large wave, but then it bobbed back to the surface, drifting slowly out to sea.
For a moment we despaired. We thought of the porches we had constructed on our homes where we hoped the foot would step. We thought of the new mattresses we had stuffed to allow our own feet to dangle off the edges. We thought of the wider streets that had been built to accommodate the foot’s girth. We thought of all the ways the foot might have crushed the old ways of seeing and worried we were creatures incapable of being imprinted.
It was not sadness. It was resentment—resentment that the foot would treat us so poorly as to tease us with its tragedy at a distance.
A murmur groaned from the crowd. Dark shapes spotted on the foot. It was the children. They waved to us. Several could be seen leaping off the foot as it bobbed in the waves on its way out to sea. A few children somersaulted and performed other acrobatics into the water, while others regretfully abandoned their mothership. Many refused to forsake their imaginations and, perched on the toes, pointed a navigational course out to sea as if they were commanding a submarine. The children swimming ashore stumbled past us as if they were newborn aliens.
“What is it?” a woman asked.
“Just a foot,” somebody said.
We gazed until the shape of the foot was lost in the glare of the fading sun, gazing until I was the only one left on the beach, unable to admit it was only a foot.