The Tenderness That Never Was

The hands Simon knows “better than his own” have never touched him except to hurt. Touch is a basic need: a body that has gone years without a single kind touch starts extracting it from whatever material is available. All the tenderness of those hands has been written in by Simon — in the only place where it is possible: his head.

Hence the “dark heat” at the sight of hands lying peacefully on a wheel: the body is reacting not to a threat but to the only source of touch it has ever had. This is not a choice and not a taste; it is the arithmetic of deprivation, in which even the instrument of pain becomes an object of longing — because no other object was ever issued.