Whorls
In March my phone stopped recognizing my thumb.
It was gradual, which is why I didn’t think much about it. First it took two tries, then three, then it gave up and asked for my passcode. I wiped the sensor. I re-registered the print. That worked for about a week. Then it stopped again. I assumed it was the phone. I’m an accountant; I spend a lot of the winter with dry, cracked hands from paper and the heater in my office, and I assumed it was that, too.
In April I applied for a job with the Spokane school district’s finance office, and part of the process is a fingerprint background check. You go to a little office in a strip mall and a woman rolls each of your fingers on a glass scanner and the image goes off to the state patrol and the FBI. Two weeks later the district HR coordinator called me and asked, in a very careful voice, whether I had ever gone by any other name.
I said no. I asked why.
She said she wasn’t allowed to tell me the details, but that the results had come back “associated with a different identity,” and that this happened sometimes when there was an error, and I should go and get printed again.
I got printed again. The same thing happened. This time the coordinator put me through to someone at the state patrol records office, who was much less careful. My fingerprints, he said, matched a set on file for a Dale Everett Kinnear, born 1968, of Wallace, Idaho, who’d been printed in 1986 for a juvenile misdemeanor and reported missing by his mother in October of 1987. Never found.
“So there’s a mistake in the database,” I said.
“There’s a match on ten of ten,” he said. “That’s not a mistake. That’s a person.”
I’m thirty-four. I was born in Pune and came to Washington with my parents when I was four. In 1987 I did not exist. I have a birth certificate, a passport, a naturalization record, and a mother who will tell anyone who’ll listen about the twenty-two hours she was in labor with me. I am not Dale Everett Kinnear.
I got my old prints. My last fingerprint record was from 2016, when I got my CPA license in Washington, which requires a background check. I requested my own file and it took a month to arrive, and when it did, I put the card on my kitchen table and put my right hand beside it under the light.
I’m not an expert. You don’t need to be. On the card, from 2016, my right index finger has a loop: lines that come in from one side, curve around, and go back out the same side, like a hairpin. My right index finger now has a whorl. A spiral. Lines that circle a central point like water going down a drain.
Fingerprints don’t change. That’s the whole point of them. They form in the womb by about the seventeenth week and they stay the same until you die, through cuts and burns and age. If you sand them off, they grow back in the same pattern. Everyone knows that.
I looked at my thumb next. The 2016 card had a loop. My thumb had a whorl. Middle finger, an arch on the card. Now a loop, leaning the other way.
I sat there for a long time with my hands flat on the table, feeling like they belonged to someone who’d put them there.
I went to a dermatologist. She looked at my fingertips with a magnifier and said they were healthy and that the skin was normal and that she didn’t know what I was asking her. I showed her the 2016 card. She was quiet for a while. She said that sometimes cards are mislabeled, that clerical errors happen. She said it in the voice of somebody who would like you to leave.
I started photographing my fingertips every morning with a macro lens clipped to my phone, which I had to unlock with a code now. Over three weeks you can see it. Not much in a day. But the ridges are moving. They’re drifting, the way sand drifts. The pattern on my left ring finger turned from a loop into a whorl between a Tuesday and a Sunday, and in the photos in between you can see the center point forming, like a little eye opening.
Then it wasn’t only my hands.
My handwriting has never been good. I write in small, square capitals, the way a lot of accountants do. In May I wrote a sticky note at work and looked down at it and it was in a looping, slanted cursive I’ve never used. I could read it. It was what I’d meant to write, call Brennan re: Q2. It just wasn’t my hand. I tried to write it again in my own printing and I could do it, but it was slow and deliberate, like copying.
I started whistling a song I didn’t know. My coworker Lindsey asked what it was and I said I didn’t know. She looked it up by humming it into an app: a country song from 1984. I’ve never listened to country music in my life.
I woke up one night craving cigarettes so badly that I sat up in bed with my hands shaking. I’ve never smoked.
In June I drove to Wallace.
It’s about two hours east, in the Silver Valley, an old mining town in a narrow canyon, brick downtown, mountains so steep on either side that the sun leaves early. I found the Kinnear house through the county assessor’s site. It was a small green house with a chain-link fence on a hillside street. A woman named Peggy Kinnear still lived there. She was ninety.
I almost didn’t knock. I sat in my car with my hands on the wheel and looked at them, and then I got out.
She answered the door with a walker. She was tiny, with a white perm and huge glasses. I said who I was and that this was going to sound strange, and I said I was looking into a records error involving her son’s name.
She looked at me for a while. Then she looked at my hands.
“Come in,” she said.
Her living room was full of pictures. Dale was in a lot of them, a skinny kid with a mullet and a Def Leppard shirt, grinning. He looked nothing like me. Not the face, not the build. I don’t know what I’d expected.
She made coffee. She didn’t ask me anything. She asked me to hold out my hands, and I did, and she put her own small dry hands under mine, and turned mine over, palms up, and looked at them for a long time.
“He always held his cigarette with his thumb and his middle finger,” she said. “Like you’re doing.”
I wasn’t holding anything. I looked down. My thumb and middle finger were pressed together, exactly as if they had something between them.
I asked her what happened to him. She said she didn’t know. He’d gone out on an October night after a fight with his father, in his truck, and the truck was found three days later at the end of a forest road up toward the state line, and that was all. They searched the mountains for a month.
“For thirty-seven years he didn’t call,” she said. “And then he called.”
I put my coffee down.
“Two months ago,” she said. “First time since he was nineteen. I knew his voice right away. A mother does. He sounded older. He sounded well. He said he was sorry he’d been gone so long and he’d been lost for a long time but now he was somewhere nice, somewhere warm, and he had a good job doing numbers, and his own place. He said he finally had his own name.” She smiled at me with all the patience in the world. “He said I shouldn’t look for him. He said somebody else would be coming by, and to be kind.”
I asked her what name he’d said he had now.
She told me.
I’ve thought about how to finish this, and I keep circling it like a whorl circling its middle.
My mother in Seattle calls me every Sunday. Last week she said I sounded tired and that she’d been confused, because I’d called her on Thursday, and we’d had such a nice long talk, and I’d been so cheerful and asked about all her friends by name. I didn’t call her on Thursday. I told her that, and she laughed and said I was working too hard and forgetting things, and that it was nice to hear me happy for once.
I’ve been printed one more time, by a private service. Ten of ten match Dale Everett Kinnear.
I don’t know where my fingerprints went. I don’t know whose hands they’re on. Somewhere warm. Somewhere with a job doing numbers. I know that sometime soon, someone with my prints is going to unlock my phone with his thumb on the first try. I’ve changed the passcode. I’ve changed it every day.
I’m writing this on paper, in a looping cursive that I’ve stopped trying to fight, because it’s faster. I’m sitting on the back step of a green house in a canyon where the sun goes down early, because Peggy said I could stay as long as I like. There’s a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket I don’t remember buying. I’ve been holding one, unlit, between my thumb and my middle finger for about an hour.
It’s the only thing that has made my hands stop shaking.