I spent the rest of the day in my apartment. I had a lot to process. I would peek outside occasionally, or look on Instagram, and I saw exactly what I expected – crowds, local news crews, everyone with cell phone cameras. Some local kids threw rocks at it which seemed to bounce off, but it looked like there were minor skin reactions to the impacts. A helicopter even showed up at one point. I kept the lights off and the blinds shut, but there were knocks on my door continually. I turned my phone on do not disturb. 

“Mind racing” is a term that doesn’t cover what I felt. More like a mental logjam stemming from the processing of an impossible occurrence. The dam of my mind had burst killing any downstream thoughts. I would try to shut my eyes, try to meditate, find stillness, but my level of agitation had me up and fidgety. Despite my attempts for some type of mental solace, I ended up just walking through different areas of my apartment. Attempting tasks and failing, body in electric agitation.

I got a hold of my sister in the afternoon after constant calling. “What’s up?” she said. Her voice had the slight edge of exasperation, a mother with children to fuss over, a house to organize, meals to plan. I told her to check the TV and when that didn’t work (the old type of reporting doesn’t travel that fast I guess), I told her to check social media, knowing it would be foreign to her. She had shied away from most modern trappings believing that they were a distraction. “From what?” I asked her once. From kids, from husband, from life. From God, but that was one of those “in-so-many-words” conversations that we had perfected. She had learned to skirt around the “God” subject with me, one of the ways that she respected my opinions, even though she thought I was wrong. 

She ended up searching Google for floating hand minneapolis. “Oh sweet lord!” It was as close to cursing as I had ever heard from her. “What on earth is that?”

“It’s exactly what it looks like,” I said, hearing her stammer in disbelief. “Kind of hard to put it into words, isn’t it?” I heard the brush of her palm over the phone’s microphone as she called out to her husband. 

“Do you have any idea where it came from? I mean, well, how could you?” She was half talking to herself now and I could tell she was mentally going through the same questions that I had been for hours. I guess technically we were experiencing wonder and awe, but it was coupled with a dreadful sense of the bizarre. “Why is it flipping you the bird?” “Why?” was the question that was constantly being asked, soon worldwide, but especially by me. “How?” was the other one. 

Worldwide fascination, which I thought might happen, descended over the hand and my apartment complex. Speculation about me was nearly as high. The Instagram clip of my freakout with the floating flip off was being broadcast pretty much everywhere. People knew who I was. One of my best decisions was to leave my apartment that night. I was hoping to be clandestine, but there was a news crew waiting outside and I was under the blinding glare of observation the moment my door shut. I had put on a hat like some sort of movie star trying to stay anonymous, but being nighttime when I left, I omitted the sunglasses. Rookie mistake. I beelined to my car as fast as I could but I had to dodge reporters who used blocking positions with their bodies to slow me down. I was pretty sure that they weren’t allowed to touch me, and I noticed that they shifted their stance as I got closer. I used this advantage to pass by. 

I had booked a hotel downtown in Minneapolis, one of the ones the sports teams and rock bands would use when they came to town. I figured a place like that would be able to keep me anonymous. I spoke to the hotel manager when I booked and let them know what was going on. They gave me instructions for a private entrance which turned out to be vital – I didn’t expect that I would be followed.