The Fourth Hand (3 page)

cage, where the lions were caught in the act of not very agreeably sharing what little remained of Patrick’s wrist and hand. Talk about a good kicker!

For the next week or more, Wal ingford watched and rewatched the footage of his hand being taken from him and consumed. It puzzled him that the attack reminded him of something mystifying his thesis adviser had said to him when she was breaking off their affair: “It’s been flattering, for a while, to be with a man who can so thoroughly lose himself in a woman. On the other hand, there’s so little
you
in you that I suspect you could lose yourself in
any
woman.”

Just what on earth she could have meant by that, or why the eating of his hand had caused him to recal the complaining woman’s remarks, he didn’t know.

But what chiefly distressed Wal ingford, in the less-than-thirty seconds it took a lion to dispose of his wrist and hand, was that the arresting images of himself were not pictures of Patrick Wal ingford as he had ever looked before. He’d had no previous experience with abject terror. The worst of the pain came later. In India, for reasons that were never clear, the government minister who was an activist for animal rights used the hand-eating episode to further the crusade against the abuse of circus animals. How eating his hand had abused the lions, Wal ingford never knew.

What concerned him was that the world had seen him scream and writhe in pain and fear; he’d wet his pants oncamera, not that a single television viewer had truly seen him do
that.
(He’d been wearing dark pants.) Nevertheless, he was an object of pity for mil ions, before whom he’d been publicly disfigured. Even five years later, whenever Wal ingford remembered or dreamed about the episode, the effect of the painkil er was foremost in his mind. The drug was not available in the United States—at least that was what the Indian doctor had told him. Wal ingford had been trying to find out what it was ever since. Whatever its name, the drug had elevated Patrick’s consciousness of his pain while at the same time leaving him utterly detached from the pain itself; it had made him feel like an indifferent observer of someone else. And in elevating his consciousness, the drug did far more than relieve his pain.

The doctor who’d prescribed the medication, which came in the form of a cobaltblue capsule—“Take only one, Mr.

Wal ingford, every twelve hours”—was a Parsi who treated him after the lion attack in Junagadh. “It’s for the best dream you’l ever have, but it’s also for pain,” Dr. Chothia added. “Don’t ever take two. Americans are always taking pil s in twos. Not this one.”

“What’s it cal ed? I presume it has a name.” Wal ingford was suspicious of it.

“After you take one, you won’t remember what it’s cal ed,”

Dr. Chothia told him cheerful y. “And you won’t hear its name in America—your FDA guys wil never approve it!”

“Why?” Wal ingford asked. He stil hadn’t taken the first capsule.

“Go on—take it! You’l see,” the Parsi said. “There’s nothing better.”

Despite his pain, Patrick didn’t want to go off on some drug-induced trip.

“Before I take it, I want to know why the FDA wil never approve it,” he said.

“Because it’s too much fun!” Dr. Chothia cried. “Your FDA guys don’t like fun. Now take it, before I spoil your fun by giving you some other medication!”

The pil had put Patrick to sleep—or was it sleep? Surely his awareness was too heightened for sleep. But how could he have known he was in a state of prescience? How can anyone identify a dream of the future? Wal ingford was floating above a smal , dark lake. There had to have been some kind of plane, or Wal ingford couldn’t have been there, but in the dream he never saw or heard the plane. He was simply descending, drawing closer to the little lake, which was surrounded by dark-green trees, fir trees and pines. Lots of white pines.

There were hardly any rock outcroppings. It didn’t look like Maine, where Wal ingford had gone to summer camp as a child. It didn’t look like Ontario, either; Patrick’s parents had once rented a cottage in Georgian Bay, Lake Huron. But the lake in the dream was no place he’d ever been.

Here and there a dock protruded into the water, and sometimes a smal boat was tied to the dock. Wal ingford saw a boathouse, too, but it was the feeling of the dock against his bare back, the roughness of its planks through a towel, that was the first physical sensation in the dream. As with the plane, he couldn’t see the towel; he could only feel something between his skin and the dock. The sun had just gone down. Wal ingford had seen no sunset, but he could tel that the heat of the sun was stil warming the dock.

Except for Patrick’s near-perfect view of the dark lake and the darker trees, the dream was al feeling. He felt the water, too, but never that he was in it. Instead he had the feeling that he’d just come out of the water. His body was drying off on the dock, yet he stil felt chil ed.

Then a woman’s voice—like no other woman’s voice Wal ingford had ever heard, like the sexiest voice in the world—said: “My bathing suit feels so
cold.
I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

From that point on, in the dream, Patrick was aware of his erection, and he heard a voice that sounded a lot like his own, saying “yes”—he wanted to take off his wet bathing suit, too.

There was additional y the soft sound of the water lapping against the dock, and dripping from the wet bathing suits between the planks, returning to the lake. He and the woman were naked now. Her skin was at first wet and cold, and then warm against his skin; her breath was hot against his throat, and he could smel her wet hair. Moreover, the smel of sunlight had been absorbed by her taut shoulders, and there was something that tasted like the lake on Patrick’s tongue, which traced the contours of the woman’s ear.

Of course Wal ingford was inside her, too—having never-ending sex on the dock at the lovely, dark lake. And when he woke up, eight hours later, he discovered that he’d had a wet dream; yet he stil had the hugest hard-on he’d ever had. The pain from his missing hand was gone. The pain would come back about ten hours after he’d taken the first of the cobalt-blue capsules. The two hours Patrick had to wait before he could take a second capsule were an eternity to him; in that miserable interim, al he could talk to Dr. Chothia about was the pil .

“What’s in it?” Wal ingford asked the mirthful Parsi.

“It was developed as a cure for impotence,” Dr. Chothia told him, “but it didn’t work.”

“It works, al right,” Wal ingford argued.

“Wel . . . apparently not for impotence,” the Parsi repeated.

“For pain, yes—but that was an accidental discovery.

Please remember what I said, Mr. Wal ingford. Don’t ever take two.”

“I’d like to take three or four,” Patrick replied, but the Parsi was not his usual mirthful self on this subject.

“No, you
wouldn’t
like to—believe me,” Dr. Chothia warned him. Swal owing only one capsule at a time, and at the proper twelve-hour intervals, Wal ingford had ingested two more of the cobalt-blue painkil ers while he was stil in India, and Dr. Chothia had given him one more to take on the plane. Patrick had pointed out to the Parsi that the plane would be more than twelve hours in getting back to New York, but the doctor would give him nothing stronger than Tylenol with codeine for when the last of the wet-dream pil s wore off. Wal ingford would have exactly the same dream four times—the last time on the flight from Frankfurt to New York. He’d taken the Tylenol with codeine on the first part of the long trip, from Bombay to Frankfurt, because (despite the pain) he’d wanted to save the best for last.

The flight attendant winked at Wal ingford when she woke him up from his bluecapsule dream, just before the plane landed in New York. “If that was pain you were in, I’d like to be in pain with you,” she whispered. “Nobody ever said

‘yes’

that many times to me!”

Although she gave Patrick her phone number, he didn’t cal her. Wal ingford wouldn’t have sex as good as the sex in the blue-capsule dream for five years. It would take Patrick longer than that to understand that the cobalt-blue capsule Dr. Chothia had given him was more than a painkil er and a sex pil —it was, more important, a
prescience
pil .

Yet the pil ’s primary benefit was that it prevented him from dreaming more than once a month about the look in the lion’s eyes when the beast had taken hold of his hand. The lion’s huge, wrinkled forehead; his tawny, arched eyebrows; the flies buzzing in his mane; the great cat’s rectangular, blood-spattered snout, which was scarred with claw marks

—these details were not as ingrained in Wal ingford’s memory, in the stuff of his dreams, as the lion’s yel ow-brown eyes, in which he’d recognized a vacant kind of sadness. He would never forget those eyes—their dispassionate scrutiny of Patrick’s face, their scholarly detachment. Regardless of what Wal ingford remembered or dreamed about, what viewers of the aptly nicknamed Disaster International network would remember
and
dream about was the footage of the hand-eating episode itself—

every heart-stopping second of it.

The calamity channel, which was routinely ridiculed for its proclivity for bizarre deaths and stupid accidents, had created just such an accident while reporting just such a death,

thereby

enhancing

its

reputation

in

an

unprecedented way. And this time the disaster had happened to a journalist! (Don’t think that wasn’t part of the popularity of the less-than-thirty-second amputation.) In general, adults identified with the hand, if not with the unfortunate reporter. Children tended to sympathize with the lion. Of course there were warnings concerning the children. After al , entire kindergarten classes had come unglued. Second-graders—at last learning to read with comprehension and fluency—regressed to a preliterate, strictly visual state of mind. Parents with children in elementary school at the time wil always remember the messages sent home to them, messages such as: “We strongly recommend that you do not let your children watch TV until that business with the lion guy is no longer being shown.”

Patrick’s former thesis adviser was traveling with her only daughter when her exlover’s hand-consuming accident was first televised. The daughter had managed to get pregnant in her senior year in boarding school; while not exactly an original feat, this was nonetheless unexpected at an al -

girls’

school. The daughter’s subsequent abortion had traumatized her and resulted in a leave of absence from her studies. The distraught girl, whose charmless boyfriend had dumped her before she knew she was carrying his child, would need to repeat her senior year.

Her mother was also having a hard time. She’d stil been in her thirties when she’d seduced Wal ingford, who was more than ten years her junior but the best-looking boy among her graduate students. Now in her early forties, she was going through her second divorce, the arbitration of which had been made more difficult by the unwelcome revelation that she’d recently slept with another of her students—her first-ever undergraduate.

He was a beautiful boy—sadly the
only
boy in her il -

advised course on the metaphysical poets, which was il advised because she should have known that such “a race of writers,” as Samuel Johnson had cal ed them when he first nicknamed them the “metaphysical poets,” would mostly be of interest to young women.

She was il advised, too, in admitting the boy to this al -girl class; he was underprepared for it. But he’d come to her office and recited Andrew Marvel ’s

“To His Coy Mistress,” flubbing only the couplet “My vegetable love should grow

/ Vaster than empires, and more slow.”

He’d said “groan” instead of “grow,” and she could almost hear him groaning as he delivered the next lines.

An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;

But thirty thousand to the rest

Oh, my, she’d thought, knowing they were
her
breasts, and the rest, that he was thinking of. So she’d let him in.

When the girls in the class flirted with him, she felt the need to protect him. At first she told herself she just wanted to mother

him.

When

she

dumped

him—no

less

ceremoniously than her pregnant daughter had been dumped by her unnamed boyfriend—the boy dropped her course and cal ed his mother. The boy’s mother, who was on the board of trustees at another university, wrote the dean of faculty: “Isn’t sleeping with one’s students in the

‘moral turpitude’

department?” Her question had resulted in Patrick’s onetime thesis adviser and lover taking a semester’s leave of absence of her own.

The unplanned sabbatical, her second divorce, her daughter’s not dissimilar disgrace . . . wel , mercy, what was Wal ingford’s old thesis adviser to do? Her soon-to-be second ex-husband had reluctantly agreed not to cancel her credit cards for one more month. He would deeply regret this. She spontaneously took her out-of-school daughter to Paris, where they moved into a suite at the Hôtel Le Bristol; it was far too expensive for her, but she’d received a postcard of it once and had always wanted to go there. The postcard had been from her first exhusband—he’d stayed there with his second wife and had sent her the card just to rub it in.