The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  “You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?” his wife asked.

  “No, Marilyn, I am not, ” he lied. Under him, the German girl held still. Wallingford tried to hold himself still, too, but holding still in the act of lovemaking is arguably more difficult for a man.

  “I just thought you’d like to know the results of your paternity test,” Marilyn said. This helped Patrick to hold still. “Well, it’s negative—you’re not the father. I guess you dodged that bullet, didn’t you?”

  All Wallingford could think of saying was: “That was improper—that they gave you the results of my blood test. It was my blood test.”

  Under him, Monika with a k went rigid; where she’d been warm, she felt cool.

  “What blood test?” she whispered in Patrick’s ear.

  But Wallingford was wearing a condom—the German sound technician was protected from most things, if not everything. (Patrick always wore a condom, even with his wife.)

  “Who is she this time?” Marilyn hollered into the phone. “Who are you fucking at this very minute?”

  Two things were clear to Wallingford: that his marriage could not be saved and that he didn’t want to save it. As always, with women, Patrick acquiesced. “Who is she?” his wife screamed again, but Wallingford wouldn’t answer her. Instead he held the mouthpiece of the phone to the German girl’s lips. Patrick needed to move a wisp of the girl’s blond hair away from her ear before he whispered into it. “Just tell her your name.”

  “Monika… with a k, ” the German girl said into the phone. Wallingford hung up, doubting that Marilyn would call back— she didn’t. But after that, he had a lot to say to Monika with a k; they hadn’t had the best night’s sleep.

  In the morning, at the Great Ganesh, the way everything had started out seemed a little anticlimactic. The ringmaster’s repeated complaints about the Indian government were not nearly so sympathetic as the fallen trapeze artist’s description of the ten-armed goddess in whom all the aerialists believed. Were they deaf and blind in the newsroom in New York? That widow in her hospital bed had been great stuff! And Wallingford still wanted to tell the story of the context of the trapeze artist falling without a safety net. The child performers were the context, those children who’d been sold to the circus. What if the trapeze artist herself had been sold to the circus as a child? What if her late husband had been rescued from a no-future childhood, only to meet his fate—his wife falling into his arms from eighty feet—under the big top? That would have been interesting.

  Instead, Patrick was interviewing the repetitive ringmaster in front of the lions’

  cage—this commonplace circus image being what New York had meant by

  “additional local color.”

  No wonder the interview seemed anticlimactic compared to Wallingford’s night with the German sound technician. Monika with a k, in her T-shirt without a bra, was making a noticeable impression on the Muslim meat wallahs, who had taken offense at the German girl’s clothes, or lack thereof. In their fear, their curiosity, their moral outrage, they would have given a better and truer depiction of additional local color than the tiresome ringmaster.

  Near the lions’ cage, but appearing either too afraid or too dumbfounded or too offended to come any closer, the Muslims stood as if in shock. Their wooden carts were piled high with the sweet-smelling meat, which was a source of infinite disgust to the largely vegetarian (Hindu) community of the circus. Naturally the lions could smell the meat, too, and were vexed at the delay. When the lions began roaring, the cameraman zoomed in on them, and Patrick Wallingford—recognizing a moment of genuine spontaneity—extended his microphone to within reach of their cage. He got a better kicker than he’d bargained for.

  A paw flicked out; a claw caught Wallingford’s left wrist. He dropped the microphone. In less than two seconds, his left arm, up to his elbow, had been snatched inside the cage. His left shoulder was slammed against the bars; his left hand, including an inch or more above his wrist, was in a lion’s mouth. In the ensuing hullabaloo, two other lions competed with the first for Patrick’s wrist and hand. The lion tamer, who was never far from his lions, intervened; he struck them in their faces with a shovel. Wallingford retained consciousness long enough to recognize the shovel—it was used principally as a lion pooper-scooper. (He’d seen it in action only minutes before.)

  Patrick passed out somewhere in the vicinity of the meat carts, not far from where Monika with a k had sympathetically fainted. But the German girl had fainted in one of the meat carts, to the considerable consternation of the meat wallahs; and when she came to, she discovered that her tool belt had been stolen while she’d lain unconscious in the wet meat.

  The German sound technician further claimed that, while she was passed out, someone had fondled her breasts—she had fingerprint bruises on both breasts to prove it. But there were no handprints among the bloodstains on her T-shirt. (The bloodstains were from the meat.) It was more likely that the bruises on her breasts were the result of her nightlong lovemaking with Patrick Wallingford. Whoever had been bold enough to swipe her tool belt had probably lacked the courage to touch her breasts. No one had touched her headphones.

  Wallingford, in turn, had been dragged away from the lions’ cage without realizing that his left hand and wrist were gone; yet he was aware that the lions were still fighting over something. At the same moment that the sweet smell of the mutton reached him, he realized that the Muslims were transfixed by his dangling left arm. (The force of the lion’s pull had separated his shoulder.) And when he looked, he saw that his watch was missing. He was not that sorry to have lost it—it had been a gift from his wife. Of course there was nothing to keep the watch from slipping off; his left hand and the big joint of his left wrist were missing, too. Not finding a familiar face among the Muslim meat wallahs, Wallingford had doubtless hoped to locate Monika with a k, stricken but no less adoring. Unfortunately, the German girl was flat on her back in one of the mutton carts, her face turned away.

  Patrick took some bitter consolation from seeing, if not the face, at least the profile of his unfazed cameraman, who had never wavered from his foremost responsibility. The determined professional had moved in close to the lions’ 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, Wallingford 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 recall the complaining woman’s remarks, he didn’t know.

  But what chiefly distressed Wallingford, 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 Wallingford 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, Wallingford never knew.

  What concerned him was that the world had seen him scream and writhe in pain and fear; he’d wet his pants on-camera, 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 millions, before whom he’d been publicly disfigured. Even five years later, whenever Wallingford remembered or dreamed about the episode, the effect of the painkiller 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. Wallingfo
rd 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. Wallingford, every twelve hours”—was a Parsi who treated him after the lion attack in Junagadh. “It’s for the best dream you’ll ever have, but it’s also for pain,” Dr. Chothia added. “Don’t ever take two. Americans are always taking pills in twos. Not this one.”

  “What’s it called? I presume it has a name.” Wallingford was suspicious of it.

  “After you take one, you won’t remember what it’s called,” Dr. Chothia told him cheerfully. “And you won’t hear its name in America—your FDA guys will never approve it!”

  “Why?” Wallingford asked. He still hadn’t taken the first capsule.

  “Go on—take it! You’ll 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 will 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 pill 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? Wallingford was floating above a small, dark lake. There had to have been some kind of plane, or Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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 small boat was tied to the dock. Wallingford 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. Wallingford had seen no sunset, but he could tell that the heat of the sun was still warming the dock. Except for Patrick’s near-perfect view of the dark lake and the darker trees, the dream was all 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 still felt chilled.

  Then a woman’s voice—like no other woman’s voice Wallingford 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 additionally 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 smell her wet hair. Moreover, the smell 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 Wallingford 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 still 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, all he could talk to Dr. Chothia about was the pill.

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

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

  “It works, all right,” Wallingford argued.

  “Well… apparently not for impotence,” the Parsi repeated. “For pain, yes—but that was an accidental discovery. Please remember what I said, Mr. Wallingford. 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. Swallowing only one capsule at a time, and at the proper twelve-hour intervals, Wallingford had ingested two more of the cobalt-blue painkillers while he was still 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 pills wore off. Wallingford 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 Wallingford 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 call her. Wallingford 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 painkiller and a sex pill—it was, more important, a prescience pill.

  Yet the pill’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 Wallingford’s memory, in the stuff of his dreams, as the lion’s yellow-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 Wallingford 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 all, 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 will 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 all-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 still been in her thirties when she’d seduced Wallingford, 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 ill-advised course on the metaphysical poets, which was ill advised because she should have known that such “a race of writers,” as Samuel Johnson had called them when he first nicknamed them the “metaphysical poets,” would mostly be of interest to young women.

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