A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  In most cases, the malpractice insurer took one look at the client and reached for his checkbook: It was settlement time.

  Yeah, life was sweet when you knew the bushes with the best berries.

  Lydia was still fuming when she reached the garage downstairs. She handed in her ticket and found herself waiting next to Dr. Johnson. He nodded to her.

  “Can’t they find your car?” she said for lack of something better.

  He shrugged. “Seems that way. Goes with the rest of the day, I guess.” He looked tired, haggard, defeated. He smiled suddenly, obviously forcing it. “How’d I do up there?”

  Lydia sensed his desperate need for some hope, some encouragement.

  “You did very well, I thought. Especially at the end.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that his final remarks were shredded on the floor of the conference room.

  “Do you think I have a snowball’s chance in hell of coming out of this with the shirt on my back?”

  Lydia couldn’t help it. She had to say something to ease this poor man’s mind. She put her hand on his arm.

  “I see lots of these cases. I’m sure they’ll settle within your coverage limits.”

  He turned to her. “Settle? I’m not going to settle anything!”

  His intensity surprised her. “Why not?”

  “Because if I agree to settle, it’s as much as an admission that I’ve done something wrong! And I haven’t!”

  “But you never know what a jury will do, Dr. Johnson.”

  “So I’ve been told, over and over and over by the insurance company. ‘Settle—settle—settle!’ They’re scared to death of juries. Better to pay off the bloodsucking lawyer and his client than risk the decision of a jury. Sure! Fine for them! They’re only thinking about the bottom line. But I did everything right in this case! I released his subdural hematoma and tied off the leaking artery inside his skull. That man would have died without me! And now he’s suing me!”

  “I’m sorry,” Lydia said. It sounded lame to her but it was all she could say. She felt somehow partly responsible for Dr. Johnson’s misery. After all, Howie was her brother.

  “Maybe I should have done what a lot of my fellow neurosurgeons do: Refuse to take emergency room calls. That way you don’t leave yourself open to the shyster sharks prowling around for a quick fortune. Maybe I should have gone into general practice with my brother back in our hometown. A foggy little place on the coast . . .”

  He rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Looks pretty hopeless, doesn’t it. If I go to court, I could lose everything I’ve worked for during my entire career, and jeopardize my family’s whole way of life. If I settle, I’m admitting I’m wrong when I know I’m right.” His jaw tightened. “It’s that damned greedy bastard lawyer.”

  Although Lydia knew the doctor was right, the words still stung. Howard might be a lot of things, but he was still her brother.

  “Things have got to change,” Dr. Johnson said. “This kind of abuse is getting way out of hand. There’s got to be a change in the laws to control these . . . these Hell’s Angels in three-piece suits!”

  “Don’t hold your breath waiting for tort reform,” Lydia said. “Ninety-nine percent of state legislators are lawyers, and they’re all members of law firms that do a thriving business on liability claims. You don’t really think they’re going to take some of the bread and butter off their own tables, do you? Talk about conflict of interest!”

  Dr. Johnson’s expression became bleaker. “Then there’s no hope of relief from the Howard Weinsteins of the world, is there? No way to give him a lesson in empathy, in knowing what kind of pain he causes in other people.”

  Dr. Johnson’s car pulled up then, a maroon Jaguar XJ.

  “I don’t know how to teach him that lesson,” he said. “My brother might, but I certainly don’t.” He sighed heavily. “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Keep fighting,” Lydia told him as she watched him walk around the car and tip the attendant.

  He looked at her over the hood of the Jaguar. There was a distant, resigned look in his eyes that made her afraid for him.

  “Easy for you to say,” he said, then got in and drove off.

  Lydia stood there in the garage and watched him go, knowing in some intangible way that she would never see Dr. Walter Johnson again.

  “He’s dead! God, Howie, he’s dead!”

  Howard looked up at Lydia’s pale, strained features as she leaned over his desk. He thought, Oh, no! It’s Dad! It’ll be in the papers! Everyone will know!

  “Who?” he managed to say.

  “Dr. Johnson! The guy you deposed last week in the malpractice case! He killed himself!”

  Relief flooded through him. “He killed himself? Did he think that would let him off the hook! The jerk! We’ll just take his estate to court!”

  “Howard! He was depressed over this suit. You drove him over the edge!”

  “I did nothing of the sort! What did he do? Shoot himself?”

  Lydia’s face got whiter. “No. He . . . he chopped his hand off. He bled to death.”

  Howard’s mind suddenly went into high gear.

  “Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute! This is great! Great! It shows tremendous guilt over his negligence! He cut off the appendage that damaged his patient! No, wait! Wait! The act of suicide, especially in such a bizarre manner, points to a deranged mind. This means I can bring the hospital executive committee into the suit for allowing an obviously impaired physician to remain on the staff of their hospital. Maybe include the hospital’s entire department of surgery, too! Oh, this is big! Big! Thank you, Lydia! You’ve just made my day! My year!”

  She stood there with her mouth hanging open, looking stupid. “I don’t believe you.”

  “What? What don’t you believe? What?” What the hell was wrong with her, anyway?

  “Isn’t there a limit, Howard? Isn’t there a place where you see a line and say to yourself, ‘I can’t cross over here. I’ll cause too much pain on the other side.’ ”

  He smiled at her. “Of course there is, Sis. And as soon as I find it, I’ll let you know.”

  She didn’t smile at the joke. Her face was hard, her eyes icy. “I think Dr. Johnson asked a good question last week. Do you have feelings, Howie? Do you ever feel anything for anybody but yourself?”

  “Get off the soapbox, Sis.”

  “Gladly,” she said. “Off the soapbox and out of your slimy presence.” She turned toward the door, then back again. “Oh, by the way, I think you should know about Dr. Johnson’s hand. You know, the one he cut off? They can’t find it.”

  Howard fluttered his hands in the air. “Oooh! I’m scared! Maybe it will come crawling after me in my sleep tonight!”

  She spun and slammed out the door. Howard immediately got on the intercom to his receptionist. “Chrissie? Get hold of Brian Jassie down at the coroner’s office.”

  Missing hand? That sounded awful weird. He wanted the straight dope on it. And Brian Jassie could get it for him.

  Brian had all the details by four p.m.

  “This is what we got so far,” he told Howard over the phone. “It’s a strange one, I tell you.”

  “Just tell me what happened, Brian.”

  “Okay. Here’s how they think it went down. About ten o’clock last night, at his Fifth Avenue office, this Dr. Johnson ties a tight tourniquet just above his right wrist with neat little pads to put extra pressure over the main arteries, and whacks off his hand. Records show he was a southpaw. There’s evidence that he used local anesthesia. Well, he must have, right? I mean, sawing through your own wrist—”

  “Brian!”

  “Okay, okay. After the hand is off, there seems to be an interval of about half an hour during which we have no idea what he does, maybe some ritual or something, then he sits down, lowers his stump into a bucket, and loosens the tourniquet. Exsanguinates in a couple of minutes. Very neat, very considerate. No mess for anybody to
clean up.”

  A real nut case, Howard thought. “Why do you say he was involved in some ritual?”

  “Just a guess. There were candles all around the room and the histology department says the hand was off for around thirty minutes before he died.”

  “Then you have the hand.”

  “Uh, no, we don’t.”

  Howard felt a little knot form in his stomach. “You’re kidding.”

  “ ‘Fraid not. The forensic team looked everywhere in the office and around the building. No hand.”

  So Lydia hadn’t been pulling his chain. The hand really was missing. Well, that would only reinforce his contention that Dr. Johnson was mentally unbalanced and shouldn’t have been allowed to practice. Yes, he would definitely bring the hospital executive committee into the suit.

  Still, he wondered about that missing hand. He sat there smoothing his mustache and wondering where it could be.

  The package arrived the next day.

  Chrissie brought it to his desk unopened. It had come by Federal Express and was marked “Personal and Confidential.” Howard had her stand by as he opened it, figuring it would have to be shoved into somebody’s file—most of the “Personal And Confidential” mail he received was anything but.

  Chrissie began to scream when the hand fell out onto his desk. She kept on screaming all the way down the hall to the reception area. Howard stared at the hand. It lay palm up on his desk blotter, a deathly, bled-out white except at the ragged, beefy red wrist stump. The skin was moist, glistening in the fluorescent glare. He could see the creases that ran along the palm and across the finger joints, could even see fingerprint whorls. A faintly sour smell rose from it.

  This had to be a joke, Lydia’s way of trying to shake him up. Well, it wasn’t going to work. This thing had to be a fake. He’d seen those amazingly lifelike platters of sushi and bowls of sukiyaki in the windows of Japanese restaurants. What was it they called the stuff? Mihon. That was it. This was the same thing: expertly sculpted and colored plastic. A gruesome piece of anatomical mihon.

  Howard touched it with his index finger and felt a faint pins-and-needles sensation run up his arm and all over his skin. It lasted about the time between eye blinks and then it was gone. But by then he had realized from the texture of the skin and the give of the flesh underneath that this wasn’t mihon. This was the real thing!

  He leaped out of his chair and stood there trembling, repeatedly wiping his finger on his suit coat as he shouted to Chrissie to call the police.

  Howard was late getting out of the office that day. The endless questions from the detectives and the forensic people had put him far behind schedule. Then, to top everything off, his last call of the day had been from Brian at the coroner’s office. According to Brian, the forensic experts downtown said that the hand had definitely belonged to the late great Dr. Walter Johnson.

  So now he was shook up, grossed out, and just plain tired. Irritable, too. He snapped at the Rican garage attendant—Jose or Gomez or whatever the hell his name was—to move his ass and get the car up front pronto.

  His red Porsche 914 squealed down the ramp and screeched to a halt in front of him. As he passed the attendant and handed him a fifty-cent tip—half the usual—he could almost feel the man’s animosity toward him.

  No, wait . . . it was more than almost. It was as if he were actually experiencing the car jockey’s anger and envy. It wormed into his system and for a moment Howard too was angry and envious. But at whom? Himself?

  And just as suddenly as it came it was gone. He was once again just tired, irritable, and anxious to get himself out to the Island and home where he could have himself a stiff drink and relax.

  Traffic wasn’t bad. That was one advantage of leaving late. He cruised the LIE to Glen Cove Road, then headed south. He stopped at the MacDonald’s drive-thru just this side of the sign that declared the southern limit of “The Incorporated Village of Monroe.” He ordered up a Big Mac and fries. As he handed his money to the pimple-faced redheaded girl in the window, a wave of euphoria rolled over him. He felt slightly giddy. He looked up at the girl in her blue uniform and noticed her fixed grin and glazed eyes.

  She’s stoned! he thought. And damned if I don’t feel stoned, too!

  He took his bagged order from her and gunned away. The feeling faded almost immediately. But not his puzzlement. First the lot attendant and now the kid at Mickey D’s. What was going on here?

  He pulled into his spot in the Soundview Condominiums lot and entered his town house. It was a three-storied job with a good view of Monroe Harbor. He’d done some legal work on the land sale and so had been able to get in on a preconstruction purchase. The price: one hundred and sixty-nine large. They were going for twice that now.

  Yeah, if you knew the right people and had the wherewithal to take advantage of situations when they presented themselves, your net worth could only go one way: Up.

  Howard pulled a Bud from the fridge and opened up the Styrofoam Big Mac container. As he ate, he stared out over the still waters of the Long Island Sound at the lights along the Connecticut shore on the far side. Much as he tried not to, he couldn’t help thinking about that severed hand in the mail today. Which led his thoughts around to Dr. Johnson. What was it he had said about empathy last week?

  I don’t think you feel anything for anyone, Mr. Weinstein. You need a real lesson in empathy.

  Something like that. And then a week later he had sat down in his office and cut off his hand, and then had somehow got it into a Federal Express overnight envelope and sent it to Howard. Personal And Confidential. And then he had let himself die.

  . . . a lesson in empathy . . .

  Then the hand had arrived and Howard had touched it, felt that tingle, and now he seemed to be able to sense what others were feeling.

  . . . empathy . . .

  Yeah, right. And any moment now, he’d heard Rod Serling’s voice fill the room.

  He finished the beer and went for another.

  But let’s not be too quick to laugh everything off, he told himself as he nibbled on some fries. Law school had taught him how to organize his thoughts and present cogent arguments. So far, there was a good case for his being the victim of some sort of curse. That would have been laughable yesterday, but this morning there had been a real live—no, strike that, make that dead—a dead human hand lying on his desk. A hand that had once belonged to a defendant in a very juicy malpractice case. A man who had said that Howard Weinstein needed a lesson in how other people felt.

  And now Howard Weinstein had encountered two instances in which he had experienced another person’s feelings.

  Or thought he had.

  That was the question. Had Dr. Johnson done a number on Howard’s head? Had he planted some sort of suggestion in his subconscious and then reinforced it by sending him a severed hand?

  Or was this the real thing? A dead man’s curse?

  Howard decided to take a scientific approach. The only way to prove a hypothesis was to test it in the field. He tossed off the second beer. Time to hit the town.

  As he gathered up the MacDonald’s debris, he noticed a dull ache all along his right arm. He rubbed it but that didn’t help. He wondered how he could have strained it. Maybe it was a result of jerking away after touching that hand this morning. No, he didn’t remember any pain then. He shrugged it off, pulled on a sweater, and stepped out into the spring night.

  The air was cool and tangy with salt from the Sound. Too beautiful a night to squeeze back into the Porsche, so he decided to walk the few blocks west down to the waterfront nightspots. He had only gone a few steps when he noticed that the ache in his arm was gone.

  Canterbury’s was the first place he came to along the newly renovated waterfront. He stopped in here occasionally with some of his local clients. Not a bad place for lunch, but after five it turned into a meat market. If AIDS had put a damper on the swinging singles scene, you couldn’t tell it here. The space around Can
terbury’s oval bar was smoky, noisy, and packed with yuppie types.

  Howard squeezed up to the bar and suddenly felt his knees get rubbery. He leaned against the mahogany edge and glanced at the fellow rubbing elbows with him to his right. He was downing a straight shot of something and chasing it with a few generous chugs of draft beer. There were four other shot glasses on the bar in front of him, all empty.

  Howard lurched away toward the booths at the rear of the room and felt better immediately.

  God, it’s happening. It’s true.

  As he moved through the crowd, he was assaulted with a complex mixture of lust, boredom, fatigue, and inebriation. It was a relief to reach the relative sanctuary of the last booth in the rear. The emotions and feelings of the room became background noise, a sensory Muzak.

  But they were still there. On the way from the city it had seemed he needed physical contact—from the garage attendant, the girl at Mickey D’s—to get the sensory input. Now the feeling seemed to waft through the air.

  Howard shut his eyes and rubbed his hands over his temples. This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t be real. This was the stuff of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and Tales from the Darkside. This sort of thing did not happen to Howard Weinstein in little old Monroe, Long Island.

  But he could not deny his own experience. He had felt drunk before noticing that the guy next to him was doing boilermakers.

  Or had he?

  Maybe he had unconsciously noticed the guy with the ball and the beer as he stepped up to the bar and his mind had done the rest.

  It was all so confusing. How could he know for sure?

  “Can I get you something, Mr. Weinstein?”

  Howard looked up. A well-stacked blonde stood over him with a tray under her arm and her order pad ready. She was thirtyish with too much make-up and too-blond hair, but on the whole not someone he’d kick out of bed. She was dressed in the standard Canterbury cocktail waitress uniform of short skirt, black stockings, and low cut Elizabethan barmaid blouse, and she was smiling.