Excerpt

The Lion Guy

Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second
event—the loss of his left hand, long before he reached
middle age.

As a schoolboy, he was a promising student, a fair-minded and
likable kid, without being terribly original. Those classmates who
could remember the future hand recipient from his elementary-school
days would never have described him as daring. Later, in high
school, his success with girls notwithstanding, he was rarely a
bold boy, certainly not a reckless one. While he was irrefutably
good-looking, what his former girlfriends would recall as most
appealing about him was that he deferred to them.

Throughout college, no one would have predicted that fame was his
destiny. “He was so unchallenging,” an ex-girlfriend
said.

Another young woman, who’d known him briefly in graduate
school, agreed. “He didn’t have the confidence of
someone who was going to do anything special” was how she put
it.

He wore a perpetual but dismaying smile—the look of someone
who knows he’s met you before but can’t recall the
exact occasion. He might have been in the act of guessing whether
the previous meeting was at a funeral or in a brothel, which would
explain why, in his smile, there was an unsettling combination of
grief and embarrassment.

He’d had an affair with his thesis adviser; she was either a
reflection of or a reason for his lack of direction as a graduate
student. Later—she was a divorcée with a nearly grown
daughter—she would assert: “You could never rely on
someone that good-looking. He was also a classic
underachiever—he wasn’t as hopeless as you first
thought. You wanted to help him. You wanted to change him. You
definitely wanted to have sex with him.”

In her eyes, there would suddenly be a kind of light that
hadn’t been there; it arrived and departed like a change of
color at the day’s end, as if there were no distance too
great for this light to travel. In noting “his vulnerability
to scorn,” she emphasized “how touching that
was.”

But what about his decision to undergo hand-transplant surgery?
Wouldn’t only an adventurer or an idealist run the risk
necessary to acquire a new hand?

No one who knew him would ever say he was an adventurer or an
idealist, but surely he’d been idealistic once. When he was a
boy, he must have had dreams; even if his goals were private,
unexpressed, he’d had goals.

His thesis adviser, who was comfortable in the role of expert,
attached some significance to the loss of his parents when he was
still a college student. But his parents had amply provided for
him; in spite of their deaths, he was financially secure. He could
have stayed in college until he had tenure—he could have gone
to graduate school for the rest of his life. Yet, although
he’d always been a successful student, he never struck any of
his teachers as exceptionally motivated. He was not an
initiator—he just took what was offered.

He had all the earmarks of someone who would come to terms with the
loss of a hand by making the best of his limitations. Everyone who
knew him had him pegged as a guy who would eventually be content
one-handed.

Besides, he was a television journalist. For what he did,
wasn’t one hand enough?

But he believed a new hand was what he wanted, and he’d
alertly understood everything that could go medically wrong with
the transplant. What he failed to realize explained why he had
never before been much of an experimenter; he lacked the
imagination to entertain the disquieting idea that the new hand
would not be entirely his. After all, it had been someone
else’s hand to begin with.

How fitting that he was a television journalist. Most television
journalists are pretty smart—in the sense of being mentally
quick, of having an instinct to cut to the chase. There’s no
procrastination on TV. A guy who decides to have hand-transplant
surgery doesn’t dither around, does he?

Anyway, his name was Patrick Wallingford and he would, without
hesitation, have traded his fame for a new left hand. At the time
of the accident, Patrick was moving up in the world of television
journalism. He’d worked for two of the three major networks,
where he repeatedly complained about the evil influence of ratings
on the news. How many times had it happened that some CEO more
familiar with the men’s room than the control room made a
“marketing decision” that compromised a story? (In
Wallingford’s opinion, the news executives had completely
caved in to the marketing mavens.)

To put it plainly, Patrick believed that the networks’
financial expectations of their news divisions were killing the
news. Why should news shows be expected to make as much money as
what the networks called entertainment? Why should there be any
pressure on a news division even to make a profit? News
wasn’t what happened in Hollywood; news wasn’t the
World Series or the Super Bowl. News (by which Wallingford meant
real news—that is, in-depth coverage) shouldn’t have to
compete for ratings with comedies or so-called dramas.

Patrick Wallingford was still working for one of the major networks
when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Patrick was thrilled to
be in Germany on such a historic occasion, but the pieces he filed
from Berlin were continually edited down—sometimes to half
the length he felt they deserved. A CEO in the New York newsroom
said to Wallingford: “Any news in the foreign-policy category
is worth shit.”

When this same network’s overseas bureaus began closing,
Patrick made the move that other TV journalists have made. He went
to work for an all-news network; it was not a very good network,
but at least it was a twenty-four-hour international news
channel.

Was Wallingford naïve enough to think that an all-news network
wouldn’t keep an eye on its ratings? In fact, the
international channel was overfond of minute-by-minute ratings that
could pinpoint when the attention of the television audience waxed
or waned.

Yet there was cautious consensus among Wallingford’s
colleagues in the media that he seemed destined to be an anchor. He
was inarguably handsome—the sharp features of his face were
perfect for television—and he’d paid his dues as a
field reporter. Funnily enough, the enmity of Wallingford’s
wife was chief among his costs.

She was his ex-wife now. He blamed the travel, but his
then-wife’s assertion was that other women were the problem.
In truth, Patrick was drawn to first-time sexual encounters, and he
would remain drawn to them, whether he traveled or not.

Just prior to Patrick’s accident, there’d been a
paternity suit against him. Although the case was dismissed—a
DNA test was negative—the mere allegation of his paternity
raised the rancor of Wallingford’s wife. Beyond her
then-husband’s flagrant infidelity, she had an additional
reason to be upset. Although she’d long wanted to have
children, Patrick had steadfastly refused. (Again he blamed the
travel.)

Now Wallingford’s ex-wife—her name was
Marilyn—was wont to say that she wished her ex-husband had
lost more than his left hand. She’d quickly remarried, had
got pregnant, had had a child; then she’d divorced again.
Marilyn would also say that the pain of
childbirth—notwithstanding how long she’d looked
forward to having a child—was greater than the pain Patrick
had experienced in losing his left hand.

Patrick Wallingford was not an angry man; a usually even-tempered
disposition was as much his trademark as his drop-dead good looks.
Yet the pain of losing his left hand was Wallingford’s most
fiercely guarded possession. It infuriated him that his ex-wife
trivialized his pain by declaring it less than hers in
“merely,” as he was wont to say, giving birth.

Nor was Wallingford always even-tempered in response to his
ex-wife’s proclamation that he was an addicted womanizer. In
Patrick’s opinion, he had never womanized. This meant that
Wallingford didn’t seduce women; he simply allowed himself to
be seduced. He never called them—they called him. He was the
boy equivalent of the girl who couldn’t say
no—emphasis, his ex-wife would say, on boy. (Patrick had been
in his late twenties, going on thirty, when his then-wife divorced
him, but, according to Marilyn, he was permanently a boy.)

The anchor chair, for which he’d seemed destined, still
eluded him. And after the accident, Wallingford’s prospects
dimmed. Some CEO cited “the squeamish factor.” Who
wants to watch their morning or their evening news telecast by some
loser-victim type who’s had his hand chomped off by a hungry
lion? It may have been a less-than-thirty-second event—the
entire story ran only three minutes—but no one with a
television set had missed it. For a couple of weeks, it was on the
tube repeatedly, worldwide.

Wallingford was in India. His all-news network, which, because of
its penchant for the catastrophic, was often referred to by the
snobs in the media elite as “Disaster International,”
or the “calamity channel,” had sent him to the site of
an Indian circus in Gujarat. (No sensible news network would have
sent a field reporter from New York to a circus in India.)

The Great Ganesh Circus was performing in Junagadh, and one of
their trapeze artists, a young woman, had fallen. She was renowned
for “flying”—as the work of such aerialists is
called—without a safety net, and while she was not killed in
the fall, which was from a height of eighty feet, her
husband/trainer had been killed when he attempted to catch her.
Although her plummeting body killed him, he managed to break her
fall.

The Indian government instantly declared no more flying without a
net, and the Great Ganesh, among other small circuses in India,
protested the ruling. For years, a certain government
minister—an overzealous animal-rights activist—had been
trying to ban the use of animals in Indian circuses, and for this
reason the circuses were sensitive to government interference of
any kind. Besides—as the excitable ringmaster of the Great
Ganesh Circus told Patrick Wallingford, on-camera—the
audiences packed the tent every afternoon and night because the
trapeze artists didn’t use a net.

What Wallingford had noticed was that the nets themselves were in
shocking disrepair. From where Patrick stood on the dry,
hard-packed earth—on the “floor” of the tent,
looking up—he saw that the pattern of holes was ragged and
torn. The damaged net resembled a colossal spiderweb that had been
wrecked by a panicked bird. It was doubtful that the net could
support the weight of a falling child, much less that of an
adult.

Many of the performers were children, and these mostly girls. Their
parents had sold them to the circus so they could have a better
(meaning a safer) life. Yet the element of risk in the Great Ganesh
was huge. The excitable ringmaster had told the truth: the
audiences packed the tent every afternoon and night to see
accidents happen. And often the victims of these accidents were
children. As performers, they were talented amateurs—good
little athletes—but they were spottily trained.

Why most of the children were girls was a subject any good
journalist would have been interested in, and
Wallingford—whether or not one believed his ex-wife’s
assessment of his character—was a good journalist. His
intelligence lay chiefly in his powers of observation, and
television had taught him the importance of quickly jumping ahead
to what might go wrong.

The jumping-ahead part was both what was brilliant about and what
was wrong with television. TV was driven by crises, not causes.
What chiefly disappointed Patrick about his field assignments for
the all-news network was how common it was to miss or ignore a more
important story. For example, the majority of the child performers
in an Indian circus were girls because their parents had not wanted
them to become prostitutes; at worst, the boys not sold to a circus
would become beggars. (Or they would starve.)

But that wasn’t the story Patrick Wallingford had been sent
to India to report. A trapeze artist, a grown woman hurtling
downward from eighty feet, had landed in her husband’s arms
and killed him. The Indian government had intervened—the
result being that every circus in India was protesting the ruling
that their aerialists now had to use a net. Even the recently
widowed trapeze artist, the woman who’d fallen, joined in the
protest.

Wallingford had interviewed her in the hospital, where she was
recovering from a broken hip and some nonspecific damage to her
spleen; she told him that flying without a safety net was what made
the flying special. Certainly she would mourn her late husband, but
her husband had been an aerialist, too—he’d also fallen
and had survived his fall. Yet possibly, his widow implied,
he’d not really escaped that first mistake; her falling on
him had conceivably signified the true conclusion of the earlier,
unfinished episode.

Now that was interesting, Wallingford thought, but his news editor,
who was cordially despised by everyone, was disappointed in the
interview. And all the people in the newsroom in New York thought
that the widowed trapeze artist had seemed “too calm”;
they preferred their disaster victims to be hysterical.

Furthermore, the recovering aerialist had said her late husband was
now “in the arms of the goddess he believed
in”—an enticing phrase. What she meant was that her
husband had believed in Durga, the Goddess of Destruction. Most of
the trapeze artists believed in Durga—the goddess is
generally depicted as having ten arms. The widow explained:
“Durga’s arms are meant to catch and hold you, if you
ever fall.”

That was interesting to Wallingford, too, but not to the people in
the newsroom in New York; they said they were “sick of
religion.” Patrick’s news editor informed him that they
had run too many religious stories lately. What a dick, Wallingford
thought. It didn’t help that the news editor’s name was
Dick.

He’d sent Patrick back to the Great Ganesh Circus to acquire
“additional local color.” Dick had further reasoned
that the ringmaster was more outspoken than the trapeze
artist.

Patrick had protested. “Something about the child performers
would make a better story,” he said. But apparently they were
also “sick of children” in New York.

“Just get more of the ringmaster,” Dick advised
Wallingford.

In tandem with the ringmaster’s excitement, the lions in
their cage—the lions were the background for the last
interview—grew restless and loud. In television terms, the
piece that Wallingford was filing from India was the intended
“kicker,” the show-ender. The lions would make the
story an even better kicker if they roared loudly enough.

It was meat day, and the Muslims who brought the meat had been
delayed. The television truck and the camera and sound
equipment—as well as the cameraman and the female sound
technician—had intimidated them. The Muslim meat wallahs had
been frozen in their tracks by so much unfamiliar technology. But
primarily it was the sight of the female sound technician that had
halted them.

A tall blonde in tight blue jeans, she wore headphones and a tool
belt with what must have struck the meat wallahs as an assortment
of male-looking accessories: either pliers or a pair of wire
cutters, a bunch of clamps and cables, and what might have been a
battery-tester. She was also wearing a T-shirt without a bra.

Wallingford knew that she was German because he’d slept with
her the night before. She’d told him about the first trip she
took to Goa—she was on vacation, traveling with another
German girl, and they’d both decided that they never wanted
to live anywhere but India.

The other girl got sick and went home, but Monika had found a way
to stay in India. That was her name—“Monika with a
k,” she’d told him. “Sound technicians can live
anywhere,” she had declared. “Anywhere there’s
sound.”

“You might like to try living in New York,” Patrick had
suggested. “There’s a lot of sound there, and you can
drink the water.” Unthinkingly, he’d added:
“German girls are very popular in New York right
now.”

“Why ‘right now’?” she’d asked.

This was symptomatic of the trouble Patrick Wallingford got into
with women; that he said things for no reason was not unlike the
way he acquiesced to the advances women made to him. There’d
been no reason for saying “German girls are very popular in
New York right now,” except to keep talking. It was his
feeble acquiescence to women, his tacit assent to their advances,
that had infuriated Wallingford’s wife, who’d just
happened to call him in his hotel room when he was fucking Monika
with a k.

There was a ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between Junagadh
and New York, but Patrick pretended he didn’t know whether
India was ten and a half hours ahead or behind. All he ever said
when his wife called was, “What time is it there,
honey?”

“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
pater- nity 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 wa-
vered 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. Wallingford 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 cobalt-blue 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 blue-capsule 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 ex-lover’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

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 called 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 . . . well, mercy, what was
Wallingford’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 ex-husband—he’d stayed there with his
second wife and had sent her the card just to rub it in.

Le Bristol was on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, surrounded
by elegant shopping of the kind not even an adventuress could
afford. Once they were there, she and her daughter didn’t
dare go anywhere or do anything. The extravagance of the hotel
itself was more than they could handle. They felt underdressed in
the lobby and in the bar, where they sat mesmerized by the people
who were clearly more at ease about simply being in Le Bristol than
they were. Yet they wouldn’t admit it had been a bad idea to
come—at least not their first night.

There was quite a nice, modestly priced bistro very near them, on
one of the smaller streets, but it was a rainy, dark evening and
they wanted to go to bed early—they were yielding to jet lag.
They planned on an early dinner at the hotel and would let the real
Paris begin for them the next day, but the hotel restaurant was
very popular. A table wouldn’t be available for them until
after nine o’clock, when they hoped to be fast asleep.

They’d come all this way to make recompense for how
they’d both been unjustly injured, or so they believed; in
truth, they were victims of the dissatisfactions of the flesh, in
which their own myriad discontents had played a principal part.
Unearned or deserved, Le Bristol was to be their reward. Now they
were forced to retreat to their suite, relegated to room
service.

There was nothing inelegant about room service at Le
Bristol—it was simply not a night in Paris of the kind they
had imagined. Both mother and daughter, uncharacteristically, tried
to make the best of it.

“I never dreamed I’d spend my first night in Paris in a
hotel room with my mother!” the daughter exclaimed; she tried
to laugh about it.

“At least I won’t get you pregnant,” her mother
remarked. They both tried to laugh about that, too.

Wallingford’s old thesis adviser began the litany of the
disappointing men in her life. The daughter had heard some of the
list before, but she was developing a list of her own, albeit thus
far vastly shorter than her mother’s. They drank two
half-bottles of wine from the mini-bar before the red Bordeaux
they’d ordered with their dinner was delivered, and they
drank that, too. Then they called room service and asked for a
second bottle.

The wine loosened their tongues—maybe more than was either
appropriate or seemly in a mother-daughter conversation. That her
wayward daughter could easily have got herself pregnant with any
number of careless boys before she encountered the lout who’d
done the job was a bitter pill for any mother to swallow—even
in Paris. That Patrick Wallingford’s former thesis adviser
was an inveterate sexual aggressor grew evident, even to her
daughter; that her mother’s sexual taste had led her to dally
with ever-younger men, which eventually included a teenager, was
possibly more than any daughter cared to know.

At a welcome lull in her mother’s nonstop
confessions—the middle-aged admirer of the metaphysical poets
was signing for the second bottle of Bordeaux while brazenly
flirting with the room-service waiter—the daughter sought
some relief from this unwanted intimacy by turning on the
television. As befitted a recently and stylishly renovated hotel,
Le Bristol offered a multitude of satellite-TV channels—in
English and other languages, as well as in French—and, as
luck would have it, the inebriated mother had no sooner closed the
door behind the room-service waiter than she turned to face the
room, her daughter, and the TV, where she saw her ex-lover lose his
left hand to a lion. Just like that!

Of course she screamed, which made her daughter scream. The second
bottle of Bordeaux would have slipped out of the mother’s
grasp, had she not gripped the neck of the bottle tightly. (She
might have been imagining that the bottle was one of her own hands,
disappearing down a lion’s throat.)

The hand-eating episode was over before the mother could reiterate
the tortured tale of her relationship with the now-maimed
television journalist. It would be an hour until the international
news channel aired the incident again, although every fifteen
minutes there were what the network called “bumpers,”
telling of the upcoming item—each promo in a ten- or
fifteen-second installment. The lions fighting over some remaining
and indistinguishable tidbit in their cage; the handless arm
dangling from Patrick’s separated shoulder; the stunned
expression on Wallingford’s face shortly before he fainted; a
hasty view of a braless, headphone-wearing blond woman, who
appeared to be sleeping in what looked like meat.

Mother and daughter sat up a second hour to watch the whole episode
again. This time the mother remarked of the braless blonde,
“I’ll bet he was fucking her.”

They went on like that, through the second bottle of Bordeaux.
Their third watching of the complete event prompted cries of
lascivious glee—as if Wallingford’s punishment, as they
thought of it, was what should have happened to every man they had
ever known.

“Only it shouldn’t have been his hand,” the
mother said.

“Yeah, right,” the daughter replied.

But after this third viewing of the grisly event, only a sullen
silence greeted the final swallowing of the body parts, and the
mother found herself looking away from Patrick’s face as he
was about to swoon.

“The poor bastard,” the daughter said under her breath.
“I’m going to bed.”

“I think I’ll see it one more time,” her mother
answered.

The daughter lay sleeplessly in the bedroom, with the flickering
light coming from under the door to the living room of the suite.
Her mother, who had turned the volume off, could be heard
crying.

The daughter dutifully went to join her mother on the living- room
couch. They kept the TV sound off; holding hands, they watched the
terrifying but stimulating footage again. The hungry lions were
immaterial—the subject of the maiming was men.

“Why do we need them if we hate them?” the daughter
tiredly asked.

“We hate them because we need them,” the mother
answered, her speech slurred.

There was Wallingford’s stricken face. He dropped to his
knees, his forearm spurting blood. His handsomeness was overwhelmed
by his pain, but such was Wallingford’s effect on women that
a drunken, jet-lagged mother and her scarcely less damaged daughter
felt their arms ache. They were actually reaching out to him as he
fell.

Patrick Wallingford initiated nothing, yet he inspired sexual
unrest and unnatural longing—even as he was caught in the act
of feeding a lion his left hand. He was a magnet to women of all
ages and types; even lying unconscious, he was a danger to the
female sex.

As often happens in families, the daughter said aloud what the
mother had also observed but was keeping to herself. “Look at
the lionesses,” the daughter said.

Not one lioness had touched his hand. There was a measure of
longing in the sadness in their eyes; even after Wallingford
fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed
that the lionesses were smitten, too.

The Fourth Hand
by by John Irving [5]

Genres: Fiction [11]
paperback: 316 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN-10: 0345449347
ISBN-13: 9780345449344