John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Wallingford checked into the Charles before ten and went immediately to the indoor swimming pool, where he spent a restorative half hour by himself. He would have stayed longer, but they closed the pool at ten-thirty. Wallingford—with his one hand—enjoyed floating and treading water. In keeping with his personality, he was a good floater.

He’d planned to get dressed and walk around Harvard Square after his swim. Summer school was in session; there would be students to look at, to remind him of his misspent youth. He could probably find a place to have a decent dinner with a good bottle of wine. In one of the bookstores on the square, he might spot something more gripping to read than the book he’d brought with him, which was a biography of Byron the size of a cinder block. But even in the taxi from the airport, Wallingford had felt the oppressive heat getting to him; and when he went back to his room from the pool, he took off his wet bathing suit and lay down naked on the bed and closed his eyes for a minute or two. He must have been tired. When he woke up almost an hour later, the air-conditioning had chilled him. He put on a bathrobe and read the room-service menu. All he wanted was a beer and a hamburger—he no longer felt like going out.

True to himself, he would not turn on a television on the weekend. Given that the only alternative was the Byron biography, Patrick’s resistance to the TV was all the more remarkable. But Wallingford fell asleep so quickly—Byron had barely been born, and the wee poet’s feckless father was still alive—that the biography caused him no pain at all.

In the morning, he ate breakfast in the casual restaurant in the downstairs of the hotel. The dining room irritated him without his knowing why. It wasn’t the children. Maybe there were too many grown-ups who seemed bothered by the very presence of children.

The previous night and this morning, while Wallingford was not watching television or even so much as glancing at a newspaper, the nation had been reliving one of TV’s not-the-news images. JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing; it appeared that he had flown into the ocean. But there was nothing to see—hence what was shown on television, again and again, was that image of young Kennedy at his father’s funeral procession. There was John junior, a three-year-old boy in shorts saluting his father’s passing casket—exactly as his mother, whispering in the little boy’s ear, had instructed him to do only seconds before. What Wallingford would later consider was that this image might stand as the representative moment of our country’s most golden century, which has also died, although we are still marketing it.

His breakfast finished, Patrick sat at his table, trying to finish his coffee without returning the relentless stare of a middle-aged woman across the room. But she now made her way toward him. Her path was deliberate; while she pretended to be only passing by, Wallingford knew she was going to say something to him. He could always tell. Often he could guess what the women were going to say, but not this time.

Her face had been pretty once. She wore no makeup, and her undyed brown hair was turning gray. In the crow’s-feet at the corners of her dark-brown eyes there was something sad and tired that reminded Patrick of Mrs. Clausen grown older.

“Scum… despicable swine… how do you sleep at night?” the woman asked him in a harsh whisper; her teeth were clenched, her lips parted no wider than was necessary for her to spit out her words.

“Pardon me?” said Patrick Wallingford.

“It didn’t take you long to get here, did it?” she asked. “Those poor families… the bodies not even recovered. But that doesn’t stop you, does it? You thrive on other people’s misfortune. You ought to call yourself the death network—no, the grief channel! Because you do more than invade people’s privacy—you steal their grief! You make their private grief public before they even have a chance to grieve!”

Wallingford wrongly assumed that she was speaking generically of his TV

newscasts past. He looked away from the woman’s entrenched stare, but among his fellow breakfast-eaters, he saw that no assistance would be forthcoming; from their unanimously hostile expressions, they appeared to share the demented woman’s view.

“I try to report what’s happened with sympathy,” Patrick began, but the nearviolent woman cut him off.

“Sympathy!” she cried. “If you had an ounce of sympathy for those poor people, you’d leave them alone!”

Since the woman was clearly deranged, what could Wallingford do? He pinned his bill to the table with the stump of his left forearm, quickly adding a tip and his room number before signing his name. The woman watched him coldly. Patrick stood up from the table. As he nodded good-bye to the woman and started to leave the restaurant, he was aware of the children gaping at his missing hand. An angry-looking sous-chef, all in white, stood glaring at Wallingford from behind a counter. “Hyena,” the sous-chef said.

“Jackal!” cried an elderly man at an adjacent table.

The woman, Patrick’s first attacker, said to his back: “Vulture… carrion feeder . .

.”

Wallingford kept walking, but he could sense that the woman was following him; she accompanied him to the elevators, where he pushed the button and waited. He could hear her breathing, but he didn’t look at her. When the elevator door opened, he stepped inside and allowed the door to close behind his back. Until he pushed the button for his floor and turned to face her, he didn’t know that the woman was not there; he was surprised to find himself alone.

It must be Cambridge, Patrick thought—all those Harvard and M.I.T. intellectuals who loathed the crassness of the media. He brushed his teeth, right-handed, of course. He was ever-conscious of how he’d been learning to brush his teeth with his left hand when it had just up and died. Still clueless about the breaking news, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and took a taxi to Dr. Zajac’s office. It was deeply disconcerting to Patrick that Dr. Zajac—specifically, his face—smelled of sex. This evidence of a private life was not what Wallingford wanted to know about his hand surgeon, even while Zajac was reassuring him that there was nothing wrong with the sensations he was experiencing in the stump of his left forearm.

It turned out there was a word for the feeling that small, unseen insects were crawling over or under his skin. “Formication,” Dr. Zajac said. Naturally Wallingford misheard him. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“It means ‘tactile hallucination.’ Formication, ” the doctor repeated, “with an m. ”

“Oh.”

“Think of nerves as having long memories,” Zajac told him. “What’s triggering those nerves isn’t your missing hand. I mentioned your love life because you once mentioned it. As for stress, I can only imagine what a week you have ahead of you. I don’t envy you the next few days. You know what I mean.”

Wallingford didn’t know what Dr. Zajac meant. What did the doctor imagine of the week Wallingford had ahead of him? But Zajac had always struck Wallingford as a little crazy. Maybe everyone in Cambridge was crazy, Patrick considered.

“It’s true, I’m a little unhappy in the love-life department,” Wallingford confessed, but there he paused—he had no memory of discussing his love life with Zajac. (Had the painkillers been more potent than he’d thought at the time?) Wallingford was further confused by trying to decide what was different about Dr. Zajac’s office. After all, that office was sacred ground; yet it had seemed a very different place when Mrs. Clausen was having her way with him in the exact chair in which he now sat, scanning the surrounding walls.