John Irving: The Fourth Hand

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 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’