The Fourth Hand

"Shiatsu?" Patrick asked them.

"There are two of us," one of the women told him.

"Yes, there certainly are," Wallingford said, but he didn't know why. Was it to make the massage go faster? Maybe it was to double the cost of the massage.

When his face was in the hole, he stared at the bare feet of the woman who was grinding her elbow into his neck; the other woman was grinding her elbow (or was it her knee?) into his spine, in the area of his lower back. Patrick gathered his courage and asked the women outright: "Why are there two of you?"

To Wallingford's surprise, the muscular massage therapists giggled like little girls.

"So we won't get raped," one of the women said.

"Two lemons, no

lape," Wallingford heard the other woman say.

Their thumbs and their elbows, or their knees, were getting to him now--the women were digging pretty deep--but what really offended Wallingford was the concept that someone could be so morally reprehensible as to rape a massage therapist. (Patrick's experiences with women had all been of a fairly limited kind: the women had wanted him.)

When the massage therapists left, Wallingford was limp. He could barely manage to walk to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth before falling into bed. He saw that he'd left his unfinished beer on the night table, where it would stink in the morning, but he was too tired to get up. He lay as if rubberized. In the morning, he awoke in the exact same position in which he'd fallen asleep--on his stomach with both arms at his sides, like a soldier, and with the right side of his face pressed into the pillow, looking at his left shoulder.

Not until Wallingford got up to answer the door--it was just his breakfast--did he realize that he couldn't move his head. His neck felt locked; he looked permanently to the left. That he could face only left would present him with a problem at the podium, where he soon had to make his opening remarks to the conference. And before that he had to eat his breakfast while facing his left shoulder. Compounding the difficulty of brushing his teeth with his right (and only) hand, the complimentary toothbrush was a trifle short--given the degree to which he faced left.

At least his luggage was back from its journey to the Philippines, which was a good thing because the laundry service called to apologize for "misplacing" his only other clothes.

"Not losing, merely misplacing!" shouted a man on the verge of hysteria. "Solly!"

When Wallingford opened his garment bag, which he managed by looking over his left shoulder, he discovered that the bag and all his clothes smelled strongly of urine. He called the airline to complain.

"Were you just in the Philippines?" the official for the airline asked.

"No, but my bag was," Wallingford replied.

"Oh, that explains it!" the official cried happily. "Those drug-sniffing dogs that they have there--sometimes they piss on the suitcases!" Naturally this sounded to Patrick like "piff on the sweet cheeses," but he got the idea. Filipino dogs had urinated on his clothes!

"Why?"

"We don't know," the airline official told him. "It just happens. The dogs have to go, I guess."

Stupefied, Wallingford searched his clothes for a shirt and a pair of pants that were, relatively speaking, not permeated with dog piss. He reluctantly sent the rest of his clothes to the hotel laundry service, admonishing the man on the phone not to lose these clothes--they were his last.

"Others not losing!" the man shouted. "Merely misplacing!" (This time he didn't even say "Solly!")

Given how he knew he smelled, Patrick was not pleased to share a taxi to the conference with Evelyn Arbuthnot--especially as he was forced, by the crick in his neck, to ride in the taxi with his face turned rudely away from her.

"I don't blame you for being angry with me, but isn't it rather childish not to look at me?" she asked. She kept sniffing all around, as if she suspected there were a dog in the cab.

Wallingford told her everything: the two-lemon massage ("the two-woman mauling," he called it); his one-way neck; the dog-peeing episode.

"I could listen to your stories for hours," Ms. Arbuthnot told him. He didn't need to see her to know she was being facetious.

Then came his speech, which he delivered standing sideways at the podium, looking down his left arm at his stump, which was more visible to him than the hard-to-read pages. With his left side to the audience, Patrick's amputation was more apparent, prompting one wag in the Japanese press to describe Wallingford as "milking his missing hand." (In the Western media, his missing hand was often referred to as his "no-hand" or his "nonhand.") More generous Japanese journalists attending Patrick's opening remarks--his male hosts, for the most part--called his left-facing oratorical method "provocative" and "incredibly cool."

The speech itself was a flop with the highly accomplished women who were the conference's participants. They had not come to Tokyo to talk about "The Future of Women" and then hear recycled master-of-ceremonies jokes from a man.

"Was that what you were writing on the plane yesterday? Or trying to write, I should say," Evelyn Arbuthnot remarked. "Jesus, we should have had room service together. If the subject of your speech had come up, I might have spared you that embarrassment."

As before, Wallingford was rendered speechless in her company.

The hall in which he'd spoken was made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray. That was roughly how Evelyn Arbuthnot struck Patrick, too--"made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray."