The Fourth Hand

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 near-violent 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.

Of course! The photographs of Zajac's famous patients--they were gone! In their place were children's drawings. One child's drawings, actually--they were all Rudy's. Castles in heaven, Patrick would have guessed, and there were several of a large, sinking ship; doubtless the young artist had seen Titanic. (Both Rudy and Dr. Zajac had seen the movie twice, although Zajac had made Rudy shut his eyes during the sex scene in the car.)

As for the model in the series of photos of an increasingly pregnant young woman ... well, not surprisingly, Wallingford felt drawn to her coarse sexuality. She must have been Irma, the self-described Mrs. Zajac, who'd spoken to Patrick on the phone. Wallingford learned that Irma was expecting twins only when he inquired about the empty picture frames that were hanging from the walls in half a dozen places, always in twos.

"They're for the twins, after they're born," Zajac told Patrick proudly.

No one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates envied Zajac having twins, although that moron Mengerink opined that twins were what Zajac deserved for fucking Irma twice as much as Mengerink believed was "normal." Schatzman had no opinion of the upcoming birth of Dr. Zajac's twins, because Schatzman was more than retired--Schatzman had died. And Gingeleskie (the living one) had shifted his envy of Zajac to a more virulent envy of a younger colleague, someone Dr. Zajac had brought into the surgical association. Nathan Blaustein had been Zajac's best student in clinical surgery at Harvard. Dr. Zajac didn't envy young Blaustein at all. Zajac simply recognized Blaustein as his technical superior--"a physical genius."

When a ten-year-old in New Hampshire had lopped off his thumb in a snow blower, Dr. Zajac had insisted that Blaustein perform the reattachment surgery. The thumb was a mess, and it had been unevenly frozen. The boy's father had needed almost an hour to find the severed thumb in the snow; then the family had to drive two hours to Boston. But the surgery had been a success. Zajac was already lobbying his colleagues to have Blaustein's name added to the office nameplate and letterhead--a request that caused Mengerink to seethe with resentment, and no doubt made Schatzman and Gingeleskie (the dead one) roll in their graves.

As for Dr. Zajac's ambitions in hand-transplant surgery, Blaustein was now in charge of such procedures. (There would soon be many procedures of that kind, Zajac had predicted.) While Zajac said he would be happy to be part of the team, he believed young Blaustein should head the operation because Blaustein was now the best surgeon among them. No envy or resentment there. Quite unexpectedly, even to himself, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac was a happy, relaxed man.

Ever since Wallingford had lost Otto Clausen's hand, Zajac had contented himself with his inventions of prosthetic devices, which he designed and assembled on his kitchen table while listening to his songbirds. Patrick Wallingford was the perfect guinea pig for Zajac's inventions, because he was willing to model any new prosthesis on his evening newscast--even though he chose not to wear a prosthesis himself. The publicity had been good for the doctor.