The Fourth Hand Read Free Page B

the next week or more, Wal ingford 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 recal the complaining woman’s remarks, he didn’t know.
    But what chiefly distressed Wal ingford, 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 Wal ingford 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, Wal ingford never knew.

    What concerned him was that the world had seen him scream and writhe in pain and fear; he’d wet his pants oncamera, 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 mil ions, before whom he’d been publicly disfigured. Even five years later, whenever Wal ingford remembered or dreamed about the episode, the effect of the painkil er 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. Wal ingford 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.
    Wal ingford, every twelve hours”—was a Parsi who treated him after the lion attack in Junagadh. “It’s for the best dream you’l ever have, but it’s also for pain,” Dr. Chothia added. “Don’t ever take two. Americans are always taking pil s in twos. Not this one.”
    “What’s it cal ed? I presume it has a name.” Wal ingford was suspicious of it.
    “After you take one, you won’t remember what it’s cal ed,”

    Dr. Chothia told him cheerful y. “And you won’t hear its name in America—your FDA guys wil never approve it!”
    “Why?” Wal ingford asked. He stil hadn’t taken the first capsule.
    “Go on—take it! You’l 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 wil 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 pil 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? Wal ingford was floating above a smal , dark lake. There had to have been some kind of plane, or Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford had gone to summer camp as a child. It didn’t look like Ontario,