{"product_id":"the-fourth-hand-isbn-9780345449344","title":"The Fourth Hand","description":"\u003cb\u003e#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. But what if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eThe Fourth Hand\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A rich and deeply moving tale . . . Vintage Irving: a story of two very disparate people, and the strange and unexpected ways we grow . . . Irving’s novels are perceptive and precise reflections of the world around us.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A blend of sexual farce, journalistic satire, and tender love story . . . From what at first seems bizarre, Irving builds the best kind of love story: an improbable one. Wallingford gets more than a transplanted hand; he begins to find his soul.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A riveting entertainment and certainly one of the funniest novels of the year. The authoritative control of Irving’s storytelling has never been more impressive. . . . The delighted reader is powerless to look away.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eChicago Sun-Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] thoroughly satisfying literary experience . . . Irving’s most compassionate and redemptive [novel] to date . . . [His] mastery of characterization is unequaled in American novelists of the day.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A beautiful story about the redemptive power of love.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Denver Post\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A RICH AND DEEPLY MOVING TALE . . . Vintage Irving: a story of two very disparate people, and the strange and unexpected ways we grow . . . Irving’s novels are perceptive and precise reflections of the world around us.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–The Washington Post Book World\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A BLEND OF SEXUAL FARCE, JOURNALISTIC SATIRE, AND TENDER LOVE STORY . . . From what at first seems bizarre, Irving builds the best kind of love story: an improbable one. Wallingford gets more than a transplanted hand; he begins to find his soul.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–USA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A RIVETING ENTERTAINMENT AND CERTAINLY ONE OF THE FUNNIEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR. The authoritative control of Irving’s storytelling has never been more impressive. . . . The delighted reader is powerless to look away.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–Chicago Sun-Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] THOROUGHLY SATISFYING LITERARY EXPERIENCE . . . Irving’s most compassionate and redemptive [novel] to date . . . [His] mastery of characterization is unequaled in American novelists of the day.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–St. Louis Post Dispatch\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A BEAUTIFUL STORY ABOUT THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF LOVE.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e–The Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eJOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, \u003ci\u003eSetting Free the Bears,\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for \u003ci\u003eThe World According to Garp.\u003c\/i\u003e In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for \u003ci\u003eThe Cider House Rules.\u003c\/i\u003e In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for \u003ci\u003eIn One Person.\u003c\/i\u003e An international writer, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. \u003ci\u003eA Prayer for Owen Meany\u003c\/i\u003e is his best-selling novel, in every language\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto.\u003c\/p\u003eThe Lion Guy\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eImagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event—the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a schoolboy, he was a promising student, a fair-minded and likable kid, without being terribly original. Those classmates who could remember the future hand recipient from his elementary-school days would never have described him as daring. Later, in high school, his success with girls notwithstanding, he was rarely a bold boy, certainly not a reckless one. While he was irrefutably good-looking, what his former girlfriends would recall as most appealing about him was that he deferred to them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout college, no one would have predicted that fame was his destiny. “He was so unchallenging,” an ex-girlfriend said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother young woman, who’d known him briefly in graduate school, agreed. “He didn’t have the confidence of someone who was going to do anything special” was how she put it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe wore a perpetual but dismaying smile—the look of someone who knows he’s met you before but can’t recall the exact occasion. He might have been in the act of guessing whether the previous meeting was at a funeral or in a brothel, which would explain why, in his smile, there was an unsettling combination of grief and embarrassment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe’d had an affair with his thesis adviser; she was either a reflection of or a reason for his lack of direction as a graduate student. Later—she was a divorcée with a nearly grown daughter—she would assert: “You could never rely on someone that good-looking. He was also a classic underachiever—he wasn’t as hopeless as you first thought. You wanted to help him. You wanted to change him. You definitely wanted to have sex with him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her eyes, there would suddenly be a kind of light that hadn’t been there; it arrived and departed like a change of color at the day’s end, as if there were no distance too great for this light to travel. In noting “his vulnerability to scorn,” she emphasized “how touching that was.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut what about his decision to undergo hand-transplant surgery? Wouldn’t only an adventurer or an idealist run the risk necessary to acquire a new hand?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo one who knew him would ever say he was an adventurer or an idealist, but surely he’d been idealistic once. When he was a boy, he must have had dreams; even if his goals were private, unexpressed, he’d had goals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis thesis adviser, who was comfortable in the role of expert, attached some significance to the loss of his parents when he was still a college student. But his parents had amply provided for him; in spite of their deaths, he was financially secure. He could have stayed in college until he had tenure—he could have gone to graduate school for the rest of his life. Yet, although he’d always been a successful student, he never struck any of his teachers as exceptionally motivated. He was not an initiator—he just took what was offered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had all the earmarks of someone who would come to terms with the loss of a hand by making the best of his limitations. Everyone who knew him had him pegged as a guy who would eventually be content one-handed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBesides, he was a television journalist. For what he did, wasn’t one hand enough?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut he believed a new hand was what he wanted, and he’d alertly understood everything that could go medically wrong with the transplant. What he failed to realize explained why he had never before been much of an experimenter; he lacked the imagination to entertain the disquieting idea that the new hand would not be entirely his. After all, it had been someone else’s hand to begin with.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow fitting that he was a television journalist. Most television journalists are pretty smart—in the sense of being mentally quick, of having an instinct to cut to the chase. There’s no procrastination on TV. A guy who decides to have hand-transplant surgery doesn’t dither around, does he?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnyway, his name was Patrick Wallingford and he would, without hesitation, have traded his fame for a new left hand. At the time of the accident, Patrick was moving up in the world of television journalism. He’d worked for two of the three major networks, where he repeatedly complained about the evil influence of ratings on the news. How many times had it happened that some CEO more familiar with the men’s room than the control room made a “marketing decision” that compromised a story? (In Wallingford’s opinion, the news executives had completely caved in to the marketing mavens.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo put it plainly, Patrick believed that the networks’ financial expectations of their news divisions were killing the news. Why should news shows be expected to make as much money as what the networks called entertainment? Why should there be any pressure on a news division even to make a profit? News wasn’t what happened in Hollywood; news wasn’t the World Series or the Super Bowl. News (by which Wallingford meant real news—that is, in-depth coverage) shouldn’t have to compete for ratings with comedies or so-called dramas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick Wallingford was still working for one of the major networks when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Patrick was thrilled to be in Germany on such a historic occasion, but the pieces he filed from Berlin were continually edited down—sometimes to half the length he felt they deserved. A CEO in the New York newsroom said to Wallingford: “Any news in the foreign-policy category is worth shit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen this same network’s overseas bureaus began closing, Patrick made the move that other TV journalists have made. He went to work for an all-news network; it was not a very good network, but at least it was a twenty-four-hour international news channel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas Wallingford naïve enough to think that an all-news network wouldn’t keep an eye on its ratings? In fact, the international channel was overfond of minute-by-minute ratings that could pinpoint when the attention of the television audience waxed or waned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet there was cautious consensus among Wallingford’s colleagues in the media that he seemed destined to be an anchor. He was inarguably handsome—the sharp features of his face were perfect for television—and he’d paid his dues as a field reporter. Funnily enough, the enmity of Wallingford’s wife was chief among his costs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe was his ex-wife now. He blamed the travel, but his then-wife’s assertion was that other women were the problem. In truth, Patrick was drawn to first-time sexual encounters, and he would remain drawn to them, whether he traveled or not.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust prior to Patrick’s accident, there’d been a paternity suit against him. Although the case was dismissed—a DNA test was negative—the mere allegation of his paternity raised the rancor of Wallingford’s wife. Beyond her then-husband’s flagrant infidelity, she had an additional reason to be upset. Although she’d long wanted to have children, Patrick had steadfastly refused. (Again he blamed the travel.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow Wallingford’s ex-wife—her name was Marilyn—was wont to say that she wished her ex-husband had lost more than his left hand. She’d quickly remarried, had got pregnant, had had a child; then she’d divorced again. Marilyn would also say that the pain of childbirth—notwithstanding how long she’d looked forward to having a child—was greater than the pain Patrick had experienced in losing his left hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick Wallingford was not an angry man; a usually even-tempered disposition was as much his trademark as his drop-dead good looks. Yet the pain of losing his left hand was Wallingford’s most fiercely guarded possession. It infuriated him that his ex-wife trivialized his pain by declaring it less than hers in “merely,” as he was wont to say, giving birth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNor was Wallingford always even-tempered in response to his ex-wife’s proclamation that he was an addicted womanizer. In Patrick’s opinion, he had never womanized. This meant that Wallingford didn’t seduce women; he simply allowed himself to be seduced. He never called them—they called him. He was the boy equivalent of the girl who couldn’t say no—emphasis, his ex-wife would say, on boy. (Patrick had been in his late twenties, going on thirty, when his then-wife divorced him, but, according to Marilyn, he was permanently a boy.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe anchor chair, for which he’d seemed destined, still eluded him. And after the accident, Wallingford’s prospects dimmed. Some CEO cited “the squeamish factor.” Who wants to watch their morning or their evening news telecast by some loser-victim type who’s had his hand chomped off by a hungry lion? It may have been a less-than-thirty-second event—the entire story ran only three minutes—but no one with a television set had missed it. For a couple of weeks, it was on the tube repeatedly, worldwide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWallingford was in India. His all-news network, which, because of its penchant for the catastrophic, was often referred to by the snobs in the media elite as “Disaster International,” or the “calamity channel,” had sent him to the site of an Indian circus in Gujarat. (No sensible news network would have sent a field reporter from New York to a circus in India.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Great Ganesh Circus was performing in Junagadh, and one of their trapeze artists, a young woman, had fallen. She was renowned for “flying”—as the work of such aerialists is called—without a safety net, and while she was not killed in the fall, which was from a height of eighty feet, her husband\/trainer had been killed when he attempted to catch her. Although her plummeting body killed him, he managed to break her fall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Indian government instantly declared no more flying without a net, and the Great Ganesh, among other small circuses in India, protested the ruling. For years, a certain government minister—an overzealous animal-rights activist—had been trying to ban the use of animals in Indian circuses, and for this reason the circuses were sensitive to government interference of any kind. Besides—as the excitable ringmaster of the Great Ganesh Circus told Patrick Wallingford, on-camera—the audiences packed the tent every afternoon and night because the trapeze artists didn’t use a net.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat Wallingford had noticed was that the nets themselves were in shocking disrepair. From where Patrick stood on the dry, hard-packed earth—on the “floor” of the tent, looking up—he saw that the pattern of holes was ragged and torn. The damaged net resembled a colossal spiderweb that had been wrecked by a panicked bird. It was doubtful that the net could support the weight of a falling child, much less that of an adult.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany of the performers were children, and these mostly girls. Their parents had sold them to the circus so they could have a better (meaning a safer) life. Yet the element of risk in the Great Ganesh was huge. The excitable ringmaster had told the truth: the audiences packed the tent every afternoon and night to see accidents happen. And often the victims of these accidents were children. As performers, they were talented amateurs—good little athletes—but they were spottily trained.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy most of the children were girls was a subject any good journalist would have been interested in, and Wallingford—whether or not one believed his ex-wife’s assessment of his character—was a good journalist. His intelligence lay chiefly in his powers of observation, and television had taught him the importance of quickly jumping ahead to what might go wrong.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe jumping-ahead part was both what was brilliant about and what was wrong with television. TV was driven by crises, not causes. What chiefly disappointed Patrick about his field assignments for the all-news network was how common it was to miss or ignore a more important story. For example, the majority of the child performers in an Indian circus were girls because their parents had not wanted them to become prostitutes; at worst, the boys not sold to a circus would become beggars. (Or they would starve.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut that wasn’t the story Patrick Wallingford had been sent to India to report. A trapeze artist, a grown woman hurtling downward from eighty feet, had landed in her husband’s arms and killed him. The Indian government had intervened—the result being that every circus in India was protesting the ruling that their aerialists now had to use a net. Even the recently widowed trapeze artist, the woman who’d fallen, joined in the protest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWallingford had interviewed her in the hospital, where she was recovering from a broken hip and some nonspecific damage to her spleen; she told him that flying without a safety net was what made the flying special. Certainly she would mourn her late husband, but her husband had been an aerialist, too—he’d also fallen and had survived his fall. Yet possibly, his widow implied, he’d not really escaped that first mistake; her falling on him had conceivably signified the true conclusion of the earlier, unfinished episode.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow that was interesting, Wallingford thought, but his news editor, who was cordially despised by everyone, was disappointed in the interview. And all the people in the newsroom in New York thought that the widowed trapeze artist had seemed “too calm”; they preferred their disaster victims to be hysterical.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFurthermore, the recovering aerialist had said her late husband was now “in the arms of the goddess he believed in”—an enticing phrase. What she meant was that her husband had believed in Durga, the Goddess of Destruction. Most of the trapeze artists believed in Durga—the goddess is generally depicted as having ten arms. The widow explained: “Durga’s arms are meant to catch and hold you, if you ever fall.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was interesting to Wallingford, too, but not to the people in the newsroom in New York; they said they were “sick of religion.” Patrick’s news editor informed him that they had run too many religious stories lately. What a dick, Wallingford thought. It didn’t help that the news editor’s name was Dick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe’d sent Patrick back to the Great Ganesh Circus to acquire “additional local color.” Dick had further reasoned that the ringmaster was more outspoken than the trapeze artist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick had protested. “Something about the child performers would make a better story,” he said. But apparently they were also “sick of children” in New York.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Just get more of the ringmaster,” Dick advised Wallingford.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn tandem with the ringmaster’s excitement, the lions in their cage—the lions were the background for the last interview—grew restless and loud. In television terms, the piece that Wallingford was filing from India was the intended “kicker,” the show-ender. The lions would make the story an even better kicker if they roared loudly enough.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was meat day, and the Muslims who brought the meat had been delayed. The television truck and the camera and sound equipment—as well as the cameraman and the female sound technician—had intimidated them. The Muslim meat wallahs had been frozen in their tracks by so much unfamiliar technology. But primarily it was the sight of the female sound technician that had halted them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA tall blonde in tight blue jeans, she wore headphones and a tool belt with what must have struck the meat wallahs as an assortment of male-looking accessories: either pliers or a pair of wire cutters, a bunch of clamps and cables, and what might have been a battery-tester. She was also wearing a T-shirt without a bra.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWallingford knew that she was German because he’d slept with her the night before. She’d told him about the first trip she took to Goa—she was on vacation, traveling with another German girl, and they’d both decided that they never wanted to live anywhere but India.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe other girl got sick and went home, but Monika had found a way to stay in India. That was her name—“Monika with a k,” she’d told him. “Sound technicians can live anywhere,” she had declared. “Anywhere there’s sound.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You might like to try living in New York,” Patrick had suggested. “There’s a lot of sound there, and you can drink the water.” Unthinkingly, he’d added: “German girls are very popular in New York right now.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Why ‘right now’?” she’d asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis was symptomatic of the trouble Patrick Wallingford got into with women; that he said things for no reason was not unlike the way he acquiesced to the advances women made to him. There’d been no reason for saying “German girls are very popular in New York right now,” except to keep talking. It was his feeble acquiescence to women, his tacit assent to their advances, that had infuriated Wallingford’s wife, who’d just happened to call him in his hotel room when he was fucking Monika with a k.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was a ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between Junagadh and New York, but Patrick pretended he didn’t know whether India was ten and a half hours ahead or behind. All he ever said when his wife called was, “What time is it there, honey?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?” his wife asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No, Marilyn, I am not,” he lied. Under him, the German girl held still. Wallingford tried to hold himself still, too, but holding still in the act of lovemaking is arguably more difficult for a man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I just thought you’d like to know the results of your pater- nity test,” Marilyn said. This helped Patrick to hold still. “Well, it’s negative—you’re not the father. I guess you dodged that bullet, didn’t you?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll Wallingford could think of saying was: “That was improper—that they gave you the results of my blood test. It was my blood test.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnder him, Monika with a k went rigid; where she’d been warm, she felt cool. “What blood test?” she whispered in Patrick’s ear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut Wallingford was wearing a condom—the German sound technician was protected from most things, if not everything. (Patrick always wore a condom, even with his wife.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Who is she this time?” Marilyn hollered into the phone. “Who are you fucking at this very minute?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo things were clear to Wallingford: that his marriage could not be saved and that he didn’t want to save it. As always, with women, Patrick acquiesced. “Who is she?” his wife screamed again, but Wallingford wouldn’t answer her. Instead he held the mouthpiece of the phone to the German girl’s lips.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick needed to move a wisp of the girl’s blond hair away from her ear before he whispered into it. “Just tell her your name.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Monika . . . with a k,” the German girl said into the phone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWallingford hung up, doubting that Marilyn would call back— she didn’t. But after that, he had a lot to say to Monika with a k; they hadn’t had the best night’s sleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the morning, at the Great Ganesh, the way everything had started out seemed a little anticlimactic. The ringmaster’s repeated complaints about the Indian government were not nearly so sympathetic as the fallen trapeze artist’s description of the ten-armed goddess in whom all the aerialists believed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWere they deaf and blind in the newsroom in New York? That widow in her hospital bed had been great stuff! And Wallingford still wanted to tell the story of the context of the trapeze artist falling without a safety net. The child performers were the context, those children who’d been sold to the circus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat if the trapeze artist herself had been sold to the circus as a child? What if her late husband had been rescued from a no-future childhood, only to meet his fate—his wife falling into his arms from eighty feet—under the big top? That would have been interesting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInstead, Patrick was interviewing the repetitive ringmaster in front of the lions’ cage—this commonplace circus image being what New York had meant by “additional local color.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo wonder the interview seemed anticlimactic compared to Wallingford’s night with the German sound technician. Monika with a k, in her T-shirt without a bra, was making a noticeable impression on the Muslim meat wallahs, who had taken offense at the German girl’s clothes, or lack thereof. In their fear, their curiosity, their moral outrage, they would have given a better and truer depiction of additional local color than the tiresome ringmaster.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNear the lions’ cage, but appearing either too afraid or too dumbfounded or too offended to come any closer, the Muslims stood as if in shock. Their wooden carts were piled high with the sweet-smelling meat, which was a source of infinite disgust to the largely vegetarian (Hindu) community of the circus. Naturally the lions could smell the meat, too, and were vexed at the delay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the lions began roaring, the cameraman zoomed in on them, and Patrick Wallingford—recognizing a moment of genuine spontaneity—extended his microphone to within reach of their cage. He got a better kicker than he’d bargained for.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA paw flicked out; a claw caught Wallingford’s left wrist. He dropped the microphone. In less than two seconds, his left arm, up to his elbow, had been snatched inside the cage. His left shoulder was slammed against the bars; his left hand, including an inch or more above his wrist, was in a lion’s mouth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the ensuing hullabaloo, two other lions competed with the first for Patrick’s wrist and hand. The lion tamer, who was never far from his lions, intervened; he struck them in their faces with a shovel. Wallingford retained consciousness long enough to recognize the shovel—it was used principally as a lion pooper-scooper. (He’d seen it in action only minutes before.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick passed out somewhere in the vicinity of the meat carts, not far from where Monika with a k had sympathetically fainted. But the German girl had fainted in one of the meat carts, to the considerable consternation of the meat wallahs; and when she came to, she discovered that her tool belt had been stolen while she’d lain unconscious in the wet meat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe German sound technician further claimed that, while she was passed out, someone had fondled her breasts—she had fingerprint bruises on both breasts to prove it. But there were no handprints among the bloodstains on her T-shirt. (The bloodstains were from the meat.) It was more likely that the bruises on her breasts were the result of her nightlong lovemaking with Patrick Wallingford. Whoever had been bold enough to swipe her tool belt had probably lacked the courage to touch her breasts. No one had touched her headphones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWallingford, in turn, had been dragged away from the lions’ cage without realizing that his left hand and wrist were gone; yet he was aware that the lions were still fighting over something. At the same moment that the sweet smell of the mutton reached him, he realized that the Muslims were transfixed by his dangling left arm. (The force of the lion’s pull had separated his shoulder.) And when he looked, he saw that his watch was missing. He was not that sorry to have lost it—it had been a gift from his wife. Of course there was nothing to keep the watch from slipping off; his left hand and the big joint of his left wrist were missing, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot finding a familiar face among the Muslim meat wallahs, Wallingford had doubtless hoped to locate Monika with a k, stricken but no less adoring. Unfortunately, the German girl was flat on her back in one of the mutton carts, her face turned away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePatrick took some bitter consolation from seeing, if not the face, at least the profile of his unfazed cameraman, who had never wa- vered from his foremost responsibility. The determined professional had moved in close to the lions’ cage, where the lions were caught in the act of not very agreeably sharing what little remained of Patrick’s wrist and hand. Talk about a good kicker!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhatever 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe doctor who’d prescribed the medication, which came in the form of a cobalt-blue 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What’s it called? I presume it has a name.” Wallingford was suspicious of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Why?” Wallingford asked. He still hadn’t taken the first capsule.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Go on—take it! You’ll see,” the Parsi said. “There’s nothing better.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite his pain, Patrick didn’t want to go off on some drug-induced trip.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Before I take it, I want to know why the","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304252461285,"sku":"NP9780345449344","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345449344.jpg?v=1767739413","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-fourth-hand-isbn-9780345449344","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}