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Actually, Dr. Zajac had rented a place in Maine that summer, but only for the month of August, when he would have custody of Rudy. Medea, now more often called Pal, would eat a ton of raw clams and mussels, shells and all; but the dog had seemingly outgrown a taste for her own turds, and Rudy and Zajac played lacrosse with a lacrosse ball. The boy had even attended a lacrosse clinic in the first week of July. Rudy was with Zajac for the weekend, in Cambridge, when Wallingford called.
Irma answered the phone. "Yeah, what is it?" she said.
Wallingford contemplated the remote possibility that Dr. Zajac had an unruly teenage daughter. He knew only that Zajac had a younger child, a six-or seven-year-old boy--like Matthew David Scott's son. In his mind's eye, Patrick was forever seeing that unknown little
boy in a baseball jersey, his hands raised like his father's--both of them celebrating that victory pitch in Philadelphia. (A "victory pitch" was how someone in the media had described it.)
"Yeah?" Irma said again. Was she a surly, oversexed babysitter for Zajac's little boy? Perhaps she was the housekeeper, except she sounded too coarse to be Dr. Zajac's housekeeper.
"Is Dr. Zajac there?" Wallingford asked.
"This is Mrs. Zajac," Irma answered. "Who wants him?"
"This is Patrick Wallingford. Dr. Zajac operated on--"
"Nicky!" Patrick heard Irma yell, although she'd partly covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand. "It's the lion guy!"
Wallingford could identify some of the background noise: almost certainly a child, definitely a dog, and the unmistakable thudding of a ball. There was the scrape of a chair and the scrambling sound of the dog's claws slipping on a wood floor. It must have been some kind of game. Were they trying to keep the ball away from the dog? Zajac, out of breath, finally came to the phone.
When Wallingford finished describing his symptoms, he added hopefully, "Maybe it's just the weather."
"The weather?" Zajac asked.
"You know--the heat wave," Patrick explained.
"Aren't you indoors most of the time?" Zajac asked. "Don't they have air-conditioning in New York?"
"It's not always pain," Wallingford went on. "Sometimes the sensation is like the start of something that doesn't go anywhere. I mean you think the twinge or the prickle is going to lead to pain, but it doesn't--it just stops as soon as it starts. Like something interrupted ... something electrical."
"Precisely," Dr. Zajac told him. What did Wallingford expect? Zajac reminded him that, only five months after the attachment surgery, he'd regained twenty-two centimeters of nerve regeneration.
"I remember," Patrick replied.
"Well, look at it this way," Zajac said. "Those nerves still have something to say."
"But why now?" Wallingford asked him. "It's been half a year since I lost it. I've felt something before, but nothing this specific. I actually feel like I'm touching something with my left middle finger or my left index finger, and I don't even have a left hand!"
"What's going on in the rest of your life?" Dr. Zajac responded. "I assume there's some stress attached to your line of work? I don't know how your love life is progressing, or if it's progressing, but I remember that your love life seemed to be a matter of some concern to you--or so you said. Just remember, there are other factors affecting nerves, including nerves that have been cut off."
"They don't feel 'cut off'--that's what I mean," Wallingford told him.
"That's what I mean," Zajac replied. "What you're feeling is known medically as 'paresthesia'--a wrong sensation, beyond perception. The nerve that used to make you feel pain or touch in your left middle finger, or in your left index finger, has been severed twice--first by a lion and then by me! That cut fiber is still sitting somewhere in the stump of your nerve bundle, accompanied by millions of other fibers coming from and going everywhere. If that neuron is stimulated at the tip of your nerve stump--by touch, by memory, by a dream--it sends the same old message it always did. The feelings that seem to come from where your left hand used to be are being registered by the same nerve fibers and pathways that used to come from your left hand. Do you get it?"
"Sort of," Wallingford replied. ("Not really," was what he should have said.) Patrick kept looking at his stump--the invisible ants were crawling there again. He'd forgotten to mention the sensation of crawling insects to Dr. Zajac, but the doctor didn't give him time.
Dr. Zajac could tell that his patient wasn't satisfied. "Look," Zajac continued, "if you're worried about it, fly up here. Stay in a nice hotel. I'll see you in the morning."
"Saturday morning?" Patrick said. "I don't want to ruin your weekend."
"I'm not going anywhere," Dr. Zajac told him. "I'll just have to find someone to unlock the building. I've done that before. I have my own keys to the office."
Wallingford wasn't really worried about his missing hand anymore, but what else was he going to do this weekend?
"Come on--take the shuttle up here," Zajac was telling him. "I'll see you in the morning, just to put your mind at ease."
"At what time?" Wallingford asked.
"Ten o'clock," Zajac told him. "Stay at the Charles--it's in Cambridge, on Bennett Street, near Harvard Square. They have a great gym, and a pool."
