The Fourth Hand Read Online Free PDF Page B

knife.
    They were risk-taking jocks—an accident-prone bunch—
    but they were famous. For a time, Dr. Zajac worshiped them; their signed photographs, radiating physical superiority, looked down from his office wal s.
    Yet even the on-the-job injuries to sports stars were often unnecessary, including a center for the Boston Celtics who attempted a backward slam dunk after the time on the shot clock had expired. He simply lost control of the bal and made a mess of his palmar fascia against the rim.
    Never mind—Dr. Zajac loved them al . And not only the athletes. Rock singers seemed prone to hotel-room injuries of two kinds. Foremost was what Zajac categorized as
    “room-service outrage”; this led to stab wounds, scalding coffee and tea injuries, and a host of unplanned confrontations with inanimate objects. A close second to these were the innumerable mishaps in wet bathrooms, to which not only rock stars but also movie stars were inclined.
    Movie stars had accidents in restaurants, too, mostly upon leaving them. From a hand surgeon’s point of view, striking a photographer was preferable to striking a photographer’s camera. For the hand’s sake, any expression of hostility toward something made of metal, glass, wood, stone, or plastic was a mistake. Yet, among the famous, violence toward things was the leading source of the injuries the doctor saw.
    When Dr. Zajac reviewed the docile visages of his renowned patients, it was with the realization that their success and seeming contentment were only public masks.
    Al this may have preoccupied Zajac, but the doctor’s col eagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates were preoccupied with him. While they never cal ed Dr. Zajac a star-fucker to his face, they knew what he was and felt superior to him—if only in this regard. As a surgeon, he was the best of them, and they knew this, too; it bothered them.
    If, at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates, they refrained from comment on Zajac’s fame-fucking, they did permit themselves to admonish their superstar col eague for his thinness. It was commonly believed that Zajac’s marriage had failed because he’d grown thinner than his wife, yet no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had been able to persuade Dr.
    Zajac to feed himself to save his marriage; they were not likely to have any success at convincing him to fatten himself up now that he was divorced. It was principal y his love of birds that drove Zajac’s neighbors nuts. For reasons that were incomprehensible even to the area’s ornithologists, Dr. Zajac was convinced that the abundance of dogshit in Greater Boston had a deleterious effect on the city’s bird life.
    There was a picture of Zajac that al his col eagues savored, although only one of them had seen the actual image. On a Sunday morning in his snow-covered yard on Brattle Street, the renowned hand surgeon—in knee-high boots, his red flannel bathrobe, and a preposterous New England Patriots ski hat, a brown paper bag in one hand, a child-size lacrosse stick in the other—was searching his yard for dog turds. Although Dr. Zajac didn’t own a dog, he had several inconsiderate neighbors, and Brattle Street was one of the most popular dog-walking routes in Cambridge.
    The lacrosse stick had been intended for Zajac’s only child, an unathletic son who visited him every third weekend. The troubled boy, disturbed by his parents’
    divorce, was an underweight six-year-old, an obdurate noneater—quite possibly at the urging of his mother, whose uncomplicated mission was to drive Zajac crazy. The ex-wife, whose name was Hildred, spoke dismissively on this subject. “Why should the kid eat? His father doesn’t. He sees his father starving himself, so he starves himself, too!”
    Therefore, in the divorce settlement, Zajac was permitted to see his son only once every three weeks, and for no longer than a weekend at a time. And Massachusetts has what they cal