The Drinking Hand
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Daniel Bissette awoke from a dream of falling to find himself on his back in a railed bed in a hospital room, an IV connected to a bag of clear fluid taped to his arm. He was horribly nauseated, his head was clanging from a stupendous headache, and his knees and elbows were badly scraped and bruised.
This was bad enough, but nothing could have prepared him for the heavily bandaged stump where his left hand had been. Not having the remotest idea how he’d lost it or how he’d gotten here, he grabbed the call button he found over his head and pressed it until someone came.
The someone was a harassed-looking, middle-aged nurse, who could tell him little except that he had been brought in by an ambulance around four a.m. and admitted with traumatic amputation of the left hand, severe blood loss and acute alcoholic intoxication. She handed him an absurdly tiny bed pan, then went to find the attending physician, Dr. Gupta. Daniel was violently ill in the interim, which made him feel well enough to start crying.
When Dr. Gupta arrived, he immediately ordered an injection of morphine, and after thus fortifying him, told Daniel all that he knew. He had been found lying in the middle of the road on Route 28, about two miles west of Poolesville, Maryland, by a trucker who almost ran over him. His left hand was missing, crudely severed from the upper wrist, resulting in near-fatal blood loss, and he was all but comatose. He would have died rather quickly, Dr. Gupta told him, if someone hadn’t applied a crude tourniquet made from a t-shirt, which was just tight enough to stem most of the blood flow but not cut off all circulation.
If the truth of what the doctor was saying wasn’t so brutally obvious, Daniel wouldn’t have believed him. His last memory was of sitting on his couch in his apartment in Woodbridge, Virginia, watching television and drinking the latest in a long series of gin-and-tonics. He assumed that he had passed out at some point while watching a movie, which he clearly remembered was The Hell With Heroes, starring Rod Taylor and Claudia Cardinale.
The police showed up an hour later. His hand had not been found at the scene, they told him, but his car was still in its assigned space at his apartment complex. They had checked his apartment and found the door unlocked, the television still on, empty bottles of gin and tonic water on the floor, and a pile of lime wedges on a plate near the couch. They asked him if he could recall anything of where and when this incident had occurred, and who may have treated him, but Daniel was ashamed to admit that he couldn’t remember a damn thing, not even the pain, which would have been unendurable, the doctor had said, without a blood alcohol of 3.4 percent.
Daniel was forced to accept that he’d left his apartment sometime after eleven thirty — he knew that, he told the detectives, because the movie started at ten p.m. and wasn’t over when he passed out — too drunk to know what he was doing, and ended up, roughly four hours later, in the wretched condition in which he was found, across the Potomac River in the Maryland countryside, more than forty-five miles from his residence in Woodbridge.
In the almost complete absence of facts or evidence, the police could only speculate. As one of their theories ran, Daniel had left his apartment, possibly in search of more liquor, then met someone who had driven him to a bar in a bad neighborhood, where he had “mouthed off” to the wrong people, possibly one or more members of the violent Salvadorean gang known as MS-13, who were known to cut off the hands of their enemies. Or he might have made advances on a woman in a bar with a jealous boyfriend, who had punished him in a way that would have a lasting impact.
These scenarios were just violent enough to be plausible, but for someone else, Daniel told the detectives, not himself. He was in search of oblivion when he drank, not a party, and preferred going to hell on his own time, in familiar surroundings. Still, he couldn’t argue with the facts: he had indeed left his apartment, either under his own power or someone else’s and ended up forty-five miles north of where he thought he was. Whoever had driven him there was nowhere to be found, and neither was his left hand, “my drinking hand,” he told the police.
The detectives assured him that they would keep looking for the perpetrator, but they also implied that if no one came forward with information, or his memory failed to return, the chances of making an arrest would diminish with time.
Dr. Gupta, meanwhile, told him that his stump was so far free of infection, that the blood transfusions had saved his life, and that he should count himself extremely lucky to be alive. He also urged him in the strongest terms to seek treatment for alcoholism, as well as suggesting physical therapy and prosthetic options in the near future.
Daniel’s response was that he had lost his health insurance along with his business, was nearly broke, and therefore effectively out of options at the moment. He did, however, agree that if losing something as incalculably precious as one’s hand was not the shock that a kamikaze drunk needed to veer off from his death spiral and at least try getting sober, then what would it take?
Daniel had been close-mouthed at first, but under Dr. Gupta’s gentle questioning, he gradually revealed what had led to the biggest blackout of his life. He had lived in northern Virginia for eleven years, having done quite well in a business software company he’d founded, thriving on a series of defense contracts that he had worked very hard to obtain. His wife had a good job at the USDA, and they had two children, a boy and a girl, and a big house in McLean. Expenses were high, but so was income and, for a time, all went well.
He’d been a fairly heavy social drinker for years, but had always kept it under control, never starting until five p.m. and usually quitting after dinner. It wasn’t until 2002, when his small company lost a vital contract at the Pentagon, that he began to slip. Sales were plummeting, he had to lay off most of his people, bills were piling up, and he was having no luck landing new contracts. He started drinking more, then bingeing, and in the disastrous year that followed, he lost his business, his marriage and custody of his children, and his home.
Eventually he was living alone in the apartment in Woodbridge, subsisting on what little money remained after the divorce, by day sending out dozens of résumés, by night slowly drinking himself into a stupor. He characterized himself as a quiet, solitary drinker, usually parked in front of the television. He often awoke the next day on the couch, the TV still on.
He was by this time approaching financial desperation, ready to take any job that would pay the bills, including, he was ashamed to admit, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores. But the smell of booze is hard to disguise when one is permeated with it, and he could see refusal in the eyes of managers even as he handed them his application. He was forty-one years old, and his behavior had so alienated his industry connections that his chances of finding work in defense contracting were practically nil, and his months-long binge had shattered his self-image as a social drinker who knew his limits.
Driving home one evening after a long, frustrating day spent making phone calls and filling out applications, he stopped at a liquor store and bought a liter of gin and a large tonic water. He had no plan, he told Dr. Gupta, other than to eat leftover pizza and drink himself to sleep.
He started drinking as soon as he got home and, by the time he tuned into the movie around ten p.m., he was stinking. The impulse to call his ex-wife, almost overwhelming during the separation, had grown less urgent in recent weeks, but he still missed her and the kids terribly. He knew that his present situation was entirely of his own making, and that his wife, who had kept her job with the USDA, would have stayed with him if he had pulled himself together.
He was going down fast, and he knew it. That very day, his landlord had threatened him with eviction if he failed to pay his rent by the end of the month. He couldn’t even afford the booze he was drinking, nor could he stop himself from making another stiff one. Between the last drink he remembered mixing and his waking up in the hospital minus a body part was a textbook case of alcoholic amnesia, and far from his first experience of it.
They kept him in the hospital four more days, monitoring the healing process and treating his severe withdrawal symptoms, before discharging him with prescriptions for pain medications and antibiotics. He would have to return periodically for check-ups and a change of bandages, but the stump was healing well.
Daniel was more worried about himself, and the first thing he did after the landlord — who, taking pity on him, had extended his grace period for another month — let him into his apartment, was to empty every bottle of liquor in the house, including cough medicine, down the drain, though he had to tear himself away from the fumes wafting up from the sink. He knew that his first duty was to heal, physically and emotionally, and that he should find the nearest chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous and begin attending sessions.
And yet he found himself putting it off. He was still grieving over his missing hand, and hated the idea of well-meaning strangers asking questions about it. The sight of his stump, especially naked of bandages, and the shockingly frequent tears it evoked, was the sternest possible reminder of the hash he had made of his life.
He longed for his lost hand, dreamed about it, apologized to it, speculated as to its present location and condition. Was it swelling at the bottom of a pond or creek, decaying in a shallow hole, or lying out in the open somewhere in the woods off Route 28, food for scavengers and insects? Night and day he asked himself what terrible thing he had done to deserve such a biblical punishment. In his fragile mental state, he was quite certain that he must have brought this on himself.
The hand that had held the woman he still loved, cradled his children, caught balls, stamped documents, raised thousands of glasses to his lips, harrowed hair, carried suitcases, pulled earlobes, sweated, grew numb with cold, itched, tirelessly expressed a thousand gestures and flourishes, after forty-one years of indispensable service, it was gone, no longer a part of him but simply a part, cruelly separated from the blood, bone and tissue that nourished it, a mere thing now, useless and repugnant, the orphan of his folly.
He was learning viscerally what he had always blithely assumed: that two hands are better than one, that it now took twice as long to shower, shave, dress, tie his shoes, prepare coffee, open a can of soup. He had no choice but to master the difficult art of one-handedness which, he reminded himself, was still a cinch compared to no-handedness. If, in the future, his prospects improved and he were able to afford a prosthetic, fine, but for now, he had to learn to live with a more basic loss even than that of his family.
At first, unaccustomed to the lightness of his arm, he used too much strength to lift it and would bang the still-tender stump on walls and cabinets. Pockets are not designed for the blunt end of an arm, and in public he found himself at a loss for where to put it. On colder days he could rest it crosswise under his coat, but in shirt sleeves he either had to use his right hand to insert it into his pants pocket, or walk while swinging it freely, which made him acutely self-conscious.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
