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| The Bad Leg | |
| By jamesbadok | ||||||||
| 01 June 2007 | ||||||||
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Download for free the collection from which this story is taken here: http://www.lulu.com/content/723529 The Bad Leg René woke up one beautiful July morning to find something was wrong. As he moved to get out of bed he felt a shooting pain in his left leg. He had never felt such a pain before. He got out of bed and walked around the bedroom, testing the leg, making sure it bent at the knee and supported him. It was working fine, but the pain was a torment, a burning of the marrow. René didn’t trust doctors. He remembered when his father had gone to hospital for a heart operation and came back with no ears. It was months before René could look at him without laughing. There was no way René was going to risk ending up like that, an object of ridicule to be smirked at in the street. However, the pain in his left leg was making him cry. It wouldn’t hurt just to consult a doctor. He needn’t consent to surgery or pills. Knowing what was causing the pain might be enough to help him cope with it. *** René opened the door and stepped into a small room. At one end there was a desk with a computer and a couple of chairs. There was a door, slightly ajar, leading into another, even smaller room. René glanced into the other room and saw a high bed with white sheets and a large wall chart made up of mystifying symbols and diagrams. There was a man sitting behind the desk, caressing the computer keyboard. He was bald and extremely short, and his nose was shaped like a parsnip. Without looking up at René he told him in a surprisingly deep voice to take a seat. One of the little hands flickered in the direction of a chair. René did as he was told, stretching out his left leg (still hurting), to give the man a clue as to why he was there. The bald man abruptly stopped touching the computer keys and swivelled his head so that his squinting eyes came to rest on René's afflicted leg. He asked René now what seemed to be the matter with him this beautiful July day. René explained about the pain and, standing up and walking around the room, showed the little man that he was quite capable of using his leg as normal. What could it mean? The man had answers up his sleeve, no doubt, to all such questions. What could it mean, indeed? He told René to remove his trousers and walk about. He squeezed the muscles on the afflicted leg. He asked questions about René's work, about his leisure activities, about his love life. He rummaged in an enormous gladstone bag which sat on the floor like a fat toad, and brought out some shiny black instruments, with which he prodded, scratched and rubbed various parts of René’s body, not just the leg. Finally, as René stood, trouserless, in the centre of the room, the bald man performed a sort of dance around him, making little exclamations in some alien tongue. Then he told him to put his trousers back on and sit down. *** Three months later René was on a trolley, being wheeled through antiseptic corridors towards the operating theatre in which the bad leg would be removed forever. It was the right thing to do. The man with the parsnip-shaped nose had been most insistent that the pain would never disappear otherwise. To prove it, he had prescribed various potent pain-killers, none of which had stopped the shooting, burning sensation. René had hardly slept since the trouble began. Now he thought with relish of his revenge on the bad leg. He would soon show it who was boss. *** It was a mild November morning and René was waking up from a dreamless slumber. He felt great. He sat up in bed and looked across the room at his favourite ornament, a huge glass case filled with formaldehyde and containing his malevolent left leg. He laughed out loud and pointed at the estranged limb, saying, “Who’s laughing now?” The leg was sickly and pale and slightly shrivelled. René was exultant. He lay back for a moment, and as he did so he suffered a most disagreeable sensation. It felt for a second as if the bad leg was still attached to him. He experienced a stabbing pain coming from the empty space where his leg used to be. In a fright, he shoved the duvet away, to reassure himself that the leg really was gone. Sure enough, his right leg had no companion. René looked back up at the bad leg in the glass case. Still there. By now the pain had gone. René sighed and smiled. It was nothing. Everything was fine. *** A week later René visited the bald little man with the parsnip-shaped nose again. He parked his wheelchair in front of the desk. The space where his left leg used to be burned like acid. He had been in constant agony for three days, and was at his wits’ end. The strange man helped René to get his trousers off and examined the space where the bad leg used to be, squinting intently at the nothingness. He placed a quivering hand over where the limb would have been and moved it back and forth, thoughtfully. René fancied that from somewhere in the distance, almost drowned out by the waves of pain, he could make out the sensation of his nonexistent leg being stroked. The man fished around in his baleful gladstone bag and brought out a pair of binoculars, and continued his examination of the non-leg with their aid, as if searching for something millions of miles away. Then he said, “Aha!” and nodded, and down went the binoculars. René asked for an explanation. The bald man wore an inexplicable smile as he told René that, although his leg was technically and from a scientific point of view quite dead, it had continued to live in some distant dimension and hence existed in our world as a phantom. As far as Nature is concerned phantoms aren’t real, so you can’t get rid of them, he enthused. René didn’t understand a word of what was being said to him. Either his leg was there or it wasn’t. He asked the man what he could do to stop the pain, which was bringing tears to his eyes again. The man shrugged and said, with the smug smile that René now wanted to punch very hard, that there was nothing anyone could do about it. René’s would be a life of irremediable pain. No pills or alternative treatments or psychotherapy would ever make the slightest difference. He asked if René wouldn’t mind closing the door behind him on his way out. *** Back home, René sat in front of his preserved leg. It looked somehow different now from the way it used to be. It no longer appeared pale or shrivelled. In fact, it was the picture of health, pink and robust. The pain in René’s phantom leg increased. René noticed his reflection in the tall mirror to his right. He was haggard and his skin had taken on the shiny texture of plastic. His eyes were hollow and glassy. It was like looking at a stranger or at a gruesome model in a spooky fairground ride. Sleeplessness and anxiety were draining him of his life. In an absurd moment he pictured the preserved leg smashing out of its glass case, splattering him with formaldehyde as it leapt onto his chest. The toenails had become talons, which gripped him by the neck, and a little mouth with two sharp fangs appeared in the sole and feasted on his throat. He could feel the lifeblood being sucked out of him. René decided that the only solution was to get rid of the preserved leg. *** That evening saw a thin, broken figure with one leg and a bulging bin liner tucked under his arm hobbling on crutches towards the lake by the petrified forest. The moonlight showed him the way along a dusty path, towards the deserted beach. The water lapped the stones in slow motion, back and forth, back and forth. René opened the bin liner to get one last look at his amputated limb. It was silvery and weird in the moonlight. Having put some large stones in with the leg (itself a tricky feat for a man so disadvantaged), he tied the top of the bin liner and chucked it into the lake, which accepted the gift with a gentle splash. Then he went home. As everybody knows, if you throw an amputated limb into a lake sooner or later it will decompose, until all that is left of it is bone. That’s how Nature works. René’s left leg was no exception, and it rotted swiftly in its leaky rubber coffin. Unfortunately, the phantom leg was here to stay. If only René had trusted his doctor’s prognosis! The triumph of watching the bin liner sink into the lake allowed René a brief respite from his pain, but by the time he was back home the mischievous phantom was up to its old tricks. Limping through the front door, René shook with agony. The crutches fell away from him and he fell flat onto his face. Lying there, his arms sprawled, he felt his phantom leg burn. Incredulity gave way to despair. He had no more strength. He was a spent man. He sobbed into the carpet made bloody by his broken nose. So the bad leg had the last laugh.
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