My Brother

by Charles Sheffield

  The whole day would have been impossibly long but for one new factor that was added to the equation. On my morning constitutional, limping along through the interior of the hospital, I worked my way down to a basement corridor where I had never been before. Even though it was new to me, it held no particular promise or interest, and I followed it only because any change to the usual route back to my room was preferable to the same old beige corridors. The new area (I should more accurately call it the old area) was more like a junk yard than part of a hospital. I went past rooms full of old chairs, cans of paint, trolleys, gurneys, stretchers, and battered and ancient beds. There was even an old model X-ray machine in one room, crouched in the corner like a metal Cyclops, dusty and neglected. I spent five minutes fiddling with the buttons and settings on it after I had plugged it into a wall socket, but it was too seized up and arthritic in the joints even to move the position of the shielding plates.

  I became bored with it after a while, and almost went on down the corridor without even looking into the next room along. But when I cracked the door open a few inches for a quick and casual glance inside, a thrill of excitement — and fear — shot through my whole body. Standing against the far wall was an old, upright piano.

  The question had been staring me in the face for months, but I had managed to look the other way. There had been no piano — so far as I knew — available in the hospital. It had been possible to avoid the central issue: how much had I lost in the crash, and how much more had gone because of lack of practice?

  I opened the lid, pulled over a chair, and sat at the keyboard. It was thirty seconds before I could bring myself to touch a key, and when I did my mouth was dry and my tongue felt two sizes too big.

  I hit two or three timid notes. The instrument was badly out of tune, and the keys didn’t strike evenly — damp had done its work. Well, so what? I took a deep breath, just like a diver standing on the high board, lifted both hands high, and plunged into the final Allegro of Schubert’s Sonata in C Minor.

  It was horrendous, with fistfuls of wrong notes all over the place. My left hand jumped and twitched over the bass like a demented grasshopper. I didn’t care. I plowed on through every discord, and I enjoyed every note. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was getting more than a simple musical response to my playing. During every left hand run in the bass, patterns of smoke blossoms appeared as images in my left eye. They meandered up the field of view, thinning to blue and purple as they rose. If I closed my left eye they disappeared.

  I switched to some of the old Czerny velocity exercises, up and down the keyboard with all the grace and elegance of a three-legged racehorse, then jumped straight into the Brahms D Minor Concerto, attacking the octave trills. While I played, regular columns of green insects came into view over the top of the piano, marching steadily to the right until they disappeared from view past the end of my nose. As I stared, the last of the moving bugs changed color, and became an unmistakable exact copy of the gold tie clip that Leo had worn in the helicopter.

  Perspiration was running down my forehead and into my eyes, but I wasn’t quite ready to quit.

  My last effort was probably a mistake. I wanted to get a feeling for just how much coordination I could summon between my left and right hands. The C Minor Fugue, Number 4 from the Well-Tempered Clavier, would normally have been a fair test, but I was in poor condition and easily tired. To do Bach justice called for much more finger control and mental equilibrium than I could muster. It was a total loss. I didn’t get a single visual image as I hacked and threshed my way through to the conclusion of a travesty of a performance.

  When I was done, I discovered that I had wet my pants.

  That ended the first Lionel Salkind post-operative recital. I slunk back to my room, thoroughly disgusted with myself and wondering if I had accidentally created a twenty-first century art form to surpass punk rock. Sonata for piano and incontinent. Serenade for tenor, flatulent, and strings. Concerto molto grosso.

  I told Sir Westcott about the whole thing when he came on his rounds, and he nodded cheerfully.

  “Synesthesia. Perfectly natural. Until you get some decent regeneration in the corpus callosum, there’ll be referred signals like this. Look on it the way that I do — positively. The main thing is that you’re beginning to get signals in from that left eye. They’re bogus ones, generated on the right side and cross-switching in somehow to the left, but that’s just the beginning. As I said, give it time.”

  “But why did I lose bladder control? That’s not synesthesia, surely.”

  He stood up from the chair — I had progressed to the point where I had a room with normal furniture, rather than standard hospital fixtures — and went over to the window. “You’ll see a variety of physical effects before you settle down. Never mind about peeing yourself — you were doing that all the time in the first few weeks. You keep your eyes open for any kind of seizure. If you ever feel something like an epileptic fit, get to bed at once. And send for me.”

  Good advice, but it made certain assumptions. It’s not easy to pop into bed when you’re running for your life, even if there’s a bed handy. Other factors loom rather larger in the list of priorities.

  I felt a bit guilty when Sir Westcott left. Here was he, trying to make a whole man out of the bits and pieces that had been left over from the accident, and here was I, holding back some of the vital facts.

  Rather than asking for approval to leave the hospital two days in a row, I took the coward’s way out. In this case that happened to be through the kitchens, and on down the long alley known as Kitchen Lane where food delivery trucks came to drop off supplies to the hospital. I sneaked away at five o’clock , when everything was quiet, and by six I was on the train and on my way to London .

  I could have saved myself all the trouble of that deception. She never came. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty I stood outside Bertorellis in a thin, summer drizzle. I didn’t get particularly wet, the rain wasn’t hard enough for that, but I did get slowly madder and madder. Deception at the hospital was bad enough. Wasted deception was much worse. All my sneaky behavior had been pointless.

  Finally I gave up. The rain was setting in harder and the evening turning colder. I went inside, sat down at a table for one, and indulged myself. The jugged hare was excellent, and the house wine made me contemplative. I was beginning to put many things together. Leo’s mood, that final afternoon. The sudden and inexplicable failure of the helicopter, listed in the accident report as “pilot error,” when I knew damned well it was nothing of the sort. Valnora Warren’s admission that Leo’s job was not what it was portrayed to be, and, worst of all, the knowledge that Leo and I had been less close than I liked to imagine. He had his secrets.

  It all made sense. From the day of our first teenage reunion, Leo had acted as the one in charge. I don’t know how much was that California upbringing, and how much that tiny few minutes of seniority, but the reason didn’t matter. He would see nothing unusual in having a life I knew nothing about.

  There was other evidence. A week before, I had received the final probate of Leo’s estate, for which I was the sole heir. That was no real surprise, with Tom and Ellen dead. But the amount he had left staggered me. Even allowing for the luck that he claimed for his stock market investments, could he have amassed such wealth as a simple government employee?

  I sat there in the restaurant for three-quarters of an hour, musing over a couple of glasses of Courvoisier. When I paid the bill and left I found that the weather had turned even nastier. It was one of those drenching summer downpours that I remembered from childhood holidays in Scarborough, when the clouds swooped in low off the sea, the temperature dropped into the forties, and the whole town seemed to lock itself up for the night about eight o’clock.

  Naturally, there wasn’t a taxi to be seen, and the pavements were deserted. Thank goodness I had come with a hat and a raincoat.

  I ducked my head low and set off at a fast walk th
rough the slick streets, heading south before cutting through to Tottenham Court Road. I was wearing rubber-soled shoes, waterproof but treacherously slippery on the wet pavement. But it made me tread lightly and carefully, and allowed me to catch the sound of heavier footsteps behind me.

  I took a quick look over my shoulder. A tall man in a tan raincoat was pacing steadily after me. The area was usually well-populated and quite safe, but the bad weather had driven everyone off the streets. With my imagination inflamed from my after-dinner speculations, I walked a little faster. I’m big enough and hefty enough to scare away most people looking for an easy mugging, but like any pianist or violinist — or anyone else who relies on uninjured hands for his living — my natural instinct was to run rather than fight. I cut east at a faster walk, heading for a busier street where people should offer some insurance. Then, at the corner, I stopped.

  In the narrow street that led through to Tottenham Court Road stood a second tan-coated figure. It could have been any casual local, waiting for his girlfriend, but somehow I knew better — or perhaps Leo did. My left arm was making agitated jerking motions, and my left leg acted as though it would like to run away down the street all by itself.

  I swivelled, looking for some way out. The man behind me was closer, and turning the corner after him came a blue Mercedes 450SL, gliding along at walking pace.

  The left-hand side of the street was lined with small shops. I moved to stand in one of the doorways — not to hide there, because that was impossible; I wanted to protect my back and sides. The man standing on the corner had started towards me now, and the tan-coated figures were converging. They halted side by side, facing the doorway.

  “All right, better make it easy for yourself,” said the shorter man. In the shop window on my left was an illuminated advertisement for State Express, and the blinking light from it showed his face as a pale, asymmetrical oblong, changing from green to yellow to red. He lifted his hand and motioned to me, “Get in the car, an’ we can all go nice an’ easy.”

  He carried a dark truncheon in his left hand, and there was a flash of bright metal on his companion’s closed fists.

  “Come on,” he repeated, when I didn’t move. “If you want to stay in one piece. We ain’t got all night.”

  There didn’t seem to be much choice. I was unarmed, and still weak from my accident. The Mercedes had halted behind them, and I shrugged and stepped forward between the two of them to get to it.

  I had given up — fighting never was my forte. Leo must have had other ideas. As I came level with the shorter man, my left arm jerked sideways and thrust stiff-fingered into his midriff. As he spasmed forward, my hand flickered upwards and stabbed hard for his eyes. The fingers went fast and deep into the soft cavities, turning as they thrust. The sensation was sickening, but before I could fully respond I was pivoting hard on my left leg, spinning to the right. My closed left fist went into the tall man’s larynx, then as his hand went to his throat I had seized his thumb, twisted, and jerked. I felt the bone snap and grate. My left knee came up hard into his crotch.

  One second more, and I was doing my best to run down the street. It was farcical, more like a stuttering hop than a sprint. But it was my best. My nerves were vibrating and uncontrollable, but somewhere underneath I felt a dancing anger, a black rage that drove me along much faster than I had reason to expect or hope.

  At the street corner I looked back. One man was reeling in circles, his hands to his eyes, and the other was crouched over, one hand to his throat and the other to his testicles. The only sound was the purr of the Mercedes’ engine, but the car was not following me. It remained, lights off, in the road. Throughout the whole violent encounter there had been silence, nothing but the gasp for air or the snap of breaking bone.

  I turned into Tottenham Court Road, then took the next left turn, and on randomly through the rainy streets of Soho . It was half an hour before my trembling subsided enough to let me venture onto the Underground, and then I sat slumped in my seat in the corner, clasping my trembling hands tightly together.

  By midnight I was back at the hospital. An hour later I was shaking all over and had a fever of a hundred and three. Tess Thomson looked in on me about three o’clock — thank heaven it was her week for night shift — and had needles into me two minutes later.

  It was four days before I felt back to normal. Long before that I had decided to tell the whole truth, so far as I knew it, to Sir Westcott.

  I did it when I was in physiotherapy, and he had come along to see how the exercises to strengthen the left side of my body were coming along. He was particularly interested in watching movements that called for integration between right and left. I swung Indian clubs for a while, then passed a rubber ball rapidly from hand to hand, behind my back. Sir Westcott looked quite pleased — until I started to tell him about what had happened at the Zoo, and about my experience in Soho .

  When I got to the end of it (even I thought it came out sounding very odd) he walked out of the room without speaking. I went on with the exercises, and in a quarter of an hour he was back.

  “Pack that in for a minute,” he said. “Come and sit your backside on the bench here.”

  I followed him to the side of the gymnasium. It was filled with the products of Sir Westcott’s unique ideas for rapid physical recovery from nervous system injuries. The walls and floor were an obstacle course of mats, rubber tires, ropes, trestles, hoops, and bars, across and through which we unfortunate patients were supposed to hop, crawl, roll, swing, and stagger, under his unflinching eye.

  He looked at me moodily as we sat down, rubbing at his fat jowls. It was late afternoon, and the gymnasium was deserted except for the two of us.

  “I had three calls made down to Soho .” He sniffed. “There was no report of a fight there on Tuesday night — nobody saw or heard a scuffle near Charlotte Street — no reports from any hospital of two men coming in with hand and eye injuries like the ones you described. All right? I’ll take your word for it you had jugged hare at Bertorellis, we didn’t check that. But we did call the American Embassy. There’s no report of anybody called Valnora Warren in the U.S. State Department. No visitor with that name here on any sort of U.S. Government business, an’ nothing on the Passport List.”

  “But suppose she was with one of the intelligence services?” My suspicions had blossomed further.

  “Suppose she wasn’t there at all?”

  “She was.”

  “You think she was. I’ll admit that all right, but it’s not the same thing.”

  He lifted one fat paw, a hand with manual skills that put mine to shame. “Hold on, before you start getting excited again. We’ve got to face something unpleasant, Lionel, an’ it’s something I’ve been putting off, and hoping would never come up.”

  “She was there, and so were the men.” Despite his good advice, I could feel my pulse pumping harder. “I’m not inventing any of this.”

  “Listen for a minute, then think again. Let’s have a go with Occam’s razor. You’ve had one hell of an operation, an’ there’s things going on inside your head that we can’t even guess at. The CAT scans look pretty good, but they don’t tell us anything about your thinking. Einstein has a brain that looks no different from your Aunt Matilda’s when it comes to X-rays and physiological tests.”

  “I know all that. But don’t forget I’m looking at this from the inside — I know what I’m thinking.”

  “You don’t — any more than the rest of us know what we’re thinking.” He snorted. “You’re underestimating the human brain, my lad. The only thing we know for certain is that you’ve got Madrill’s technique to stimulate nerve cell regeneration going on inside your head. There’s an electrical storm brewing when all those little cross-connections cuddle up to each other. It’s more than we can comprehend. You’re going to experience perceptual anomalies, sure as I’m sitting here.”

  I stood up. “You’ve told me all that. I’m going to have synesthesia
—”

  “That’s an easy one.” He picked up an Indian club and sighted along it. “There’s things a lot harder to pick up. It’s easy to know there’s something off when you play Mozart and get rows of green beetles crawling up your nose. But what happens when you ‘see’ people” — his voice put quotes around the verb — “that Leo knew? Imagining a woman that he was fond of, or people he didn’t like — that’d be normal enough. But it’s hard to tell a data-sorting function like that from the real thing. That’s why I want you to take things easy. We don’t want to confuse internal and external realities.”

  “Look, I saw a van. A grey van, with painted windows and rear doors with a black line along them. That’s not part of Leo’s past. I bet somebody saw it at the Zoo — it had to get into and out of the car park.”

  “Fine. Feel free to go and look for it, if you want to.” He clumped the Indian club back hard on the floor. “If you can come back here with witnesses, and a license plate for that van, I’ll eat my Sunday boots with Branston Pickle. Haven’t you noticed that everything that happened to you was with no witnesses? An’ a broken thumb hurts like hell, but your man didn’t let out a peep. Yer see, you’ve no idea how cunning the human brain can be at protecting its constructs. If you talk to a man who thinks the earth is flat, or that he’s Napoleon or Hitler, he’ll give you a hundred good reasons why he has to be right.”

  He shook his head sadly and stood up. “I was hoping we could move you to outpatient status, but I think we should wait a bit longer. Let me know if anything else happens. I’ve got to go an’ scrub.”