My Brother

by Charles Sheffield

  He was a hard man to argue with, yet I still felt like Galileo as he stood down from the witness box after facing the questioning. Subdued, but unpersuaded.

  “… but she was there.”

  Proving it might be another matter.

  - 5 -

  There had to be one more go-around with Sir Westcott before I could get out of Queen’s Hospital Annex. The day before my release I hung about the top floor all morning with Tess Thomson, waiting until there was a gap in his schedule. It took a long time and by eleven-thirty I was feeling more and more impatient.

  Tess did her best to calm me down. “Remember that blood pressure. Keep it low, or he’ll want you to stay another month.”

  “I’ll go mad first.” Apart from passes at Tess, my only satisfaction came from the daily sessions on the old piano down in the basement. I had tuned it myself and ground my way through hour after hour of left-hand exercises. The dexterity was coming back — but it was slow. And I had the terrible feeling that my playing had been drained of all its emotional content.

  Tess was fidgeting by the door, trying to see through the frosted glass that led to Sir Westcott Shaw’s reception area.

  “You’d get used to being here after a while,” she said. “Look at me, I’ve been in the place for four years. And I don’t get to use the fancy equipment, it’s the same old round of emptying bedpans.”

  I went over to stand next to her, and put my hand on her arm. “Tess, be serious for a minute. You’ve done a fantastic job looking after me, bedpans and all. How about dinner tonight? I owe you at least that, as a farewell thank-you for everything. Look.” I held up my left hand and wiggled it. “See, it moves. If you hadn’t made me exercise, I’d be all lopsided.”

  She turned around, smiling. I was always delighted when I could make her lose those frown lines on her forehead.

  “Never give up, do you? What do you think my boyfriend would say?”

  “Why tell him?” I had decided a month earlier that he didn’t exist — he was a useful invention to keep the patients in their places.

  “I don’t keep secrets from him. Women are different from men; we don’t like to live a double life.”

  “You know all my secrets — you’ve seen bits of me that I didn’t know I had. What do you say? Dinner and dalliance?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me. “I’ll let you know. Later. All right?”

  “When?”

  “By three o’clock . I’ve got work to do on some of the records.”

  I nodded. Before I could talk restaurants the door to the reception area opened. Sir Westcott’s secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman who was rumored to also be his mistress, appeared. As she gestured me in I heard a bellow from the inner office.

  “Bad mood?” I said to her.

  She nodded. There was a shout from inside: “When I say the records have to be looked at, I bloody well mean it. We’re a hospital, not a knacker’s yard. Do you understand?”

  His secretary bit her lip. The door to the inner office opened and two men in white coats came out. One of them was sweating heavily and his face was as white and shiny as bone china. His companion steered him out. Neither of them even looked at us. The secretary took a deep breath.

  “We lost two patients during the night,” she said softly, her hand on my arm. “He thinks it was our fault — we didn’t pay enough attention to the X-rays and the drug tolerances.”

  “Is he right?” I automatically lowered my voice to a whisper.

  “Probably not. But it always upsets him. Try not to excite him.”

  He seemed to me to be excited enough already. “I thought doctors didn’t get emotionally involved?” I whispered to her. “They can’t afford to be too subjective if a patient dies.”

  She managed the trace of a smile. “Not the really good ones — they’re involved. HE” — you could hear the capital letters in her voice — “takes it as a personal insult from Nature when he loses a patient. Come on, let’s go in. Don’t mind if he’s hard to deal with.”

  Sir Westcott was sitting at the big desk, staring blindly at a folder in front of him. His fringe of hair was sticking up wildly, and his jowls looked fatter and looser than ever. I sat down uninvited in the chair opposite and waited. Finally he grunted, closed the folder, and looked up at me.

  “I know, you want to get out of here. It’s too soon, and you’re being a bloody fool, but that’s your option.”

  “I’m feeling good. I’m taking up a room somebody else might need.”

  “That’s for me to worry about.” He tapped the folder. “Take a look in there if you think you’re in great shape. This past week you’ve had fevers twice, and your blood pressure’s been up and down faster than a whore’s knickers. You should be taking things real easy. It’s daft buggers like you that keep the undertakers in business.”

  As he spoke he was watching me closely, but his eyes would flicker now and again to a glass ornament on the top of the desk. Tess had told me all about it. The chair I was sitting on had sensors for pulse and blood pressure, with a display built into the far side of the paperweight. He was deliberately trying to excite me and watching for the reaction.

  I sat quite still. “I’ll be taking things easy. And I won’t go far away. From Shepherds Bush I can be here in an hour and a half, and I’m not planning on leaving my flat much.”

  He took a last look at the paperweight, then nodded. “You’ll do. Bugger off then, before I change my mind. And here, take this with you.” He picked up a flat plastic pillbox about as big across as a ten-penny piece. “You’ve been moaning to Nurse Thomson about you being an experimental animal with your operation — don’t deny it, I know more than you think. Well, this makes you a real experiment. The fellows over at Guy’s have come up with a new drug, a synthetic neurotransmitter, right out of the lab. It still has to go through controlled tests, but they think it may damp the unstable feedback situations that we’ve sometimes had with Madrill’s nerve regeneration treatment.”

  I picked up the pillbox. “How do I take this?”

  “You don’t — not unless you have to. You’ll know a seizure’s coming on if you feel like you’re getting smaller and smaller. Cram a couple of these pills down, as fast as you can. They’ll damp the regeneration process for a few hours. Get to a hospital.”

  “What if I can’t reach one?”

  “No problem.” He grinned. “You’ll be dead. An’ chances are you’ll only have yourself to blame. The Madrill treatment goes wild if you get too worked up and excited over something.”

  “Don’t rub it in. I got the message.” I put the pillbox into my pocket. “I’d just like to thank you for all the work—”

  “Nonsense.” He banged the buzzer on his desk. “Don’t undo all my work, that’s all. First sign of another hallucination, I want you back in here fast enough to set fire to your pants. Verstehen? And good luck.”

  Sir Westcott’s secretary had given me another parting present when I checked out of the hospital: a big, four-color chart of the structure of the human brain, with views from front, back, side, top and bottom. The first thing I did in my flat was hang it in pride of place on the bedroom wall. Before I pushed in the last thumbtack I had second thoughts. Tess had agreed to dinner, but postponed it for one day. If she somehow found herself here, in the bedroom, a detailed diagram of the brain might not be the most romantic thing to find on the wall.…

  I left it up. Maybe it would make her feel at home. I went back to the little box-room that I thought of as the study and opened the desk drawer. I reached for the colored pens, then paused. Somebody had been searching the desk. Unless my visual memory was playing me tricks — a possibility I couldn’t rule out — the pens and pencils had been reversed since I last saw them.

  Other things in the flat had been moved, too. That was obvious as soon as I took a good look at my clothes, CDs, and books. And I never left the piano lid open, the way it was now. Nothing seemed to be missing, though,
so at last I went back, much puzzled, to the bedroom.

  I took blue and red felt-tipped pens and went across to the diagram on the wall. It gave me a perverse pleasure to mark there, as closely as I knew, regions as “LEO” (blue) and “LIONEL” (red).

  Now for the spooky bit. I transferred the red pen to my left hand, closed my right eye, and lifted my hand towards the diagram. Sir Westcott had suggested this experiment, but I’d only tried it once before, with no results.

  No signals were coming in from my left eye now. I stood there, knowing that my left hand was moving. There was the scratch of felt tip against paper. It took a lot of self control to stand there patiently, waiting until that noise ended and my left hand stopped moving.

  For the first month after I woke, the left side of my body had been almost paralyzed. Fingers and toes would move reluctantly, and they felt wooden and poorly controlled. I had been scared, but Sir Westcott had expected it. “I told you,” he said, “the left half of your body takes its marching orders mostly from the right side of the brain. You’re having to scramble for control right now — lots of that hemisphere was cut out. When the links to Leo’s brain tissue come into action that problem will all go away.”

  I wiggled my fingers, willing them to move faster and easier. “How can I function with thirty percent of my brain out of action?”

  “Redundancy. There’s one hell of a lot of redundancy in all of us — youngsters do well even if they lose half their brain. They just rewire themselves. No trouble.”

  “What about adults? I’m not a youngster.” I still feared that I would be a permanent cripple.

  “You’ll be surprised. Look, if you want to see how much Leo’s active in the system without your control, there’s an easy test you can do for yourself. Get a piece of paper, put a pencil in your left hand, and cover your right eye. That’ll let the left hemisphere in on the action.”

  Trying that now in my own bedroom, there was an insane temptation to peek. Finally the pen stopped moving, and I opened my right eye. While the pen drew, I had been concentrating my attention on the functions of the brain, and how it was structured, and I expected to see something like that on the diagram — perhaps a different region marked “LIONEL.” Instead, the red pen had drawn on a clear area of the diagram. Two wobbly ellipses sat there, side by side.

  What were they? Not quite zeroes, or eggs — they were slightly pointed at the long ends. Lemons? A pair of lemons.

  No sense there. I found that I was bathed in a cold, pouring sweat while I struggled to interpret the figures in front of me. It felt like the day in my hospital room when a nurse had brought a vase of fresh-cut red roses and placed them on the table next to me. I had begun to tremble and perspire, and Tess was forced to run in and give me an injection.

  Lemons.

  The hell with it. I’d have time to think on the Underground, and if I didn’t leave soon I’d be late meeting Tess.

  Lemon thoughts came close to spoiling the whole evening. I just couldn’t get them out of my head. Tess noticed my preoccupied look after we had worked over the menu together and agreed to share a rack of lamb. Then I dithered over the wine list, not really paying attention to it, until Tess took over. She asked the wine waiter a couple of questions, and it became obvious that she knew wines better than I ever would.

  “I’ve picked one that’s underpriced and underrated,” she said, as the waiter nodded respectfully and left. “I know it’ll be good. Do you think you should be drinking, though? Have you had any dizziness?”

  “I’m fine.” I didn’t mention the wine and brandy I had drunk two days before.

  She looked less sure. We sat there for a minute or two without attempting conversation. As I had learned during my first conscious weeks in the hospital, a lot went on behind that broad forehead. Sir Westcott wouldn’t trust his most critical cases to just anybody. Tess didn’t strike like lightning, on the first encounter; she grew on you, steadily, so that after a while you worried when she was off duty and kept wondering what she was doing.

  “All right, penny for your thoughts.” She had been watching me closely, while I ate olives and paté. “Or are you going to sit there and brood all night without talking about it?”

  I looked down at the table for something I could draw on. There were only the napkins and the cloth, and I didn’t think the management would like me to sketch on those. Finally Tess helped out with a paper bag that she found in her purse.

  I drew as accurately as I could (which wasn’t very) and told her how they had been generated on the brain diagram.

  She sat there, head to one side, studying the oval figures.

  “Eggs?” she said at last, “Walnuts, lemons, balloons — they could be anything. I’d like to see the real thing. How were these placed relative to the anatomy chart?”

  “I can’t describe it easily. They were down on the left, in a clear area near the front view of the brain. But you’d have to see it for yourself to know how they were positioned.”

  “Well, I’m game for that. This could be important.” She tucked the bag into her purse. “Where did you leave the diagram?”

  I shrugged. “Back at my flat — hanging on the bedroom wall.”

  The frown lines came for a split second, then dissolved to a high-voltage smile. “That must be the worst line yet. Wouldn’t it be better to offer to show me your etchings?”

  She didn’t discuss that any further, but she didn’t make an alternative suggestion. For the rest of the dinner I felt excited, happy, and more than a little bit nervous. I had noticed when we first met for dinner that she wasn’t wearing her ring, and deduced that like her boyfriend it was protection against unwanted attentions in the hospital. Tess looked at me calmly, while I drank rather more wine than I should have and made a mess of bread crumbs by working over the basket of rolls on my side of the table. For the first time since the crash (I could think of it less and less as an accident) I didn’t feel embarrassed at being seen in public. Tess certainly didn’t seem to care about my scars, and she knew I had a lot more than would show to the casual inspection.

  In the taxi back to Shepherds Bush I worried all the way. First about what might happen, then about what might not. Brain injuries often cause other physical effects — I had read the literature Sir Westcott provided to me, and was all ready to fear the worst. And even assuming the best, there might still be mechanical problems. A good deal of interior rerouting had been done on me. If I did have plumbing difficulties, this would be one hell of a time to find out about them.

  What with one thing and another I wasn’t at my mental peak when we got to the flat. I noticed that the door leading to the main hall of the building was unlocked, which it shouldn’t have been. And somebody or something had knocked over and rooted through the dustbins, but that hardly seemed the sort of conversational gem to impress Tess. Maybe I didn’t need to. She was much more relaxed, humming softly and taking my arm as we walked down the mews to the front door, just as though we were an old married couple.

  We spent ten minutes worrying over the diagram in my bedroom, trying to puzzle some sense out of it. Tess threw out a few other possibilities for the oval shapes (eye-glasses, onions, light bulbs) but nothing useful. We sat for a few minutes looking at each other.

  I was wondering what to do next when Tess went quietly out of the bedroom and back through the living room.

  “Just making sure the outer door’s locked,” she said when she came back. “Somebody had to do it, and I’m not sure you’d ever get round to it.”

  She came over to where I was sitting and gave me a first kiss. It was warm, soft, and quite disconcertingly pleasant. After a few minutes I pulled myself together enough to lower the lights. I had seen myself naked in a full-length mirror, and Frankenstein’s monster had less stitching.

  Well, hats off to Sir Westcott. Everything seemed to be in excellent working order. I was nervous, so I didn’t exactly cover myself with glory the first time, but after t
hat with Tess’s assistance everything turned into a roaring success.

  “There,” she said afterwards. “I knew you had nothing to worry about.”

  I turned my head sideways, to look down at the top of her head. “I didn’t know. And I don’t see how you could have.”

  She chuckled drowsily, running her fingers gently over the operation scars on my right side and tracing the line of subcutaneous stitching on the muscle walls. “I took a look at the latest X-rays this afternoon. I couldn’t tell about the inside of your head, but all the rest of you has healed nicely. Very nicely. You’re doing fine.”

  That would have been the right time to tell her about the crash, and my suspicions, and about the woman in the zoo and the men in the street in Soho . But her touch was soft and there seemed to be no rush. I could tell her in the morning, and see if she would believe me. I was sure she would have more faith than Sir Westcott.

  It didn’t work out that way.

  When I woke up the sun was shining, the phone was ringing, and the bed was empty. She left a note for me on the pillow, next to my head.

  Duty calls. I’m on from seven to four today. Call me tonight (if you want to).

  Perhaps it was just as well. I felt terrible when I sat up, physically wiped out and certainly in no condition for the hair of the dog. I staggered to the phone, and it infuriatingly stopped ringing an instant before I picked it up.

  Toast and coffee improved things somewhat, and a hot shower did even more. There were no signs of fevers or seizures, and I wondered if I should report to Sir Westcott that another step had been taken on the road to recovery. But what would I do if he wanted details? I dressed slowly, then made my way downstairs to pick up the newspapers.

  It was nearly ten o’clock and the sun had moved around so that it didn’t shine directly into the entrance hall. I didn’t feel like going back up to turn on the stair light, so I descended into a gloom lit only by the light from the dusty window, high up in the wall.

  As soon as I reached the foot of the stairs I noticed the smell. It was strong, like acetate mixed with ripe peaches. I halted, and was still trying to identify it when the floor of the entrance hall seemed to vanish from beneath my feet. I was standing on black velvet, soft and endless. I fell backwards.