My Brother

“What do they stand for?”

“I don’t know — that’s what I hoped you’d be able to tell me. It was somebody that I’m sure was trying to hurt him. Someone he’d heard of and I’m sure he knew rather well. But he was afraid of them. In his last message to me the tape was hard to hear, but he said that the thing he was scared of most was that T.P. would get him.”

“Sorry.” I shook my head and raised myself higher on my knees in the van. “I can’t help you there. He never mentioned anything to me.”

“Well, never mind.” She gave a shaky little sort of laugh. She had come up on her knees too, as I started to open the door, and she was almost in an attitude of prayer. “It’s astonishing, you look so like him.… Be careful when you leave here. I’ll see you tomorrow night, right?” She gave another little groan when the light from outside the van fell on my face. “You look so like him…”

I closed the van door quietly on her misery and limped away into the late afternoon sunshine. I was sorry for her, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. And the inside of my head was begi

I felt terrible, dry-mouthed and panting as I reached the subway. And when I got back to the hospital, I caught hell from Tess, and then a second hell from Sir Westcott. I had arrived two hours later than I said I would. Didn’t I realize that I was still a very sick man, far to sick to overtax myself like this? And didn’t I know how important it was to avoid too much mental stimulation? Well, thank Heaven that the Zoo was a nice, restful place for me to visit. Tess made me a glass of warm milk.

But I ought to concentrate on quiet, peaceful activities for the next two weeks, and not let anyone disturb me. They both insisted on it.

- 4 -

When I woke the next morning I was tempted to tell Sir Westcott Shaw the whole thing. After all, how could he decide how to treat me if he didn’t know what had been happening to me?

The thing that kept me silent was fear. Not the fear that he would disbelieve me and dismiss the whole thing as more mental tricks coming from my tattered brain. No, what I was afraid was that he would believe me, and forbid me to attend the meeting with Valnora Warren because it would overexcite me. It would, too. Every time I thought about the evening my left hand got the jitters and I had trouble swallowing. But I had to know what had been going on — and I don’t just mean I wanted to know. I had to know.

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, thi

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 ru

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 begi

“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.”