My Brother

“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 i

“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 pla

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-pe

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 gri

“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 di

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.