My Brother

“It’s been a month since the accident, and I’m still alive.”

“Alive, and doing very well. You were in good physical shape before the crash, too, or you’d never be as far along as you are. But my other problem was your brother, Leo. He was in worse shape even than you were. With his spinal injuries and internal bleeding, he was sinking before we could even get him into the theater. I had to make a decision.”

He paused, and suddenly I knew what was coming. It made me feel sick inside.

“You killed Leo.”

“No.” He sighed. “The crash killed Leo. I saved you.”

“Leo is dead. You never told me that.” I was trembling.

“Because it’s not true. Shut up, and listen to me.” He glowered down at me. “Your brother was a hopeless case, absolutely hopeless. And you were terribly injured. I had to make a decision, but it was an easy one. Save one, or save none.”

I closed my eyes. “So you killed Leo to save me.”

“I did not, you jackass. Will you shut up and listen to me? You know as well as I do that you and Leo were perfect donors for each other. There’s no tissue rejection problem with identical twins. And since Madrill’s work in ’03, the success rate for nerve tissue regeneration has been going up every year. I did the easy work first. You have Leo’s right leg, right kidney, right testicle, right i

He took the knife he was holding and cut the apple in his hand cleanly down the middle. “If I were to put the problem in your half-baked terms, you died as much as Leo did.”

“I’m here, and he isn’t.”

“Don’t be too sure of that. Look, imagine this apple is the whole brain, and now the two halves are the left and right hemispheres. At first, I had the idea that we might be able to put all Leo’s brain into your skull — a full transplant. But no one ever made one work yet, and I didn’t like the odds. It was easier to be less ambitious. You lost partial segments from three main brain lobes, but you had the brain stem and the midbrain completely intact. This was what your right hemisphere looked like, if we forget the part that was damaged.”

He made a few swift crosscuts with his knife, and segments of apple fell clear into the palm of his hand. He looked at them vaguely for a couple of seconds, then popped them into his mouth and ate them.

“See?” he said with his mouth full. “You lost a good part of one hemisphere, but what you had left was well-co

He looked pleased with himself. “And it worked — worked damned well. You’re getting better all the time.”

“But Leo’s dead. I don’t feel half like Leo, and half like myself. I’m Lionel Salkind.”

“That’s what you tell me — I asked you that when you first became conscious. But all it proves is that you have the verbal part of the brain under control. That’s all in your hemisphere, we know that’s a left hemisphere function. You feel just the way you ought to, at this stage in the recovery. Do you know what the corpus callosum is?”

“No. ”

“Well, you will, for the rest of your life.” He pushed the two apple segments together, then drew them apart again. “The corpus callosum is the part that sits between the two brain hemispheres. It acts as a sort of a bridge between them, and pons would be the natural Latin name for it, ’cause that means a bridge. But we got smart too late, so another bit of the brain is called the pons. But it’s the corpus callosum that’s the real bridge, and handles all the information transfer directly between the hemispheres. There’s lots of other communication goes on, of course, through a bit called the anterior commissure, but that’s mainly indirect and chemical. To make the story short, just now you’re missing a corpus callosum between your brain segments and Leo’s. But it’ll regenerate, thanks to Madrill’s treatments.”

“When?”

“Ah, now there you have me. It could take three months, or it could be a couple of years. Just to complicate things a bit more, the left side of your body is mainly controlled from the right side of your brain. That’s why I wanted to know if you were getting any information through that left eye. That’d give us some idea how fast regeneration of nerve tissue is going. Nothing yet?”

I closed my right eye. “Nothing. Look, are you saying that Leo’s sort of alive still? I mean, if you transplanted his kidney into me you wouldn’t say he was alive, would you?”

“I wouldn’t; but then not many people think with their kidneys. If you want my honest opinion, yes, I think that Leo Foss is still alive, in some sense, and he’s inhabiting part of your skull. At some time — don’t ask me when and where, or even how — I would expect the two halves of the brain to integrate again. You’ll become a single individual. And beyond that, I can’t go.”

He pressed a button at the end of the bed. “Now, I think you’ve had all the excitement that’s good for you for one day. Miss Thomson will be here in a minute or two and give you an injection. If you don’t mind, I’d like to sit here and watch as that takes effect.”

He handed the carved-up apple to the nurse when she appeared and took the second one from his pocket. While she checked my blood pressure, pulse, and temperature (I suspect I tested worse than I had that morning) I looked at Sir Westcott and had terrible visions of those uncouth, pork-butcher hands meddling with the delicate couplings of my brain, cutting and tying and stitching.

While I watched, Sir Westcott took his open clasp knife and started absentmindedly to peel the apple. He didn’t seem to look at it, and the thick fingers were as clumsy-looking as ever. But the apple peel came off magically in one beautiful regular strip, a uniform half inch wide. There was no trace of green peel left on the body of the apple, and no sign of white overcut flesh on the lengthening spiral that came off it.

By the time the injection took effect, at least one of my worries had been eased.

- 3 -

As Mark Hambourg remarked, three things are essential if you want to be a professional musician: the first requirement is good health, and the other two are the same. A performer’s life is hard, and there’s no way you can tell the critics that you didn’t play well because you were feeling less than your best.

I had always taken health for granted, and never been really sick in my whole life. That made me a bad patient. My convalescence broke naturally into two phases: very sick, then very bored. I gradually began to regain full control of the left side of my body, but no one could tell me how fast that should happen. The operation that Sir Westcott had performed on me was experimental — as he explained, the previous subjects had been dogs, where it was much commoner to have available members of the same litter.

It may sound ridiculous to say that things could be boring when I had to learn to control and live with a body that was more like a patchwork quilt than the standard human model. But the body was merely a nuisance rather than a real source of interest. Inside six weeks I was up and about, and had even taken the classical step in patient recovery — the “turn for the nurse.” Tess Thomson handled my clumsy advance without missing a beat of my pulse, and took it for the good omen that it was.