My Brother's Keeper (8 page)

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 that 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.

"Mind his head," said a voice from behind me. Arms came from nowhere to cushion my fall. Then I was gone, down deep below the velvet surface to a place where the sun never shone.

"He's awake. Go get the boss on the phone."

He wasn't, though. Not if they were talking about me. He was half-asleep, with the worst hangover ever, and unable to open his eyes to face that light directly above.

Not above, I realized after a while; in front, that's where it was, and I wasn't lying down. I was sitting in a chair. There was no danger that I would fall out of it. My wrists were bound to the chair arms, and there was something murderously tight around my knees and ankles. I felt as sick as a dog. I turned my head away from the bright wall lamp and panted hard as waves of nausea ran through me.

"Here." A big hand held a cup to my mouth. "You're not as bad as you think. Drink this down an' you'll feel a sight different."

I swallowed as he tilted the cup. My mouth puckered at the bitter taste, and there was a moment when I thought it would come right back up. Then I suddenly was a lot better, improved enough physically to feel a sharp panic when I at last understood what had happened. I was completely helpless, unable to move hand or foot. Apprehension turned my mouth dry and left me unable to swallow.

I opened my eyes and peered up. The man holding the cup was tall, about my height. He was heavily built, in his early twenties at the latest. With his fresh, round face and no sign of lines or wrinkles, he could have passed as a teenager if he had been smaller. His expression as he looked at me was a mixture of wariness and curiosity.

"They're coming right over," said another voice from behind me. A second man walked forward into my field of view. "Did he drink it?"'

The newcomer was on the short side, very lightly built and dapperly dressed. His hair was greased and parted in the middle in a style that had gone out fifty years ago. I concentrated hard on their faces, looking for anything that might reassure me as to my own position. They were both unreadable.