Kiss Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t
concern us. We never touch them.”
      
“All right,” I said. “Imagine that I’ve just died. Now what
would you do?”
      
“I should immediately open your neck and locate the four
arteries, the carotids and the vertebrals. I should then perfuse
them, which means that I’d stick a large hollow needle into
each. These four needles would be connected by tubes to the
artificial heart.
      
“Then, working quickly, I would dissect out both the left
and right jugular veins and hitch these also to the heart
machine to complete the circuit. Now switch on the machine,

which is already primed with the right type of blood, and
there you are. The circulation through your brain would be
restored.”
      
“I’d be like that Russian dog.”
      
“I don’t think you would. For one thing, you’d certainly
lose consciousness when you died, and I very much doubt
whether you would come to again for quite a long time—if
indeed you came to at all. But, conscious or not, you’d be in a
rather interesting position, wouldn’t you? You’d have a cold
dead body and a living brain.”
      
Landy paused to savour this delightful prospect. The man
was so entranced and bemused by the whole idea that he
evidently found it impossible to believe I might not be feeling
the same way.
      
“We could now afford to take our time,” he said. “And
believe me, we’d need it. The first thing we’d do would be to
wheel you to the operating-room, accompanied of course by
the machine, which must never stop pumping. The next
problem . . .”
      
“All right,” I said. “That’s enough. I don’t have to hear the
details.”
      
“Oh but you must,” he said. “It is important that you should
know precisely what is going to happen to you all the way
through. You see, afterwards, when you regain consciousness,
it will be much more satisfactory from your point of view if
you are able to remember exactly where you are and how you came to be there. If only for your own peace of mind you
should know that. You agree?”
      
I lay still on the bed, watching him.
      
“So the next problem would be to remove your brain, intact
and undamaged, from your dead body. The body is useless.
In fact it has already started to decay. The skull and the face
are also useless. They are both encumbrances and I don’t
want them around. All I want is the brain, the clean beautiful
brain, alive and perfect. So when I get you on the table I will

take a saw, a small oscillating saw, and with this I shall
proceed to remove the whole vault of your skull. You’d still be
unconscious at that point so I wouldn’t have to bother with
anaesthetic.”
      
“Like hell you wouldn’t,” I said.
      
“You’d be out cold, I promise you that, William. Don’t
forget you died just a few minutes before.”
      
“Nobody’s sawing off the top of my skull without an
anaesthetic,” I said.
      
Landy shrugged his shoulders. “It makes no difference to
me,” he said. “I’ll be glad to give you a little procaine if you
want it. If it will make you any happier I’ll infiltrate the whole
scalp with procaine, the whole head, from the neck up.”
      
“Thanks very much,” I said.
      
“You know,” he went on, “it’s extraordinary what sometimes
happens. Only last week a man was brought in unconscious,
and I opened his head without any anaesthetic at all and
removed a small blood clot. I was still working inside the skull
when he woke up and began talking.
      
“ ‘Where am I?’ he asked.
      
“ ‘You’re in hospital.’
      
“ ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Fancy that.’
      
“ ‘Tell me,’ I asked him, ‘is this bothering you, what I’m
doing?’
      
“ ‘No,’ he answered. ‘Not at all. What are you
doing?’
      
“ ‘I’m just removing a blood