My Brother's Keeper Read Online Free PDF

and Leo for something, then he frowned and shook his head unhappily.
    "That worries me. It sounds like pure hallucination from start to finish, I was hoping we wouldn't run into any of that."
    "It's not hallucination. I remember it clearly, and that's just how it happened."
    He shrugged. "I'm sure that's the way you remember it. The records say otherwise. The first people at the crash were a carload of farmers who saw the helicopter come down from a few fields away. They didn't search you, and they brought you straight here. Just as well that they did. Half an hour later, and we'd have been able to do nothing for you. You had a close call."
    "But I'm telling you, it happened the way I said. We were searched."
    "I don't want to beat that point to death—we can talk about it more later. I promised you some explanations today, and I think you're well enough to take them. But it will take a few minutes. Stop me if this gets to be too much, or if you have trouble following what I'm saying, Otherwise, let me talk."
    He took a manila folder—he had been sitting on it—opened it, and started to read from it in a flat, toneless voice. The beginning was simple and unpleasant enough: my list of injuries when they logged me into the Emergency Room at Queen's Hospital Annex in Reading.
    Lionel Salkind, British subject .
    Crushed right leg below the knee; broken tibia and fibula, compound fracture; broken patella; crushed talus, crushed navicular, broken metatarsals .
    Broken right femur, compound fracture, with severed sartorius muscle. Crushed right testicle and epididymis.  
    Fractured eight, ninth, tenth, and eleventh ribs, penetrating the costal pleura and piercing the right lung.  
    Ruptured spleen.  
    Damaged right kidney, and severed renal artery.  
    If I had been feeling sick when Sir Westcott began his catalog, I grew sicker as he went on with it.
    "Don't just keep reading that," I said to him, when be showed no signs of stopping. "Tell me what you can do about it."
    He waved his hand at me without looking up. "I'm keeping this as short as I can. There's a lot of messy detail for all these that don't help us at all. Let me get to the bad part. Here we are. Head injuries."
    Crushed right middle and inner ear and severed pharyngo-tympanic tube.  
    Crushed right mastoid, sphenoid, temporal and occipital bones, with fragment penetration of right frontal, temporal, and parietal brain lobes. Crushed cuneus and precuneus. Right cerebral cortex shows numerous lesions and approximately fifty percent tissue destruction.  
    He coughed. " Prognosis: terminal. "
    Then he looked at me to see my reaction. I couldn't speak, but the punch line of an old tall story would have been the thing to offer. "So what happened to you then, Bill?" "What happened to me? Why, I died, of course."
    Prognosis: terminal .
    If you want a phrase guaranteed to send you over the edge into lunacy, there's my candidate.
    I gave a sort of hysterical titter. "What are you telling me? That I died and now I'm in Hell?"
    "Nothing so sensational. Let me finish." He pulled another sheet of paper from his folder. "Your brother."
    Leo Foss, United States subject. Broken pelvis .
    Broken lower mandible, broken humerus.  
    Damaged and crushed liver, lacerated pancreas, lacerated stomach.  
    Shattered spinal column, crushed lumbar, thoracic, and cervical vertebrae, crushed medulla, severed spinal cord in cervical region.  
    He looked up at me. "There's more, but it all tells the same story. Prognosis: terminal . For ten different reasons."
    At that point he laid down his folder, pulled an apple out of his pocket, and fished about for his clasp knife. I couldn't believe my eyes. Was he going to settle in and munch one now, leaving Leo and me with our terminal prognoses while he had a mid-afternoon snack?
    "You see," he said—now he was deliberately opening the knife. "I knew I had a problem within five minutes of you being brought into the hospital. I could fix your