My Brother's Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

broken leg, after a fashion. You'd not walk on that ankle, but I'd have taken it off at the knee, anyway. And I could have done a halfway decent job on your ribs and lung, too. You'd have had to manage on one kidney and one ear, but there's plenty of people who do that, an' get along very well with it. Only your very close friends would ever get to know that you only had one testicle, so that didn't worry me, either. You see the problem? It was that smashed skull, and the damaged brain lobes. The right-hand side, in by the ear, that was a mess. It was all bubble-an'-squeak, no good to anybody. I might have been able to keep you alive for a couple of weeks, and that would have been it."
    "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 inner ear, and a bone graft from his ribs. That was straightforward, and we know it will work. Once the nerve regeneration therapy is complete, you'll have full use of all those. The tricky part came later."
    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-connected. People have survived head injuries in which they lost nearly this much, and had nobody around to give transplant material to them. You'd have died, but not, so to speak, by very much. And if I took parts of Leo's brain, and used them to replace the lobe segments you lost, the chances became very good. I could use undamaged parts of his skull, too, and have that as bone grafts for the smashed parts of your skull. That's what I did."
    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