One week more, and I was given the run of the hospital wards. Although there was plenty of evidence of imperfect body control as I hobbled, staggered and leaked (kidneys and bladder still partly out of control) along the corridors, the presence of Leo’s brain segment was not apparent. Sir Westcott dismissed as “predictable and minor” most of the things that worried me.
Predictable and minor — good doctors’ talk. It included incredible blinding headaches, dizziness, nausea (he blamed the ear for that, not the brain, but the distinction was a fine one to the sufferer), insomnia, sneezing fits, aphasia, weak bladder, sudden and stupefying lethargy, uncontrollable weeping, muscular spasms, and a rolling left eye. I don’t know where the left eye took its orders from, but I never knew where it would be looking, or why, even though I was beginning to receive random images from it.
I poured out this whole catalog of woes to Sir Westcott. He would eat another apple and say, “Most interesting.”
It went slowly. Two months after my first conversation with Sir Westcott Shaw I was ready to climb the walls. I had enough control to walk from one end of the hospital to the other without falling down, visibly twitching, or peeing myself. On the strength of that I applied (pleaded might be a better word) for a day outside.
Where would you go?
I had anticipated that question. To the Zoo. Where else?
As I mentioned earlier, it’s natural to assume that anyone who performs frequently in public must be extroverted and thrive on attention. After all, applause is rightly regarded as the purest form of ego-food. I like that as much as anyone else, but once I’m offstage I have always found it hard to meet people or to feel at home among new faces. Leo was the confident and the outgoing one. I would find myself again and again in a big city, the day of an evening recital, free and with nowhere to go. Movies staled after a while, and I had no taste for museums, horse racing, or dog shows.
Zoos were another matter. Before I was twenty I was a connoisseur. Most big cities have a zoo of some kind, or at worst an aviary. I looked forward to seeing the pandas whenever I went to Washington , the snow leopards in San Diego , the giraffes at Whipsnade, the gorillas in Riyadh , springbok herd in Denver , sealions in Sydney , elephants in Tokyo , lions and tigers in Santiago , and hippopotami in Montevideo and Berlin .
My favorites, wherever I went (and the psychologists can make what they like of it) were the snakes and reptiles.
So if Sir Westcott would let me out for a day, I would go to the new London Zoo. I told him about my long-time hobby, but I didn’t tell him my secondary motive. Maybe I was reluctant to admit it, even to myself. My secondary motive was fear.
Sir Westcott had given me plenty of material to read about the human brain, and I had struggled through most of it. It’s surprising how fast we learn things when they apply to us personally. One message that was repeated in paper after paper was the importance of the right hemisphere of the brain for music. Even if I recovered my health completely — even if Leo and I became a single and integrated personality — the old career of concert pianist might be closed to me. I might be able to read the notes easily enough, but if the feel had gone no amount of technique could hide it. I was scared.
As for the technique: there is a story that was told to me when I was ten years old and attributed to Horowitz, but it’s so much a part of pianistic folklore that it could have been said originally by Rachmaninov, or Liszt, or any virtuoso all the way back to Mozart and Clementi. “If I do not practice for one day I know it; if I do not practice for two days my fellow pianists know it; if I do not practice for three days everyone knows it.”
I had not touched a piano for three months. I was not trained for any life other than a pianist. What was I going to do with myself from now until old age?
For an hour or two I had the wild idea that I might take Leo’s job — after all, I was partly entitled to it. But it was out of the question. For one thing, he was legally dead. With two people going into the hospital, and only one coming out of it, something had to be done to make a rational record. Worse than that, though, I had no idea what Leo did for a living. He always seemed to be trotting off around the world for the U.S. State Department — a year in India , a year in Africa . But as to what he did there, I was as incompetent to assume that duty as he would have been to play the Brahms’ Second.
That’s when I got the idea that maybe my hobby could be turned into my job. If I eventually recovered sufficiently to return to the concert stage, fine. If not, over the past ten years I had built up more knowledge of snakes and reptiles than the average zookeeper. Leo and I had both been blessed with unusual memories. That might be a place to use it.
Both Sir Westcott and Tess gave me cautionary lectures before I was allowed to leave the hospital. No excitement, they said, and no exertion. Remember you are still early in your recovery, and if you feel at all dizzy sit down right where you are and ask for help. I nodded meekly — all I wanted to do was get out of there and on my way.
The weather was warm but I wore a knitted wool cap. My appearance in the mirror was something I had learned to live with. Others might balk at a tall, shambling figure, dot-and-carry-one in his walk, and with scars all over his head. Stubbly black hair was reluctantly growing to cover them, but I had a long way to go. No prizes for my appearance, unless it was in the scarecrow-of-the-year category.
It had been three years since I had last visited this zoo. I took my time, savoring each enclosure. There was a new small mammal house, and an improved environment for viewing nocturnals, with recessed red bulbs and a thermal infrared viewer on some cages.
Thursday afternoon was not a busy time. I saw two parties of schoolchildren, one policeman, and one young couple who walked arm-in-arm and never, so far as I could tell, looked at any of the animals. I dawdled through the Monkey House, then went last of all to see the reptiles. The Reptile House had been horridly renamed as the Herpetarium. Somebody had more erudition than sense.
It was highly satisfying. Crocodiles, snakes, lizards, turtles, and even a rare specimen of Rhynchocephalia, the tuatera lizard.
I had thought the place was deserted. So it was rather a shock when I turned from a glass cage containing a blase-looking puff adder and caught sight of a woman in a dark blue dress peering at me from the other end of the long room. She dodged quickly out of sight behind the central row of exhibits. I took a couple of steps in that direction, then my pulse began to hammer away at about twice its usual rate, I felt dizzy and nauseated, and there was no choice but to sit down on the ledge that ran in front of the cage.
Avoid all excitement, Tess had said, and I felt I had done my best. It was difficult to understand why a brief glimpse of an unremarkable — and unfamiliar — face should wipe me out so completely.
In a minute or so I was under good enough control to walk the length of the Reptile House. The woman had disappeared. I continued through the exhibits — fine specimens of Draco lizards, and some unusual Hydrophidae, sea-snakes over seven feet long — but I felt shaken and some of my enjoyment had gone.
As I was leaving the Reptile House I saw her again. This time I had a better look. She was about thirty years old, maybe five-feet five, and a bit too thin. She walked towards me, looking sideways towards the sealions’ pool as we passed and avoiding my eyes completely. Her profile was a little too sharp for beauty.
“Follow me, Leo.”
The words came so softly that I wondered if they might be a fabrication of my poor battered brain. I turned, but she walked on and did not look round.