Kiss Kiss (3 page)

      
“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 clot from your brain.’
      
“ ‘You
are
?’
      
“ ‘Just lie still. Don’t move. I’m nearly finished.’
      
“ ‘So that’s the bastard who’s been giving me all those headaches,’
the man said.”
      
Landy paused and smiled, remembering the occasion. “That’s
word for word what the man said,” he went on, “although the
next day he couldn’t even recollect the incident. It’s a funny
thing, the brain.”
      
“I’ll have the procaine,” I said.
      
“As you wish, William. And now, as I say, I’d take a small
oscillating saw and carefully remove your complete calvarium—the
whole vault of the skull. This would expose the top
half of the brain, or rather the outer covering in which it is
wrapped. You may or may not know that there are three
separate coverings around the brain itself—the outer one called
the dura mater or dura, the middle one called the arachnoid,
and the inner one called the pia mater or pia. Most laymen
seem to have the idea that the brain is a naked thing floating
around in fluid in your head. But it isn’t. It’s wrapped up
neatly in these three strong coverings, and the cerebrospinal
fluid actually flows within the little gap between the two inner
coverings, known as the subarachnoid space. As I told you
before, this fluid is manufactured by the brain and it drains off
into the venous system by osmosis.
      
“I myself would leave all three coverings—don’t they have
lovely names, the dura, the arachnoid, and the pia?—I’d leave
them all intact. There are many reasons for this, not least
among them being the fact that within the dura run the venous
channels that drain the blood from the brain into the jugular.
      
“Now,” he went on, “we’ve got the upper half of your skull
off so that the top of the brain, wrapped in its outer covering,
is exposed. The next step is the really tricky one: to release
the whole package so that it can be lifted cleanly away, leaving
the stubs of the four supply arteries and the two veins hanging
underneath ready to be re-connected to the machine. This is
an immensely lengthy and complicated business involving the
delicate chipping away of much bone, the severing of many
nerves, and the cutting and tying of numerous blood vessels.
The only way I could do it with any hope of success would
be by taking a rongeur and slowly biting off the rest of your
skull, peeling it off downward like an orange until the sides
and underneath of the brain covering are fully exposed. The
problems involved are highly technical and I won’t go into
them, but I feel fairly sure that the work can be done. It’s
simply a question of surgical skill and patience. And don’t
forget that I’d have plenty of time, as much as I wanted,
because the artificial heart would be continually pumping
away alongside the operating-table, keeping the brain alive.
      
“Now, let’s assume that I’ve succeeded in peeling off your
skull and removing everything else that surrounds the sides of
the brain. That leaves it connected to the body only at the
base, mainly by the spinal column and by the two large veins and
the four arteries that are supplying it with blood. So what next?
      
“I would sever the spinal column just above the first cervical
vertebra, taking great care not to harm the two vertebral
arteries which are in that area. But you must remember that
the dura or outer covering is open at this place to receive the
spinal column, so I’d have to close this opening by sewing the
edges of the dura together. There’d be no problem there.
      
“At this point, I would be ready for the final move. To one
side, on a table, I’d have a basin of a special shape, and this
would be filled with what we call Ringer’s Solution. That is a
special kind of fluid we use for irrigation in neurosurgery. I
would now cut the brain completely loose by severing the
supply arteries and the veins. Then I would simply pick it up
in my hands and transfer it to the basin. This would be the
only other time during the whole proceeding when the blood
flow would be cut off; but once it was in the basin, it wouldn’t
take a moment to re-connect the stubs of the arteries and veins
to the artificial heart.
      
“So there you are,” Landy said. “Your brain is now in the
basin, and still alive, and there isn’t any reason why it shouldn’t
stay alive for a very long time, years and years perhaps,
provided we looked after the blood and the machine.”
      
“But would it
function
?”
      
“My dear William, how should I know? I can’t even tell
you whether it would ever regain consciousness.”
      
“And if it did?”
      
“There now! That would be fascinating!”
      
“Would it?” I said, and I must admit I had my doubts.
      
“Of course it would! Lying there with all your thinking
processes working beautifully, and your memory as well . . .”
      
“And not being able to see or feel or smell or hear or talk,”
I said.
      
“Ah!” he cried. “I knew I’d forgotten something! I never
told you about the eye. Listen. I am going to try to leave one
of your optic nerves intact, as well as the eye itself. The optic
nerve is a little thing about the thickness of a clinical thermometer
and about two inches in length as it stretches between
the brain and the eye. The beauty of it is that it’s not really a
nerve at all. It’s an outpouching of the brain itself, and the
dura or brain covering extends along it and is attached to the
eyeball. The back of the eye is therefore in very close contact
with the brain, and cerebrospinal fluid flows right up to it.
      
“All this suits my purpose very well, and makes it reasonable
to suppose that I could succeed in preserving one of your eyes.
I’ve already constructed a small plastic case to contain the
eyeball, instead of your own socket, and when the brain is in the
basin, submerged in Ringer’s Solution, the eyeball in its case
will float on the surface of the liquid.”
      
“Staring at the ceiling,” I said.
      
“I suppose so, yes. I’m afraid there wouldn’t be any muscles
there to move it around. But it might be sort of fun to lie there
so quietly and comfortably peering out at the world from
your basin.”
      
“Hilarious,” I said. “How about leaving me an ear as well?”
      
“I’d rather not try an ear this time.”
      
“I want an ear,” I said. “I insist upon an ear.”
      
“No.”
      
“I want to listen to Bach.”
      
“You don’t understand how difficult it would be,” Landy said gently.
“The hearing apparatus—the cochlea, as it’s called—is
a far more delicate mechanism than the eye. What’s more,
it is encased in bone. So is a part of the auditory nerve that
connects it with the brain. I couldn’t possibly chisel the whole
thing out intact.”
      
“Couldn’t you leave it encased in the bone and bring the
bone to the basin?”
      
“No,” he said firmly. “This thing is complicated enough
already. And anyway, if the eye works, it doesn’t matter all
that much about your hearing. We can always hold up
messages for you to read. You really must leave me to decide
what is possible and what isn’t.”
      
“I haven’t yet said that I’m going to do it.”
      
“I know, William, I know.”
      
“I’m not sure I fancy the idea very much.”
      
“Would you rather be dead, altogether?”
      
“Perhaps I would. I don’t know yet. I wouldn’t be able to
talk, would I?”
      
“Of course not.”
      
“Then how would I communicate with you? How would
you know that I’m conscious?”
      
“It would be easy for us to know whether or not you regain
consciousness,” Landy said. “The ordinary electro-encephalograph
could tell us that. We’d attach the electrodes directly
to the frontal lobes of your brain, there in the basin.”
      
“And you could actually tell?”
      
“Oh, definitely. Any hospital could do that part of it.”
      
“But
I
couldn’t communicate with
you
.”
      
“As a matter of fact,” Landy said, “I believe you could.
There’s a man up in London called Wertheimer who’s doing
some interesting work on the subject of thought communication,
and I’ve been in touch with him. You know, don’t you,
that the thinking brain throws off electrical and chemical
discharges? And that these discharges go out in the form of
waves, rather like radio waves?”
      
“I know a bit about it,” I said.
      
“Well, Wertheimer has constructed an apparatus somewhat
similar to the encephalograph, though far more sensitive, and
he maintains that within certain narrow limits it can help him
to interpret the actual things that a brain is thinking. It
produces a kind of graph which is apparently decipherable into
words or thoughts. Would you like me to ask Wertheimer to
come and see you?”
      
“No,” I said. Landy was already taking it for granted that
I was going to go through with this business, and I resented his
attitude. “Go away now and leave me alone,” I told him. “You
won’t get anywhere by trying to rush me.”
      
He stood up at once and crossed to the door.
      
“One question,” I said.
      
He paused with a hand on the doorknob. “Yes, William?”
      
“Simply this. Do you yourself honestly believe that when
my brain is in that basin, my mind will be able to function
exactly as it is doing at present? Do you believe that I will be
able to think and reason as I can now? And will the power of
memory remain?”
      
“I don’t see why not,” he answered. “It’s the same brain. It’s
alive. It’s undamaged. In fact, it’s completely untouched. We
haven’t even opened the dura. The big difference, of course,
would be that we’ve severed every single nerve that leads into
it—except for the one optic nerve—and this means that your
thinking would no longer be influenced by your senses. You’d
be living in an extraordinarily pure and detached world.
Nothing to bother you at all, not even pain. You couldn’t
possibly feel pain because there wouldn’t be any nerves to feel
it with. In a way, it would be an almost perfect situation. No
worries or fears or pains or hunger or thirst. Not even any
desires. Just your memories and your thoughts, and if the
remaining eye happened to function, then you could read
books as well. It all sounds rather pleasant to me.”