Thanks For Sharing (2005)

Please provide information pertaining to the donor of the specimen and the time intervals between the steps of obtaining and packing the brain.

Before I started pretending to be him, all I knew was that he was studying neurology and that his surname was Khan. After the pub was fully chucked out I found him sitting on the floor of the men’s toilet cubicle, with his hands around his knees. It looked like he was preparing to lever himself up from the tiles. Standing, he would probably have been about six feet tall. If you were putting out a warrant for him, you’d say he had an athletic build, and people would know what you mean. What’s athletic? Not fat, not skinny. Not me. He had broad shoulders, shortish legs that could probably kick a football with some accuracy and long, wiry arms I could imagine swinging a tennis racquet. His head was as rectangular as a head can be without tipping over into freakishness. His hairline was so low on his head you might describe it as advancing instead of receding.

Oh, and he was dead. Trust me. It’s not just that his eyes had rolled up into his head as he blissed himself to oblivion, and that they stayed there when he died. Not just his blue lips— cyanotic’s the word, cyanotic— or the needle still protruding comically from the scabby arm with a hastily rolled-up sleeve. Anyone could probably have guessed that he was dead, just by looking at him. I had an advantage over anyone. I wasn’t always one of those 'yeah, what' barmen everyone hates. I used to study medicine, just like Mr Mohammed S. Khan. I was on the road to being a doctor until my little problem intervened. So I knew where his pulse should be but wasn’t, and I wasn’t surprised that he was still warm.

Anyway, his credit cards told me I was going through the pockets of the terminal heroin addict formerly known as Mr Mohammed S. Khan. In addition to an overdose of heroin in the bogs of a laminate-floor chain boozer he had three credit cards, fifty pounds in cash (four Darwins and two Elizabeth Frys), some change I put in the tip jar on the way out, his hospital ID and two condoms. Mr and Mrs Khan must have been so proud. 'Oh, your son’s going to be a doctor, how wonderful,' Mrs Khan would say, 'Did I tell you that our son’s going to be a brain surgeon?'

Those were just about the only words I remembered of his:

‘I’m gonna be a brain surgeon,’ he said.

I didn’t reply, just gave a tiny nod to show that I’d heard and he didn’t need to repeat himself. He still made me look at the dog-eared letter he kept in his coat pocket— his proof, his magic charm. That’s when I found out that his name was Khan and that he was due to start as a something or other in the neurology department the following day.

‘Right, good,’ I said, ‘Good for you.’

And me just a barman. I guessed that he didn’t have any friends he could tell, at least not the type of friends who listened when he didn’t have any horse to pass around. The letter had been scrutinised and exhibited so many times, it almost refolded itself. He put it back where it came from with the exaggerated care of a drunk trying to concentrate.

Khan came in often, but always drank alone; he wasn’t always on smack. Sometimes he just came in to drink. When he was on the H, though, he did it in the pub’s toilet. There was a UV light in there to stop people shooting up. I always knew he must have found some way to circumvent it, because he’d go in looking hungry and desperate and come out ten minutes later as a Cheshire Cat smile. As I knelt beside his dead body I could see that before going in, he’d simply used a permanent black marker to draw a cross on a suitable vein. I had to admire his lateral thinking, if not his choice of recreational drug and drinking establishment.

Now I could have called the police. That’s what you— or our theoretical anyone— would have thought they should do. You might have robbed his dead pockets, like I did, but then you would have called the police. I, on the other hand, still had this thing about one day being a doctor. And we have this idiot here pissing away his privilege and killing himself. Accidentally, I’ll admit, but if this stupid dead fucking junkie isn’t going to do anything with a great opportunity, then why shouldn’t I?

I’m what the police would describe as IC2, 'of southern European or Mediterranean appearance.' Not as brown as Mohammed, but dark enough that people used to ask me how I kept my tan all year in a way people I met later on never dared; by that time everyone thought I was an Anglo-Pakistani. In the old version of reality my dad was a half-Italian Catholic and my mum was Jewish. In addition to guilt-trips, hypocrisy, mixed moral messages and emotional blackmail in stereo, I got a full complement of SPF 20 DNA, a Roman nose and a permanent five o’ clock shadow. Thick black eyebrows, too. The same advancing hairline and hairy nape as my new dead friend Mohammed. At school he probably used to get called Caveman and Monkey Neck, just like I did.

I stood nose-to-nose with myself in the cracked mirror and didn’t think I’d get away with it. But I kept looking until I resembled Mohammed S. Khan in almost every way.

1. Recommended items to pack a fresh brain: 2 dry, clean Ziploc plastic bags (about 22 x 30 cm); plastic bucket with a tightly fitting lid (about 4.0 litres); large plastic bag (about 40 x 50 cm); envelope for documents; thermosafe polyfoam container (about 38 x 33 x 31 cm); two refrigerant packs (about 17 x 10 cm).

The corridor was very long, and I was sitting right at the end of it, so I saw her and her white coat approaching for a long time before she saw me. So it was particularly stupid of me to react to her question: ‘Mohammed Khan?’ by doing this kind of gormless comedy look around on either side of me before I was able to reply.

‘Mohammed Khan? Khan, yeah, that’s me.’

She laughed, obviously thinking I was being cute since there was nobody else sitting nearby, at least nobody who was likely to be called Mohammed Khan.

‘Well, this is it. Welcome to the department. I hope you’re not disappointed. You look different. Have you changed your hair?’ she said.

I shrugged. She stooped slightly to look at my laminated ID.

‘That’s a terrible picture,’ she said.

I laughed.

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘Nobody ever looks like themselves in passport photos, do they?’

This could have been too much for some people— too bold— but she didn’t seem to notice. She just concurred with a small shrug and a rueful smile that I couldn’t decipher.

Since we’d apparently met, Mohammed should probably know this woman’s name already. She was wearing an ID tag the same as mine, but at first I had some kind of mental block. I kept seeing her name as Ni MH, which is Nickel Metal Hydride— a type of rechargeable battery. I just stood there like an idiot until she reminded me that her name was Neev Carver. The dissonance went away and I was able to compose myself again. Unlike my picture, the photograph on her tag looked like her, but more so.

We walked through a ward with lots of dazed-looking people wearing bandages on their heads. Most of them looked decapitated, bodiless heads propped among loose wrappings, like unwanted gifts. Niamh said that the first thing I’d be doing was histology. This, she said with a grin, would break me in nicely. Or break my will nicely; I’m not sure which. At the time I was fairly certain I knew what histology was, but I stuck a post-it note to the inside of my forehead: find a dictionary or check it out on the internet. Then she suggested we go and get lunch before the shifts officially changed over, otherwise the staff canteen would be inundated with junior doctors and ward nurses who were half-psychotic with exhaustion.

‘This is Stephen Wong. He’s been here since last week,’ she said, waving me into the queue between him and her. I guessed that Niamh thought we made a nice couple: her two boys, Pakistani and Chinese.

As Niamh’s hand hovered over the last bacon roll, she looked over her shoulder and asked me if I was a Muslim.

‘Yeah, I mean no. Well, kind of. No. My parents—’

‘I get it,’ she said, ‘I know exactly what you mean. They wish you were but know you’re not. It’s just like the Irish thing, the Catholic thing. They never say anything. They just look at you with this absolutely horrific pity and disappointment. I think they really think you’re going to Hell. Do Muslims have Hell?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and it was true. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

I thought about it while I ate the bacon roll. The more I considered what she’d said, the more I was affronted on Mohammed’s behalf at the impertinence of her question. I decided that if she went on like that I could probably take her to a racial equality tribunal or complain about her religious intolerance or something.

Stephen apparently thought that my brown skin meant we must automatically have more in common than any two random white people do. He didn’t say much until Niamh had gone. Then, with very little preamble or provocation, he confided that his real name wasn’t Wong. It was Willis. He looked Chinese and his mum really was from Hong Kong, but Stephen thought he’d stand more chance of being singled out from the other applicants if he had an ethnic-sounding name to match the way he looked. He was sick of people getting all surprised and embarrassed when they were expecting Stephen Willis and then some Chinese bloke turned up instead.

He looked at me expectantly, probably hoping that I’d trade him some of my own private information; make it into a pact of some kind. I carried on eating my lunch.

‘Seems like I’m the only person in this hospital who doesn’t have any secrets,’ I said, and Stephen made an insipid smile in reply.

After that he ate very slowly and silently, careful not to look in my direction.

2. Packing procedure:  Put the fresh brain in the first Ziploc bag, and zip the bag closed. Place sealed first bag inside second bag and Ziploc it. Place .5 kg of wet ice into the bucket and transfer the double-bagged brain onto the ice. Cover double-bagged brain with wet ice and tightly fit the lid onto the bucket.

So this is the Frankenstein moment. That’s right, I dropped the brain. You’ve probably never held one, but those bastards are slippery. A surgically excised brain looks almost cartoonish or cute, like it might be kind of rubbery and it would bounce if you dropped it. If you want a good opposite of 'bounce', try 'splatter'. These things aren’t easy to come by, not legally anyway. You need informed consent, all kinds of documents signed and countersigned. I say what does a cadaver care if their brain’s removed? They’re just flat on their back, rotting away. But when relatives occasionally find out that doctors have taken stuff without asking, everyone makes a huge fuss about the whole thing. Doctors do it all the time, though, just like half of them have deliberately killed at least one whinging old biddy with diamorph, or marked someone as NFR just to clear the bed, or misdiagnosed somebody who suffered and died because of it. There are some things you just have to accept as basic facts of your profession.

Actually it just sort of ruptured slightly on the left hemisphere when I dropped it. It would probably have been OK— there was nobody around to see what I’d done, and it was going to be made into slides anyway— but somehow in my shock I kind of trod on the part of it that was still intact and skidded across the floor on it like a roller skate. Here’s where the word 'splatter' starts to become apposite.

Mainly I was mortified that I’d look like a total fucking idiot for pulverising a donated brain on my second day. I immediately knew I was going to need a brain to replace the one I’d ruined, and there wasn’t a conveniently placed murderer’s brain in a nearby jar. I just had to hope that nobody asked for the slides before the following day. I bagged it up in a biohazard sack for incineration and carefully placed it under a pile of similar ones on a cart; before I even left the building, it had probably gone the same way as all the removed appendices, tumours and pus-sodden bandages.

If you’ve been wondering what happened to the ambitious young neurologist formerly known as Mohammed S. Khan, now’s probably a convenient time for me to tell you. He was in the boot of my car, which had the advantage of smelling so bad already that it couldn’t get much worse. I’d wrapped him in a plastic sheet and left him there because at first I had no idea how I could reliably get rid of him. What I did know was that even though they’re dead, corpses occasionally do some fucked up shit. Within a few minutes of dying, potassium starts to leach out; salts and sugars build up. The salt draws fluid into the cells, and the heart fills with lactic acid— like an exhausted athlete’s muscles. Free radicals get free and radical, and the body starts to fall apart from the cellular level upwards. And less poetically, yes, they shit. They let their bowels and bladders go, they fill up with gas, they moan and fart and twitch and bloat. So as a temporary measure I’d left him in the boot of my car, which I planned to dump because it was going to fail its MOT anyway.

I was in the garage, sawing away at Mohammed’s skull. After a few minutes I thought I heard him groan. Bodies make noises sometimes, especially when you start manhandling them, so it didn’t worry me unduly. I scolded him that he was dead so he’d better shut the fuck up, and furthermore that he better not shit in his pants again. The saw finally bit deeply enough into the bone for me to go around the circumference of his skull and start flipping off the top of the cranium.

His hand shot up and snatched feebly my right wrist, even though his blackened eyes stayed screwed shut and glued up with mucous. The saw clattered onto the concrete floor and I don’t mind admitting that my instincts had me halfway across the garage before I even knew what I was doing. He didn’t move again. After a few minutes I crept back and felt his pulse at arm’s length. There it was, for a moment. Then nothing, at least nothing my fingertips could perceive. A flicker of pulse again, like the sporadic wing beats of a butterfly just hatched or at the end of its time. It might have been my own pulse I could feel, instead of his. I wasn’t entirely present and rational at the time.

I held the plastic tight over his mouth and nose until I was certain he couldn’t be alive anymore. When I finally began to saw again he didn’t object. At last he donated his brain to science and I knew that everything would turn out OK.

3. Put the large plastic bag into the polyfoam container and then place about .3 kg of wet ice into the bag.

As I drove to the hospital on my third day, the sky was so grey and heavy with rain that the oppressive atmosphere seemed to creep indoors with me. There was nothing I could even define or articulate. I just had this horrible ominous feeling as I dumped some unidentifiable offcuts of Mohammed S. Khan’s face and scalp in one of the biohazard bins for incineration. Stephen Wong made things worse. There was obviously something eating at him as well.

I was trying to make the slides for Niamh, using the new brain that had caused me so much aggravation. I brought it into work in a bucket full of ice. Nobody asks a man in a white coat what he’s got in the bucket. Wong had the other half of the brain, and obviously logic dictated that he had the same amount of work ahead of him as I did. No matter how much I tried to concentrate or ignore him, Wong was always wittering away somewhere on the periphery of my awareness like a parrot that’s just learned some new expletives and wants to get a reaction from you. Or he was fidgeting and making the chair creak, or clattering things on the work surface. Blurting out huge paragraphs on random subjects. A long and rambling account of a dream he had the night before. I don’t recall now what his dream was. One of the least interesting things on earth is listening to the stories people make up about the weird misfirings of their sleeping brains.

'I think this guy must have been murdered.'

Finally, silence. It seemed he was expecting more of a response from me than the noncommittal grunts I’d been allowing him occasionally. I kept my eye fixed on top of the microscope eyepiece, even though I was no longer looking at anything.

'Careful,' he said, and there was a crack as the mechanism of my microscope ground down into the slide.

It turned out that Stephen Wong was even more annoying than I had ever anticipated. Neurology, pathology, forensic medicine; he knew it all. I don’t know if he was keeping his career options open, or if he was just an overachiever. He probably could have been a very highly paid consultant before he was thirty. Unfortunately his career ended prematurely when I lured him up to the hospital roof and pushed him off.

4. Transfer sealed bucket into plastic bag of the container, place it onto the ice and add refrigerant packs. Close plastic bag, put polyfoam lid in place, add documents and close cardboard box.

I made sure they sent Stephen Wong’s brain anonymously to a university in Scotland, and all his other usable components to as many different places as possible. His high-velocity meeting with a car park at the age of twenty-four meant that his organs were in good condition. He didn’t smoke or take drugs. He even had a donor card in his wallet on the day he died. He’d finished a course of antidepressants a few months back, but nobody could work out why he decided to jump off the roof. They just assumed it was suicide because there was nobody in the world who would want to kill Wong. Depressed people sometimes do things like that, especially when they have a nice tall hospital to launch themselves from.

A few months after his funeral, his mother and I burned a complete set of paper organs for him. She needed to be certain he was complete, because she didn’t agree with the hospital taking her only child’s lungs, corneas and so forth. She told me, his friend, that the Chinese have this stuff called Hell Money. You burn it and it goes to people in the Chinese afterlife, which seems pretty much like ordinary life except you’re dead forever. It’s not as if you’ve been sent to some kind of Christian Hell for punishment or anything; you’re not missing out on Heaven because apparently everyone’s in Hell. I think it’s just called Hell Money because it has to be called something and Hell Money is what it happens to be called. Just like my name is Mohammed S. Khan, because that’s what my name is and I can’t be called anything else.

You can burn other things for dead people; use the smoke to send them anything you think they might need or want. Food, consumer goods. Anything at all. I don’t know if she was making this stuff up, or if I misunderstood. She was still pretty much unhinged with grief, the day of the Hell Money. His father— also Stephen Willis— stood nearby, passing Hell Money out of a carrier bag into his wife’s hand as she in turn fed the flames. We watched the fake money curl and burn. Niamh came to the funeral, but only I was invited to help send Wong his Hell Money.

I had this idea of sending Mohammed S. Khan something. A Hell neurologist’s salary. Or paper replica syringes full of the highest quality Hell heroin; even more pure and more potent than the diamorphine he used to steal from the hospital. I still don’t know if Muslims believe in Hell. Maybe they all go to heaven automatically because of being Muslims and doing whatever Islamic things they do. I wonder what happens to them if they’ve not been buried yet. Spiritually, I mean. I’m very well aware of what happens physically when you find it more difficult than anticipated to clandestinely and permanently dispose of a headless corpse.

He might not even have been a Muslim. I mean, I don’t know whether I am, or if it would make things easier if people thought I was one. Maybe I could be secular Muslim. I should at least try to find out more about this Muslims and Hell question. The whole experience of studying neurology is turning out to be genuinely educational.

© Alistair Gentry 2005. From 'Uncanny Valley: Collected Short Stories'.