zoot landers: renegade dutch neurosurgeon

Zoot Landers was born into a respectable Dutch family that had amassed a considerable amount of wealth developing and selling agricultural fertilizers on an industrial scale. From an early age he manifested an interest in science which evolved into an interest in the burgeoning science of neurology and neuro-science. He went to university in Rotterdam, majoring in medicine and neuroscience and wrote his Doctoral Thesis on related matters. His passion was real. However, he found that he couldn't indulge in the kind of experimentation he was interested in in Holland as it would be considered illegal. He wondered about Da Vinci, who had famously been among the forerunners of forensic pathologists, carrying out autopsies and disecting and bisecting the human frame, specifically to study the organs, muscular structure, etc. If only Zoot could perform the same kinds of autopsies on human brains. But not only on the dead, but on the living! In an age before the scanning and imaging made possible by the turn of the 21st century just 15 years gone by now, Zoot would need to rely on other methods to study the brain's responses to various scientifically controlled stimuli, and he would need brains, lots of brains.

He would have to go to Africa. He had contacts, a nation there, with oil and diamonds and soldiers and factions and machine guns, and best of all, lots and lots of corpses and refugees with brains, brains, brains!

Zoot looked at his watch as his plane started to accelerate on the runway, to take him from Schipol Airport to Nairobi. Jerk. The jet lunged forward, suddenly accelerating to 200 kph. Zoot stretched his feet out and thought about his father, now deceased, and his avid fondness for yachting. How he remembered his father reprimanding him: 'never let out your spinnakers a moment too soon or too late!' that summarized his father's teaching to him in life. The family business, spanning some four generations, from humble beginnings to an internationally floated multinational, did not interest Zoot. Only brains interested Zoot: pre-frontal cortexes, neurons, synapses. Memory. Olfactory functioning. Speech. Balance. All things neurology interested Zoot and nothing else did unless he could relate it back to neurology. Spinnakers. He remembered as a child, yachting with his father......bwaffffff...... the jet took off a few short seconds after Zoot's train of thought had begun. How quickly the brain worked, at the speed of electrical current, in fact. Zoot thought about the experiments he would do involving conscious recollection in the non-conscious. The comas he would induce on living subjects and the tests he would do on them to study their stimuli perception. He would be inserting fine metallic, conducting needles into open-air brains, whose skulls had been neatly sawed off.

"Launch!" his father would cry and Zoot and his fellow sailors would have to launch the yacht's spinnakers as it turned a buoy, heading into a down-wind. The challenge when sailing into the wind was to zig-zag back and forth into the wind, deflecting wind at minimal acute angles, or highly obtuse ones, depending on how you looked at it, trigonometric-ally. With a tail wind, the spinnaker would balloon into the air and the wind would catch it and not a moment could be wasted as Zoot's father was extremely pedantic and passionate about not wasting a precious moment of the gusting sea-winds. Whoof! The yacht would take off, just as Zoot's jet now zoomed higher and higher into the stratosphere. Some of his family owned and operated small planes however Zoot was most exposed to yachting, until he sequestered himself to pursue his interest with determination. Still, flying and yachting were not unpleasant activities to Zoot yet his mind was always on neurology. How many endorphins were released in indulging in reminiscing, and in the physicality of the current flight?

His mind went ahead to Nairobi. He must have order. He ran through his plans to arrive at his final destination. The contacts he would be meeting along the way, the logistics. The warehousing. The money, the bribes to be paid. The handlers to keep close. The handlers he could trust. Money talked Zoot surmised, and bullshit could only walk with the correct electrical impulses from the motor/balance section of the brain. Zoot napped.

Zoot sat back comfortably with a cocktail and a cigar in a pleasant and upscale outdoor bar in Nairobi, Kenya. He'd arrived only recently and now sat with his primary contact and handler.

"Zoot suits are all the rage here my friend. If you want to be hip, you should always wear a different one every day," Zoot's contact informed him.

Zoot disagreed. Casual, unostentatious, poor looking and functional attire, loose fitting and suited to the climate would serve him better he informed his interlocutor.

Days past and Zoot's long journey overland through breathtaking scenery, warzones, jungles and plains whirled by. Zoot was able to set up his home and practice as per prior arrangement, in an out of the way farmstead. He was joined by a lovely lady, a southern belle American woman, a whitey, to be sure. Bred from cotton farm owners from the 19th century. Her accent and turns of speech, Zoot found, were quite charming and not without appeal. She was considerable older than Zoot, by some eight years, Zoot being in his late twenties. She had been found guilty of medical malpractice in America and fled the law to Suriname near Venezuela and from there, Zoot recruited her from Holland via phone interviews and the like however they never met until a day earlier at the farmstead which Zoot had dubbed 'Zootland', erecting a hand painted sign to say so.

"I do declare, our first subject has arrived Mr Zoot, only but a moment ago," declared Miss Shelly to Zoot with her carefree heavy southern accent while she fussed around in Zoot's laboratory which had a hospital bed with straps as well as various paraphernalia normally found in surgeons' operating theaters. Miss Shelly scrubbed her hands and put plastic gloves on and fastened an apron.

"Don't get gloved up already, Missy Shelly," Zoot informed her, reminding himself again that she was about a third asian thanks to some vietnamese and chinese genes of hers, although it wasn't really perceptible to the eye. "You told me she's about to wake up, I need you to knock her out and keep her down for about two hours, render a paralytic also so that she's well paralyzed from the neck down for the next six hours and so that only her mouth can move.... I want to talk to her after we've opened up her skull and see what I can get out of her."

Miss Shelly, prior to that request from Zoot, had explained that the local villagers had brought the subject as she was considered dangerous and possessed of the devil, although the story that came out made it seem she was involved in a jealous lovers triangle and there was some reason to her madness.

"Whaddaya have in mind Zoot?" Miss Shelly asked, with her funny accent.

"First of all I want to try out an pseudo-acupuncture technique on the pre-frontal cortex, also I've prepared some patches for you to administer to her biceps, they'll release a hormone which should affect some changes to her hippocampus which i'm interested to study. Make sure she's lucid after two hours but paralyzed except for her lips. Shave her head and buckle her down right here in this seat, we'll get her sitting down the whole time. Then get scrubbed up and join me."

"You're not gonna put that funny euro-pop music on while we operate, are you?" Miss Shelly asked disapprovingly.

"Whenever the patient's male, you can put the music on you like," Zoot responded and went for his cranium cutting saw.

Zoot grabbed his cranium cutting saw and gave it a whirl with panache, he was very comfortable wielding that instrument, and experienced, of course. He was starting to feel happy and excited about the upcoming experiment. He picked up a fact sheet that had info about the patient. Her name was Umbatu. On all the blank fact sheets he'd had printed out, the section for english language skills only showed one box, which was automatically checked, it read: pigeon. Thus:  english language skills: Pigeon X. Other languages had option such as Swahili: advanced, intermediate, basic, and the boxes beside the competencies levels were left blank, for Shelly to fill in. However, it was assumed everyone's english language skills were pigeon english level, so the box there was always checked automatically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCuTrfTfGd0

Zoot proceeded to listen to his europop music and his assistant Miss Shelly went ahead and conformed with his instructions. Umbatu had been paralyzed and  her head shaved and her skull top removed. Her brain was exposed to the air and Zoot was on standby with his needles and electric currents and dials and what not. Her mouth was left un-numbed but most of the rest of her body was numbed up.

"Help me, oh Jesus, please help me! Save me from this devil!" Umbatu cried suddenly. Miss Shelly began to turn really white in the face, as in, all the blood and color just drained away. Miss Shelly wasn't particularly religious but had done some Sunday schooling and was freaking out. "Help me Jesus, save me, save me!" shrieked Umbatu. Miss Shelly was really affected by it, but Zoot was not so affected.

"What's wrong Umbatu?" Zoot asked.

"Help! Help! Save me Jesus!" cried Umbatu still more imploringly. Miss Shelly began to have a panic attack and had to sit down.

"Oh God, we need to help her Zoot! She wants help, what do we do?" Miss Shelly asked Zoot in a panic.

"Get her a picture of Jesus, there's a bible on the shelf over there, there's a picture of Jesus inside the front cover." Zoot said to Miss Shelly, indicating a stand in the corner.

Miss Shelly did that and the two noticed that Umbatu focused her eyes on the picture but just started crying anyway, like tears were rolling down her face. She kept on screaming and crying for Jesus. Like she was freaking out. There weren't any mirrors so she wouldn't have seen or felt that her skull cap had been removed and her brains were exposed to the air.

Miss Shelly fished around for some tissues, then heard a strange noise and looked up and saw Zoot was staggering and had his hands towards his throat, there was blood there too.

"Don't move Zoot!" Miss Shelly had found her calmness at last. "Don't move, Umbatu has just slammed a long metallic incisor through your throat sideways."

Zoot did as he was told but at the same time he was starting to choke, he couldn't breath. The incisor went clean through his larynx. Miss Shelly quickly looked for a plastic, malleable airway pipe she could insert down Zoot's throat, in order to help him breath, her panic was replaced by calm.

Zoot was able to take some labored breaths after that but the long silver scalpel was well and truly rammed clean through his throat horizontally, from one end, protruding out of the other. Miss Shelly quickly jammed a syringe into Umbatu to knock her out so she couldn't fuss anymore. She proceeded to ease Zoot towards a spare operating table and got him to edge himself onto it, this isn't how she imagined going to bed with him would be like. She stuck a milder tranquilizing shot into him too and proceeded to study the situation with his larynx. She would have to operate, fast.