The Unit (13 page)

18

After the incident with the failed antidepressant experiment, Elsa and I ended up for the first and only time in the same scientific experiment, a psychological study where the researchers wanted to find out if there was a biological or genetic parental instinct, and if so, whether it was the same in women and men. As dispensable people we were the perfect target group, since none of us had the physical or emotional experience of caring for and bringing up our own children, as mothers and fathers have.

For the first few days we each sat with our head inside a brain scanner, which measured and registered the reactions of the brain as we were exposed to a series of visual, audio, and olfactory impressions. There were pictures of children at different ages and in different situations, the sound of babies crowing, children laughing, newborn babies crying, tantrums, the smell of baby rice, talcum powder, baby feces, wet diapers and baby vomit. There were also pictures, noises, and smells that signaled different kinds of threat or danger: hot stoves, the screech of a car’s brakes, fire, smoke, swimming pools, steep staircases, buzzing wasps, growling dogs baring their teeth, sharp and pointed objects, guns, different kinds of poisonous items, nasty old men offering children candy, images of child pornography and lots of other things.

After these introductory days the experiment continued with a series of different tests. There were multiple-choice questionnaires, there were discussion groups, there were sessions when different scenarios were acted out for us and our reactions measured in different ways. The experiment lasted for two weeks and on the penultimate day we got—or at least I got—a small shock when we arrived in lab 2, where the majority of the work had taken place, to find the place crawling with real live children. There were something like twenty of them, aged between eighteen months and six years, and we were to play with them, talk to them and, if necessary, feed them and change their diapers and their clothes.

Elsa and I spent several hours playing with a girl aged four and a boy aged two and a half. We built a cabin using a table, some blankets and some cushions, and we had a tea party with some dolls and were attacked by extremists and had a battle with the terrorists and died and we were dead until the girl decided it wasn’t actually that serious, we were just badly injured and needed Band-Aids and bandages, and then we could carry on eating cake and conversing with the dolls. Although after a while we were interrupted again, because the boy needed to pee so urgently and so badly that we didn’t quite make it to the bathroom before he wet his pants a bit, so he had to change into a pair of dark green pants that he didn’t like instead of the red ones he’d been wearing, which he liked much better. And he wept, furious and desolate, for a while until Elsa came up with the idea that he was actually wearing a pair of green military pants, and that it was time for a new war on terror, and everything was fine again. The boy was called Olav and the girl was called Kristina; I thought they were a delight.

The following day we were interviewed, one on one in separate little rooms, about how we had felt and how we had reacted to our time with the children. The room was equipped with a very basic desk, two chairs, a DAT recorder, a TV and a DVD player. The person who interviewed me was a woman of roughly my age, quite powerful and with a calm, steady gaze. Under normal circumstances I would have found her reassuring, but not this particular morning.

During the previous evening and night I had been very low, and had felt the same kind of ache in my stomach and chest that missing Jock had caused during my first months in the unit. I had fought back the tears and turned my back on Johannes in bed; he had noticed that something was wrong and tried to comfort me, but hadn’t really succeeded. Naturally I didn’t want to talk about this during the interview. But the psychologists running the tests had access to our journals, and therefore the woman interviewing me knew that I had had an abortion when I was young. And—as if that weren’t enough—when she asked how I had experienced the contact with the children in light of the fact that I had had an abortion early in life and then not had any children, and I refused to answer, she said:

“Look at this, Dorrit,” and she pressed PLAY on the DVD.

Something greenish that looked as if it had been filmed with an underwater camera appeared on the screen. I was automatically expecting to see fish, starfish, corals, and billowing seaweed, and perhaps a diver in a rubber suit with an oxygen tank on his back. But after only a couple of seconds I realized this was no film recorded at the bottom of some ocean, not even at the bottom of some lake, or even an aquarium, it was a room, a greenish bedroom, with two greenish people in a greenish double bed filmed with a thermal imaging camera. At first the two people were lying there still and silent, one with their back to the other, but then there were some muffled sounds, then a murmur, and the murmur had words: “Dorrit … ? Darling, what is it?”

And I saw, from above and at an angle, how Johannes turned me to face him with gentle force, and I heard my own muffled sounds transformed into words and sentences, at first chopped about by sobs and incomprehensible, then a little unclear but perfectly audible. I was surprised—and horrified—at the sound quality.

The interviewer stopped the film, turned to me, looked at me, calmly waiting, without saying a word. It lasted quite a long time. We sat there in silence, she with her hands on her knee and her gaze fixed on my face, me as stiff as a corpse. I was silent and stiff for so long that it finished me off completely, it was as if everything inside had shut down, I was empty, and when that happened I was able—mechanically—to begin to explain how I had felt about the events of yesterday and what I had felt and thought afterward.

19

Time passed. Time flew. The days flew like balloons, filled with hours at the computer beneath the picture of Majken’s deformed fetus, hours spent on experiments and humane tests, hours of walking, stamina training, swimming, appointments with the psychologist, massages, pedicures and saunas. The evenings came and went with visits to the cinema, dinners, conversations, time spent with friends. And the nights came in to land, only to drift away again filled with hours of lovemaking, whispering, sleep and dreams. And the days and nights turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and at the end of each month five, six, seven or eight new dispensable individuals would arrive in the unit, and a new welcome party would be held with dinner, entertainment and dancing. And each month a number of residents would disappear from the unit and would not come back; more and more often there would be someone I knew among them. And for a while the time just flowed into one for me. Or to put it more accurately: in my memory the time flows into one. And that probably isn’t only due to the fact that our memory is selective and mixes things up and picks out what seems right at the time. Under normal circumstances, in the real world out there, our memory can usually support itself by the seasons; a certain event is linked with a particular time of year. For example, I know that my father died and was buried in the fall, because the maples in the churchyard were red and orange, and the weather was crisp and clear and cold. And my mother died the following summer, right at the beginning, when the oilseed rape is in flower and the schools are letting out. I also know that it was early spring when Nils came home with me for the first time, because I remember showing him the hepatica that had just come into flower behind the compost, and at first he didn’t believe they really were hepatica, because for some reason he thought they were extinct, and I had to go in and get my flower book and look it up and show him. I had moved into my house in the late fall when the trees were bare and the fields muddy and heavy. And Jock became mine that same winter; I had to clear the car windshield of freshly fallen wet snow and clear the garden path before I drove, slowly and carefully, through the slush to the animal rescue to collect him. But when I think back over my time in the unit my memory has no such assistance from the seasons, because the seasons never change. In the unit there are only days and nights, that’s the only thing that changes: darkness and daylight. In the winter garden everything is in bud or in flower, but nothing shrivels, withers or dies. It is never winter in the winter garden.

After lunch one day, during one of my more or less daily walks in the garden, I arrived at the citrus grove just as the petals were falling. I went in among the low trees, into the Impressionist pattern of white dots, and stood there thinking of Majken and Jock—Majken because she liked the Impressionists’ way of portraying the world, Jock because I knew he would have loved this white blizzard of petals. I turned my face upward and watched the little petals as they drifted down toward me slowly and with dignity, like perfumed snowflakes that would never melt on this windless day, landing in my hair, on my forehead, on one eyelid, on the other eyebrow, on the tip of my nose, on my upper lip. I blew the last one away, then looked down again and gave myself a shake. Then I saw that I was not alone in the grove. A person wearing round glasses was standing a little way off in his pale green staff shirt, watching me through the white-dotted air. Potter.

“Hi there!” he called out, raising a hand in greeting when he realized I had seen him.

He started walking over, and when he got to me he asked:

“How are things?”

“Good,” I replied. “And how are you?”

“Fine …” Then he seemed to hesitate, looking down at the ground, then up again before taking a deep breath and saying:

“It was terrible, what happened.”

“With Erik and the others, you mean?”

“Yes. Mistakes like that just can’t be allowed to happen, and it just doesn’t matter whether the drug in question is being tested on those who are dispensable or on rats or amoebae or on those who are needed. It’s a completely indefensible …”—he searched for the right word—“… waste.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “They could just as well have thrown their research funding in the sea.”

“A waste of people, I mean,” said Potter. “Not money.”

“People are money,” I replied. “Just as time is money.”

He shook his head.

“People are people,” he said seriously. “Life.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“I nearly resigned,” Potter went on, clearly needing to unburden himself. “It’s difficult, seeing the way you’re treated here.”

“We’re treated very well,” I said.

“Do you think so?” He was genuinely surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed.

“Yes,” I replied. “If you compare it with the way we’re treated out in the community. In here I can be myself, on every level, completely openly, without being rejected or mocked, and without the risk of not being taken seriously. I am not regarded as odd or as some kind of alien or some troublesome fifth wheel that people don’t know what to do with. Here I’m like everybody else. I fit in. I count. And I can afford to go to the doctor and the dentist and even to the hairdresser and the podiatrist, and I can eat out and go to the movies and the theater. I have a dignified life here. I am respected.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. In comparison, I mean.”

Potter looked at me.

“Okay,” he said. “I understand. I think.”

I changed the topic of conversation.

“So why didn’t you resign, then?”

“Well … I don’t think I can afford to be out of work right now. My partner and I are expecting. Twins. We need a bigger place to live.”

“Right,” I said. “I understand. I think.”

He laughed. I smiled. Then we parted company. I carried on through the citrus grove. It was like walking through a landscape veiled in fresh snow, and suddenly I felt an intense longing for winter and wind, biting cold and steaming breath, mittens, a scarf and hat, and a little white dog with brown and black patches racing through drifts of powdery snow, tail wagging like mad, snuffling with his nose at the porous covering so that the white snow flew up ahead of him like little whirlwinds.

And I got an idea.

I had three things on my agenda for the rest of the afternoon: give blood at the central blood bank at the hospital, go down to the labs for a chromium injection—I was participating in an experiment where high doses of chromium were being tested as a means of raising the blood sugar—and go for a massage. Later, in the evening, Johannes and I were going to the theater to see a new play everyone was talking about.

While I was giving blood, and during the full body massage that followed, I had plenty of time to work out carefully my idea for a plan, and as soon as I got home I set the wheels in motion:

I opened my door and went into the living room, yawning and stretching lazily—a massage always made me sleepy—then ambled into the kitchenette and poured myself a large glass of water. Turned back to the living room with the glass in my hand, yawned again, then wandered across to the sofa, where I sank into a half-lying position and tried to drink my water. Then I put the glass on the table next to the remote, which I picked up and fiddled with absentmindedly. Turned onto my side with a sigh, pointed the remote at the TV and selected a channel at random. Watching television was something I had rarely done since I became dispensable, so I tried to make it look as if it were a spur of the moment impulse. The image of a hilly, lush landscape burst onto the screen: a valley with meadows and terraced vineyards scrambling up the slopes, the blue tones of distant mountain ridges in the background; then I lay there watching, apparently relaxed, a soap opera that was set in some French wine region.

I waited until a commercial break, and until the second advertising slot, which was for diapers; then I pretended that I’d had an idea, an idea for my writing, sat up quickly and put my feet on the floor, grabbed the notepad and pen that were always on the coffee table, placed the pad on my knee, bent over and scribbled feverishly. But my handwriting was much smaller than usual, and I had worked out what I wanted to say in advance, while I was giving blood:

I have a Danish-Swedish farm dog called Jock. He is white with brown and black patches; his left ear is white, the other black, and on his back he has a bigger brown patch that looks like a saddle that has slipped to one side slightly. He lives with Lisa and Sten Jansson, Verkholma Farm, just outside Elnarp, the second farm on the right just after the speed limit sign if you’re driving toward Kasstorp. Please, if you possibly can, find out how he’s getting by, and let me know!

When I had finished I read through the four sentences, said, “No, no!,” ripped the page from the pad, screwed it up and threw it on the coffee table, then slumped down on my side on the sofa again and finished watching the soap.

A while later, after a quick shower and a change of clothes, I was tidying the room while I waited for Johannes, who was being a gentleman and picking me up for our visit to the theater. I picked up the glass and the crumpled piece of paper, and as I walked toward the kitchenette with the glass in my left hand, I pretended to straighten my pants with my right hand, and took the opportunity to slip the piece of paper into my pocket. I put the glass down on the counter, then just to make things look right I opened the cabinet under the sink and pretended to throw something in the trash.

Then all I could do was wait. For Johannes, first of all, and then for the moment when I might bump into Potter again. I sank back down on the sofa, and half lay there wondering what might have come first: the name or the glasses. Was Potter a nickname he had acquired since he got those glasses with their round black frames, or did he go for glasses like that because he was called Potter? But who calls their child Potter—as a first name? If he’d been a girl, what would they have called her? Longstocking?

Johannes arrived. Kissed me on the mouth. His lips were cool, as if he had just come from the real outside world, from an outside world where the temperature was below freezing, or almost. I closed my eyes and pretended that was the case.

“You look happy,” he said.

“Yes, you taste of winter. That’s why. You taste as if you’ve just come in from a storm.”

He laughed. “It almost feels that way. I feel as if I’ve been running against the wind all day. I’m shattered.”

Johannes had started on a new experiment involving drugs that lowered the blood pressure; perhaps his blood pressure was a bit too low. I frowned in concern:

“They are carrying out regular checks on you? Pulse, blood pressure, and so on?”

“Sure,” he said. “Don’t worry. Shall we go?”

The play was long and not particularly entertaining, but its premise was interesting: it was about a couple who had one miscarriage after another, and how their love grew stronger and stronger through this constant blossoming of hope that was dashed every time, how grief and yearning and their common goal bound them closer and closer together into a single unit. But when, roughly halfway through the play, they managed to carry and give birth to this longed-for child, they began, slowly but surely, to drift apart, only to end up as two strangers who didn’t speak the same language—quite literally; they spoke different languages and were unable to understand each other—and all communication was carried out through the child, who had to act as an interpreter between the parents. All very strange.

Johannes slept through most of the second act, which meant he was wide awake when it finished.

“A beer would be just fantastic right now!” he said, stretching as we came out into the square after he’d just woken up.

“A proper snowstorm and a good strong beer!” I said, because that was exactly what I felt like right then.

“You seem really into all this winter stuff. How come?”

“Oh, the petals were falling in the citrus grove today.”

Then we went back to my place. When I got undressed I was careful to fold up my pants so that the piece of paper wouldn’t fall out of the right-hand pocket.

“My, you’ve gotten very tidy all of a sudden,” said Johannes from the bed; he was already undressed and under the covers with one arm behind his head.

“I just don’t want them to get creased.”

“They already are.”

“Well, even more creased then.”

“Since when did you start worrying about that kind of thing?”

I wanted to change the subject.

“Since I met you,” I said, and quickly took off the rest of my clothes—folding them neatly if quickly and draping them over the chair on top of my pants—then lifted the duvet at the foot of the bed to make a gap and crept up the bed alongside one of Johannes’s legs, with its soft, curly hairs, its slightly rough skin that smelled of man, that smelled of precisely this man who smelled of sunshine and something that reminded me of cumin, coriander and cinnamon, the calf muscles pressing down against the mattress, the lower part of the kneecap particularly coarse and slightly knobbly and rough like a cat’s tongue, and the thigh—the huge thigh muscle at the front, tensing and swelling as my hands found their way further up.