You Disappear: A Novel (16 page)
Read You Disappear: A Novel Online
Authors: Christian Jungersen
But now I see everything differently. After nearly twenty years, it’s clear that he’s still besotted with his wife. More than any other man I’ve met. And now I can see that it’s not a wolf he resembles so much as a family dog who can’t find its way home. The prominent cheekbones, the intense eyes belong to a dog who restlessly roams the winter streets, hunting for the
family and the warm hearth it once knew, while each day its bones grow more and more visible beneath its fur.
We all go up to the second floor and enter the bathroom. There’s no sawing or drilling noises from the workshop; Frederik must be marking cutting patterns on the fiberboard. I’ve been slowly finding traces of personality in the assessor’s features. He’s a bit more round-headed than most men; his lips are a bit thicker, his eyes a bit smaller. If I bump into him on the street in a couple of days and don’t acknowledge him, it’ll no longer be because I mix him up with all the others in my mind, but because I don’t want to.
Our bathroom’s too small, and it feels even more cramped because we don’t have anywhere else to put the stacked washer and dryer.
“Hmm; hmm. Well, this is disappointing,” the assessor says. “It could easily knock a couple hundred thousand off the price.”
“But we’ve just redone it!”
“I hope you haven’t paid a lot of money for it. This remodel only reduces the value.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Look at this row of tiles. A buyer would want them straight.”
“Well, that’s part of the charm—after all, the tiles are sitting …”
Suddenly I realize: the man who laid the tiles was definitely not the real Frederik.
Two years ago, Frederik and I spent a lot of weekends here. We had perhaps the best time of our best years—flirting and laughing and puttering about among the tools, grout, and tiles. Frederik’s never been good at maintaining the house, that’s more my department, but he wanted to put up the row of green glass tiles himself, and every time I sit on the toilet and stare up at them, their skewed aspect recalls our happiness.
But the real Frederik would have kept at it till everything was perfect—especially with something he wasn’t good at. The real Frederik would never have tolerated anything crooked.
The play of light from the halogen lamps on the tile surface merges with the smell of the open packages of laundry powder, the humid air, and the odor of Frederik’s wet towel. I feel like vomiting on the bulging linoleum, with its uneven cut in the corner. Two years ago, the temperament
of the sick Frederik was unfamiliar to me—the temperament in which everything is uncomplicated and fun, in which nothing has depth. I must have let his humor rub off on me because I didn’t know any better.
• • •
“Let me stay here for a minute,” I say when the assessor and the lawyer are ready to go out and survey the rest of the upstairs.
Bernard looks at me—an inquiring look, straight in the eye. He wants to know if I can manage. Right away he’s able to see that I can’t, but what can he do? He asks, with a carefree air that I can hear doesn’t come natural, “Do you think you’ll be here for a while?”
“Nah.”
I lock the door behind them and sit down on the toilet lid, my head in my hands. How I detest the stench of our wet towels, laundry soap, and standing water.
Does Bernard and Lærke’s bathroom smell like this? I can’t imagine it does. Does it smell in a way that’s even reminiscent of this? Without being conscious of it, I must have sniffed Bernard during the course of the morning, for to my surprise I have a clear sense of how he smells—and therefore of how his bathroom smells. It smells good.
When I come out, the others are in Niklas’s room. The assessor has Niklas’s camera bag in one hand, and he’s about to root around in it—just as he roots through everything else.
“Don’t open that!” I exclaim from the doorway. “It isn’t ours, it’s our son’s.”
“Do you have a receipt?”
I rush over so I’m standing right in front of his face. “Could you leave my son’s bag alone! It’s his, you can’t take it!”
But he’s not supposed to care about what I say. “Then you need to have a receipt in your son’s name,” he says. “Gosh, it’s a splendid camera.”
Bernard’s voice is soothing. “They’re not going to take it, Mia. It’s not Frederik’s. They just need to know …”
He falls silent, and the other men do too. They’re looking toward the door in back of me.
Frederik’s come out of his workshop.
“Frederik, they want to take Niklas’s camera!” I shout.
“That’s not really what they want,” says Bernard quietly. “What they want …”
Frederik studies the three of them, then he ignores them and looks at me. I gaze right into his cheerful eyes. That blank expression. That indifferent pleasure—just like when he’s lying to me. Just like when he takes a walk, when he watches TV, when he eats.
“Mia, we have to go out and buy more fiberboard.”
“We don’t have to go out and buy more fiberboard. They want to seize Niklas’s camera. So can’t you see that—”
“But I need more fiberboard. I’ve revised the construction plans.”
“Are you listening to what I’m saying? They want to take your son’s camera!”
“I think we should go out and buy it this afternoon. Then I can take a nap first.”
“God
damn
it, Frederik! Can’t we focus for two seconds on someone other than you?”
Something shifts in his eyes. As if a personality is emerging somewhere within. Tentative attempts to figure out how he can get his way. To figure out how I’m thinking and feeling, and what he has to say to get that fiberboard. It’s the same look, deeply focused and oddly distant at the same time, as when a little boy—the new neural pathways forming—practices sitting on the pot.
“And if I don’t let you decide for me, then you’ll just start hitting me, won’t you?” He looks hesitantly at all four of us. “Then you’ll just beat me hard on my back, right? If I don’t let you decide, then you’ll beat me with that bowl from the coffee table.”
It has long been a riddle why people with orbitofrontal brain injuries make such disastrous choices in daily life, when the same people can appear normal in conversation and on conventional psychological tests.
The phenomenon can be explained if we assume that we utilize different areas in our brains when we are going to make an important decision than when we are going to choose between a cappuccino and a café au lait.
We must also assume that there is a marked difference between the brain areas we use when we
talk
about critical life decisions, and the brain areas we use when we actually
decide
.
Orbitofrontal damage is easiest to discover when the affected person has the freedom to make his own decisions. However, such injuries can be quite difficult to observe in situations with well-defined rules—which is precisely why traditional IQ tests and ordinary conversations do not register them.
In addition to satisfying scientific curiosity, the development of an effective test for orbitofrontal injuries is of critical importance in determining how the affected people are treated by doctors and social workers, whether they can qualify for accident insurance and disability pensions, and a host of other practical issues.
But how do we construct a psychological test that will mimic fundamental life choices in all their emotional complexity and lack of rules?
Antoine Bechara
, who worked in the department of the famed neurologist
Antonio Damasio
at the University of Iowa, developed the Iowa Gambling Task for exactly this purpose in 1994.
In the test, the investigator places four piles of cards in front of the research subject. The subject is not told anything about the piles or about the rules of the game, other than that he has the possibility of winning or losing money. Neither is he told how long the game will last. He has to figure these things out for himself.
In two of the piles, the research subject receives $50 for every card he turns up, except for occasional cards that require him to pay $250. If he keeps drawing cards from these two piles, he will make a profit.
In the other two piles, the subject receives double the reward—$100—for each card he draws, except when he turns up an occasional card that costs him $1,250—i.e., a rather substantial penalty. If he continues to draw cards from these two piles, he will lose a fortune over the long run.
Experimental subjects who are healthy (or have brain injuries that lie outside the frontal lobes) will begin by taking cards from all four piles while they try to determine a pattern in the game. After just a few cards, they will prefer the $100 piles, but before they have drawn 30 cards, they generally learn to keep to the low-risk piles. They will thus earn money from the game. They cannot say exactly why they choose the low-risk piles; they just have a vague (but correct) sense that they are profitable in the long run.
The orbitofrontally damaged subjects also begin by preferring the high-risk piles. But they never learn to shift to the other piles. Instead, they focus more and more on the losing high-risk piles. After 50 cards, they have lost everything and want to borrow money so that they can play even more.
Sometimes they can even explain rationally and persuasively that they should choose the other piles, or the investigator can simply inform them of that fact and bring them back in a few weeks to try the test again. And then they will again lose a fortune.
If we measure the subjects’ stress level by attaching electrodes to their skin (popularly known as “using a lie detector”), we can see that both the healthy and the ill subjects react to losing and winning money. There is no difference.
But the experiment shows that when a healthy research subject has played for a short time, a stress response is also detected when his hand merely approaches one of the high-risk piles. Although the subject is not yet conscious of the pile being risky, his body sends him a signal of danger and unease when he considers drawing a card from it. The longer a healthy subject plays, the stronger this signal becomes, until finally he is able to explain the system behind the game.
The Iowa Gambling Task strikingly and unequivocally demonstrates that subjects with orbitofrontal damage never develop this unconscious physical signal about approaching danger.
Similarly, if a researcher shows them photos of natural disasters, wars,
or other scenes of human suffering, they do not show any fluctuation in galvanic skin response, such as is found in healthy subjects. Neither do they get gooseflesh when healthy subjects do, e.g., while listening to certain pieces of music.
These results led to
Antonio Damasio
’s
Somatic-Marker Hypothesis
, which he argues for in his book
Descartes’ Error
.
It is only when a healthy subject has been experiencing such corporeal signals for some time—about which action will be most advantageous—that he is able to explain the choices he makes. The Somatic-Marker Hypothesis says that a rational choice depends on first an emotion, then a physical reaction to the emotion, and finally an intellectual explanation of what the reaction signifies.
The title of Damasio’s book,
Descartes’ Error
, reflects its main thesis: a refutation of
René Descartes
(1596–1650). One of Western philosophy’s most influential figures, Descartes is known for, among other things, his theory of the separation of mind and body, and for his assertion “I think, therefore I am.”
According to Damasio’s theory of somatic markers, Descartes was mistaken in isolating the mind from the biological body. Damasio maintains that rational thought and ethical assessments cannot exist independently of the body and its physical reactions.
“This article explains everything!”
I run up to Niklas’s room to share it with him, but of course he isn’t home. From his window I look down the street to see if he’s on his way. But nobody’s there.
I hurry toward Frederik’s office to tell him but stop in the hallway. He won’t care, I’ll become unhappy, we might start arguing.
I could call Vibeke and Thorkild, but I can’t muster the energy. Then there are our friends, but many of them work at Saxtorph, and the vast majority are siding with Laust and the new administration; they hope that, if Frederik does get well again, he’ll be handed a heavy sentence.
One of the teachers we still talk to, and who doesn’t question Frederik’s innocence, told me that one day the male teachers started fighting during a faculty meeting because some of them referred to Frederik as a criminal and others wouldn’t stand for it.
Sometimes when I’m out shopping, random people come over to me and declare their support, while others shout “Swine!” if I take Frederik with me to the Irma supermarket in The Square, Farum’s one major mall.
I’d particularly like to phone Laust and tell him about the Iowa Gambling Task; maybe he can understand now how wrong he’s been. Yet I can’t bring myself to call him again. The few times I’ve tried, he’s slammed down the receiver—even though some nights he still calls me and drunkenly rants and weeps about his school. He keeps on saying that Frederik hasn’t just destroyed the lives of students and staff; he’s also made meaningless the lives of Laust’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.
I go down to the living room and look out the window again to see if Niklas is coming home yet. Though why should he?
Three boys run from our yard. Something about them tells me they’re not just out playing. I walk outside to find that they’ve spray-painted our house.
SHITHEAD LIVES HERE!
it says. I go straight for a stiff brush and a bucket of soap and water.
Half an hour later, dusk is falling and I’ve scrubbed off as much as I can. The air is chilly and damp, but I’m heated with the effort and walk around to the backyard, where neighbors and passersby can’t see me. Here I can also escape from the sight of the burnt grass and the faint hovering shadows on the front wall of the house, where the soap has removed old grime in a pattern that vaguely says
SHITHEAD
.