You Disappear: A Novel (20 page)

It’s possible to find “experts” who will say anything for money, so to avoid that American state of affairs, the government has established a special
group of forensic psychiatrists. It pays them to keep abreast of the latest findings in forensic psychiatry, maintaining a level of knowledge that judges, lawyers, and ordinary psychiatrists cannot.

Frederik’s psychiatric report was prepared by the Clinic of Forensic Psychiatry in Copenhagen. It was based on four examinations: two by psychiatrists, one by a social worker, and one by a psychologist. In the waiting room before each exam, I was as nervous as if we were about to appear before a judge—and with good grounds, it turns out. For the four of them have been compiled into a psychiatric report that goes against Frederik.

You can’t appeal a psychiatric report, nor even register a complaint about it. But Bernard requested that Frederik’s report be submitted for approval to the Medico-Legal Council, which is as high in the system as you can go. In Danish law, there’s no other body above it.

Today, nearly two months after Frederik’s arrest, and plenty of phone conversations with Bernard later, Frederik and I are sitting in the waiting room of neuropsychologist Herdis Lebech. The council has appointed her to conduct a new psychological examination before it makes its final ruling.

Between Frederik’s operation, his rehabilitation, and his embezzlement case, I’ve become a seasoned user of the waiting rooms of neurologists, neuropsychologists, neurosurgeons, and neurological clinics large and small. I always take along a bag of required reading for the wait, but this particular appointment is too important to let me read. I get up from my chair and sit down again with an agitation that’d make a casual observer think that my calm husband had accompanied me here and not vice versa.

The man in the chair next to me is in his sixties, slim and dressed in an elegant suit. It’s easy to imagine he keeps a yacht in some expensive slip north of Copenhagen.

“I want to go home now,” he says.

His wife is tanned and slathered in some odd glistening grease, and she answers him dully, like a tired receptionist.

“But you can’t.”

“But I want to go home.”

“Yes, but you can’t.”

“I’d like to go home now.”

“First we have to have the exam.”

“But I want to go home.”

“You’ll have to wait.”

“Now I think we should leave.”

“You have to see the doctor first.”

“But I want to go home.”

She falls silent and gazes straight in front of her. It isn’t for long.

“Erica! You could answer me when I speak to you! It’s the least one could expect!”

“But you can’t go home now.”

“But I want to.”

“You can’t.”

“I think we should go now.”

Twenty minutes of listening to them, while I alternate between sitting and standing with a cramp in one leg, and I’m ready to go round the bend.

“Now I think we should go home.”

“Just wait here a bit.”

“Let’s go home now.”

“We have to go in for the exam.”

“But I want to go home.”

I smile at her and try to pass the time by making a little amateur diagnosis. He must be suffering from a frontal lobe injury too: he’s got the deficient apprehension of how much time he spends continuing to do the same thing—perseveration, of course—and then the absolute lack of initiative. After all, he could just get up and go. Nobody’s forcing him to stay.

I’m only beginning to form a vague sense of how the brain functions, but I wonder if his extreme lack of initiative doesn’t mean that his injury lies more dorsolaterally than Frederik’s. In addition, his cheerless monotone makes me think that the damage extends farther to the left.

Perhaps I should have taken Niklas along to one of these examinations, so that he could see what I have to put up with for our family’s sake. On the other hand, I’d like to spare him this world.

Frederik slumps in his chair with eyes closed; perhaps he’s asleep. He’s storing up for the exam, I think. I can’t even stand still anymore but have to shuffle about with annoyingly small steps because my calves keep cramping up.

Like an old lady who’s peed her pants, I toddle down the long corridor,
with all its identical closed doors. When I glance back at the waiting room, I note that the elegant yacht owner is sitting motionless in the same position as when he first sat down. He reminds me of a story Birgit told during support group last night. A week ago, when she went to fetch her husband from the day-care center, the staff couldn’t find him. It turned out that he was still sitting on his stationary cycle in the workout room, even though he had finished biking two and a half hours earlier and everyone else had left the room. His initiative has been affected to an unusual degree. If no one tells him to get off the bike, he’ll just keep sitting there. And he doesn’t say anything because no one asks him. He probably would have sat there all night long if Birgit hadn’t found him.

When our old friends see Frederik, even the best of them might say, “If I ever get a brain injury, I’m going to exercise like mad every day to get better.” I get so irritated when they say things like that, for it shows they’re only pretending that they think Frederik’s innocent. They haven’t understood anything.

If man had a self located outside the brain, and that self could stick to a decision to rehabilitate intensively, even after the brain was damaged, it could also stick to a decision to not commit crimes. Then Frederik
would
deserve to rot away in some jail. And then if he ever came out, we wouldn’t be able to look ourselves or our friends in the eye; we’d have to take new names and move far away. But we have no such self. Outside the brain, there’s nothing.

That’s also why it’s such a relief to go to support group. Everyone there knows the score. They’re not just pretending to.

After I’ve shuffled around the same area for more than half an hour, I venture farther down the hospital’s deserted corridors. There I meet a petite dark-haired woman with a pageboy. I say, “They’ll come out and call us in, won’t they?”

“Come out and call us in.”

“Yes. It’s just taken so long that I’ve started to have doubts.”

“Doubts.”

“Yes, we got a letter saying we were going to have an examination with Dr. Lebech.”

“Lebech.”

“Right. She’s a neuropsychologist here.”

“She is, right. She’s a neuropsychologist here.”

I feel like an idiot, looking at the small woman sweetly smiling up at me. How do I extricate myself?

I say, “Thank you for your help.”

“But thank
you
for your help.”

I’ve read about echolalia—when someone with brain damage can’t help but repeat what another person says. Perhaps she suffers from echopraxia too? A cold impulse makes me raise my right hand and wait. But she doesn’t raise hers; it’s only words that she mimics.

Behind one of the doors a toilet flushes, and a grey-haired, even more diminutive woman emerges.

“I was just standing here talking to your daughter,” I say.

Behind me I hear a voice. “Talking to your daughter.”

“Do you know whether they’ll call us, or do we go someplace first and let them know we’re here?”

I try not to listen to the daughter while the mother tells me we’ve done exactly what we should have. We just have to keep waiting. “Then a secretary will come and call you.”

“A secretary will call you.”

A few months ago, I never imagined that this secret world existed, tens of thousands of homes where there was brain damage in the family. Pigheaded people I’ve argued with in the supermarket, irrationally angry folks on the sidewalk, blockheads at public meetings—now I realize that many of them are literally sick in the head. And lots of them have friends and families who love them, and who meet up like we do in my new group.

It’s as if I’m in some film, where suddenly I can see and hear all the ghosts who walk among us. People with brain injuries have been here the whole time. I’ve met them, spoken with them, argued with them—and suspected not a thing.

• • •

By now, I’ve read lots of stories about people who have undergone neurological changes without anyone noticing. It could be due to a fall from a ladder or a bike, or to a slowly growing tumor.

We don’t normally go around diagnosing each other. Even after a thousand
arguments and a divorce, it rarely occurs to a person that it might be brain damage that transformed their engaged and socially adept spouse into someone cold and stubborn. It’s only when you look back that all the pieces fall into place.

So when did what the doctors call
insidious personality changes
begin with Frederik?

In the case of an orbitofrontal tumor, the first signs typically appear when your partner begins to make choices that you don’t understand, and he becomes more adamant about these choices than usual. The neurologists use the word
rigid
for this lack of flexibility. They say that word a lot.

In addition, you should keep your eye on whether he becomes more easily distracted by immediate pleasures and impulses. For example, he might be getting lazier and worse at honoring agreements.

You should also monitor any changes in his emotional life. It could be that he starts to always be in the same unvarying mood—or conversely, that he starts experiencing dramatic mood swings.

Then of course there’s increased self-centeredness. And finally, another danger signal is alterations in your partner’s sexuality—if he exhibits markedly enhanced or diminished sexual energy, or if his sexual interests change.

Looking back on the last few years with all this knowledge, I can see now that yes, Frederik was starting to make poor decisions more often. But in fact I thought that the change was in me—that I was getting older and smarter and less youthfully uncritical in my adoration of him.

A few times, he also acted impulsively in a way I doubt he would have before—for instance when he bought Niklas’s camera or the Alfa Romeo. Yet it’s hard to say exactly when it wasn’t just a normal development in his old self, but him actually becoming another person.

And compared to the husbands of all my friends, he didn’t grow lazy, though with respect to his own standards he certainly did. In the old days, he shirked his domestic obligations plenty of times; the difference was that when he did so then, it was always because he had more important things to do at school. Now he’d do it sometimes just so he could loaf around at home. And I thought,
Finally!
We started kicking back together on the weekends in a way that I’d begged for in vain for more than ten
years. Never mind that I had to cut the grass after we’d agreed he would. I didn’t care.

Did he start having a harder time controlling his emotions? Yes, he probably did. In the last couple of years before the operation, he occasionally became angry or upset like he never had before. But I found comfort in that too—because it meant we were together. Because I no longer felt he was hiding his feelings from me. At last he was letting me in. And it didn’t seem pathological. None of his changes seemed the least bit pathological.

I’ve read that an increase in the number of arguments is often the warning signal you notice first. That’s because in a family context, where everyone’s evolving and interconnected, it can be hard to single out changes in one person. And Frederik and I did begin to argue, in the car; I’d tell him that he took alarming risks in traffic, and he’d shout back that I’d gotten more chicken since we first met. The truth probably lay somewhere between—or so I thought until recently.

Yet by and large we argued less than before. In the old days we would argue a lot about his absence from our family. And that stopped.

So when did the insidious changes begin—when exactly? Among all the thousands of chaotic little conflicts and oddities that make up everyday life in a family, what’s the first episode, however minor, that I can point to and say
Frederik wasn’t himself
?

The earliest one I can come up with and date precisely was on our anniversary six years ago. As his gift to me, Frederik bought a cheese. I was furious—especially because I still felt bitter about his affair with the English teacher that I’d uncovered a few years earlier.

“I’m sure you didn’t buy
her
a cheese!” I yelled.

And he was, yes, perfectly rigid in insisting that it was a fine romantic present. “A
delectable
cheese!” he said, again and again. “It was expensive! We’d never buy a cheese like this if it weren’t our anniversary. We’ll have a great time eating it and savoring it together.”

And he persuaded me that I was the one being rigid, though of course we didn’t use that word. That I wasn’t being open and modern if I couldn’t see how romantic it would be for us to enjoy ourselves with that cheese and some fine wine.

Now I think differently about every single detail of our eighteen-year
marriage … It
is
a weird gift for an anniversary, isn’t it? A
cheese
? Would a perfectly healthy Frederik have come up with that? I’m genuinely convinced that he wouldn’t have. And that was six years ago.

• • •

I’ve lost all sense of dignity and am standing doing stretches up against the wall, to get rid of my leg cramps, when a secretary calls Frederik in.

Herdis Lebech, who will now pass judgment on us, turns out to be a small, smiling woman with an enormous pelvis. She ushers us into an office with overflowing shelves. It could easily belong to an accountant or an insurance agent if it weren’t for the plastic model of a brain that stands on a table right in front of my chair. The brain’s wrinkled surface has been painted neon red and pale blue, so that it resembles the face of a mandrill.

“The Medico-Legal Council has sent me the reports from your earlier examinations. In addition, I have here the scans from before and after your operation,” she says, addressing Frederik. “What I’d like to do first is have the three of us talk together. After that, I’ll ask your wife to leave, so that you can concentrate on some new tests I have for you. And finally, I’d also like to speak alone with your wife, if that’s all right with you.”