You Disappear Page 13

  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.

  13

  “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.

  I sit down on the naked springs of the hanging sofa. How long ago is it now that Frederik and I blew off the neighbor’s summer party and sat here with a bottle of wine before going up to our bedroom? Was that about the same time we were doing the bathroom remodel?

  The metal wires press against my buttocks, and I look up at the window of Frederik’s office workshop. It’s still dark; I ought to go in and turn on a light for him. He forgets to, every evening, and it’s wrecking his eyes.

  My cell phone rings.

  “Hello, it’s Bernard. Am I bothering you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “You sound like you’re freezing.”

  “Nah, not really. Has something happened?”

  “I got an e-mail from Andrea in the support group. She said we should google Iowa Gambling Task. I did, and it makes a convincing argument that when Frederik was playing the commodities market, he wasn’t his real self.”

  As he speaks, I can almost see the dew descending in the half darkness among the branches of the shrubbery. It falls and falls, it soothes without ever seeming to land. Bernard’s voice is that way too: deep and steady as it settles over me.

  “She sent that to me too. I just read about it on the web—just now!”

  “So you must be happy, right?”

  “Yes.” I choose not to mention the graffi
ti on the wall, to say that even children hate us now. And it’s too complicated to explain that even when I’m “happy,” I still have an underlying angst, a feeling that if I exhale deeply and really relax for half a second, the world will collapse. Hopefully, if Frederik is acquitted, the anxiety will stop.

  “You and Frederik should celebrate.” He notices my hesitation almost before he has a chance to draw a breath. “Well, Frederik might not be so interested. But when he’s better …”

  “Yes … then he’ll realize how important it is.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go inside? Because you do sound like you’re freezing.”

  “I’m going in now.”

  As soon as I’m in the house, I discover how cold I am.

  “I’m going to lie down on the sofa,” I say into the phone. “I’ve got to enjoy it as much as possible before we have to sell it.”

  And then we both laugh.

  • • •

  “What happened to the house?”

  Niklas is speaking to me, and I struggle to figure out where I am. The sofa in the living room, still mine. He stands in front of me. It’s dark; I must have slept for several hours. Where’s Frederik? Did he run outside? And where’s Niklas been—what was it he said?

  “What happened to the house?” he says again.

  Yes, what did happen to the house? I sit up. How dark it is! It starts coming back to me.

  “The house? The house? Somebody wrote on it this afternoon. Can you see it in the dark?”

  “It looks like big clouds on the front.”

  “That’s where I scrubbed off the spray paint. The surface is lighter there, isn’t it?”

  “From the street it looks like there’s ghosts floating around the yard.”

  “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Is it late?”

  “After nine.”

  I stumble up to Frederik’s office. He isn’t there, but I find him sleeping in our bed. So I go down to the kitchen to throw together a bite to eat. I imagine that his brain heals better when he’s asleep, so I never wake him unless it’s absolutely necessary.

  On the kitchen counter stand a half-empty carton of milk and half a pear pie I bought on my way home from work.

  “Niklas!” I shout.

  He doesn’t respond, so I go out into the entry.

  “Niklas!”

  “Yes!” The voice comes from his room.

  “Would you come down here, please?”

  The potatoes are boiling by the time he appears. His shirt is buttoned wrong; it wasn’t before.

  “What’s up?”

  “You’re old enough to set the milk and pie back in the fridge when you’re done with them.”

  “I forgot. Why didn’t you do it yourself, since you were here already?”

  “Because you need to learn to do it. We have to save money. We can’t let food go bad.”

  “Dad forgets the butter on the table all the time.”

  “Yes, which is why it’s even more important that the rest of us remember to put things away. Dad can’t help it.”

  “I can’t help it either. My orbitofrontal region is also—”

  He breaks off suddenly when he catches sight of something behind me. I wheel around, but I can’t see what he’s reacting to. There isn’t anything there, just one of Frederik’s typical piles of speaker clutter. I step closer: electronic components soldered together, a soldering iron, a coil of solder, some sort of meter. I haven’t seen the meter before. It looks highly technical, and expensive. I lift it up; engraved on the bottom it says PHYSICS LAB / PROPERTY OF BIRKERØD GYMNASIUM.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s for Dad’s speakers.”

  “Did you take it from the school?”

  “I borrowed it for him.”

  “Did they give you permission to?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Have you started stealing?”

  “Everything Dad does is just fine. All the time, no matter what. You don’t give him a hard time for stealing twelve million crowns! But if I borrow just one little tiny thing that isn’t even for myself—”

  “Niklas, your father is gravely ill.”

  “Yeah, but my frontal lobes don’t function the way they should either.”

  Something here isn’t quite right, but I can’t put my finger on it. He’s not yelling at me as loudly as he usually would; his shirt is misbuttoned; he’s taken a double portion of pie. Does he have someone up in his room with him—Mathias? The girl that Frederik was so rude to, Emilie? Is she up there now? My thigh bumps into the counter so that the soldering iron tumbles over the edge and dangles on its cord, three-fourths of the way to the floor.

  A note of Frederik’s indifferent, unsympathetic tone creeps into Niklas’s voice. “You should also show some concern for my brain. My impulse control and long-term planning aren’t—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The thought of Emilie in his room: myself once, in Casper’s room. Sixteen years old. He let his fingers slide lightly—almost floating—up the length of my forearm. And down again, back and forth, floating. That’s what we did—for an eternity. The darkness and Duran Duran. On the captain’s bed in his room with our clothes on.

  “There was an article about it lying on the coffee table.”

  “An article about what?”

  “Something you printed out. About how when you’re sixteen, you’re just as smart as a grown-up, but some parts of your brain still need to develop and won’t finish till you’re twenty.”

  Casper thrust a hand underneath my blouse, and afterward down my pants. The thin pale boyish skin of his cheeks, still hairless.

  Niklas regards me defiantly. “They’re in the frontal lobes, same place as Dad. So I’m just as—”

  “Niklas, you can’t think about yourself that way. It doesn’t give you permission to do whatever you want.”

  “But it’s true!”

  “Yes, it might be true enough. But you should think that way only about others. With other people, it can help you understand and forgive. But with yourself …”

  We discuss the matter. I’ve never caught him taking something from school before, and I want him to understand how serious it is. But the whole time, I see before me Emilie and Niklas. She’s such a beautiful girl, pale and freckled. And Niklas is better looking than Casper was … Are they girlfriend and boyfriend? Niklas lets his hand glide across one of her breasts while she lies on the captain’s bed in Casper’s room. Duran Duran. Culture Club. Niklas’s own music.

  He’s anxious to leave the kitchen.

  “Did you bring someone home with you?”

  He hesitates, tilting his head slightly as he answers. “I might’ve.”

  “Is it Emilie?”

  The way his face freezes, eyes wide open. He’s in love, I can see it in his fright.

  “You’re not going up there.”

  I find myself smiling. “No, of course not.”

  He’s in love. Frederik and I went in for an ultrasound; the heartbeat, his first day of school, the day in the yard when we played badminton. I’ve got to stop myself, to act adult. Niklas is in love; am I smiling too much? He looks so incredibly serious. Theft, responsibility, pregnancy.

  “Do her parents know where she is?”

  “Of course!”

  And then he’s on his way back upstairs.

  • • •

  Every day, I try to empty my head of thoughts about how different my life would have been if I’d stayed with one of the men I knew before Frederik. Niklas would have had less amazing genes, been less intelligent, less creative, looked different. But perhaps he’d have wanted to play tennis and go running with me. Perhaps we would have been closer.

  We’d probably have been something of a sports family, since all the men I was with before Frederik were interested in sports. And maybe Niklas would have had siblings. The fertility
specialist said that the problem lay with me, but with another man you never know.

  At one time I lived for a year and a half with Søren, who was studying public administration. We were sure that it would be the two of us for life, and we both sobbed on the foam mattress in our dank, noisy apartment on Pheasant Road when it became necessary for me to tell him I’d met someone else. But I was too obsessed with Frederik to stay—Frederik was so much fun, so attentive, he knew everything, he was so honest and could share his feelings. The problems I’d had with Søren, and which I’d thought were problems with me, weren’t there with Frederik. No one could compete. No one came close.

  A few years ago, Niklas and I were standing in line for the duty-free shop on the ferry to Germany. We were going on vacation, and Frederik was standing up on the deck talking with Laust on his cell, just as he’d done in the car. Suddenly I realized that the father in the family in front of us was Søren. I hadn’t seen him since when he wouldn’t stop writing me letters about how he’d never be happy if I left him.

  On the ferry, he told me that he still played tennis twice a week. He was working in the Department of Sport within the Ministry of Culture, and he wore his age much better than Frederik. He proudly presented his beautiful fit wife, who had the same blond ponytail as me, and their three lovely girls. And Niklas met the man who would have been his father if Trørød Elementary hadn’t decided that Frederik and I should both attend a school camp in Sweden where it would be raining on a broad deserted beach.

  I told Niklas that Søren was my boyfriend before I met his father, and he regarded Søren with a look that was astonished and intensely blank at the same time. I’d never seen such a look before, though since Frederik’s operation it’s become a regular part of my life. It’s the same expression Frederik gets when someone mentions that he’s sick. There’s no pigeonhole in his brain where he can file that datum. It simply doesn’t exist.

  • • •

  So much would have been different if I’d stayed with Søren. My husband would be healthy. My children’s father would be healthy.