You Disappear: A Novel (6 page)

I want to throw up, but nothing will come. Sweat trickles down my back. I try to hawk something up. Again. And again. Then I feel a warm hand upon my brow. It’s Niklas. He learned it from me, that’s the way I always placed my hand against his forehead when he threw up as a little boy.

It should be me who’s taking care of him. I want to get up and press my hand against his brow. It should be him who’s throwing up. When I finally do rise, he embraces me; he’s taller than me, his arms are strong, he pats me on the head.

The orbitofrontal cortex coordinates emotions from our limbic system with our overarching control systems.

The limbic system sends strong signals to the rest of the brain with messages to flee, fight, mate, feel sadness/pain, or grow angry—survival signals that we share with other animals. The orbitofrontal cortex is the region that modulates these all-or-nothing signals and gives them a more nuanced, human expression.

Orbitofrontal damage results in the injured person losing the unique, personal way he modulates his emotions. He possesses only two levels of emotion: quiescence and maximum strength. There is no middle ground.

The injured person will often experience pathologically high spirits and feel strikingly uninvolved with and indifferent to what happens around him. The personality and subtlety in how he reacts to his surroundings have disappeared. Instead, when he cries or is angry, he cannot govern the strength of his emotions—just like an infant.

Frequently, an isolated orbitofrontal injury will not affect intelligence, memory, or language. Yet it will lead to a fundamental personality change, in which the injured person’s sense of what constitutes a good or bad choice is nullified. He becomes a more fearless, “simple” person, who has a hard time controlling his immediate impulses and making long-term plans.

It is characteristic of frontal-lobe syndrome that the person who suffers from it mistakenly believes he is healthy and completely unaffected. No test or argument can convince him otherwise. The absence of empathy for others, and of a sense for when he is about to make a poor choice, often leads to a radically altered way of life for a person with orbitofrontal damage—even one whose injuries are so minor as to be undetectable by conventional psychological tests.

Introduction to Neuropsychology

The orbitofrontal cortex sits in the very front of the brain, just over the eyes.

Some people with orbitofrontal injuries may exhibit only a few of the following characteristics, while others develop most of them:

These symptoms can manifest themselves without any evident sign of neurological illness, such as paralysis. Moreover, the injured person experiences virtually no sense of being ill. As a consequence, he is completely uninterested in consulting a physician or psychologist.

“Of course you’re going to stay with him,” Helena says on the telephone when I call her at three in the morning because I can’t sleep. “You’ll stay. Because that’s the way you are.”

An eternity ago, we were three girls from the same dorm studying architecture together: Hanne, who died shortly before I met Frederik; Helena, who with her iron will was the only one to finish the degree; and myself. Helena and I also played tennis together, which we’ve done ever since. Perhaps she doesn’t have quite the finesse in her game that I do, but she’s a tall woman with slightly masculine features and well-defined muscles, so we’re an even match. After five years as a more-or-less unemployed architect, she took up my suggestion to get a second degree in primary education. And then she got a job at my school, so now we’re colleagues as well as tennis partners.

Helena says, “I’ve thought about this. If I were attacked some night by a man who knocked me over so I couldn’t run away, you’re the woman I’d most want with me when it happened. Because you’d go after him, you wouldn’t bolt. And together we could handle him.”

I’m so tired, so very tired. Lying on my back in the bed, knowing that I can talk as loudly as I want and Frederik won’t wake up. As soon as he falls asleep, he’s out cold.

“Does the man have a gun?” I ask.

“You know, if he’s holding me down on the ground, it really doesn’t matter.”

“If he has a gun, I’d be an idiot not to run away.”

“Sure, there’d be a thousand things racing through your head: should you risk your life by staying and fighting these men? But even while you’re thinking these things you’d stay put. For it isn’t your thoughts that decide what you do. It’s your instinct.”

“Oh, so now there’s more than just one guy?”

“There are three, and they don’t have a gun, and we take them down.”

“As long as it ends well.”

I don’t know where she got the idea of us being attacked some night by three men. Yet she’s right about how in the space of a single moment, everything in your life can turn upside down. You’re sitting in an endless teacher’s meeting yearning for it to end, or finding a blouse to pack in your tennis bag, or hurrying out to the kitchen for some chocolate ice cream while a British detective show is on the tube. The sort of moment that feels utterly dependable—a moment everything can be snatched away. If, say, a blood vessel bursts in your brain.

I was twelve the first time my world exploded. My parents had taken pains to make their everyday lives indistinguishable from thousands of other young couples’. I was happy enough in the newly built suburb where we lived, outside Fredericia, and they managed to get everyone to think they were happy too—my father with his job as a bank clerk, my mother with her housework and her shifting part-time jobs in company canteens.

For my father, the high point of each week was Thursday evening, when he played soccer with his friends on a field behind the school. Through his soccer friends he met a bunch of Copenhagen “freaks” who’d just started a commune in a run-down building on Prince Street. And then without warning, one Saturday morning he moved out of our house and into theirs. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened, and neither could my mother.

Whenever I ran into my father around town, he seemed happy to see me—though not enough to make me think he missed me. He talked about the revolution they all were convinced was about to break out. He talked about oppressed peoples and about traveling to see the world, especially the Third World. One day when I happened to mention to my mother what he’d been saying, she screamed, “Don’t believe him, he’s lying! The only reason he moved in there is to ball hippie chicks!”

She tried to find a new boyfriend, but they all left her, and I learned to block out her stifling bitterness toward my father, toward the latest man of
the month, toward everyone else she knew. Today you’d say she suffered from depression, but nobody said that back then.

Meanwhile, my father became more fun to talk to. I secretly visited him at the commune, until one day when I showed up unannounced and they told me he’d been arrested in Thailand for smuggling hash.

Then my mother became obsessed with writing long letters to him in prison, and a year later she traveled over to visit him. When she got back home, she showed me photos of how thin he’d grown and said he shared a cell with two murderers. I wrote to him, and to Danish politicians and journalists too, so that they’d do something to bring him back to Denmark.

When he finally returned, five years later, he looked like a concentration camp inmate. He received a disability pension on psychological grounds, and when I went by his small cluttered apartment, he often said strange things, especially about the neighbors being after him and wanting to kill him. During my visits he remained stretched out on the couch with the TV on and a foul blanket over his legs. He died before I turned thirty.

Even though he abandoned our family for the sake of long-haired girls from Copenhagen, I never felt anger toward him—only toward my mother. She’s the one who dumped me into a sobbing swamp of adult problems, a swamp that reeked of biscuits and tea. She still lives in the same small house in Fredericia. We don’t talk on the phone or see each other very much, and I don’t miss her.

• • •

Three weeks after Frederik’s fall, and he still hasn’t been operated on. Thorkild and Vibeke have to be at the house while I’m at work because he ends up doing the queerest things.

In the first days, it seemed natural that he talked only about himself. Who wouldn’t, after such a grave diagnosis? But then he didn’t stop. It was unending, and always with the same energetic, cheerful voice. No modulation in his tone, no resonance in his thoughts or feelings.

During dinner, I’d have lunged across the table and strangled him if it would have killed just the voice. That voice gave me nightmares. I dreamt that it possessed him, that it resided in the tumor like a little spiny monster
that talked and talked. The voice decided everything, and in my dream it got tangled up with a gross tennis coach in too-tight shorts whom I had when I was sixteen, and whom all the girls in the club hated.

I go on the web every day and every night now to read about the disease, and I’ve been inhaling books on neuropsychology. I have to know everything I can about the situation I find myself in. Do the books say Frederik will survive? Will he become himself again?

Several doctors who’ve had kids at Saxtorph call to see if they can be of assistance. I ask for their prognoses, but nobody can say. So I listen to their tone when they speak. How long do they pause before answering? How often do they clear their throats? I read everything as an omen.

A lot of other people call too, offering help and support. They say,
Normally, I wouldn’t ring up the headmaster of my child’s school, but it’s different with Frederik
. In the end, Laust has to send an e-mail to “Friends of Saxtorph”: please do not call or bring any more gifts.

In the evenings it’s me who talks and talks, and just like Frederik it’s always about the same thing, only my audience isn’t him. I call my friends and describe the mountains in Majorca and how dangerously he drove; the three lovely years we had; what the doctors said today. And Niklas, who’s out with his friends every night. My rasping monotone lament becomes an evil twin of the voice that’s laid siege to our house.

Laust doesn’t visit us anymore, since Frederik is still furious with him. But he listens to me over the phone, asking how he can best support us, and he never whines about how the rest of the administration has to work overtime. And he often calls with questions about the school, just like before Frederik got sick, only now it’s me he rings up. In the beginning, we worked out complicated strategies to worm the answers out of Frederik, but we quickly discovered that it wasn’t necessary.

I can just ask, without prelude, “Frederik, the last letters from the lessee of the school cafeteria are missing from the file with the other letters. Where might they be?”

He’s unable to imagine that other people’s words are the calculated product of thoughts and feelings, so he doesn’t worry about motives, he just answers. “They’re in a folder beneath the file with our cleaning agreements. I’m planning to use them when I draw up a new contract with the cleaning firm.”

“Aha, so that’s where they are. And something else I was wondering: What did you decide at the meeting you had in September with Fatima from the after-school club?”

On top of everything else, there are all the public offices to get through to on the telephone, the government forms and insurance forms to fill out, and the confusing bills that Frederik used to pay. By the time I lie down it’s late. Now I have to try to relax and go to sleep with a man who snores differently, smells different, and twitches in his sleep in an unfamiliar fashion. I may as well be sharing our queen-size bed with some burglar.

Will we ever be able to make love again? When he lies there pestering me for sex, I turn my back on him, squeeze my thick pillow between my breasts, and use my legs to push him away.

And then one night I decide he’s got a point. We’re still man and wife, after all. Why keep insisting that he stay on his half of the bed? We both want the same thing, and he’s been a stranger now for five weeks.

Besides, night after night when I’m half asleep under the comforter, I’ve been entertaining a fantasy about making him well again. I know it’ll never happen, but I’m seized by the notion of it all being some misunderstanding. Something in me says that there’s no tumor, that he’ll return to normal if I just let him have sex with me. That the last five weeks have been nothing more than a test of my love for him, and in a short while he’ll become himself again if I only let him.

So one night I consent, and seconds later he’s on top of me, frenetically trying to grind away. There’s nothing erotic or loving about it; for him I’m not really a person, that’s abominably clear. Some creature is pawing at me and attempting to mount me, some creature without age or face, eyes or voice.