Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

For the thousandth time, I try to summarize in a few seconds all the books and articles I’ve been poring over for months. But she hurries off, and it’s clear that I’ve yanked the rug out from under her. She’ll be talking about it for the rest of the day to her husband and all her friends.

• • •

Before our case, I never realized that sometimes a verdict isn’t decided by a judge or jury. Frederik’s will be determined instead by a small group of state-approved psychiatrists, and it can’t be appealed.

We’ll still go to court all right, months from now, but the proceedings will be essentially pro forma. For the judge knows that he doesn’t have a clue about neuropsychology, and he’ll let everything hang on the psychiatric report. If the report says that Frederik embezzled the funds of his own free will, the judge will sentence him to a minimum of three years in jail. If however the report says it was the illness that drove him to it, Frederik will have to undergo treatment instead. Since the treatment is actually the operation he’s already had, he’ll be able to leave the courtroom a free man who doesn’t have to feel guilty about having destroyed an entire school.

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.”