Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

Figure 23.2. Test for perseveration.

The subject has been asked to draw a circle.

If Frederik is going to go to jail because I couldn’t control myself around his lawyer, I’ll never forgive myself, and it simply sucks to be having this conversation right now, heading down the freeway at eighty miles an hour.

But he keeps interrogating me.

“Stop it! God damn it, Frederik, it’s your fault I’m even in a support group. I talk to all of them.”

“But you don’t talk to the others in the middle of the night, do you?”

“Yeah, actually I do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Stop it!”

“So which of the others do you call? Do you call up Andrea at two in the morning?”

“Frederik! You’re going to end up in jail and will never get another job if our meeting with Bernard goes down in flames.”

“But what’s all this about Bernard not wanting my case, and then you call him up and he takes it on anyway?”

“Frederik, stop! You’re perseverating!”

That gets him to shut up. He sits there grumbling, staring at the airbag panel in front of him.

• • •

Bernard’s office is situated in an old half-timbered building on Great King Street. The reception area is small, but modernly furnished and bright. I’ve been here a couple of times and know that all the rooms are like this.

Before we kissed at the apartment viewing, Bernard often alluded to his first year after the car accident, a watershed year when he had to figure out how to deal with everything being different. Till then he’d had a brilliant career in one of Copenhagen’s largest law firms, but if his eight-year-old boys were to have a healthy parent in their everyday lives, and if Lærke were to have the support he wanted to give her, he had to sacrifice his future with the firm.

For a while he tried using a nursing aide and an au pair to help him balance his work and home life. He also got permission to cut back on his hours at the firm, though otherwise he would have soon made partner. But it couldn’t be avoided; he had to make a choice. He chose to quit and join forces with an old classmate to start a small firm that would bring in a lot less money. During law school the friend, Alex, had kept to the periphery of parties and student life; for a few months each year he’d be away paragliding or visiting tropical islands no one had heard of. Yet even though most students seldom saw him, Alex made an impression, for he did surprisingly well whenever he finally showed up for exams with his long sun-bleached hair.

Now Alex lives with four kids and wife number two in Amager, where they share a large rambling house with another family. He still has lots of friends in Africa, and he spends long hours each week doing pro bono work for a fair-trade organization.

As I understand it, they became the subject of intense speculation by old acquaintances when they started the firm seven years ago. Hadn’t the industrious Bernard always been Alex’s opposite? Or were they, beneath the surface, really cut from the same cloth? Some lawyers maintained that they’d always thought Bernard and Alex ought to start something together.

It’s the end of the working day when we arrive, and both the receptionist and secretary have gone home, so Bernard comes out and lets us in.

He shakes hands with Frederik, and afterward with me. Everything in his expression and body language is polite and serious. I wish I could look so composed, but I doubt I do.

Frederik looks at him, then back at me, and then again at Bernard.

Perhaps he sees something that surprises him — but if so, he doesn’t know how to process it. It’s still a novelty for him to be interested in other people at all, or to think of them as having lives when he doesn’t see them.

Bernard leads us down a short hallway to a conference room with expensive but bland furnishings, where he starts reading through the psychiatric report.

The room grows quiet. I can still feel the way his hand clasped mine a short while ago. A large hand, a dry hand — a bit like Frederik’s, but younger and warmer. I can also feel my buttocks and thighs against the seat of this skinny little Arne Jacobsen chair. Hand, ass, the hand between my legs; the lingering sense-memory of him inside me. Almost as if he’s still there, and I let out a small gasp that he must be able to hear. A brief twitch crosses his face, but he doesn’t lift his eyes from the report.

I wonder what Lærke’s doing now. I can’t stop myself from imagining her at the handicapped center. No doubt she’s sitting with a group of other disabled people at some round table where they’re weaving baskets or painting with watercolors, while she waits to be picked up by her amazing husband whom she’s too brain-damaged to appreciate.

I see them come home from the center in their white Volvo station wagon — Bernard opening the door for her, getting out the wheelchair or the crutches, helping her over to the magnificent yard that slopes down toward the woods. There they sit, contemplating the mild summer evening. It’s true that I don’t know her that well, so in my fantasy she says the same thing as when I visited them: We like it a great deal . She smiles sweetly and beautifully beneath her large hat. Language is so rich .

And I see how Bernard was standing last night in the orange light with his pants down. His large erect cock; the feeling that every cell of my body is excited and alert.

“The Medico-Legal Council finds that even though you were somewhat impaired mentally at the time of the crime, it shouldn’t have been abnormally difficult for you to resist selfish impulses.” Bernard gazes intensely into Frederik’s eyes, as if I weren’t here. “That’s because before you had the tumor, you were unusually intelligent, structured, and focused in your thinking.”

That might be the only thing that gives Bernard away — the fact that he isn’t sufficiently attentive to me. After all, I am the wife of the accused.

He’s kind to Frederik, and he’s always been — also back when Frederik was much sicker than he is now. Bernard’s shirt lies a little taut across his shoulders; I know how it feels to squeeze those shoulders tight.

“There have evidently been some problems in using the Iowa Gambling Task diagnostically,” he continues. “In brief, people with orbitofrontal damage are not the only ones who exhibit the irrational behavior that the test detects. There are also many healthy people who make precisely the same mistakes when they sit before the stacks of cards. They too will gamble all their money away, flouting common sense — and the strategy they expressly state they should be using. And that certainly doesn’t exempt them from punishment.”

Frederik asks, “But then what can we do?”

“Louise was correct in saying that there isn’t any higher court to appeal the ruling to. But the ruling is not a verdict. It’s perfectly acceptable for us to contact the Medico-Legal Council and argue that they’ve overlooked something in their report. But that only makes sense if we can point them to facts that they haven’t been aware of.”

“I’ve told them everything.”

“If for instance your secretary were to declare that your personality underwent a dramatic change — or if others who’ve worked closely with you for a long time were to say so.”

“But they’re all at Saxtorph. They work for Laust.”

I break in. “Are you suggesting that we try to get employees from the school to speak up in defiance of the new administration?”