Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

And then he finally settled down.

He no longer stayed at school every evening. He finally began to relax, and I felt I could engage him. He ate at home and we watched TV together, visited friends together. He spent time with Niklas, and the two of us talked about our son, our house and yard. All the things that other couples enjoy doing together.

Again and again, my friends had told me that you cannot change a man. They advised me to get a divorce. But I fought and persevered.

And it turned out they were wrong.

• • •

Twenty minutes later, we’re on our way home in my in-laws’ car. Thorkild handled the conversation with the two airport cops who showed up, and he’s also the one who’s driving now, with Vibeke seated beside him and the other three of us in back.

I said a lot of sweet things to Frederik, and I have to say that they worked. He’s asleep now, with his head up against the window.

On my other side, Niklas sits erect. He looks so lovely and fragile. In the dim light through the thin clouds and the light rain he looks almost like a girl, a wistful model, and I cannot stop thinking that it would have been easier on him if it were me who was ill, instead of his father.

For our son’s sake, Frederik would have sometimes been able to transform the depressing daily round with a sick mother into a Help Our Crazy Mother game. Of course they would still feel sad, but they’d also have fun — and Niklas can’t live without humor. It’s not the same with me; when I’m unhappy, my sorrow eclipses everything. And he knows that.

Niklas gazes insistently out the window. I take my eyes from his neck and look out the other window, through the small vibrating drops that the wind presses across the glass.

And I resolve with myself that I don’t owe Frederik anything. On the contrary, he owes me, for all the years when I trusted him and suffered so terribly from him never being home. I thought I was sacrificing myself for the students of Saxtorph, while in reality he had something going on with other women in Copenhagen. Year after year. The years of my youth.

If I became seriously ill, he ought to care for me for a long, long time to answer for that.

And I decide, as I’ve already done several times in the last few days, that if the operation doesn’t cure Frederik, I’ll stick with him for a year and a half, maximum. Only until he’s gotten as far as he can with rehab; after that it’s over. It feels good for me to think that. It’s necessary to have an emergency exit.

Frederik’s head shifts over, so it no longer rests against the window but on my shoulder instead. Warmth, the soft press of his ear, the little sounds of his halting snore.

I start to cry, muted and still. For that’s not the way it’ll be; I know that. In the end I won’t leave him. Not after a year and a half. It’ll be Frederik and me forever.

Will he keep hitting people after the operation? Will I have to quit my job? Will we have to move? I throw him to the concrete floor of the parking garage and pin his arm behind his back, I strike him in the supermarket when he attacks me for not letting him decide what to buy, I hold him down while he struggles on the patio of Thorkild and Vibeke’s summer cottage.

“Thorkild, could you please pull over? I’m not feeling well.”

My father-in-law stops on the freeway shoulder, and I tumble out onto the strip of overgrown grass along the roadside. I sink to my knees and raise my hands to my forehead.

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:

• lack of empathy for and interest in other people

• recklessness, tactless behavior, unacceptable sexual advances

• unnatural jocularity involving trite, childish jokes

• fearlessness and emotional callousness, with minimal capacity for self-criticism

• distractibility and a tendency to give up when confronted with any difficulty

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.