The Unit Page 13

  This clearly interested him, because his expression came alive, he placed his hands on his knees and began to ask questions about Siv and my family and the relationships when I was growing up. I answered dutifully and almost mechanically, rattling off my thoughts and theories on why Siv and I were the only two out of the five of us who hadn’t succeeded in establishing a family of our own, and had chosen professions with an uncertain income.

  It would definitely have been more useful to talk about my recurring dreams involving Jock, or about what was happening between Johannes and me, because these were new phenomena and new feelings that I didn’t really understand, while my relationship with my family was old and already made sense. But I couldn’t bring myself to change the topic of conversation yet again, and when I left Arnold ’s office it was with the feeling that I had wasted a whole hour of my life.

  16

  One afternoon after I had been downstairs and swallowed the second pill of the day, I took the elevator up to the library to return some books, and found Vivi behind the desk. There was no sign of Kjell, and as I turned my books over with the bar code facing her, I asked where he was.

  “Did he get fired?”

  It was meant as a joke, but Vivi’s expression was serious.

  “Haven’t you heard?” she said. “He’s sick. Serious side effects. He’s really dizzy all the time. And completely disoriented when it comes to time and space. He can hardly get out of bed or feed himself.”

  “What?! How long has this been going on? I’m in the same experiment, so I mean I’m wondering…”

  “… if it’s going to happen to you too? It won’t.”

  “Really…?”

  “If you haven’t had any side effects by now, then you’ve been given sugar pills. And if you’re wondering how I know, well of course I don’t. But all the indications would suggest that. Some of you became very happy at first, then confused and completely out of it. Up like the sun, down like a pancake, you could say. Kjell was like a completely different person for the first few days-I was here at the time, helping to unpack new films and clear out some of the old magazines and newspapers. He was in an excellent mood, joking and carrying on, and so intense that it was almost unbearable. Then all of a sudden, from one day to the next, he became listless and tired. Then it just went downhill; he found it difficult to judge distances, walked into things, tripped and fell over and dropped things left and right. And he got so forgetful, he hardly knew where he was after a while. In the end he couldn’t carry on here, it just wasn’t working. And, as I said, he isn’t the only one. That man who’s always so sad, for example, the one who sat opposite you at my welcome party-he’s the same. Bedridden.”

  “Erik?” I said. “You mean Erik.” I felt my heart sink and I had to lean on the issue desk for support; my head was spinning. “How do you know all this?” I asked her.

  Vivi said with a little smile that when you work in a place like a library, you find out all kinds of things about all kinds of things. And she went on telling me what she had heard about a couple of other people who were involved in the same experiment as me. But I wasn’t really listening, I was thinking about Erik. I was thinking about how low and lost he had been since Vanja’s final donation. He would have needed her now, he would have needed the love and solicitude of another person.

  I gathered together a little group: Elsa, Lena, Johannes, and Peder, and we went to visit Erik. It was around eight-thirty in the evening, after I had been to the gym, had dinner, and been down to lab 3 to take the final yellow pill of the day.

  Erik was in a worse state than I had thought. He didn’t recognize any of us. And it wasn’t only because he had problems with his vision and was shaking so much that he couldn’t keep his head still. Something had happened inside his head as well, something to do with his awareness and his memory. He just didn’t know who we were, not even Peder, whom he’d known the longest.

  “Oooh!” said Erik in a strange, singsong voice, and smiled with his whole face when we walked into his bedroom after being let into his apartment by a young orderly wearing big, round glasses with black frames, who was looking after him and helping him to eat and wash and go to the bathroom. “Wel-wel-wellllcome!”

  His huge smile was the only redeeming feature about his condition; at least he was happy, and for the first time in weeks. But he called Peder Uncle Jonas, Johannes Grandpa, and Elsa Mommy. And he called me, with a certain amount of contempt, the Snork Maiden and Mademoiselle. He didn’t speak to Lena at all, but he was very shy around her, blushing and giggling and looking away every time she spoke to him or glanced at him.

  We were all very low when we left. As we were walking through the living room on the way out, Johannes said so quietly that only I, walking next to him, could hear:

  “It’s only a matter of days.”

  I looked up at him but said nothing. Instead I went over to the young orderly, who was sitting on the sofa watching TV, and asked:

  “How serious is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I sat down next to him on the sofa. POTTER read the name badge on his shirt.

  “Will Erik be… normal again?” I asked.

  Potter looked me in the eye, his expression behind the glasses strangely distant yet sympathetic at the same time.

  “I don’t think anybody really knows for certain. But personally, I don’t think so.”

  And after a while, in a very low voice-and protected by the noise of the television: “I’ve seen the X-ray plates.”

  Then he leaned forward a fraction, coughed, cleared his throat, and at the end of the throat clearing he spat out, so quickly and hoarsely that I only just managed to get it: “Abnormal atrophy.” And another cough: “The brain…,” and a final throat clearing: “… has shrunk.”

  I knew very well what abnormal brain atrophy was; it’s the cause of Alzheimer’s, and simply means that the brain becomes vestigial, that it shrinks inside the skull until nothing remains, just a big space between the ears and a despairing expression on the sufferer’s face. I had seen this a lot when I was young and working in geriatric care.

  After his brief coughing attack Potter placed, very properly, a hand on my shoulder and said in a friendly, conversational tone:

  “But you mustn’t worry. He’s getting very good care. And you could see how cheerful he is.”

  I nodded, well aware that patients with Alzheimer’s are unhappy far more often than they are happy. As if Potter had heard what I was thinking, he added:

  “He’s actually cheerful like this most of the time. He seems contented. Strangely enough.”

  Of course I don’t know whether what he said was true, he might have said it just to console me.

  “Have they stopped the experiment?” I asked.

  “No, it’s still ongoing.”

  “No, but I mean in Erik’s case. Is he still having three pills a day?”

  “Of course. The experiment is still ongoing, as I said.”

  Potter smiled-his expression now considerably more distant than sympathetic-and I realized that the audience was over, so I got up, asked him to take good care of Erik, and went to join the others, who were sitting in the lounge, pale and silent.

  “What did he say?” asked Peder, who was palest of them all.

  “He didn’t know much,” I lied, because I couldn’t abuse the young orderly’s trust and speak openly about the information he had been kind enough to cough at me. I just added: “But things don’t look too promising, he did say that.”

  A few hours later, as soon as Johannes and I were inside my apartment, I pulled him to me and began kissing and caressing him, and as he moaned and grunted loudly I whispered in his ear what I had found out about Erik’s brain.

  17

  Erik and Kjell and thirteen others were sent to make their final donation. Officially the residents weren’t told much more than that. The unofficial information-the information that was whispered and coughed and sprea
d among various sources-was patchy and, presumably, mixed with rumor and speculation. What we did eventually manage to establish as being reasonably reliable was this:

  During the manufacture of the antidepressant drug an accidental mix-up had occurred between different components, and traces of a kind of nerve poison of the same type used in some chemical weapons had found their way into the pills. When the pharmaceutical company, late in the day and by pure chance, discovered this lamentable error, those responsible informed the leadership team in the reserve bank unit immediately; they in turn decided it would be best to eliminate the fifteen participants in the experiment who had been affected, since their brains were irrevocably destroyed and there was no point in drawing the whole thing out. They therefore chose to act quickly and effectively, to save what could be saved from the bodies of those involved, then to return to the normal way of things without saying any more than necessary about the matter-and to allow collective amnesia to play its part.

  The account didn’t state to what extent the demand for organs and tissues matched this sudden flow onto the market, but I know that certain types of tissue can be preserved for a long time until a recipient is found, and I’m sure dead bodies are always welcome in research and teaching. So I hope and believe that the remains of Erik and the others were of use in some way.

  The other fifteen of us involved in the experiment were called to a meeting led by the unit’s director, Petra Runhede, herself. As she allowed her gaze to glide over us, serious and sympathetic as always, lingering for a second or two on each person, she expressed her regret at what had happened and confirmed what Vivi had told me: that those of us who had not suffered side effects had been given sugar pills.

  “Of course the experiment will be canceled with immediate effect,” she went on. “You will be allocated new tasks very shortly.”

  Naturally we were all shaken, and overwhelmed by powerful, conflicting emotions. It is in the nature of things to feel conflicting emotions when you realize that you belong to a group of survivors, selected purely at random. Some people wept, some laughed hysterically, a couple sat staring blankly into space, shivering, their teeth chattering-of course they were taken care of and treated for shock-and two collapsed and had to be more or less carried out for emergency sessions with their respective psychologists. Lena and I kept calm, but we sat there holding hands throughout the entire meeting.

  After Kjell’s death Vivi took over responsibility for the library. She seemed very happy with the arrangement, and unfortunately I have to say that not many people missed Kjell. He was a miserable complainer but didn’t make much noise apart from that, and he didn’t exactly have any friends in the unit, even if he didn’t have enemies either. He was mourned by no one, left no one behind, and Vivi slipped into his shoes just as if she had always been the one padding around between the shelves, putting the books, films, CDs, magazines and daily papers in the right place, noting down and sending off orders for distance loans, signing out readers, downloading e-books and exchanging a few words with the borrowers as they came and went. After just a few weeks it was as if Kjell had never existed, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that his life had come to an end because of a scandal and a tragedy, I don’t think anybody would ever have given him a thought.

  18

  After the incident with the failed antidepressant experiment, Elsa and I ended up for the first and only time in the same scientific experiment, a psychological study where the researchers wanted to find out if there was a biological or genetic parental instinct, and if so, whether it was the same in women and men. As dispensable people we were the perfect target group, since none of us had the physical or emotional experience of caring for and bringing up our own children, as mothers and fathers have.

  For the first few days we each sat with our head inside a brain scanner, which measured and registered the reactions of the brain as we were exposed to a series of visual, audio, and olfactory impressions. There were pictures of children at different ages and in different situations, the sound of babies crowing, children laughing, newborn babies crying, tantrums, the smell of baby rice, talcum powder, baby feces, wet diapers and baby vomit. There were also pictures, noises, and smells that signaled different kinds of threat or danger: hot stoves, the screech of a car’s brakes, fire, smoke, swimming pools, steep staircases, buzzing wasps, growling dogs baring their teeth, sharp and pointed objects, guns, different kinds of poisonous items, nasty old men offering children candy, images of child pornography and lots of other things.

  After these introductory days the experiment continued with a series of different tests. There were multiple-choice questionnaires, there were discussion groups, there were sessions when different scenarios were acted out for us and our reactions measured in different ways. The experiment lasted for two weeks and on the penultimate day we got-or at least I got-a small shock when we arrived in lab 2, where the majority of the work had taken place, to find the place crawling with real live children. There were something like twenty of them, aged between eighteen months and six years, and we were to play with them, talk to them and, if necessary, feed them and change their diapers and their clothes.

  Elsa and I spent several hours playing with a girl aged four and a boy aged two and a half. We built a cabin using a table, some blankets and some cushions, and we had a tea party with some dolls and were attacked by extremists and had a battle with the terrorists and died and we were dead until the girl decided it wasn’t actually that serious, we were just badly injured and needed Band-Aids and bandages, and then we could carry on eating cake and conversing with the dolls. Although after a while we were interrupted again, because the boy needed to pee so urgently and so badly that we didn’t quite make it to the bathroom before he wet his pants a bit, so he had to change into a pair of dark green pants that he didn’t like instead of the red ones he’d been wearing, which he liked much better. And he wept, furious and desolate, for a while until Elsa came up with the idea that he was actually wearing a pair of green military pants, and that it was time for a new war on terror, and everything was fine again. The boy was called Olav and the girl was called Kristina; I thought they were a delight.

  The following day we were interviewed, one on one in separate little rooms, about how we had felt and how we had reacted to our time with the children. The room was equipped with a very basic desk, two chairs, a DAT recorder, a TV and a DVD player. The person who interviewed me was a woman of roughly my age, quite powerful and with a calm, steady gaze. Under normal circumstances I would have found her reassuring, but not this particular morning.

  During the previous evening and night I had been very low, and had felt the same kind of ache in my stomach and chest that missing Jock had caused during my first months in the unit. I had fought back the tears and turned my back on Johannes in bed; he had noticed that something was wrong and tried to comfort me, but hadn’t really succeeded. Naturally I didn’t want to talk about this during the interview. But the psychologists running the tests had access to our journals, and therefore the woman interviewing me knew that I had had an abortion when I was young. And-as if that weren’t enough-when she asked how I had experienced the contact with the children in light of the fact that I had had an abortion early in life and then not had any children, and I refused to answer, she said:

  “Look at this, Dorrit,” and she pressed PLAY on the DVD.

  Something greenish that looked as if it had been filmed with an underwater camera appeared on the screen. I was automatically expecting to see fish, starfish, corals, and billowing seaweed, and perhaps a diver in a rubber suit with an oxygen tank on his back. But after only a couple of seconds I realized this was no film recorded at the bottom of some ocean, not even at the bottom of some lake, or even an aquarium, it was a room, a greenish bedroom, with two greenish people in a greenish double bed filmed with a thermal imaging camera. At first the two people were lying there still and silent, one with their back to the other, but then ther
e were some muffled sounds, then a murmur, and the murmur had words: “Dorrit…? Darling, what is it?”

  And I saw, from above and at an angle, how Johannes turned me to face him with gentle force, and I heard my own muffled sounds transformed into words and sentences, at first chopped about by sobs and incomprehensible, then a little unclear but perfectly audible. I was surprised-and horrified-at the sound quality.

  The interviewer stopped the film, turned to me, looked at me, calmly waiting, without saying a word. It lasted quite a long time. We sat there in silence, she with her hands on her knee and her gaze fixed on my face, me as stiff as a corpse. I was silent and stiff for so long that it finished me off completely, it was as if everything inside had shut down, I was empty, and when that happened I was able-mechanically-to begin to explain how I had felt about the events of yesterday and what I had felt and thought afterward.

  19

  Time passed. Time flew. The days flew like balloons, filled with hours at the computer beneath the picture of Majken’s deformed fetus, hours spent on experiments and humane tests, hours of walking, stamina training, swimming, appointments with the psychologist, massages, pedicures and saunas. The evenings came and went with visits to the cinema, dinners, conversations, time spent with friends. And the nights came in to land, only to drift away again filled with hours of lovemaking, whispering, sleep and dreams. And the days and nights turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and at the end of each month five, six, seven or eight new dispensable individuals would arrive in the unit, and a new welcome party would be held with dinner, entertainment and dancing. And each month a number of residents would disappear from the unit and would not come back; more and more often there would be someone I knew among them. And for a while the time just flowed into one for me. Or to put it more accurately: in my memory the time flows into one. And that probably isn’t only due to the fact that our memory is selective and mixes things up and picks out what seems right at the time. Under normal circumstances, in the real world out there, our memory can usually support itself by the seasons; a certain event is linked with a particular time of year. For example, I know that my father died and was buried in the fall, because the maples in the churchyard were red and orange, and the weather was crisp and clear and cold. And my mother died the following summer, right at the beginning, when the oilseed rape is in flower and the schools are letting out. I also know that it was early spring when Nils came home with me for the first time, because I remember showing him the hepatica that had just come into flower behind the compost, and at first he didn’t believe they really were hepatica, because for some reason he thought they were extinct, and I had to go in and get my flower book and look it up and show him. I had moved into my house in the late fall when the trees were bare and the fields muddy and heavy. And Jock became mine that same winter; I had to clear the car windshield of freshly fallen wet snow and clear the garden path before I drove, slowly and carefully, through the slush to the animal rescue to collect him. But when I think back over my time in the unit my memory has no such assistance from the seasons, because the seasons never change. In the unit there are only days and nights, that’s the only thing that changes: darkness and daylight. In the winter garden everything is in bud or in flower, but nothing shrivels, withers or dies. It is never winter in the winter garden.