“He lay in a coma for days,” Andrea says. “Just like Lærke. Everyone thought he was going to die, and his parents flew up from Paris.”
I manage to say, “I know they came up, but wasn’t he sitting next to Lærke while she was in a coma?”
“Yes—afterward! He was a totally altered man when he came to. Just like other people who suffer brain damage — their sleeping pattern changes, their body odor changes, their appetite. It’s all hormones. Didn’t he ever tell you how he had to restructure his life, dropping his career and all?”
I don’t answer. I just say, “He isn’t sick.”
I say that even though I know she’s right. Something deep inside me knows that he’s terribly sick, just like Niklas is sick and I’m sick too. Everything’s so fragile. Our brains are all disintegrating, halfway to some alien state — and only maybe is the alien state death.
The sun reflects off something between the trees and hurts my eyes. I feel as if I can’t stand up any longer. Andrea sees this and embraces me, she clasps me to her and prevents me from falling.
“I never heard you could become monogamous from hitting your head,” I say in a small voice, speaking into her neck.
“Nor I. But have you ever met another man like Bernard?”
“No.”
“Me neither. He’s not normal; he’s too good to be true. It’s all something to do with vasopressin and oxytocin. It’s well known that those two hormones in particular are the ones that control monogamy. Compared to a healthy man, Bernard’s hormone profile must be off the charts.”
“But it’s his choice to be kind to Lærke, isn’t it? His own healthy choice?” I ask in a voice that I can hardly hear.
The sun’s reflection from in among the trees. It ought to be raining. If my story had any symbolic meaning, it ought to be coming down in buckets.
• • •
Winnie opens the door of Bernard and Lærke’s house. I cut short my run with Andrea and had her drive me over. Now I stand here in running clothes that never got sweaty, and Andrea’s driven off again.
“Sorry to intrude,” I say, “but there’s something I need to ask Bernard about our case. Really quick, it’ll just take a minute.”
Winnie looks a bit skeptical, but she leads me through the house and into the backyard, which the roses during these last days of August have made even more overwhelming than last time. At a long table on the lawn sit Bernard and Lærke, their two boys who I’ve seen pictures of but never met, and Bernard’s father-in-law.
The welcome’s not the warmest; Bernard’s family doesn’t look as if they like having their lunch interrupted. And perhaps they have a sneaking suspicion, an intuition that I’m not just here to take their food — that after I’ve raided their Saturday lunch I’ll plunder their house and kidnap their father, husband, son-in-law. That I’m shameless, that like a swarm of grasshoppers I will consume everything.
Lærke’s the only one who gives me a big smile when she sees me, waving her arms enthusiastically. “Why Mille! So lovely that you’ve come. You can sit between Jonathan and Benjamin. There’s lots of room!”
The boys have mousy hair and look sullen. They’re not nearly as handsome as my Niklas, not by a long shot.
Bernard’s on his feet long before I reach the table. “Oh yes, I forgot to give Frederik the documents,” he says in a clear voice across the table. “It’s good you came by to get them.” He turns toward his mother-in-law. “Mia and I just have to pop into the office. I have some charts she and her husband are going to use this weekend.”
He walks quickly around the table.
“The papers should be inside,” he tells me loudly.
“But Mette, you’ll come back out and eat with us afterward, won’t you?” asks Lærke.
Bernard answers for me, saying, “Not everyone has time to sit down and hang out all afternoon like we do.”
“I’d love to,” I say. “Unfortunately, I need to bring these charts back to my husband.”
As Bernard walks across the lawn, it’s as if he’s grasping my arm and dragging me away, though of course he doesn’t actually touch me. We march over to the house. As soon as we’re out of the others’ hearing, he hisses, “You should never come here without calling first!”
“But I did call! I called you again and again!”
We step into the house, and he leads me toward his little office, saying, “What the hell were you thinking of, coming here?”
Looking at him, I can tell he’s not so much angry as afraid; his family’s nearby. My voice is louder than it should be. “You lied to me, you lied through your teeth! You said you’d never been with anyone since you met Lærke, and here I find you were screwing the whole town! You don’t return my calls! And you deceived me! I’m married, and you — what the hell were you thinking, Bernard? What the hell? You deceived me so that—”
“But I didn’t lie!” He raises one hand a little, as if to place it on me to calm me down.
I do my best not to shout. “You said you’d never been with anyone else!”
“And I haven’t — not the person I am now. That was someone else, Mia. You have to believe that! And I don’t like that man. I hate that man! He isn’t me.”
Mia Halling
From: Solveig Jansen To: Mia Halling Date: Mon, August 22, 2011, 3:09 pm Subject: Our recent phone conversation
Dear Mia,
Now that we’ve been together in support group for half a year, and you met my family and friends at Torben’s funeral, I feel we’re close enough for me to send you this e-mail.
Ever since you joined the group, I felt we thought the same way about many things, and I found it very troubling that I made you hang up on me so quickly the other day. I suppose you tried to control yourself because it’s only a few weeks since my husband died, but I could tell in any case how much I upset you.
Let me try to explain what I meant.
I know you think that Frederik was free when he was healthy. And that he wasn’t free when he was ill and embezzled from his school. But you should remember that the sick Frederik was no more inhibited in his thinking than lots of normal people who’ve never been diagnosed as sick. They just weren’t born with Frederik’s exceptional abilities.
Do you really think that these people are free, when Frederik wasn’t?
Who says the ability to think clearly is developed to the same degree in every adult? That can’t possibly be true. For example, even though the intelligence of teenagers is fully developed, their frontal lobes are still deficient. That means they have a hard time pulling themselves together and doing what they’ve decided to, and they’re too easily distracted by short-term temptations. And surely adult brains don’t all attain the exact same level of development beyond the teenage brain.
Which means that, biologically, the amount of free will varies from person to person. That’s the “nuancing” of the free-will debate I was talking about. Only a small number of especially gifted people are 100 % free.
Before Torben fell ill, he and I often discussed this question with his best friends from the Ministry of Justice.
Take China for instance: the reason it’ll achieve world domination before long is their one-child policy, plus the way they’ve kept their exchange rates so low that the ordinary Chinese live in utter poverty. When it comes to the country’s long-term interests, these decisions are absolutely the right ones to make — but can the man on the street think that far ahead? Hardly; only the Chinese politburo can do that. If China had been a democracy, it wouldn’t be on its way to owning most of the Western world.