You Disappear: A Novel (25 page)
Read You Disappear: A Novel Online
Authors: Christian Jungersen
TOM BUCHMANN
Our society risks becoming much more callous in its treatment of deviants.
Tom Buchmann has an MS in sociology and serves as a senior researcher at the Center for Future Studies.
IN 2009, AFTER IT WAS revealed that Tiger Woods had had at least 11 extramarital affairs, it didn’t take long for the golf star to be admitted to a rehabilitation facility for the treatment of sex addiction. Woods
wasn’t
a mendacious, egotistic person—no no, he was merely the victim of an illness.
After similarly embarrassing public episodes, other celebrities have explained that they too suffer from disorders, including various forms of dependency and the inability to control anger. We’re inclined to shrug off these statements with a quick laugh and not think any more about them, but in point of fact the celebrities are right. They haven’t
wanted
to take drugs, or to destroy their marriages and careers with angry outbursts. They’ve never consciously wished for lives like that.
In recent years, science has found genetic and neurological
explanations for a host of human weaknesses, including:
• alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse
• lack of concentration
• poor social skills
• excessive fits of rage
• timidity
• self-centeredness
• loss of initiative
The latest research has shown that all of these character traits have a physiological basis—and that if it’s at all possible to change them, it isn’t simply by “pulling yourself together.”
As a result, we live in an era when our shared sense of what it means to be human and exercise responsibility has been changing at breakneck speed. The way we think about our impossible son (ADHD), our boozing uncle (addictive personality), and our killjoy mother (hidden depression) is shifting. Who are these people really? And how should we relate to them if they’re not to blame for their own actions?
IN THE COURSE OF the next few years, many other human traits will become closely associated with neurological functions and dysfunctions. This is something that can be stated with complete confidence, since it’s an unavoidable consequence of the huge breakthroughs in brain research.
If someone is lazy, for instance, soon we may be able to measure what it is in his or her brain that is causing the laziness. And perhaps all lazy people will be able to address this trait merely by taking a pill—just as we’ve seen with the tremendously widespread use of anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants, and of concentration-enhancing drugs for children with ADHD.
The causes of numerous other personality traits will doubtless be determined in the same fashion; the only thing we don’t know is the exact order in which they’ll be identified. They may include the reasons for things like compulsive lying, pigheadedness, and poor long-term planning. And we’ll be able to address some of these traits pharmaceutically.
Accordingly, human personality will become something one can increasingly design and purchase. Certain coveted personality traits will require the newest, most advanced treatments—perhaps even surgical or electromagnetic intervention in the brain. In this way, these characteristics will
become status symbols in the course of a couple of decades, just like costly cosmetic surgery has been in recent years.
This development isn’t an abstraction or something that belongs to the distant future. It’s already happening now, and in a few years it will pick up a great deal of speed. Consider for instance how rapidly the ways we think about depression, childhood hyperactivity, and male impotence have changed after having stood essentially still for millennia.
OF COURSE IT IS DIFFICULT, if not impossible, to predict how our culture will react to new knowledge about how we really function. But the following thought experiment may provide a clue.
Imagine that you know two men who both have serious drinking problems, and who both hit their wives and children when they are drunk. You find the way they treat their families deeply disturbing. Brain scans reveal that one of the men is neurologically normal. They also show that, neurologically, the second man is highly disposed to alcoholism and violence—and in fact, on the basis of his scans, the specialists expect him to behave at least as terribly as he does.
What is your attitude to each of these men? Would you be more forgiving of one than the other? Would you be able to be friends with one and not the other—and if so, which one? Take your time mulling it over, for the answers to these questions are far from straightforward.
Your reaction to the man who is neurologically
normal
is probably reminiscent of the way many people regarded violent alcoholics 20 years ago, when few people knew that alcoholism could be considered a disease. This man has made some despicable choices and quite likely attracts your greatest moral condemnation.
By contrast, your reaction to the
man who is neurologically abnormal
should provide some indication of where our culture will stand in 20 years—and not only with respect to violence and alcoholism, but also with respect to countless other human traits that will be mapped out in the brain by that time.
Many of us would feel a certain sympathy for this man if we knew he was an unwilling victim of his neurological flaws. (How awful it must be, to be relentlessly compelled to hurt the ones you love!) We would be inclined to forgive him—for after all, the
doctors have said that he can be expected to behave
at least
as horribly as he does. Perhaps it has required an extraordinary effort on his part simply not to murder his family. He’s pulled himself together and done the best he could.
AT THE SAME TIME, the matter is more complicated than that. If no pharmaceutical treatments have been developed yet for
the neurologically abnormal man
, we will do everything we can to keep him away from our workplace and prevent him from marrying into our circle of family and friends. For his brain will not permit him to get any better.
The opposite is true of
the neurologically normal man
. Maybe he speaks the truth when he says that he deeply regrets the way he has been and that he has turned over a new leaf. We cannot know, for the brain he has
could
get him on the right track. Should he not have a chance?
In this way, our society risks becoming much more callous in its treatment of deviants—and only because we are learning more about ourselves and our brains. On the surface, this inevitable evolution in our view of human nature is making us more generous. Yet underneath it we risk becoming merciless and incompassionate. If we no longer consider some people to have free will when it comes to beating or not beating their spouses and children, do we still think of them as human at all? Can’t we just expel them then from all social contexts—families, workplaces, etc.?
GRADUALLY, as we become accustomed to new ways of looking at ourselves and others, it also becomes natural for us to think that there must be some hidden reason for why the second man hits his wife and children. No one really wants to be that way voluntarily, does he? Might he be a victim of childhood trauma, a personality disorder, or some neurological deviance that science simply isn’t capable of showing on a brain scan yet?
And aren’t the two men subject in the same degree to neurological processes beyond their control, even though the processes can only be detected in one of them? Surely that must be the case. Don’t both of them deserve the same forgiveness and compassion?
And what about us?
Aren’t even the most apparently healthy people simply unwilling
(cont. on p. 64)
I’m on my way home from school. In a little while, I’ll find Frederik in our bed. He’s been lying there for more than a week with the curtains drawn. He might lie like that for months or years to come.
As soon as I get home, I’ll drink a couple of cups of tea, eat a couple of open-face sandwiches, and lie down beside him. That’s what I’ve done every day of the past week, and every day I remain there until the world forces me to get up again.
But I’m not home yet. My car is stopped for a red light on Mayor Jespersen Road, and I’m thinking about the days Bernard and I have spent together: the phone conversations, the texts, the brief meetings.
One day we walked through Østerbro from the office of the public prosecutor for serious financial crimes. The sun was low and the light sharp and red, making the quarter’s monotone rust-brown high-rises seem luminous. Why does everything light up that way? That’s what I remember wondering. Why isn’t it just reds that get a boost of color from the afternoon light? The wrapper of a chocolate bar, a dark green bench, the remnants of a dandelion between the paving stones—why does everything
glow
?
Bernard was wearing one of his grey suits, and he talked about his twin sons. At the boarding school they were attending for the final year before gymnasium, one of them had developed a passion for astronomy. There was a telescope at the school, and three of the boys and the math teacher were using a computer program to look for signs of life in the universe.
While Bernard spoke, he forgot all about Frederik’s case, he forgot
about me, he forgot the streets. There was no doubt in my mind that he was a good father.
And besides the things we talked about, besides the luminous buildings around us, there were our bodies. Their harmony as we walked together down the sidewalk at an inconspicuous distance. The even rhythmic click of our heels on the paving stones. The feeling that spread throughout my body: that it was good to walk like this, next to his body.
Just think if Niklas had had a father like Bernard. Then I wouldn’t have needed to keep secrets from him when he was small, about his father’s lechery at school. I wouldn’t have needed to throw his father out on his ear or drink myself blind. Niklas wouldn’t have found me and had to call to have my stomach pumped. It’s impossible to imagine what our relationship could have been like.
I’m on the overpass that crosses the freeway, almost home now, and I recall another time sitting here in the car on my way from work, talking to Bernard on the phone about my day. He told me about his own day, on his way home to Lærke in his car, and just as I reached Station Road, we started talking about a trip he’d taken once as a student. Three law students traveling together, staying in a cottage in some community garden outside East Berlin. They were into the local raves, which were huge back then in the years after the Wall fell.
“I was pretty wild when I was young,” he said.
“Wild?” Perhaps I sounded startled. “But you were already with Lærke back then, weren’t you?”
“Well yeah. Not wild in that way.”
• • •
I throw my school bag onto the small table in the entry and call out, “I’m home!” like I usually do.
Frederik doesn’t answer. I turn on the electric kettle and go upstairs.
The bed’s empty. I walk quickly, almost at a run, to the workshop. He isn’t there either.
“Frederik! Frederik!”
Has he left a note behind, a letter? I run back to the bedroom, down
to the living room, back to the kitchen, out into the yard. No letter, no Frederik.
On our patio I stand completely still, listening to sounds from the neighboring yards, feeling the pulse in my temples. Will today be the day I’ve been fearing, ever since he began lying in bed and moaning for hours at a time? Since he first said that he’d destroyed everything and just wanted to die?
The yard’s as still as I am. The silver-white undersides of the leaves on the tall poplars next door don’t so much as stir.
And just the way you always hear cops state the exact time when they arrest someone, I hear the basic facts being recited in my ear:
There is no wind, it is cooler than normal for the season, there is moisture in the air. I am standing on the patio of our silent yard. Frederik is dead
.
No one can know how it must’ve felt for him, for the first time in ages, to reproach himself for something. For the first time since a tumor changed everything. How does guilt feel the very first time? Or empathy for another person? How does it feel to realize in a blinding flash that you’ve ruined the lives of everyone around you?
I call Niklas, who is at Mathias’s with some friends, but he hasn’t seen or heard from his father. I manage to sound calm on the phone, though I can hear the thudding of my heart. Niklas sounds calm too, and I don’t think it’s an act. He has no sense of the danger; he hasn’t been home during the afternoons when Frederik’s at his most inconsolable.
Then it’s my in-laws’ turn.
“Is it possible he might do something to himself?” Vibeke asks.
I hesitate too long, and Thorkild has to take the receiver. “We’re coming over there now,” he says.
“I’d rather you wait. If I don’t find him in the next half hour, I’ll call you again.”
Back to the yard. I shout his name and get no answer.
And just then—at the same time that I’m searching and calling and feeling desperate—just then, it’s not simply despair I feel. What was it that Ulla said at my first support group meeting?
It would have been better if Kirsten’s husband had died this time
. The group smiled afterward; we all felt a bond.