by Lars Kepler
“Patterns? What kind of patterns?”
“Can you tell us what you’re hoping to find?” asked Annika Lorentzon, with an encouraging smile.
I took a deep breath. “I’m hoping to map the mental barriers that remain during hypnosis—how the brain, in a state of deep relaxation, comes up with new ways of protecting the individual from the memory of trauma or fear. What I mean—and this is really exciting—is that when a patient is getting closer to a trauma, the core, the thing that’s really dangerous, when the suppressed memory finally begins to float towards the surface during hypnosis, the mind begins to rummage around in a final attempt to protect the secret. What I have begun to realise and document is that the subject incorporates dream material into his or her memories, simply in order to avoid seeing.”
“To avoid seeing the situation itself?” asked Ronny Johansson, with a sudden burst of curiosity.
“In a way. It’s the perpetrator they don’t want to see,” I replied. “They replace the perpetrator with something else, often an animal.”
There was silence around the table. I could see Annika, who had so far looked mainly embarrassed on my behalf, smiling to herself.
“Can this be true?” said Ronny Johansson, almost in a whisper.
“How clear is this pattern?” asked Mälarstedt.
“Clear, but not fully established,” I replied.
“Is there any similar research going on elsewhere in the world?” Mälarstedt wondered.
“No,” Ronny Johansson replied abruptly.
“But does it stop there?” said Holstein. “Or will the patient always find some new way of protecting himself under hypnosis, in your opinion?”
“Yes, is it possible to move beyond this protective mechanism?” asked Mälarstedt.
I could feel my cheeks beginning to burn; I cleared my throat. “I think it’s possible to move beyond the mechanism, to find what lies beneath these images through deeper hypnosis.”
“And what about the patients?”
“I was thinking about them, too,” Mälarstedt said to Annika Lorentzon.
“This is all very tempting, of course,” said Holstein. “But I want guarantees. No psychoses, no suicides.”
“Yes, but—”
“Can you promise me that?”
Frank Paulsson was just sitting there, scraping at the label on his bottle of mineral water. Holstein looked tired and glanced openly at his watch.
“My priority is to help my patients,” I said.
“And your research?”
“It’s—” I cleared my throat again—“it’s a by-product, when it comes down to it,” I said quietly. “That’s how I have to regard it. I would never develop an experimental technique if there was any indication that it was detrimental to a patient’s condition.”
Some of the men around the table exchanged glances.
“Good answer,” said Frank Paulsson, all of a sudden. “I am giving Erik Maria Bark my full support.”
“I still have some concerns about the patients,” said Holstein.
“Everything is in here,” Paulsson said, pointing to the folder of notes I had provided in advance. “He’s written about the development of the patients; it looks more than promising, I’d say.”
“It’s just that it’s very unusual therapy. It’s so bold we have to be certain we can defend it if something goes wrong.”
“Nothing can really go wrong,” I said, feeling shivers down my spine.
“Erik, it’s Friday and everybody wants to go home,” said Annika Lorentzon. “I think you can assume that your funding will be renewed.”
The others nodded in agreement, and Ronny Johansson leaned back and began to applaud.
Simone was standing in our spacious kitchen when I got home. She’d covered the table with groceries: bundles of asparagus, fresh marjoram, a chicken, a lemon, jasmine rice. When she caught sight of me she laughed.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head and said with a broad grin, “You should see your face.”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like a little kid on Christmas Eve.”
“Is it so obvious?”
“Benjamin!” she shouted.
Benjamin came into the kitchen with Pokémon cards in his hand. Simone hid her merriment and pointed at me. “How does Daddy look, Benjamin?”
He studied me for a moment and began to smile. “You look happy, Daddy.”
“I am happy, little man. I am happy.”
“Have they found the medicine?” he asked.
“What medicine?”
“To make me better, so I won’t need injections,” he said.
I picked him up, hugged him, and explained that they hadn’t found the medicine yet but I hoped they soon would, more than anything.
“All right,” he said.
I put him down and saw Simone’s pensive expression.
Benjamin tugged at my trouser leg. “So what was it, Daddy?”
I didn’t understand.
“Why were you so happy, Daddy?”
“It was just money,” I replied, subdued. “I’ve got some money for my research.”
“David says you do magic.”
“I don’t do magic. I try to help people who are frightened and unhappy.”
Simone let Benjamin run his fingers through the marjoram leaves and inhale their scent. “Tomorrow I sign the lease for the space on Arsenalsgatan.”
“But why didn’t you say anything? Congratulations, Sixan!”
She laughed. “I know exactly what my opening exhibition is going to be,” she said. “There’s a girl who’s just finished at the art college in Bergen. She’s absolutely fantastic; she does these huge—”
Simone broke off as the doorbell rang. She tried to see who it was through the kitchen window, before she went and opened the front door. I followed her and saw her walk through the dark hall and towards the doorway, which was filled with light. When I got there, she was standing looking out.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“Nobody. There was nobody here.”
I looked out over the shrubbery towards the street.
“What’s that?” she asked suddenly.
On the step in front of the door lay a rod with a handle at one end and a small round plate of wood at the other.
“Strange,” I said, picking up the old tool and turning it over in my hands.
“What is it?”
“A ferrule, I think. It was used to punish children in the old days.”
It was time for a session with the hypnosis group. They would be here in ten minutes. The usual six plus the new woman, Eva Blau.
I picked up my pad and read through my notes from the session a week earlier, when Marek Semiovic had talked about the big wooden house in the country in the region of Zenica-Doboj.
It was Charlotte’s turn to begin this time, and I thought I might then make a first attempt with Eva Blau.
I arranged the chairs in a semicircle and set up the video camera tripod as far away as possible.
I was eager that day. The stress of worrying about funding had been relieved, and I was curious as to what would emerge during the session. I was becoming increasingly convinced that this new form of therapy was better than anything I had practised in the past—that the importance of the collective was immense in the treatment of trauma. I was excited by the way the lonely isolation of individual pain could be transformed into a shared and empathetic healing process.
I inserted a new tape in the video camera, zoomed in on the back of a chair, adjusted the focus, and zoomed out again.
Charlotte Ceder entered. She was wearing a dark blue trench coat with a wide belt tightly cinched around her slender waist. As she pulled off her hat, her thick, chestnut-brown hair tumbled around her face. As always, she was beautifully, and terribly, sad.
I went over to the window, opened it, and felt the soft spring breeze blowing over my face. When I turned arou
nd, Jussi Persson had arrived.
“Doctor,” he said in his calm Norrland accent.
We shook hands and he went over to say hello to Sibel, who had just come in. He patted his beer belly and said something that made her giggle and blush. They chatted quietly as the rest of the group arrived: Lydia, Pierre, and finally Marek, slightly late as usual.
I stood motionless, waiting until they felt ready. As individuals, they had one thing in common: they had each suffered traumatising abuse of one kind or another, abuse that had created such devastation within their psyches that they had concealed what had happened from themselves in order to survive. In some cases, I had a greater command of the facts of their lives than they did. They were each, however, acutely aware that their lives had been decimated by terrible events in the past.
“The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” I would often quote William Faulkner. I meant that every little thing that happens to people remains with them throughout their lives. Every experience influences every choice. In the case of traumatic experiences, the past occupies almost all the space available in the present.
Everyone was waiting for me to start, but Eva Blau had not yet arrived. I glanced at the clock and decided to begin without her.
Charlotte always sat furthest away. She had taken off her coat and was as usual dressed elegantly. When our eyes met, she smiled tentatively at me. Charlotte had tried to take her own life fifteen times before I accepted her into the group. The last time she had shot herself in the head with her husband’s elk rifle, right in the drawing room of their villa. The gun had slipped, and she had lost one ear and a small part of her cheek. There was no trace of it now; she had undergone expensive plastic surgery and changed her hairstyle into a smooth, thick bob that concealed her prosthetic ear and hearing aid. Yet despite the fact that she was beautiful and impeccably groomed, I sensed an abyss within her, on the edge of which she was constantly teetering. Whenever I saw her tilt her head to one side, favouring her good ear as she politely and respectfully listened to the others, I always went cold with anxiety.
“Are you comfortable, Charlotte?” I asked.
She nodded and replied, in her gentle, beautifully articulated voice, “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Today we’re going to investigate Charlotte’s inner rooms,” I explained.
“My own haunted house.” She smiled.
“Exactly.” I was always pleased and a little amazed at the way that certain meaningful phrases and expressions were commonly adopted as part of the private idiom in use within the group.
Marek grinned joylessly and impatiently at me as our eyes met. He had been training at the gym all morning, and his muscles were suffused with blood.
“Are we all ready to begin?” I asked.
Sibel spat her chewing gum into a tissue and got up quickly to throw it away. She glanced at me shyly and said, “I’m ready, doctor.”
Slowly I led them into a trance, evoking the image of a wet wooden staircase down which I was leading them. A familiar special energy began to flow among us, a unique warmth we all shared. My own voice, clear and articulated at first, began to register as a series of mesmerising, calming sounds that guided the patients. I seemed to be watching through someone else’s eyes as their bodies settled more heavily into their chairs and their features flattened and relaxed, assuming the coarse, open expression shared by those under hypnosis.
I moved behind them, gently touching their shoulders, guiding them individually all the time, counting backwards, step by step.
“Continue down the staircase,” I said quietly.
I hadn’t told the board that the hypnotist also becomes immersed in a kind of parallel trance as he puts his patients under. In my opinion this was both unavoidable and a good thing. My own trance always took place underwater. I didn’t understand why, but I liked the image of water; it was clear and pleasant, and I had developed a way of using it as a visual and tactile metaphor to help me understand and interpret the course of events during sessions.
My patients were each seeing something completely different, of course; all drifting down into memories, into the past, ending up in the rooms of their childhood, the places where they had spent their youth; returning to their parents’ summer cottages, or the garage of the little girl who lived next door. They didn’t know that for me they were deep underwater at the same time, slowly floating down past an enormous coral formation, a deep-sea plinth, the rough wall of a continental rift, all of us sinking together through gently bubbling water.
This time I wanted to try to take them all with me into a deeper hypnosis. My voice kept on counting, speaking of pleasant relaxation as the water roared in my ears. I watched them.
Jussi hissed something to himself.
Marek’s mouth was open, and a trickle of saliva ran out.
Pierre looked thinner and weaker than ever.
Lydia’s hands hung loosely over the arms of her chair.
“I want you to go even deeper, even further,” I said. “Continue moving downwards, but more slowly now, more slowly. Soon you will stop, very gently coming to rest … a little deeper, just a little more, and now we are stopping.”
The whole group stood facing me in a semicircle on a sandy seabed, level and wide like a gigantic floor. The water was pale and slightly green. The sand beneath our feet moved in small, regular waves. Shimmering pink jellyfish floated above us. From time to time, a flatfish whirled up a little cloud of sand, then darted away.
“We are all deep down now,” I said.
They opened their eyes and looked straight at me.
“Charlotte, it’s your turn to begin,” I went on. “What can you see? Where are you?”
Her mouth moved silently.
“There’s nothing here that is dangerous,” I reminded her. “We’re right behind you all the time.”
“I know,” she said in a monotone.
Her eyes peered at me like those of a sleepwalker, empty and distant.
“You’re standing outside the door,” I said. “Would you like to go in?”
She nodded, and her hair moved with the currents of water.
“Let’s go through the door now,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you gone inside?” I asked, feeling distantly that I was rushing things.
“Yes.”
“Can you see anything?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Is it something strange?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Tell me what you see,” I said quickly.
She shook her head. Small air bubbles were released from her hair and rose towards the surface, glittering. The nagging sense that I was doing the wrong thing seemed closer now, more insistent, warning me that I wasn’t listening, that I wasn’t helping lead her forward but, instead, was pushing her. Still, I couldn’t help saying, “You’re in your grandfather’s house.”
“Yes,” she replied, her voice subdued.
“You’re inside the door, and you’re moving forward.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Just take one step.”
“Maybe not right now,” she whispered.
“Raise your head and look.”
“I don’t want to.” Her lower lip was trembling.
“Can you see anything strange?” I persisted. “Anything that shouldn’t be there?”
A deep furrow appeared in her forehead, and I suddenly realised that she would very soon let go and simply be ripped out of her hypnotic state. This could be dangerous; she could end up in a deep depression if it happened too quickly. Large bubbles were floating out of her mouth like a shining chain. Her face shimmered, and blue-green lines played across her brow.
“You don’t have to look, Charlotte,” I said reassuringly. “You can open the French doors and go out to the garden if you like.”
But her body was sha
king, and I realised it was too late.
“We are completely calm now,” I whispered, reaching out to pat her gently.
Her lips were white, her eyes wide open.
“Charlotte, we are going to return to the surface together, very slowly,” I said.
Her feet kicked up a dense cloud of sand as she floated upwards.
“Wait,” I said faintly.
Marek was looking at me, trying to shout something.
“We are already on our way up, and I am going to count to ten,” I continued, as we moved quickly towards the surface. “And when I have counted to ten you will open your eyes and you will feel fine.”
Charlotte was gasping for breath as she got unsteadily to her feet. She adjusted her clothing and looked at me entreatingly.
“Let’s take a short break,” I said.
Sibel got up slowly and went out for a smoke. Pierre followed her. Jussi remained where he was, heavy and inert. None of them was completely awake. The ascent had been too steep, too quick. I remained seated; I rubbed my face and was taking some notes when Marek sauntered over.
“Well done,” he said, with a wry grimace.
“It didn’t quite go as planned,” I replied, without looking up.
“I thought it was funny,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “What was funny?” I met his eyes, which burned with an obscure hostility.
Lydia was on her way over, jewellery rattling. Her henna-dyed hair glowed like threads of copper as she walked through a sunbeam.
“The way you put that upper-class whore in her place,” Marek said.
“What did you say?” asked Lydia.
“I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about—”
“You’re not to call Charlotte a whore, because it isn’t true,” Lydia said softly. “Right, Marek?”
“Fine, whatever.”
I moved away, looking at my notes, but kept on listening to their conversation.
“Do you have issues with women?” she continued.
“Things happened in the haunted house,” he said quietly. “If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t understand.”
He fell silent, clamping his teeth so tightly together I could see his jaw muscles working.
