The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  But one’s personal freedom cannot be bought for money.

  Standing in front of Andrea Fink I forget all about Laban, the way I always forget the greater part of the outside world, and this time faster than ever because I can see right away she’s discovered something.

  When Andrea Fink makes a discovery, she goes quiet and becomes more compact in a way. It’s as if her density increases and her metabolism drops. She walks ahead of me into the laboratory with small, plodding steps.

  This one’s in the basement. Between the kids’ discarded skis and sledges, banks of monitors and computers have been installed, and in the centre of them all is a dentist’s chair.

  A projector has been set up in front of a screen.

  On the screen are two figures. She hits a key and the two figures shake hands.

  ‘Before you and I met, Susan, we had already conducted fifteen hundred days of experiments covering three hundred subjects dressed up in electronics from head to toe. Heart monitors, blood pressure monitors, electrodes measuring tension in the surface of the skin, oximeters registering oxygen levels in the blood, EKGs and EEGs, MCGs to record the electromagnetic signals of the heart. Moreover, in-depth phenomenological interviews of each and every subject after each and every test day. We’ve now compared that data with your own sessions. The results came in yesterday.’

  The two figures on the screen jump into life again. Next to their hearts, a graphic appears in the shape of a sphere, and then another between their eyes.

  ‘The sheer volume of information is, of course, immense. The mobile EEG on its own delivers thirty thousand cross-section cerebral images per second. For that reason we concentrated on conventional encounters. The ways people have of greeting each other. We isolated those situations in which test individuals shook hands with others. The handshake is a global gesture, there are billions of them occurring every day. Yet no one has ever investigated what actually takes place.’

  A thought steals my attention for a second: the number of test individuals. At this point I’m only nineteen years old. I haven’t the faintest idea when it comes to research funding. But all of a sudden I get a sense of what it must cost to hire three hundred subjects, dress them up in electronics, monitor them for a whole day and then process the resulting data.

  I don’t enquire about anything. But this is one of those moments where I get an inkling of the extent of the resources this frail woman has at her disposal.

  Her voice slows.

  ‘It seems three things happen. All over the globe, the same three things whenever people approach each other. And none of it ever systematically described. First, a physical connection is established: the touching of hands. Almost simultaneously, the heart’s electromagnetic field expands and a subtle increase of activity occurs in the medulla oblongata. We could call this an activation of the heart. Then a change takes place in the mind: arousal and keener levels of attention. This is the physical correlate of the persons involved making eye contact. What’s new here is the cardiac activity. The empathetic emotions are mirrored physically by the heart. Trust, gratitude, sympathy. The data here indicates that human interaction, even between strangers, is facilitated by an increase in cardiac interference. Supported by physical contact and borne along by an intensification of focus and heightened attentiveness.’

  She pauses for a moment. Both of us are thinking about her sons. And her husband. And me. Everything people can feel compelled to trample on in order to get close to each other.

  ‘It would seem to be a law governing all human fellowship. At every encounter with another human being, however brief and superficial it might appear, we endeavour to reach one another. Primarily through physical adjustments, in the heart and the brain. The process appears to be the same in every instance. The question now is what constrains such encounters? As yet we don’t know. But if we look at the twenty-seven hundred handshake situations in our study, then deep, mainly subconscious and yet minutely standardised conventions would seem to be qualitatively determinative. Conventions regulating the length of each eye contact, the extent to which empathetic emotions are liberated. One theory could be that these conventions protect us against what would happen in the instance of an encounter becoming deeper than the situation warranted. It’s with that assumption in mind that we’ve been examining your interviews. They show the same amount of contact time as observed in the case of the police’s own interview experts. The same frequency of eye contact. But the cardiac activity patterns are completely different. Both you and those you interviewed displayed strong increases of activity in the region of the pons, as well as more generally in the heart’s wider electromagnetic field. Something in your system, Susan, doesn’t stop at the normal limit of empathetic contact. With no marked visible or even measurable variance in perceivable physical or cognitive contact, the empathetic opening that occurs between you and others continues to deepen. At least under certain circumstances. And the effect is seemingly transferred from you to your interlocutor.’

  Outside the window is a pond full of carp. Graceful, torpid fish that now and then ripple the surface, the April sun a shimmer in its mirror, a golden chemical combination of water, fish and light.

  The pond is covered by a near-invisible, fine-meshed net of nylon. Another koan solved: how to make sure the pond is deep enough for the fish to survive a harsh winter beneath thirty centimetres of ice and at the same time eliminate the risk of your grandchildren drowning.

  She puts her hand on my arm.

  ‘The twenty-seven hundred handshakes are nothing. The outer rim of something much greater. The evidence up to now is compelling. We appear to be on the verge of proving that whenever people come together, some deeper relationship is trying to establish itself. Our job now is to proceed to other kinds of interaction. My guess is the results will be much the same. The field effects we’ve discovered up to now – of which your own is but one – could well prove to be the first steps towards describing something never before uncovered: the laws governing cognitive interference between humans.’

  I remove her hand from my arm.

  ‘There’s no such thing as cognition,’ I tell her. ‘Other than as a derivative of physical processes. The Effect has nothing to do with the heart. Differences between people are all down to chemistry.’

  She looks out at the pond. It’s a way she has of controlling herself. Somehow it gives her peace of mind. The pond was Bohr’s idea. The carp species in it were bred to refinement in Taoist temples.

  ‘And what of love, Susan? Is that chemistry, too?’

  ‘Especially love.’

  Two blotches of red bloom on her cheeks. I get to my feet.

  ‘Andrea, you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist. The human consciousness isn’t an independent phenomenon. In ten years we’ll have reduced it all to psychology, all psychology to biology, all biology to chemistry, all chemistry to physics, and all physics to mathematics, which in turn will be exhausted in a single logical calculus. By then we’ll have an algebra providing an exhaustive and consistent description of the regularities governing all human interaction.’

  Something about the sight of the pond annoys me. Maybe it’s the insipid softness of it. The way they’ve tried to minimise the risk of accident. Her inveterate belief in what she’s doing.

  ‘Susan, you’re about to leave in anger. Do you know that half the times you’ve been here you’ve done just that: left in anger? It’s all about self-control. You’ll never let go of the emergency brake if you reserve the right to turn on your heels at any moment!’

  Now she’s standing too.

  ‘You should see yourself,’ I tell her. ‘You’re as furious as a troll!’

  She twitches with rage. We’ve only known each other a couple of years and she’s still getting used to the resistance I’ve brought into her life.

  ‘And today,’ I say, ‘I finally got rid of your little composer for good.’

  She advances towards me.
Any minute now and we’ll spiral into our first catfight. We face off, nostrils flaring.

  ‘Leaving like this,’ I tell her, ‘has nothing to do with self-control. Nothing at all. The real reason is physical. I’ve always loved slamming doors!’

  And with that, I turn and march out. And slam the door so hard the dust whirls in my wake. Bohr’s carp dive to the bottom.

  I catch the bus to P. Carl Petersens Kollegium, the student halls where I live. Stepping into my room I’m met by the sight of my Raleigh in the middle of the floor.

  It’s mine, and yet it isn’t. The frame, the handlebars and the wheels are mine. But the saddle is new.

  My floral-patterned saddle is a worn-out thing of plastic with a crack in it that’s been pinching my buttocks for a year. But what am I supposed to do? I live on a student grant and money’s tight. You can’t be immersed in Boolean algebra and have a weekend job in a bakery.

  But now the saddle’s gone, and in its place is a costly, dark-brown leather job by Brooks. On top of it there’s a red rose.

  I edge past the bike and sit down on the bed.

  What touches me most isn’t the saddle or the rose. It’s the fact that the bike’s been polished. And not just polished, we’re talking mirror finish: even the hubs and spokes are gleaming. The green paintwork’s been seen to as well. It’s been given some kind of wax finish, and is all buffed up like new.

  It’s easy to tell experimental physicists from the theorists.

  Theorists don’t want acid on their clothes. They basically don’t care for the smell of laboratories, and they certainly don’t like white coats and rubber gloves. Practical physics is too much like manual work for their liking. And part of the reason they hide themselves away at universities at all is to avoid that sort of thing.

  Laban Svendsen is, with one hundred per cent certainty, the music world’s equivalent of a theoretical physicist. I could tell that right from the start. I could read it from the way he handled the potatoes in Andrea Fink’s scullery.

  What touches me now is that he nonetheless has risen from his scattered sheets of music paper, the ivory and Bakelite keys of his piano, or whatever it is they’re made of, and has rolled up his sleeves and polished my bike.

  He hasn’t left a message. No address, no phone number. Only my shining bicycle, its matt, treated leather saddle and the red rose.

  One could be inclined to think it sufficient.

  26

  ACCORDING TO KRAKS Directory, the former monastery of Vor Frue Kloster is situated on the Kratrenden path running through the boggy area known as Vaserne, bordering on the Furesø.

  I get there by taking my bike with me on the S-train from Hellerup to Holte, then following the railway north to where the Kratrenden begins.

  I’m starting to think I must have taken a wrong turn, because a monastery can’t possibly be located on Millionaires’ Row. But then I come to a white sign with a pictogram of what I take to be a stained-glass window featuring the Virgin Mary, below which it says No. 7 and Vor Frue Kloster. I follow a long avenue of trees through a landscape too cared for to be woodland, too true to nature to be a park, before eventually the path stops at a cluster of buildings that with all clarity indicate to me that this is not a habitat of millionaires at all, but of multimillionaires, because the buildings and attendant woods extend over at least sixteen acres of land leading directly down to the lake, and the structures themselves are built the way Laban and I would have wanted if only we’d been able to afford it, clad in Norwegian slate stacked up to form a solid encasement and punctuated by great expanses of plate glass so the monks inside can lounge around and enjoy the view.

  I park my bike outside. There’s no enclosing wall and no gate, and if it hadn’t been for the sign at the bottom of the path and the big bronze bell that hangs ponderously in an open wooden construction on the grounds, the buildings could have been almost anything. Anything, that is, with the capacity to generate a seven-figure monthly mortgage.

  ‘Welcome!’

  I didn’t hear him approach. He’s about my age and clad in something resembling a cowl. Gone, it seems, are the days when monks went about in barbed wire. This is class fabric, with an elegant hang and a distinctly modern cut.

  ‘I’m here to see Henrik Kornelius.’

  What does a monk look for in a woman before deciding whether to let her into his monastery?

  ‘Do you fancy a beer?’

  I must look surprised, the way he smiles.

  ‘We’ll go through the brewery.’

  He leads me inside and through the largest of the buildings. The main space is as high-ceilinged as a sports hall, with whitewashed walls, and throughout its length, each standing on its own concrete platform, are perhaps thirty or forty 1500-litre stainless-steel vats.

  ‘We brew in open vats. It adds an element of unpredictability to the process. Of course, we can’t do it during the summer months, because of the high risk of infection from microbe fallout and wild yeast. But it does lend a unique individuality to each brew.’

  The end wall is covered by shelving, on which large, corked bottles are lined up in their thousands. He picks one out, turns it in his hand and shows me the label. It’s handwritten. Beneath the picture of the Holy Virgin and the monastery’s name, a brewing date has been indicated, along with a specification stating the hop as a sort called Kaskade and then a number.

  ‘Each brew is unique and therefore accorded its own particular number.’

  He hands me the bottle.

  ‘It’s a gift. Monks have been brewing here since before the Reformation. The Trappists were one of the few orders the absolute monarchy allowed. Because of the beer. However, it wasn’t until the forties we started numbering. The hall here is from the big rebuild in 2012.’

  We walk through a passage of glass connecting the fermentation hall with another building, continuing along quiet, tiled corridors with walls of exposed brick. There is no adornment here, nor is any necessary. Outside the windows, the snow-covered lawns are bathed in sunlight, and where they end the Furesø begins. It doesn’t get much better than this. And that’s without the very singular atmosphere of the place, the mood of contemplative silence.

  We round a corner and the corridor ends at what looks like the door of a strongroom; in front are two stringently designed sofas on which you can sit and wait until the bank opens.

  My guide doesn’t knock, and even if he did it wouldn’t help much, because no one on the other side would ever know if the world the rest of us inhabit came crashing to an end. There is, however, a button, which he presses, and then we wait for Father Kornelius.

  Who apparently isn’t in any hurry.

  ‘What’s it like being a monk?’

  ‘It’s a calling.’

  ‘What about sex? Does the urge go away?’

  The Effect has a twist of impudence about it. One must trust in the verifiability of one’s intuitions and allow oneself to fall. And hopefully land on one’s feet.

  Which is what we do. He smiles, his teeth a gleaming white.

  ‘In the secular world the urge is always present. The choice exists in the question of what to do about it.’

  It’s the first time in my life I’ve spoken to a monk. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this kind of frankness.

  He pushes the heavy door open and calls out. There’s no answer.

  ‘Let me go and find him. Back in a second.’

  He disappears off down the corridor again. I sit down on a sofa. There are several books spread out on a table, all by Henrik Kornelius. One of them bears the title Circular Prayer.

  The door has been left open. Somewhere behind it I can hear the sound of a washing machine.

  Laban would immediately have been able to pinpoint the electric motor’s tone, and its overtones, too. I can identify it as an industrial model with a digital inverter.

  The machine is too full, the arrhythmic thud of the drum tells me so, thoug
h the outer casing must be stabilised, because there’s no attendant noise from any levelling feet against the floor.

  I stand up and put my head round the door. It’s impolite of me. But time’s pushing on and we’re already well into our countdown of forty-eight hours minus Christmas Eve.

  The door opens into a small entrance containing a second door, on the other side of which is a library-cum-living room, or else a living room-cum-library. At any rate, the walls are obliterated by books from floor to ceiling. And we’re talking about a ceiling height of over four metres.

  Across the room is another door, this one half-open. Through the gap can be seen a bedroom and a single bed. The sound of the washing machine is coming from behind that door.

  And then the noise stops, as if a fuse suddenly blew.

  You can get a decent idea of the way anyone relates to the world just by casting a glance at their desk. Laban’s, for instance, looks like an explosion, an anarchy of sheet music and coffee mugs, CDs and violins, flutes and inspirational thingamajigs from ancient sunken cities, photos of the kids and, at least until a few months ago, of me – all of it signalling confidence in providence, or some other responsible institution, at some point sending a man to tidy up.

  That’s not what it looks like here. This place isn’t just tidy, it’s meticulous, and when whoever’s responsible was finished, they sharpened all the pencils and placed the pile of Xerox paper, which has been laid out ready for the next book on the importance of prayer to be printed onto its pages, in neat alignment with the edge of the desk.

  A man with such a well-developed sense for the importance of physical organisation does not overfill a washing machine. I step inside the bedroom. Though not without a distinct feeling of being out of bounds. It’s one thing for this to be a place where people brew beer and tell things like they are. But quite another for a woman to enter the bedroom of a man who has taken his holy vows.

  The bedroom walls, too, are lined with books. A door leads off into a bathroom. Inside the bathroom is another, behind which, presumably, is some kind of utility room. That’s where the washing machine is.