The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  He opens his arms. And before I know what’s happening I find myself where every little girl wants to be, even if she happens to be forty-three years old: in her father’s embrace.

  He steps back and considers me at arm’s length.

  ‘Susan. Susan.’

  He speaks my name slowly, trying to build a bridge across thirty-five years of time, to identify the name and his recollections of an eight-year-old girl with the woman now standing in front of his eyes.

  Authority is a peculiar phenomenon. The room has fallen silent, all activity drawn to a standstill. There may be between forty and fifty people around us, all with their particular roles to play in an important event that is already underway. Yet everything has ground to a halt.

  In that silence, my ballet prince steps forward.

  ‘I should like to ask for your daughter’s hand.’

  All eyes are on him. His words may have been valid in Shakespeare’s day. But even by the time my father was a boy they must surely have fallen from circulation.

  My father gestures, imperceptibly almost, and two men emerge from behind him. A fist moves swiftly in the region of my beau’s kidneys and instantly he sags, white as a sheet, his legs buckled beneath him, and the two men whisk him away by the armpits.

  My father ushers me forward. We go through a door, and in our wake people follow. We step over snaking cables duct-taped to the floor, circumventing a TV crew before stepping out onto a balcony above what used to be the concert hall, now a storage facility with boxes stacked everywhere.

  We continue up a flight of stairs to the roof. Behind us come Hegn, Thorbjørn Halk and Laban.

  Falck-Hansen is standing waiting for us. Expressionless, he stares at Laban and me.

  At close quarters the balloon doesn’t look like a balloon at all, more like a modern art installation. The buoyancy element itself comprises at most 100 cubic metres, harnessed within a lightweight metal framework that moreover holds the sail, a thirty-metre-tall construction of man-made fibre that reflects like tinfoil and yet is partially transparent. Hundreds of ethereal solar cells are held in place by barely visible wires.

  A slightly framed, enclosed cabin is attached to the harness underneath the balloon, and affixed to the bottom of it is a long keel of aluminium. The overall impression is of a slender keelboat built for racing, on top of which someone has placed an enormous beachball, and on top of that an upturned aeroplane wing.

  We are the only people on the roof besides a handful of technical staff. My father steps onto the gangway and opens the door of the cabin.

  ‘Susan, may I show you Copenhagen from the skies?’

  For a moment the situation is electrified with a potential difference of about a million volts. Hegn is about to say something, but thinks better of it. A pair of technicians appear with what must be parachutes. My father shakes his head.

  ‘Fate is on our side today. Do you believe in fate, Susan?’

  ‘If there is such a thing,’ I say, ‘then we’re part of its making. Like the laws of nature.’

  Hegn crosses the gangway and enters the cabin. Falck-Hansen follows him, and Halk steps forward to do likewise.

  My father holds up a hand.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  Halk senses a misunderstanding. He glares at my father.

  ‘And who might you be?’

  Another gesture, as near imperceptible as the first, and Thorbjørn is flanked by two men. They grip him by the arms, wheel round and walk him away.

  I step onto the gangway in front of my father. He turns towards those still on the roof.

  ‘You can let the press in now.’

  10

  THE MOMENT MY father’s hands touch the instrument panel, my childhood is returned to me. Not some vague recollection, or mere fragment, but in its entirety. I remember him at the wheel of our car. His hands caressing the instruments. The smell of the leather interior. The unstated bond between us. His joy at describing the physical world. It’s from him my enthusiasm stems, my wish to explain the world to my twins. I remember the sound of the door when he came home in winter. The smell and the dampness of his olive-green coat when I pressed my cheek against it. The fluid softness of bearskin when he handed me his hat.

  The cabin is equipped with the electronics of a jet fighter, the instrument panel as long and wide as a desk. His fingers pass over it like a musician’s.

  ‘I’ve been involved all along, Susan. In the construction. Unbeknown to Halk. Quite a number of details are my own. It’s the first craft of its kind to utilise the balloon as an expansion tank. Altitude is regulated by increasing or diminishing the volume.’

  He pulls back a lever and the vessel rises a few inches. The bracing wires tighten with a faint whistle.

  The room is illuminated by the light of twoscore suns on the roof below us, the flash of cameras going off in unison. There must be a hundred reporters and photographers. Falck-Hansen, the foreign minister, goes to the door and waves. Hegn and my father ignore them.

  The spring locks of the bracing wires open, and the thin cables are reeled up underneath the cabin. The balloon rises and with it the sound of applause, gradually becoming distant. Several of the cabin windows glide down, the entire windscreen retracting into the roof. It feels like we’re in the open air.

  I’ve never been in a balloon before. The first thing that strikes me is how quiet it is. On the ground, noise is everywhere: traffic, birdsong, human voices, machines. Up here the only thing audible is the whisper of the wind passing kindly over the buoyancy element, and the gentle creak of the wingsail.

  The absence of all other sound creates an illusion: it’s impossible to tell if we’re ascending or if Copenhagen is dropping away beneath us.

  My father presses a button, and somewhere below us a system of hydraulics winches in a line and we turn towards the blue-white glittering waters of the Øresund.

  He takes my hand. The memories of his physical warmth come flooding back.

  Most men are unable to concentrate mentally on a matter and engage in physical contact at the same time. The signals issued by the body serve to cloud any clarity of thought. The body and the mind are, in such respect, enemies. This, however, does not apply to my father. To him, determination of thought and physical touch have always intertwined.

  ‘The first warnings came before you were born, Susan. No one remembers any more, but European biologists were vocal about the threat of pollution as early as the mid-sixties. Since then, everything’s gone exponentially downhill. The scenarios of apocalypse are unfolding now, and the biological systems are breaking down. Not one intelligent journalist is unaware of this. Not one politician, not one scientist. But still it cannot be spoken out loud. And if it could, no one would listen. The media are incapable of providing any true picture of reality. The political parties are powerless even to propose what needs to be done, aware that they would never be able to sell the goods, no one would vote for them. We are all of us a part of the problem. There are no enemies any more. We can’t pass the buck. What we have to do now is to ensure the best survive. You, Susan, are among the best. You, and the twins. I’m not much impressed by that husband of yours, but he’s coming too. And your mother, of course. Along with her …’

  He hesitates. His hesitation is a crack, opened by the Effect. From that crack seeps what still is unresolved in his life: his love of my mother. Part of him has remained behind in a past it’s become too late to change.

  ‘The island has it all, Susan. In the event of a nuclear war the northern hemisphere will be ravaged by a new ice age. The southern hemisphere will be untouched. When the oil runs out, we’ll have renewable energy sources and smart grid power. We’ll be able to meet all our own needs for food, withstand a twenty-metre rise in sea level and still have eight hundred square kilometres to live on without getting our feet wet. We’ve got seeds and livestock, and the technology and information to rebuild civilisation from scratch. It’s not Noah’s Ark, Susan
, it’s not the spaceship of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s a sustainable Atlantis.’

  He gauges my thoughts. He’s always been able to do that. When I was a little girl we could sense what the other was thinking. One of us would begin to speak, only for the other to chuckle with glee, tickled by the synchronism of what was going on in our minds.

  ‘When everything comes crashing down, as it will very soon, our democracies will succumb. They were always a thin veneer. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s population still need to be told what to do and how to go about it. Our political institutions will be the first to go. The military and the big transnational concerns will have to take over. Visionary politicians like Jørgen here have known all along. Many of us didn’t need the commission. But the commission confirmed what we already suspected. It was a kickstart for the survival plan. It convinced the politicians and business. But the plans were already there. For the transfer of power to those with the ability and the will.’

  ‘And you’re one of them, aren’t you, Dad?’

  ‘It’ll be a whole new field. Fraught with difficulties. The management of power in a post-democracy. It’s going to require new knowledge, if what’s left of our societies is to avoid oblivion, avoid ending up in barbary. It’ll take a combination of military, operative and administrative experience. We’re taking a hundred and fifty men from the special forces with us to Spray Island. Army, navy, air force. A select group of my own men. A frigate. Two fighter planes. A small submarine.’

  We drift out over the Øresund. I register a sense of what migrating birds must feel when they leave land. Uncertainty combined with the euphoria of wide expanses of water.

  My father turns away from the instruments. There must be some kind of automatic pilot, the minute adjustments to course must come from a computer.

  ‘Susan, you’re the one who spoke to the commission members last. Moreover, you have that wonderful talent of yours. Thorkild has told me all about it. You must have made them talk. What did they tell you? What was their time frame? When was it going to occur, the final collapse?’

  I’ve seen Copenhagen from above lots of times before. From planes and towers, from the restaurant of the SAS Royal Hotel, from the Ferris wheel in the Tivoli Gardens, from the upper floors of my department and the Panum Building. But this time it’s different. From here the city seems so vulnerable.

  Maybe it’s the sedateness of the craft itself, the frailty of the cabin, the delicacy of the whole construction. For a moment it’s as if there’s no barrier between me and the million and a half people below us.

  ‘There was no date.’

  ‘No matter. It’ll be soon, in any circumstance. You and the twins should go home, go back to work and school, and remain prepared. Within a few months we’ll have you evacuated.’

  ‘Why were the commission’s members killed?’

  ‘They were elderly, Susan.’

  I relax into the Effect. It feels much like falling. The experience feels unfamiliar every time, unsettling even for me. Honesty is not something to which one becomes accustomed once and for all. It’s a process, a new rejection every time of all that is familiar and fixed.

  ‘They’d become greedy, had sought to profit from their ability, to sell it off like a commodity. But being able to see into the future is a much more sensitive issue than access to any thinkable secret of state. Thorkild managed them during more than forty years. But few can live with such power without abusing it. They had to go.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wait? Until I’d spoken to them?’

  My father drapes an arm around Thorkild Hegn’s shoulders. They look like brothers now.

  ‘There was a difference of opinion. Thorkild wanted them kept alive.’

  I know it from the labs. That magical moment at which a hypothesis is released into the world, and what until then has been but a fragile mental construction begins to find body. That’s what’s happening now. The dissolution of our democracies isn’t just a prognosis. Both Hegn and Falck-Hansen are fading into the background. My father is the true authority.

  ‘Who did it?’

  Pain passes over his face, another torment of the past.

  ‘I have people, Susan. Closest to me is Jason. I have trusted him blindly. He delivered the letters, to you and your mother.’

  ‘I saw the bodies. He enjoys his work.’

  Again, a twitch of anguish.

  ‘I wanted it done properly, Susan. The way they do in the slaughterhouses. Have you ever seen it? Admirable. They insert a tube into the spinal cord. To avoid the violence of the muscular spasms. It’s all very gentle and subdued. I wanted it done like that. Jason has been like a son to me. I’ve looked after him, Susan. As if he were your brother.’

  ‘How touching,’ I say.

  ‘Indeed. The things I’ve covered up on his account. He’s a psychopath, you see. Should have had his head examined. It was his fault all this began to get out of hand. Now we shall have to cut him loose.’

  ‘He’s got my children. He’s got Thit and Harald. Are you behind that?’

  He doesn’t flinch. It’s as if his ability to be shocked has long been lost. But he pauses.

  ‘Where, Susan?’

  ‘I don’t know. He phoned me up. Said it was me he wanted to speak to.’

  ‘We’ll have him located in fifteen minutes.’

  I know it’s a lie.

  ‘And then he’ll be taken care of, Susan.’

  ‘Will you do it yourself?’

  ‘I can’t. He’s like my own child.’

  The other two men have come closer.

  ‘I had a dog once,’ Falck-Hansen says. ‘A beagle. Incapable of regulating their appetite, beagles. He could eat till he dropped. Only he never did. Drop, I mean. All he ever did was eat. And when he wasn’t eating he was begging at the table. He had the most enchanting brown eyes. We couldn’t say no. When his weight got to fifty kilos his heart began to pack in. He looked like he’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. Finally, I had to take him to the vet. I looked into his eyes when they put him down. He knew what was happening.’

  I feel a dizziness coming on. The membrane that separates honesty from madness is flimsy indeed, and now it’s about to rupture. None of the three have noticed.

  ‘I had to stop seeing one of my daughters!’

  This time it’s Hegn. His eyes sparkle and glisten. Confession always prompts a release of endorphins.

  ‘She got wind of what I was doing at the institute, the commission. That it ran against all democracy. She kept putting pressure on me. Eventually, I had to threaten her with the courts. Closed doors, of course. And a prison sentence. Imagine that, threatening one’s own daughter with prison!’

  My father has turned to face them.

  ‘You know when you try to remember the names of everyone you’ve slept with, only you can’t? Imagine what it’s like trying to remember those you’ve killed. And not being able to, because there are too many. And then when you’re trying to fall asleep they’re all there, lined up in front of you, ready to be counted the way you count sheep, and all you can do is hope they’ll give you just a few minutes’ rest.’

  Somewhere within their systems, they now sense the situation to be out of control. But it’s too late. There is a deep and instinctive urge in all of us towards honesty. The Effect is merely a slight reinforcement of that urge.

  ‘I’ve been involved in all the major political scandals,’ Falck-Hansen says. ‘And that’s going back forty years! I’ve lied in court! Allowed my staff to shoulder the blame. Ruined long-standing political friendships.’

  One of the great red-letter days of organic chemistry occurred in April 1943, when Albert Hofmann, in search of an effective medicine to counter migraine headaches of the same calibre as my mother’s, succeeded in isolating the twenty-fifth semi-synthetic derivative of lysergic acid extracted from ergot fungus, ingested twenty-five milligrams and was catapulted off into the world’s first acid trip. The men i
n front of me are much worse off. Hofmann retained his grip throughout. They’ve already let go.

  Hegn takes the floor.

  ‘What you’ve all told me here makes a very deep impression on me. I’m touched. And yet all of it is so little compared to what my own conscience must bear. I transformed the institute with the sole aim of circumventing the country’s constitution. I withheld from parliament, and from the nation, important information delivered by the commission. And not only because it was more than they would have been capable of handling. What I really wanted was power and influence.’

  There are tears in his eyes.

  ‘It goes back to my childhood. I had five brothers and sisters. I kept the entire family in a vice. Even though my father was a naval officer.’

  He gets no further. Falck-Hansen pushes him aside.

  ‘I’m sorry, Thorkild. But listen to this: I had two sisters. I came very close to prostituting them both. I was ten, they were fourteen and eighteen. There was this neighbour of ours. He—’

  My father cuts him off in mid-flow, gripping both men by the hair, forcing them to their knees and pressing their faces to the floor.

  It’s a violent movement of great brutality, and yet seemingly effortless. He crouches down and leans towards them. The level of his voice is unchanged by even a decibel.

  ‘There’s something we need to agree about in order to gain a realistic idea of the distribution of guilt here. The hell I inhabit, and which each and every day—’

  Circumstances notwithstanding, Thorkild Hegn manages to squeak a protest:

  ‘I’ve got the law behind me, Svend, the full weight of society. I can have a hundred policemen waiting for you as soon as we land. You’ll be off to that new prison at Trørød before you can say knife.’

  Falck-Hansen manages to squirm free and scrabble to his feet.

  ‘I represent the government of this country. And as long as our democracy prevails—’

  My father pulls his legs from under him. But the foreign minister brings my father down with him in the fall. They slam against the floor.