18.
After lunch on Thursday, I go to Dr. Bek’s office. I sink down into the Venn chair. There is no sign of the electroencephalogram. He folds his gloved hands on his desk and begins in Oslo.
“In Oslo, there is a hospital that sits on a hill. It overlooks the water, the inner Oslofjord. In 1985, I was a much younger man. That year, Arne Treholt, a Norwegian politician, went on trial for spying. He had smuggled classified materials to the KGB and the Iraqis—not enough to sell our secrets to just one country. In the break room at the hospital, the trial was always on the news. I was fascinated by the case because Arne Treholt looked just like my father.”
I can’t imagine what all this has to do with our Hospital.
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“He was sentenced to twenty years, out in a decade. He moved to Cyprus and started writing books.” He leans forward in his chair, his suit groaning. “If you are asking about what happened to my father, that is a story for another time.”
I didn’t mean to ask about his father; I always think of mothers first.
Dr. Bek tells me about other things that happened that year in Norway. Parliamentary elections were held. A volcano on the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen erupted. He seems to enjoy talking about Norway, about home.
Jan Mayen has a nice sound to it. Maybe one day I would like to live in a place called Jan Mayen.
“I’ve never seen a volcano before,” I tell Dr. Bek.
“I know.” His mouth stays open and I see the damp mass of his tongue.
In 1985, he was thirty years old. In 1985, he got married and went to work at this hospital. It is not, however, the year when the most important part of this story takes place.
*
“The hospital on the hill was not a place where people went to get well,” Dr. Bek tells me during our next appointment. It was a hospital for people with troubled minds, troubles that could not ever be cured. He had been working at the hospital for seven years when a young woman with Creutzfeldt-Jakob was admitted.
In the beginning, this woman noticed herself stumbling more than usual. The toe of her shoe was always catching on the bottom stair or on patches of uneven sidewalk. When she woke, she was stiff as an old lady. All day the muscles in her legs twitched. She stopped sleeping. She grew confused. She tried to go to the grocery store in the middle of the night. At the bank, she could not remember her own address. Her speech turned thick and slow and she screamed at her husband, accused him of getting her drunk. She was admitted to an emergency room after she collapsed in a museum.
It was fall in Oslo, the season for picking berries and mushrooms, the season when the waters of the inner Oslofjord protect the city from the cold.
In the emergency room, the doctors performed a spinal tap and discovered the 14-3-3 protein, which suggested Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The diagnosis was supported by an MRI. One doctor described her diseased brain as a spider web where the threads were being pulled apart until they snapped. No one knew the cause: it wasn’t hereditary, as a small amount of Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases are, and infection by contamination, like a medical procedure or tainted food, was unlikely. She had never had an operation. She had not left Norway in fifteen years. It was sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob, where the cause is a mystery.
After the diagnosis, she was sent to this hospital on the hill to die, which was expected to take four to eight weeks. She was twenty-eight years old, and there was nothing anyone could do for her. At least in this hospital, the nurses could roll her wheelchair to a window and she could look out at the water, if she was still able to remember what water was.
“She spent her days in bed or in the wheelchair, parked in front of the window, her arms trembling,” Dr. Bek tells me. “One eye drooped shut, and it looked like she was winking. She went days without speaking and when she did speak, her speech slurred like a drunk’s. “Sleep” sounded like “Shhheep.” “You” sounded like “Fooo.” I had not the faintest idea what was happening inside her mind, what she remembered, and by then I had been married to this woman for the better part of a decade.”
I hold tight to the arms of the Venn chair.
One day another doctor at the hospital, a man in a senior position, took an interest in his wife. As a young man, he had studied psychosomatic medicine with a famous German doctor, who would ask a patient with a broken arm why he no longer wanted to have use of his arm or ask a patient with a flu what he hoped the fever was going to sweat out. He believed the body followed the orders of the unconscious mind.
If your unconscious mind wishes you to be well, you are well. If it wishes you to be sick, you become sick. If it wishes you to die, you die.