The Unit

18

After the incident with the failed antidepressant experiment, Elsa and I ended up for the first and only time in the same scientific experiment, a psychological study where the researchers wanted to find out if there was a biological or genetic parental instinct, and if so, whether it was the same in women and men. As dispensable people we were the perfect target group, since none of us had the physical or emotional experience of caring for and bringing up our own children, as mothers and fathers have.

For the first few days we each sat with our head inside a brain sca

After these introductory days the experiment continued with a series of different tests. There were multiple-choice questio

Elsa and I spent several hours playing with a girl aged four and a boy aged two and a half. We built a cabin using a table, some blankets and some cushions, and we had a tea party with some dolls and were attacked by extremists and had a battle with the terrorists and died and we were dead until the girl decided it wasn’t actually that serious, we were just badly injured and needed Band-Aids and bandages, and then we could carry on eating cake and conversing with the dolls. Although after a while we were interrupted again, because the boy needed to pee so urgently and so badly that we didn’t quite make it to the bathroom before he wet his pants a bit, so he had to change into a pair of dark green pants that he didn’t like instead of the red ones he’d been wearing, which he liked much better. And he wept, furious and desolate, for a while until Elsa came up with the idea that he was actually wearing a pair of green military pants, and that it was time for a new war on terror, and everything was fine again. The boy was called Olav and the girl was called Kristina; I thought they were a delight.

The following day we were interviewed, one on one in separate little rooms, about how we had felt and how we had reacted to our time with the children. The room was equipped with a very basic desk, two chairs, a DAT recorder, a TV and a DVD player. The person who interviewed me was a woman of roughly my age, quite powerful and with a calm, steady gaze. Under normal circumstances I would have found her reassuring, but not this particular morning.

During the previous evening and night I had been very low, and had felt the same kind of ache in my stomach and chest that missing Jock had caused during my first months in the unit. I had fought back the tears and turned my back on Joha

“Look at this, Dorrit,” and she pressed PLAY on the DVD.

Something greenish that looked as if it had been filmed with an underwater camera appeared on the screen. I was automatically expecting to see fish, starfish, corals, and billowing seaweed, and perhaps a diver in a rubber suit with an oxygen tank on his back. But after only a couple of seconds I realized this was no film recorded at the bottom of some ocean, not even at the bottom of some lake, or even an aquarium, it was a room, a greenish bedroom, with two greenish people in a greenish double bed filmed with a thermal imaging camera. At first the two people were lying there still and silent, one with their back to the other, but then there were some muffled sounds, then a murmur, and the murmur had words: “Dorrit…? Darling, what is it?”

And I saw, from above and at an angle, how Joha

The interviewer stopped the film, turned to me, looked at me, calmly waiting, without saying a word. It lasted quite a long time. We sat there in silence, she with her hands on her knee and her gaze fixed on my face, me as stiff as a corpse. I was silent and stiff for so long that it finished me off completely, it was as if everything inside had shut down, I was empty, and when that happened I was able-mechanically-to begin to explain how I had felt about the events of yesterday and what I had felt and thought afterward.

19

Time passed. Time flew. The days flew like balloons, filled with hours at the computer beneath the picture of Majken’s deformed fetus, hours spent on experiments and humane tests, hours of walking, stamina training, swimming, appointments with the psychologist, massages, pedicures and saunas. The evenings came and went with visits to the cinema, di