A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding: longlisted for the International Booker Prize

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Prologue

I LONDON

II EASTER ISLAND

III CICADA

IV EASTER ISLAND

V LONDON

THANKS

A SYSTEM SO MAGNIFICENT

IT IS BLINDING

Amanda Svensson grew up in Malmö. She studied creative writing and has translated books by Ali Smith, Tessa Hadley, and Kristen Roupenian. A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding was awarded the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize. It is shortlisted for Tidningen Vi’s Literature Prize.

Nichola Smalley is a translator of Swedish and Norwegian literature. Her translation of Andrzej Tichý’s novel Wretchedness won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize that same year. She lives in London.

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Ett system så magnifikt att det bländar © Amanda Svensson, first published by Norstedts, Sweden, in 2019.

Published by Scribe 2022

Published by agreement with Norstedts Agency

Copyright © Amanda Svensson 2019

Translation copyright © Nichola Smalley 2022

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

‘Landlocked Blues’: words and music by Conor Oberst © 2005, reproduced by permission of Bedrooms & Spiders Ltd/Sony Music Publishing, London W1T 3LP.

Excerpts from ‘The Building’ and ‘This Be The Verse’ from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin © Philip Larkin, reproduced in Australia and the UK with kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and reprinted in North America by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts from ‘Am I Unto Death Quite Worn’ by Harriet Löwenhjelm translated by Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey © Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey.

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Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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The baby blues came quickly to the triplets’ mother. But before that, the babies, of course. Sebastian was first, then Clara, then Matilda. Or perhaps the order was different — afterwards no one could really be sure because then came pandemonium, as one of the newborns’ heartbeats, and then breathing, went awry. A doctor rushed into the room. A baby was borne out at lightning speed and in its place was brought a tray bearing open sandwiches, cordial, and three little Swedish flags (bad timing, obviously), and a father — the triplets’ father — was suddenly left empty-handed with not a clue what to do. He picked up a cheese sandwich while his wife, with the two remaining babies clutched one to each breast, delivered the afterbirth.

It wasn’t until afterwards that he realised what he ought to have done was run after the doctor who’d gone to try to revive his child. Perhaps he was in shock — that’s what his wife would think later — and in any case the baby was soon back again: suddenly there it was, lying in its father’s arms, tiny, wrinkly, and gulping for breath, but quite clearly alive. It was like getting a second chance, the father thought, looking down at his newborn’s fluffy head — and he decided to take it. The triplets’ father wasn’t stupid, and even the first time he stuck his hand down his dental hygienist’s knickers he’d understood two things. One: that he didn’t have strong enough nerves to maintain a double life indefinitely and would therefore be forced, sooner or later, to admit his affair to his wife — who he actually loved very deeply, or at least had a very deep dependency on, which, the father reasoned, was essentially the same thing. And two: that the best time to do this would be at the exact moment she’d become responsible for not one but three children, making it unlikely she’d be able to manage on her own, and consequently, unlikely she’d throw him out.

This turned out to be a wholly correct assessment. In the jittery moments after her three children had been borne into this world on a wave of blood and pain, the triplets’ mother, a priest at All Saints Parish in Lund, experienced a fear of the future that was so intense it caused her very belief in God to evade her mockingly. The fact that one of her babies had almost perished from what the doctors would later call spontaneous asphyxia neonatorum with no lasting complications unsurprisingly exacerbated this fear. For the ten minutes during which, instead of the three babies whose soft feet she’d for months felt pressing against her hands through her abdominal wall, she’d suddenly only had two, she experienced a sorrow so cruel and bottomless that all the sorrow that was to come, including that inflicted by her own spouse, paled into insignificance. For those ten minutes she’d felt ready to throw God out with the babies’ first bathwater — for what God could tear a newborn baby from its mother’s arms before she’d even had the chance to touch its wrinkly little hand?

Compared to this divine betrayal, the betrayal of the man who’d stood there, mouth full of Gouda and fluffy white bread, solemnly swearing to stand by the babies and her, if she’d only overlook his dalliances with the dental hygienist, appeared little more than a trifle.

That’s not to say she didn’t cry.

That’s not to say she forgave the guy.

But she was happy, she was happy all the same. So dizzyingly, joyously happy about the babies, about suddenly having a family, even if it was somewhat skewed and scuffed and a bit of a sham. Suddenly the gold in the world stood out so brightly all around her: the coffee, the clementines, the fluttering hospital curtains on that unusually warm, sunny autumn day, as finicky little Sebastian finally latched on to the breast in exactly the right way and took a full feed for the very first time. Everything tasted heavenly. All the colours were vivid. Every bodily sensation, even the painful ones, took on a new, almost erotic dimension. In a meadow of powerfully scented flowers — since flowers were still allowed on labour wards in the late eighties — over the week she stayed in the hospital with her three rather underweight little babies, the triplets’ mother slowly but surely regained her faith in God and divine love, of which the children were unquestionably a part.

Things were undeniably less certain regarding her earthly love for their father, and yet she endured for more than two further decades. There were other things to think about. Feeding schedules. The cost of music lessons. Secrets.

But of course, the marriage was bound to crumble in the end.

First came the triplets, then the drama and the tears, and the drama again. Then almost twenty-three years’ ceasefire. But the day finally came when the last of the triplets left home: the first-born, Sebastian, who, perhaps because he’d been the first to leave the womb, had the most difficulty flying the nest, even though he flew no further than to a room in the local student halls. The same day, their father moved into a single room at the local hotel. It didn’t even have a minibar, but there were stars outside the window — indeed, the whole universe. He looked out of the window and for the first time in his life it struck him that the universe was very, very big and that a person, in comparison, was very, very small.

This happened in 2012 — making the triplets’ birth year 1989, in October. For Christmas the same year, their father gave their mother a piece of the Berlin Wall he’d bought from a street-hawker outside the supermarket. It was supposed to symbolise reconciliation. She threw it at the kitchen wall and went on breastfeeding.

In the summer of 1994, southern Skåne was swarming with ladybirds. Small red dots everywhere, even in the dog’s fur. All three siblings remembered it, even though they’d never talked about it.

In the summer of 1999, the dog died and was seamlessly replaced by another. It was a Newfoundland just like the first and they called it Bernarda. It had nothing to do with García Lorca.

1994 was also the year Sebastian wet the bed an average of 3.2 nights a week.

In October 1989, a girl who came to be christened Violetta was born in the same hospital. Her eyes were remarkably blue, her limbs remarkably thin, and her breathing notably laboured.

In the spring of 1995, Clara learned to ride a bike, but not Sebastian or Matilda. This was balanced out by the fact that both Sebastian and Matilda learned to swim that summer, but not Clara. The question of whose motor skills were the most advanced therefore went mercifully unanswered.

In 2016, Sebastian travelled to London, Clara to Easter Island, and Matilda to Västerbotten, in Northern Sweden. After that, none of them were the same. That year, their mother got an allotment in St Månslyckan. There, one frosty morning in February, she met a badger whose pungent scent and sharp claws made her think for a moment she’d come eye-to-eye with the devil, just like Luther in the Wartburg Castle. After that she started calling the allotment Fright-Delight, a name that made her feel alive. It was also the catalyst for a new-found desire to become completely pure in the eyes of the Saviour, which, over the coming months, would turn her children’s already somewhat complicated lives upside down.

In 2004, both Clara and Matilda got their first periods, in January and February respectively. Sebastian got a PlayStation 2.

I

LONDON

All love stories, no matter how twisted they become in the end, have an innocent beginning, and this was Sebastian and Laura’s.

Him saying: Laura Kadinsky?

And her saying: Here.

The human brain is both more and less complex than the average person thinks. The brain isn’t a machine: it bears only a fleeting resemblance to a computer processor; it encompasses much more than the Chinese room. If you rolled out your neurones on the ground they would stretch three times round the equator. If we assume that the average person covers roughly ten kilometres a day on foot then it would take almost half a lifetime to go just one circuit around your own head, and that’s not taking into account the fact that at a fleeting glance, the brain is something of a labyrinth. In reality, though, it’s so simple you could compare it to the veins on a leaf. Picture the spine as a stalk, and the mind as a leaf in the palm of your hand. Then imagine your life as water, your soul as sugars and chlorophyll. Some spiders’ brains are distributed throughout their bodies, and the leech has thirty-seven brains. In the human intestinal cavity there are as many neurones as in the head of a cat, though not many people are prepared to acknowledge this.

All vertebrates have a brain, but not all brains are created equal. The human brain, for example, consists of three distinct and well-studied parts — the cerebellum, the cerebrum, and the brain stem — while the giant squid’s brain most closely resembles a rubber ring, through the opening of which it forces the food it has chewed into its body. But the thing that most distinguishes humans from less complex beings is a thin but very compact outer layer, a gold plating to the cerebral cortex known as the neocortex. It is present in many mammals: when humans see a dolphin pretending to have fun at the aquarium, it’s the neocortex’s shiny surface they’re seeing themselves reflected in. But in any case, the human neocortex is something quite apart. Together with our opposable thumbs it’s what has made the human race king of the castle, the jewel in the crown of creation, the only species on earth incapable of being completely satisfied.

The price of this dubious privilege is primarily paid by women and their fragile perineum, the pressure on the bladder caused by the human infant’s outsized head. Sebastian Isaksson — twenty-six years old, blond, blue-eyed, clinically depressed even though he himself wasn’t aware of it, son of a priest in the Swedish Church and an administrator at the Swedish Tax Agency, and the brother of two women who didn’t speak to each other, currently residing in a miserable studio flat in London’s southern suburbs — had always thought of the biblical story of the fall of man as a metaphor for the origination of the human brain’s grotesquely oversized neocortex. Eve, he thought, was striving for a cognitive ability beyond what she saw in Adam, her lifelong comrade and only stimulus, happy as he was as a pig in muck. She reached with evolutionary instinct for the apple and God said: Eve, I’m going to give you a brain with capabilities you can’t even imagine in your present half-vegetative state; I’m going to give you gifts called abstract thought, spatial awareness, a sense of time, consciousness of death, generalised anxiety; I shall give you everything you’re asking for and a little extra; and all this shall spring forth from something I shall call NEOCORTEX!

And Eve said: Sounds good.

And God said: To fit all this into your skull I have to make it swell like a sourdough to twice its size, and the same shall apply to your offspring, but just to be difficult I’m not going to expand your pelvis and your birth canal.

And Eve said: Okay. Fine. Whatevs.

And God said: Because you’re still unable to think logically, you’re not able to put these two facts together, but I can tell you that the consequence will be that you and all women after you will give birth to your children in horrific pain.

And Eve said: I’m not afraid.

Though in reality she was shit-scared.

And thereby, with her pluck and her pride, proved herself worthy of both gift and punishment.

Truth be told, the neocortex isn’t the only thing inside the skull that directs human behaviour. You can think of the brain as an advanced Ancient Roman delicacy, a Russian doll made of more and more complicated animals: a mouse inside a pheasant inside a pig. On the outside, a golden casing of milk and honey, and in the very centre a terrified little bird, encapsulated in an egg. Without all that meat in the middle, the casing would fall in upon itself. There’s a brain stem, without which we’d be unable to breathe or swallow, without which the heart would be unable to beat. There’s a little lump above the neck without which we’d be unable to stand up or run a finger across someone else’s cheek. There’s a middle layer of functions without which human existence would be completely meaningless: the hippocampus (memory), the olfactory bulb (scent), the ventricles (waste disposal). But you can go on all you like about the basic functions, it’s still from the neocortex that the most human of human traits arise, which you could say has gone to its head somewhat. The neocortex is poised at the top of the pyramid. The neocortex is the best-compensated part of the brain system, taking 80 per cent of all the energy. The neocortex makes weird mistakes at work but blames its underlings. In other words, the neocortex is boss.

Not entirely unexpectedly, the brain’s hierarchical structure is reflected in the physical world it’s played a part in shaping. From woodland and wetland, muddy waterways and half-decayed stegosaurus bones, have risen skyscrapers and signposts, clock towers and cranes, everything that is tall and beautiful and functional. Man has built the world from the bottom up, because that’s how he has built himself. So it’s only natural that the London Institute of Cognitive Science (LICS) — one of the world’s leading centres for research into everything from our senses to our synapses, right at the cutting edge of cognitive science — was organised according to the same model as the one found inside the human cranium.

The Institute was in the heart of London, a city that had, at one time at least, had a claim to being the centre of the world. The building in itself, a charming brick edifice which over time had been extended upwards and outwards with nothing but layers of concrete and metal, had an internal structure that was as strictly hierarchical as it was complex. Furthest down in the basement were the animals, in a literal sense, with the workers — in other words, Sebastian and his colleagues — on the many intermediate floors. Visitors were admitted through the doors facing the street and then shunted at lightning speed between floors via a complicated system of lifts and stairs. It was said that many never made it out again, that they burned up like short-circuited nerve cells and disappeared.

Right at the top and right at the front, with a view out over historic Russell Square, in the building’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the Institute’s directors had their offices, neatly ordered by seniority. It was outside the third door from the end that Sebastian Isaksson found himself standing one pallid morning in January, trying to smooth his hair into something resembling decorum across his sweaty forehead. After failing multiple times, a fact remarked upon by a passing cleaner, he gave up and knocked on the door with trembling knuckles.

Why was Sebastian so nervous? It was partly, if not wholly, a result of the fact that this was the first time he was meeting his boss. Throughout the recruitment process at LICS Sebastian had dealt with many people, from the academic talent scout who’d been in the canteen at Lund University’s medical faculty one day, holding a sign with his name on, just like the kind pre-booked taxi drivers have when they’re waiting for business passengers at airports, to the researcher who welcomed him on his first day at the Institute, but the actual director of the place had only communicated with him via the building’s pneumatic postal system. The fact that his boss was the only one at the Institute who still used the old system — instead of just expelling little puffs of information into the much-vaunted ‘cloud’ — had made Sebastian suspect that his superior was of the eccentric type not completely uncommon among men of talent. This anticipated eccentricity was the other reason Sebastian was nervous — a lifetime surrounded by eccentric women had taught him it was a most overrated character trait.

The door flew open.

‘So, we meet at last, my young friend! Take a seat, I don’t bite,’ thundered Rudolph Corrigan, the towering red-headed man with a strong American accent who reared up in the doorway. He stepped to one side and pointed to a chair. The hand that pointed was as big as the scalp of an average-sized Scandinavian two-year-old and Sebastian obeyed, suddenly filled with the striking sense of wellbeing that arises when you’ve thrown yourself into a situation you’ve been dreading, only to realise you’re probably going to survive after all.

‘So … Sebastian Isaksson. From Lund University.’

‘That’s correct, sir.’

‘Venerable seat of learning, n’est-ce pas? Not quite Cambridge, mind you, but the best you have in Sweden, I understand?’ said Corrigan when he’d cast himself down behind his desk.

‘Sadly, I have to confess that Lund is mainly known for the humanities. The best medical research takes place at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.’

‘So why haven’t you found your way there?’

‘Personal reasons, sir.’

‘Love?’

‘Fear.’

The forbidden word slid out of Sebastian before he had time to stop it; slippery as an eel, it wriggled across the room, floated down into Corrigan’s postal tube, and out into the building’s synapse system, soon reaching every lobe, every person, sending a cold shiver down the spine of each and every one, because that’s how it is with certain words, they ought never to be spoken aloud except in a psychologist’s office. However, Rudolph Corrigan was a gentleman. Not for nothing had he spent twelve years eating apple pie, practising French conversation, and ironing his school uniform at an exclusive prep school in New Hampshire. He let Sebastian’s faux pas pass and changed the subject.

‘How are you finding it here with us? It must be coming up for a month since you arrived?’

‘Very well, sir. I’m very grateful for the opportunity.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. Or, what I mean is, I’m sure I’m going to be very grateful once I understand what this opportunity means. Which I must admit I don’t quite. Yet. But I’m sure it’s wonderful. The opportunity, I mean.’

‘Yes, it’s something of a mystery, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not quite sure I follow you, sir.’

‘What you’re doing here, Sebastian. It’s a mystery, right?’

‘I don’t know if I’d use a word as strong as mystery. But I have to admit it’s a little unclear.’

‘It’s clear as day to me.’

‘Yes, I hope so,’ Sebastian said, allowing himself a smile he hoped would be interpreted as jovial, or even collegial. Corrigan didn’t take the bait.

‘This is how it is, Sebastian, now listen good, because I’ll say this once and once only. The days when brain research was a marginal field of medicine, aimed at curing disease and solving little everyday mysteries such as why some people become homosexual or others depressed, are over. We’re on the brink of a paradigm shift. The nature of which I imagine you’re aware of.’

(Sebastian wasn’t.)

‘That’s why I think you also understand that there’s a need to keep information where it belongs.’

(He didn’t understand this either, just as you can’t understand an equation in which the basic denominator is unknown.)

‘In other words, it’s not for nothing that I use this reliable old system.’

Corrigan stroked the pneumatic post apparatus fondly and leaned back in his black leather office chair.

‘We live in a surveillance society, Sebastian. I’m no dinosaur — as you know, you can’t be in this field — but I believe in a certain degree of integrity, both personal and professional. In vain I’ve sought to convince those higher up to realise this and stop their blind belief in this cloud business, but what can you do. Fundamentally, everyone here on the top floor is agreed that we need to maintain confidentiality. That’s why the Institute is no longer a proponent of transparency; quite the opposite, we’re in the midst of a restructuring process according to a model well tested by criminal networks and terrorists. Not because we’re criminals, mind you, but because, in spite of everything, they’ve proved themselves extremely effective when it comes to minimising the risk of leaks. I’m talking, you see, about a division into cells, in which each cell holds only the information needed to undertake the tasks delegated to that cell. In the event of, say, bugging, kidnapping, or similar, the damage would be limited because a member of a given cell would hold only one or possibly two pieces of the puzzle that makes up the bigger picture. Are you with me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you understand that we’re talking about a puzzle with thousands of pieces? Because to be as frank as I can without undermining the model I’ve just described to you: I can’t tell you exactly why we’ve recruited you, Sebastian. Bearing in mind that you accepted our offer in spite of this, I can only conclude that this neither deters nor particularly surprises you. Am I right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

(Of course, this was no more true than it was untrue. Due to the situation Sebastian found himself in when he was approached by the Institute’s talent scout and offered the post, it was all the same to him what it involved, in the same way it had been all the same to him whether the sun would rise the following day or not. He would have said yes to any offer that got him out of Lund. Because there was nothing left for him in Lund, and in some ways, having nothing is less painful in a new environment. Or at any rate, it’s painful in a different way.)

‘Bien!’

Corrigan clapped his hands cheerfully before digging around in a heap of papers on his desk.

‘I have a few reports here from Barázza … he says you’re getting along very well. You and Barázza are in the same cell, perhaps you were aware of that? On the basis of his praise, one might imagine you were a Multi-talent! But of course, he’s temperamental, Barázza …’

‘A Multi-talent, sir?’

‘Our most valuable employees, Sebastian — the diamonds, the cherries on the cake, the Nobel Prize–winners–in–waiting. It’s no secret who they are, or that they have a salary that’s more or less precisely 4.3 times higher than yours. Childs, Harvey, Misomoto, Benutti, Jensen … myself, naturally. And Travis, of course, the delightful Jennifer Travis! And what do I know, Sebastian, perhaps you’re sitting on talents we’ve not yet discovered, it’s certainly possible. Though I doubt it, to be quite honest.’

‘No, probably not, sir.’

‘In any case: Barázza has written here that you seem to be a fast learner, cooperative, and most of all, that your judgement of the sample material seems to be very accurate. To quote: "An initial degree of uncertainty seems to have been replaced by an uncommon clarity as concerns diagnosis, cataloguing, and proposed measures for those cases of abnormal cerebral process previously observed by Cell 12 in the referred subjects. I recommend with burning passion that Isaksson’s areas of responsibility be expanded to include, alongside diagnostic assessments, follow-up, investigation, and — if desired — initial treatment of some of the future subjects in Cell 14’s test groups 3A, 3B, and 3C. It is proposed that this should occur under the supervision of the undersigned." Et voilà, Sebastian! With this little scribble from me, your first promotion is authorised …’

With the kind of flourish typical of those accustomed to power, Corrigan signed the piece of paper he’d just read from and pushed it across to Sebastian, who, without knowing what he was supposed to do with it, picked it up and just sort of held it there in mid-air. Corrigan jerked the sheet of paper out of his hand, folded it, and once again pushed it across the desk to Sebastian.

‘Take this and give it to Barázza. He’ll inform you of your new tasks and the level of confidentiality applicable to the results generated. Well, what do you say, shall we celebrate?’

From a desk drawer, Corrigan pulled out a thermos and a packet of Jaffa cakes. Sebastian — who, during his weeks in England, had developed a certain fondness for Jaffa cakes — identified them as a more expensive kind than the ones he tended to indulge in, and discovered to his surprise — and unformulated terror — how a wave of hunger for life, and for these specific Jaffa cakes with their promise of higher-than-average cocoa content and bitter rather than sweet orange filling, tickled his waistline. Was it really that easy? Was that all that was needed to break the emotional fast he’d imposed since what happened happened — a little praise, fat, and sugar?

‘Well, help yourself!’ Corrigan roared, waving the pack of biscuits under Sebastian’s nose. ‘Or are you one of those fanatics who think sugar is comparable to speed? As someone with significant experience of both substances, I can tell you: IT IS NOT.’

‘Of course not, sir,’ Sebastian said, picking up one Jaffa cake in each hand. Their scent was intoxicating, like the scent of a woman’s thighs rubbing against each other as she walks by. With horror, Sebastian realised he was on the verge of tears, whether from gratitude or sorrow was hard to say, but it was embarrassing in any case, and he was forced to stuff his mouth full in order to swallow the lump in his throat before it tore him asunder across Corrigan’s desk.

‘And how’re things going with the monkey?’ his boss asked, tipping his office chair back to a suitable angle from which to conduct an apparently relaxed conversation with an underling.

‘Good,’ Sebastian managed to stammer once the mass of biscuit had cleared his gullet and his tear ducts.

‘Bear in mind, Sebastian, that this is a very special monkey.’

‘I realise that, sir.’

‘I really don’t think you do,’ said Corrigan.

‘I mean, she’s very intelligent. Almost like a human.’

‘Not at all! She’s not at all like a human, Sebastian! I’m disappointed in you. I really am, I have to say.’

Corrigan pulled a lever on his chair, making the seat back fly forward with a pop. Suddenly the distance between his face and Sebastian’s was uncomfortably small.

‘This is the deal, Sebastian: the monkey you’ve been entrusted with caring for is interesting because — despite her obvious, if not unique, level of intelligence — she exhibits clear signs of a trait quite alien to human nature. You see, she has a moral compass, this monkey.’

‘Many monkeys —’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But you’re not hearing me: this is a very moral monkey. She has her rules, you see, and she never wavers. I mean, never! That’s a level of consistency I’m sure you’ll agree no human on the planet can boast. Most of us think, for example, that you shouldn’t, say, eat people. And yet: imagine you’re stuck on a desert island with no food, together with an old lady who’s had two hip replacements, with cataracts, diabetes, and what have you. I’m sure that if you got hungry enough, you’d kill the old dear and eat her, wouldn’t you?’

‘No. Well. Maybe. Maybe I would. I don’t know.’

‘You see?’ Corrigan said merrily. ‘Nothing’s really sacred for us humans, not even the widely accepted rule that individuals from our own species have an inviolable right to life, you know? But this monkey, she never wavers on anything.’

‘But, what kinds of rules are we talking about?’ Sebastian asked, genuinely curious.

‘The monkey came to us from the philosophy department at UCL. They’d used her in some kind of morality experiment, you see, trained her to decode human expressions as they were confronted with various classic moral dilemmas. And she seems to possess a set of moral rules based upon a kind of average Western, Judeo-Christian viewpoint. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, and so on. The difference being that she follows them slavishly. I myself was tasked with her care for a while, but I couldn’t take the pressure. I’m going to be honest with you, Sebastian: I like women. Pretty much all women. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m happily married to an exceptional woman, but we have an open marriage. And I’ve tried to explain this to the monkey. Many times. But she fails to see my side of the story.’

In his head, Sebastian saw Corrigan and the monkey in the grip of an animated sign language conversation in which the same obscene gesture was repeated time and time again until Corrigan was tearing his red hair out.

‘Me and Temple — you know, Tiffany from the admin department — we tend to meet once a week or so and, well, enjoy each other’s company. Nothing wrong with that, in my eyes, quite within the regulations seeing as the secretaries work in a separate cell structure over which I have no jurisdiction of any kind, so what’s the problem?’ At this, Corrigan paused as though expecting a reply. Sebastian, whose sex life had been beset by every kind of problem, could come up with at least a dozen but refrained from spelling them out. Instead he asked:

‘So what did she do, then?’

‘Temple? Well, you can hardly expect me to tell you that, are you crazy? I repeat, Isaksson, one must keep information where it belongs.’

‘No, the monkey, sir, I meant the monkey! What did the monkey do?’

‘Exactly what you’re doing now.’

‘I’m not doing anything. What am I doing?’

‘Your eyes, Sebastian. I could see it in her eyes every time Tiffany’d been to visit. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Refused her afternoon snack, kept throwing pieces of cucumber at my head instead. Classic monkeying around, nothing particularly refined. But still, it hurt.’

‘How do you know her agitation was of the moral variety? Perhaps she was just jealous?’ asked Sebastian.

‘I’ve thought about that, of course. But no. She has nothing against my wife, for instance. It’s definitely a moral standpoint.’

‘What are you going to do with her, then? The monkey, not Temple.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. You don’t have clearance to access that information. Your duty is to feed her and make sure she stays in a good mood. That’s all. Then we’ll see, then we’ll see. If the day were to come, well …’

Corrigan let his gaze drift mysteriously out through the window, and Sebastian did the same. From up here, the dark water of the river looked like a line drawn with a paintbrush, the buildings like piles of ash. It wasn’t beautiful, but it could make a grown man cry: how delicately the milky air quivered, how a single sunbeam could split it into a thousand golden shards of smog, ready to dissolve before you’d even had a chance to register their existence.

For a few seconds, Sebastian got the sense that he and Corrigan, united in pale grey silence with their eyes turned towards the city’s formless body, were having what the girls in his high-school class used to call a moment: a flash of wordless understanding, of shared terror and joy at being alive. This was implausible, Sebastian soon realised, as it dawned on him that he had absolutely no damn clue what Corrigan was thinking, making it impossible to speak of any genuine understanding. Of course, that wasn’t unique to this situation — indeed, thought Sebastian, the chimera of genuine understanding was a fact of human life, which could only occasionally be surmounted by true and eternal love and its defiance of all worldly laws. And if Corrigan and Sebastian hadn’t just fallen deeply and irrevocably in love, it was hardly a tragedy. But still. The realisation that they were, in spite of everything, still just two strangers who happened to be sitting there staring out at the same magically tragic view suddenly made Sebastian feel very, very alone.

Which was exactly what he was, and in a certain sense what he always had been.

‘Well,’ said Corrigan, pressing his broad hands against the table. ‘Don’t look so scared, young man. I believe in you. You’ll be alright on the night. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

Sebastian swallowed. To his ears that sounded more like a jibe than an encouragement.

‘Begone!’ bellowed Corrigan, and Sebastian rose without a word and left the room to return to his office, more uncertain than ever about what he was actually doing there.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t beautiful. The building itself, for example, wasn’t beautiful; it blended in, grey against grey, as though it were one with the sky. The birds certainly seemed to think it was the sky: they crashed into the concrete facade on a daily basis, falling like snow to the ground. The shredded plumage looked like icing sugar.

It was later that afternoon, and Sebastian was standing in his office leaning his forehead against the window. He thought he’d probably get used to it — the dying birds, the fright-delight, the sound of the birds’ speed through the air — impossible for the human ear to register before the blow comes, the blow that brings everything to an abrupt end — the sense of complete identification with the birds, when the feeling of intoxicating freedom and the feeling of paralysing sorrow reach a person at exactly the same moment, awakening every part of the emotional spectrum. He’d get used to it, he thought, because that’s what you do. Get used to things. You could get used to almost anything, the taste of spinach, the taste of blood, the taste of freedom and loss. The taste of ruin. It was just a consequence of the brain’s plasticity.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t beautiful, he thought soberly, writing a name in the fog from his breath, because beauty never lasts. That was what the birds reminded him of, of how fleeting everything was, how quickly everything you’d built up could be torn down. Bang! The feathers flew into the air just like the flour from a dropped packet. And then, in the dawn, men and women in orange hi-vis came and swept up the traces from the ground, and life was reborn somewhere else, the leaves crunched under the wellington-shod feet of children, the breakfast queue at the sandwich place round the corner lurched forward, and a new working day began at the Institute.

In this context it didn’t matter that the building he found himself in from nine to five every day was the same colour as the ashen face of death. After all, there was table tennis in the basement, and Klimt reproductions in the canteen. There were monkeys and there were fish, and tapeworms, and reptiles with Alzheimer’s whose brain tissue was like crinkly cellophane, all within the building’s impenetrable walls. There were stem cells. There was work organised in the same way as terror cells. There was the only thing research, just like life, really needed: forward progress, cyclical progress, any kind of progress that death couldn’t touch. He thought this was what he wanted, and even if it wasn’t, then at least it was what he needed.

It was now more than three weeks since Sebastian, an emotional amputee with a brand-new PhD, had left the Institute of Neuroscience at Lund University for this junior post at LICS. But it had been three weeks stretched like an elastic band, to breaking point; where every second was at once significant — and completely meaningless. Three weeks and an ocean of low-level anxiety, full of the navigational obstacles of working life. His slender shoulders had taken on so much more responsibility, bowed by the weight even as it made him walk taller. And he was tall as it was, six foot two, and as beautiful as Susanna at her bath. Admittedly, it was his mother the priest who’d paid him this last compliment, but others thought Sebastian was beautiful too. That had got them nowhere. Sebastian had come to London for several reasons, but only one bore a woman’s name, and that name was literally carved in stone.

Sighing inwardly, Sebastian turned from the window and went back to his desk where his promotion letter was staring at him from beside a pile of half-completed anamneses. He wasn’t all that glad to have risen among the ranks. It was hard enough just conducting the interviews with potential subjects. Having actual responsibility for them was more than he was confident of managing.

The gigantic and rather vague research project Sebastian was employed on included an extensive and ever-growing group of volunteers — most of them ill in some way — who had to be interviewed, assessed, and then given an in-depth examination using both fMRI and an individually tailored, experimental set of tests. As the most recently appointed talent at the Institute, and also one of the youngest, it had fallen to Sebastian to undertake many of the initial diagnostic interviews with the would-be research subjects. Or, that wasn’t actually true, the very first screening of volunteers was done by a general psychologist by the name of Dr Benedict Katz, who had a rudimentary grounding in neuroscience. It was the managers’ opinion, Sebastian had understood from conversations with his supervisor Barázza, that this preliminary work involved little more than a kind of conveyor-belt categorisation to separate the attention-seekers and general chatterboxes from the genuinely neurologically damaged, and fob them off. In this research institute people in need of talking therapies were not wanted; what was required were defective brains, fantastic brains, brains that behaved differently in ways that were light-years away from what the standard brain was capable of.

So it wasn’t until Benedict had cut out around 95 per cent of the corpus of applicants that Sebastian met the remaining 5 per cent for an initial diagnostic interview. This was all new to Sebastian, who’d previously kept a respectful distance from the interpersonal dimension which is occasionally to be found even in the hardest of the natural sciences. There had been a time, as in the life of every youngster in Lund, when Sebastian had dreamed of becoming a doctor — a dream he’d nurtured tenderly during his early teens with the same blind desperation as someone watering a plant whose root system has long since dried out. It wasn’t until he saw an episode of the wildly popular mid-noughties show Grey’s Anatomy that he realised the medical profession, as it had developed during the twentieth century, was as much about tending souls as diagnosing bodies. Sebastian didn’t want to tend souls at work, that much he’d realised at seventeen — he had enough of it in his personal life, with one sister who had a loyalty card with the local child psychiatrist, another who was afraid of her own shadow, and a girlfriend who insisted on only eating on odd days of the month. He didn’t want to comfort anxious relatives, because he himself was an anxious relative in need of comfort.

So he decided on another path — instead of brain surgery, he would dedicate himself to brain research. If he’d grown up in any other town in Sweden, he probably would have been laughed at for his new dream career — a fantasy career; he might as well have said he wanted to become an astronaut, a lion tamer, an investigative journalist. But Lund was different: it was a city of learning, a city of science, a city of pretensions and professors collecting their pensions, a city where the sons and daughters of academics and architects ate waffles on the roof of the observatory or lay in piles of leaves under the plane trees, rubbing their cheeks against each other’s soft woolly jumpers and whispering, ‘When we graduate from high school I’m going to become a neuroscientist and you’ll be a poet, we’ll have babies and dogs and honorary doctorates and nothing bad will ever happen to us, as long as we live on the right side of the tracks.’ That’s what the youngsters whispered, and, far from being met with ridicule or class analysis, they encountered instead a gentle smile, a fingertip on the cheek, and a hoarse yet resonant: ‘Sebastian, I think I love you.’

In other words: teenage Sebastian had had the support of those around him in his new life goal, most of all his mother and father, since his sisters had much less ambitious natures — from Sebastian’s perspective, it had seemed as though Clara and Matilda spent most of their time longing to escape, energy Sebastian thought would be better spent actually trying to go somewhere else, if that was what they really wanted (and in time they managed it, too — after a few years as an aid worker in Bangladesh, Matilda finally settled down in Berlin, and Clara had long since lived in Stockholm). But he’d never wanted anything but to stay in Lund for the rest of his life. To be moderately successful in his career, get married, and have his own old-before-their-years children.

But of course, things turned out differently, after what happened happened.

It’s well known that traumatic experiences can redraw our inner landscapes — that is, the brain’s spiderweb of impulses and emotions — in the most dramatic way. Sebastian knew that what had happened to him was the sort of life event that could explode a brain like dynamite, requiring a person to carefully piece it back together again afterwards. Most people spent their years of bereavement trying to rebuild the person they’d once been, but it didn’t have to be that way. You could also try to build something new out of the remains. The thing in Sebastian’s life that looked like a catastrophe, and without a doubt was, would perhaps also — since nothing in life was just one thing — turn out to be a catalyst. With many of his brain’s synapses burned out by grief, he might be able to become a different person to the one he’d previously been: a person who lived wholly for his work, for science, for the things that death couldn’t touch.

Every morning, before Sebastian left his room in Tulse Hill, he stood in front of his shaving mirror and recited a mantra based on hard facts that he’d decided would be the guiding light of his new life:

REMEMBER

THAT THE BRAIN IS PLASTIC

THAT MEANS IT IS POSSIBLE

TO LEARN AND RELEARN

THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE

THAT MEANS

THERE’S NO DAMAGE

THAT CAN’T BE UNDONE

THERE’S NO CHARACTER TRAIT

THAT CAN’T BE TURNED INTO ITS OPPOSITE

THERE’S NO FEAR

THAT CAN’T BE CHECKED

AND LIFE LIVED

DIFFERENTLY

But every day it ended with him laughing at himself in the mirror, turning away, and going on with his life exactly as before, in other words, fumblingly. The brain could be retrained, but that didn’t mean it was easy.

In spite of his dread of social interaction, the diagnostic interviews had, to Sebastian’s great relief, got easier each time. It was a victory, albeit a small one, a step on the way to becoming someone who was not affected by other people as anything more than mere objects of study. He no longer vomited with nerves every time a new person put their mind in his hands and asked him to judge whether it was healthy or sick, normal or abnormal, beautiful or grotesque. That’s not to say he found it fun or even rewarding. He longed to be down in the basement, among the machines, among the images of walnuts bursting with all the colours of the rainbow, those maps of the innermost, of the uppermost, the answers to those elusive questions about what a human being really is; the brains, he longed for the brains, disconnected from the makeweight of the human enigma: the bodies, the hands, the sweat, the voices, the eyes, the desires, the fears, and the demands.

Now Sebastian sat down at his desk and looked unhappily at his promotion letter. The thing he should have realised from the very beginning had just occurred to him: that the latter, i.e. the scientific study of brains, didn’t exclude the former, i.e. the interpersonal contact and feeling of responsibility for the people whose brains he was tasked with examining. In his new post he’d finally get into the lab, but he’d also be binding these unlucky people closer to him. They would think he could help them, and only he — as well as, perhaps, the very moral monkey, who really was very perceptive — would know it wasn’t possible.

He was roused from his melancholic slumber by a beep from the intercom system (another of Corrigan’s innovations).

‘Isaksson,’ Sebastian said.

‘Tiffany from admin here. I’ve been notified from on high that you’re henceforth to be responsible for Subject 3A16:1?’

Sebastian looked at the clock. His promotion had been in effect for exactly two hours and seven minutes.

‘Yeah, hmm, that sounds about right. If you say so. Who is it?’

Tiffany lowered her voice. ‘I’m not actually allowed to say things like this, but I was there when Benno did the interview and bloody hell, this one’s a real nutjob.’

Sebastian fixed his gaze on the ceiling. Am I unto death quite worn.

‘Dr Isaksson? Should I send up the notes?’

‘Yeah,’ Sebastian replied with a sigh. ‘Send them up in the chute.’

Subject 3A16:1, known as ‘Toilet Baby’ (TB)

Interview with Benedict Katz, PsyD (BK), 7 January 2016

Transcription: Tiffany Temple, med. sec.

TB: I dreamed I gave birth to a premature baby in my toilet. You know, like some chicks you read about sometimes: ‘WENT TO TOILET — GAVE BIRTH: Fat turned out to be foetus’ and you’re just like, what fucking state of denial has that girl been living in? How can you not notice you’re preggers for nine months? And then the obligatory picture of the girl in the hospital bed with a smile like a fucking banana from ear to ear and this unexpected surprise of a kid in her arms, and though she says stuff like, ‘Course it was a bit of a shock, but I mean, the first time I looked into his eyes there on the floor of the toilet at the Fox and Bullhorn I felt this love I’d never felt before, it was totally magical and I’m so happy,’ you can see from her eyes that she’s flippin’ well scared to death and thinks, like, if I hadn’t been so idiotically terrified of confrontation then I would have discovered, like, eight months ago that I was pregnant and then I could have aborted this little monster, but now I’m here and I’m tabloid material and the best thing I can do is hope Huggies will find my story scintillating and want to be my nappy sponsor. So yeah, in my dream I was, like, that kind of girl. Went into the loo with a bit of a tummy ache thinking I was in for a real squitfest, and what happens? I feel something sort of wriggling out of me like an eel, all slimy and cold. And then I look down into the toilet and there it is, and I realise it’s a foetus, so I get up because I can’t handle seeing it, but then I change my mind, you know, I’ve never seen a miscarriage, I’ve never even had an abortion, believe it or not. And what do I see but the little brat moving about down there in the water! Waving its little arms and legs and opening and closing its mouth like a fish. And I’m just like, shit, it’s alive, so I reach down into the toilet bowl and pick