The Hypnotist (39 page)

“Shall we sit down and have a little chat?” said the social worker, keeping her tone neutral.

I pushed open the door and saw that Lydia was slowly moving closer.

“Erik,” she said. I started to close the door, and Lydia sprang forward. I raced down the hall, but the door at the end was locked. Lydia kept pace, making a strange wailing noise as she ran. I yanked open another door and stumbled into a TV room. Lydia followed me in. I bumped into an armchair as I made for the balcony door, but it was impossible to turn the handle. Lydia flew at me with the knife, and I took cover behind a large oval table.

“It’s your fault,” she said, as she chased me this way, that way, around the table.

The social worker ran into the room. She was completely out of breath. “Lydia,” she said sharply. “Stop this right now.”

“It’s all his fault,” said Lydia.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What’s my fault?”

“This,” said Lydia, drawing the knife across her throat. She looked into my eyes as the blood splashed down over her dress and her bare feet. Her mouth was trembling. The knife fell to the floor. One hand groped for support, but she sank down to the floor, coming to rest, balanced on one hip, like a mermaid.

Annika Lorentzon’s smile was troubled. Rainer Milch leaned across the table and poured a glass of mineral water with a hiss of carbon dioxide. His cuff links flashed royal blue and gold.

“I’m sure you understand why we wanted to speak to you as soon as possible,” said Peter Mälarstedt, adjusting his tie.

I opened the folder they had handed to me. Identical materials sat before each board member. The contents of the folder stated that Lydia had made a complaint against me. She claimed that I had driven her to attempt suicide by coercing her to confess to things that had not taken place. She accused me of having used her for the purposes of my experiments and implanted false memories in her mind during deep hypnosis, and she said I had persecuted her ruthlessly and cynically in front of the others until she was completely shattered and had suffered severe emotional distress.

I looked up from the papers. “Is this some kind of joke?” I said.

Annika Lorentzon looked away. Svein Holstein’s face was completely expressionless as he said, “She’s your patient, and these are serious accusations.”

“I don’t want to accuse a very disturbed patient of lying,” I said angrily, “but she’s either lying or she’s delusional. It’s impossible to implant memories during hypnosis. I can lead them to a memory, but I can’t create one. I lead them up to doors, but I can’t open those doors on my own.”

Rainer Milch looked at me, his expression grave. “The suspicion alone could destroy all your research, Erik, so I’m sure you realize how critical this is.”

I shook my head irritably. “Under hypnosis, she related events concerning herself and her son that I considered so serious I felt I had no choice but to contact Social Services. The fact that she would react in this way was— ”

Ronny Johansson interrupted me sharply. “But she hasn’t even got any children. It says so here.” He tapped on the folder with a long finger. I snorted and got a strange look from Annika.

“Erik, being arrogant in this situation is not particularly helpful,” she said quietly.

“From the very first day she walked into this hospital, her relationship with her son has been the focus of almost every remark,” I said, with an irritable smile. “And not only in a therapeutic context. Whenever she chats with the others, she— ”

Annika leaned over the table. “Erik,” she said slowly, “she has no son. She’s never had any children.”

“She hasn’t got any children?”

“No.”

The room fell silent.

I watched the bubbles in the mineral water rising to the surface.

“I don’t understand. She still lives in her childhood home.” I attempted to explain as calmly as I could. “All the details matched. I can’t believe— ”

“You can’t believe,” Milch broke in, “but you were wrong.”

“They can’t lie like that under hypnosis.”

“Are you certain she was under hypnosis?”

“I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“In a way, you have, Erik. But it doesn’t matter now. The damage is already done.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, half to myself. “Perhaps she was talking about her own childhood; it’s nothing I’ve come across, but perhaps she was working through a memory of her own.”

“It could be exactly as you say,” Annika interjected. “It could be a number of things. But the fact remains that your patient made a suicide attempt for which she blames you. We suggest you take a leave of absence while we investigate the matter.” She smiled wanly at me. “This will all sort itself out, Erik, I’m sure of it,” she said gently. “But right now you have to step aside until we’ve looked into everything. We simply can’t afford to let the press wallow in this.”

I thought about Charlotte, Marek, Jussi, Sibel, Pierre, and Eva. We’d all worked to establish trust, a rapport. All individual progress had been the hard-won result of the specific chemistry we’d achieved as a group. My abandonment of them would leave them feeling betrayed and let down.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.

Annika patted my hand. “It will sort itself out. Lydia Everson is obviously unstable and confused, but the most important thing now is to do things by the book. You will request a leave of absence from your activities involving hypnosis while we conduct an internal investigation into these events. I know you’re a good doctor, Erik. I’m sure you’ll be back with your group in no more than”— she shrugged her shoulders— “six months.”

“Six months?” I leaped to my feet. “I have patients; they rely on me. I can’t just leave them,” I said furiously.

Annika’s gentle smile disappeared like a candle flame being extinguished. Her face closed down and her voice turned brittle. “Your patient has demanded that an immediate ban be placed on your activities. She has also made a complaint against you to the police. These are not trivial matters as far as we are concerned; we have invested in your work, and if it should transpire that your research has not been up to the required standard, we will have to take appropriate measures.”

I didn’t know what to say; I just wanted to laugh at the whole thing. “This is ridiculous,” was all I managed to get out. I turned to leave the room.

“Erik,” Peter Mälarstedt called after me, “consider this a good opportunity.”

I stopped. “What?”

“To— ah— reconsider the trajectory of your work.”

I wheeled to face him. “Peter, do you believe all that crap about implanting false memories?”

Annika slammed the palm of her hand down on the table. “Erik, enough. That’s not the important thing. The important thing is to follow the rules. Take a leave of absence from your work with hypnosis, try to regard it as an offer of reconciliation. You can continue with your research, you can work in peace and quiet, but you will not practise hypnosis therapy while we are conducting our investigation.”

“I can’t admit to something that isn’t true.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Well, that’s what it sounds like. If I request a leave of absence, it looks as if I’m making an admission.”

“Tell me you’ll request a leave of absence,” she insisted stiffly.

“This is fucking idiotic,” I said with a laugh, and left the room.

It was late in the afternoon. The sun was sparkling in the puddles after a brief shower, and the smell of the forest— wet earth and rotten roots— rose up from the ground as I ran along the track around the lake, pondering Lydia’s actions. I was certain she had been speaking the truth under hypnosis— but which truth had she actually told me? Presumably she was describing a real concrete memory, but she had placed the memory in the wrong time. During hypnosis it is even more obvious that the past is not past, I reminded myself.

I filled my lungs with the fresh, cold spring air and sprinted the last stretch home through the forest. When I got to our street I saw a big black car parked in front of our drive, with two men leaning against the bonnet, waiting. One of them was checking his reflection in the shiny paintwork as he smoked a cigarette. The other was taking pictures of our house. They hadn’t seen me yet. I slowed down and was just wondering whether to turn around when they spotted me. The man with the cigarette quickly stubbed it out with his foot, while the other immediately turned the camera on me. I was still out of breath as I approached them.

“Erik Maria Bark?” asked the man who had been smoking.

“What do you want?”

“We’re from the press,
Expressen
.”

“The press?”

“Yes. We’d like to ask you a few questions about one of your patients.” I shook my head and waved a hand. “I can’t discuss my patients.”

“Right.”

The man’s gaze slid over my flushed face, my black track-suit top, my bulky trousers, and my woolly hat. I heard the photographer behind him cough. A bird darted through the air above us, its body describing a perfect arc, reflected in the roof of the car. Above the forest, the sky was thickening and darkening. It looked like more rain.

“There’s an interview with your patient in tomorrow’s paper. She makes some pretty serious accusations against you,” said the journalist.

I met his gaze. He had a fairly sympathetic face: middle-aged, running slightly to fat.

“This is your chance to respond,” he said quietly.

The lights weren’t on in our house. No doubt Simone was still at the gallery. Benjamin was at preschool.

“Otherwise her version will be printed with no contradiction from you,” the man said frankly.

“I would never dream of discussing a patient,” I repeated slowly. I walked up the drive past the two men, unlocked the door, went inside and stood in the hall, and listened to them drive away.

The telephone rang at seven-thirty the following morning. It was Annika Lorentzon. “Erik,” she said, sounding strained. “Have you seen the paper?”

Simone sat up in bed beside me, her expression anxious; I waved dismissively and moved into the hall.

“If this is about Lydia’s accusations, I’m sure everybody realizes they’re just lies.”

“No,” she said sharply. “Everybody doesn’t realize that at all. After reading this story, many people will see her as a weak, defenceless, vulnerable person, who has been used by a particularly manipulative doctor toward his own selfish ends. The man she trusted most of all, the man in whom she confided, has betrayed and exploited her. That’s what’s in the paper.”

I could hear her breathing heavily at the other end of the line. She sounded hoarse and tired. “This compromises everything we do, as I’m sure you understand.”

“I’ll write a response,” I said curtly.

“That won’t be enough, Erik.” She paused briefly, then said tone-lessly, “She’s intending to sue.”

I snorted. “She’ll never win.”

“You still don’t understand how serious this is, do you?”

“So what is she saying?”

“I suggest you go out and buy a paper. Then I think you ought to sit down and think about your response. The board would like to see you at four o’clock this afternoon.”

When I saw my face on the front page, I felt as if my heartbeat were slowing down. It was a close-up of me in my woolly hat and black top. My face was flushed, I looked bilious and irritable, and I seemed to be waving my hand dismissively. I bought a copy of the paper and went back home. The centre spread was adorned with a picture of Lydia, curled up with a teddy bear in her arms. The whole article focused on how I, Erik Maria Bark, had used her as a kind of lab rat, persecuting her with assertions of abuse. I had broken her down, taking advantage of her suggestibility during deep hypnosis to manipulate her into believing herself guilty of imaginary crimes. The culmination of my persecution had come when I stormed into her house and challenged her to commit suicide. She had simply wanted to die, she said. She compared herself to a member of a cult and me to a cult leader and asserted that, thanks to me, she had no will of her own. It was only when she was in the hospital that she finally dared to start questioning my treatment of her. According to the reporter, she had wept and explained that she wasn’t interested in any kind of compensation. Money could never make up for what she had been through. All she wanted was that I never be allowed to do this to anyone else.

On the next page was a picture of Marek. The ex-torturer agreed with Lydia, saying that my activities were life-threatening, and that I was obsessed with making up sick ideas to which my patients were then forced to confess under hypnosis.

Farther down the page, a so-called “expert” furnished a comment— I’d never heard of the man— but here he was denigrating the whole of my research, equating hypnosis with a séance and hinting that I probably drugged my patients in order to get them to do what I wanted.

There was an empty silence inside my head. I sat at the kitchen table until the door opened and Simone walked in. When she had read the paper, her face was ashen.

“What’s happening?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said. My mouth was completely dry.

I sat there staring into empty space, thinking the unthinkable. What if my theories were wrong? What if hypnosis
didn’t
work on deeply traumatized individuals? What if it was true that my desire to find patterns had influenced their memories? I didn’t believe it was possible for Lydia to see a child that didn’t exist while she was under hypnosis. I had been convinced that she was describing a genuine memory, but now I was beginning to doubt myself.

It was a strange experience, walking the short distance through the lobby to the lift up to Annika Lorentzon’s office. For years, the place had been like a second home to me, but now none of the staff wanted to look me in the eye. When I passed people I knew and associated with, they simply looked stressed and strained, turned away, and hurried off.

Even the smell in the lift was strange. It smelled of rotten flowers, and it made me think of rain, farewells, funerals.

As I walked out of the lift, Maja Swartling slipped quickly past, ignoring me. Rainer Milch was waiting for me in the doorway of Annika’s office. He moved aside and I went in and said hello.