LIKE A magnificent ship, Gisela Obermann’s balcony seemed to be drifting through the air. From the ground below them came the smell of pine needles, moist grass, and glacial-melt. The sky was overcast and veils of cloud glided at low altitude through the valley.
Gisela Obermann tucked the blanket more tightly around him, then sat down in the adjacent recliner and asked, “What do you actually know about Himmelstal, Daniel?”
“It’s a luxury clinic in a beautiful but dangerous setting. The staff seem crazier than the patients. But the native inhabitants of the valley are craziest of all. And there’s practically no communication with the outside world. Every time I try to get away from here, I get yanked back by some invisible rubber band. That’s pretty much all I know.”
He buried his chin in the blanket the doctor had wrapped around him. It had a faint smell of her own perfume.
It wasn’t really cold, but the thermostat controlling his body temperature seemed rather erratic, and without warning an icy chill could rise up from the injured parts of his leg and upper arm and spread through his body with a shiver. The next moment the cold could be replaced by heat. He had been told that this was good, a sign that the nerves were undamaged.
“So you don’t know anything. This place must seem extremely odd to you.”
Daniel let out a bitter little laugh.
“To put it mildly.”
“It’s occurred to me that I’m going to have to regard you as a new arrival here in Himmelstal. And tell you all the things I usually tell new arrivals.”
Gisela Obermann sat herself more comfortably in the recliner.
“I should probably take it from the start. It takes a while to explain.”
Daniel shrugged his shoulders under the blanket.
“I’ve been here almost two weeks. I can stay a little bit longer. Take as long as you like.”
“Okay. You know what psychopathic behavior is, don’t you?”
“Sure, how do you mean? A psychopath is a person with no conscience. An evil person.”
“That last phrase isn’t a term used by professionals, obviously. But of course by definition evil is precisely the act of causing innocent people to suffer without feeling any guilt. But if we are to call a person evil, then this person has to have the chance to make a choice. And the person making the choice has to know what they are choosing between, naturally. But a psychopath doesn’t know the difference between good and evil.”
Daniel protested.
“I’m sure they do.”
“Intellectually, maybe. They know that lies, theft, and violence are evil, in the same way that someone color-blind knows that tomatoes, blood, and sunsets are red. But just as a color-blind person will never experience with his or her own senses what we mean when we say ‘red,’ a psychopath will never experience what we mean when we say something is ‘evil.’ Concepts such as good and evil, love and guilt are words without any meaning. It’s a definite lack, but the psychopath him or herself doesn’t suffer from it. It’s the world around them that suffers. The worst violent crimes are committed by psychopaths—”
“Forgive me,” Daniel interrupted, “but where are you going with this? Which psychopath are you talking about here?”
Gisela Obermann looked at him in surprise and seemed close to laughter. She looked down at her lap for a few seconds, apparently composing herself, then raised a perfectly serious face to him.
“You’ll soon understand, Daniel. Just be patient. So, as I was saying, the worst violent crimes are committed by psychopaths. People who commit crimes like that are obviously given very severe punishments. But…” She held a finger in the air and raised her eyebrows. “What if the people committing these crimes have a small medical abnormality that makes their brains different from ours? What if their brains lack the capacity for empathy? Is it then right to demand that they show empathy and punish them because they can’t? Isn’t that just as wrong as demanding that a paralyzed stroke victim should walk? Or that someone with learning disabilities should solve complex logic puzzles? They simply can’t. They don’t have the brain that’s required to do it.”
“Do you have any scientific evidence for this, or is this something you’ve worked out entirely on your own?” Daniel asked.
“A bit of both. We’ve got loads of research evidence showing that psychopaths’ brains are different from other people’s, but not enough for us to understand the full extent of the difference. We might be able to solve the mystery next year, or in ten years’ time. Or maybe never. But what is obvious is that psychopaths’ brains demonstrate clear abnormalities. There are very definite differences in their frontal lobes and amygdalas, unusual brain waves in response to emotional stimuli, an overactive dopamine system, and a number of other things. The differences are physiological and measurable. If these people act the way they do as the result of a physical handicap, can it be right to punish them, Daniel? Locking them up in terrible prisons or, as in some countries, executing them?”
“I’m against capital punishment,” Daniel said, scratching his chin.
He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his beard was starting to grow again. He couldn’t help feeling it. It was like a source of security in the midst of all the confusion. A fuzzy animal that was always with him.
“But obviously society needs to protect itself from dangerous criminals,” he went on. “Whether or not they’ve had unhappy childhoods or have weird brain waves or whatever else. There’s no place for them in society.”
Gisela Obermann seemed satisfied with his answer.
“Exactly. Every attempt at treatment and rehabilitation so far has failed. The reoffending rate among psychopathic criminals is alarmingly high. Psychopathy remains incurable. So: punishment instead of treatment.”
She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a case containing long, narrow cigarillos.
“Unless,” she said, lighting one of them, “there’s a third option.”
“Do you really want some sort of moral, philosophical discussion?” Daniel said. “I think you’re going to have to find someone else for that. I’d rather you just explained what happened to me in that meadow. I’ve never come across an electric fence strong enough to inflict actual physical burns before. What sort of animals are kept there? Elephants?”
Gisela held the case of cigarillos out to Daniel. He shook his head. She leaned back in her chair, took a few thoughtful puffs, and let the smoke sail off over the railing of the balcony.
“A third option,” she repeated, as if she hadn’t heard Daniel’s interruption.
Maybe she was a bit crazy? It wouldn’t be that unusual for a psychiatrist.
“What third option?” Daniel asked.
She carried on smoking in silence for a while, then went on.
“A bit of history: Fourteen years ago there was a big European conference in Turin about psychosocial personality disorders, popularly known as the Psychopath Conference, where a whole load of neurologists, psychiatrists, politicians, and philosophers met up. They shared research findings, held debates, argued. They struggled round the clock with the question of how we can protect ourselves from these extremely dangerous individuals in an ethically defensible way. After rigorous debate, gradually a vision emerged around which they could all unite. Some form of long-term—probably lifelong—isolation was deemed essential, but not in an institution like a prison or a mental hospital. It had to be an environment that offered decent living standards and freedom within certain very limited boundaries. A place where people could live a reasonable life. The place would have to be fairly large, seeing as it would have to house a lot of people, and would constitute its inhabitants’ whole world for the rest of their lives. What they had in mind was a life that was as normal as possible. The inhabitants should have private accommodation, they should have some sort of occupation or other meaningful activity. They should be able to run businesses, study, take exercise, and be given the possibility to develop different skills. In short, an entire little society.”
“That all sounds nice and cozy,” Daniel said.
“That depends on how you look at it. The place would obviously have to be completely isolated from the outside world. Everyone was careful to stress how different it would be from the way similar groups had been treated historically—leper colonies and so on. This wasn’t about shunting people out of sight and forgetting about them. On the contrary, the place would be a center for research and would offer a unique opportunity to study psychopaths under controlled conditions in a relatively normal environment. Not to punish, not to provide care. But to study. Research, observe, measure. With the intention of finally uncovering the mysteries of psychopathy, identifying its causes, and developing an effective treatment. That was the goal, albeit a distant one.”
“A colony of psychopaths,” Daniel said with a little whistle.
Gisela Obermann reached over the balcony railing and tapped the ash from her cigarillo.
“Exactly. The conference delegates all agreed on this. The problem was the location. A lot of people thought an island would be the obvious choice for an experiment of this nature. A working group was set up to investigate the possibility of various islands. But it turned out that the supply of isolated islands with the conditions for a reasonable life was distinctly limited. Any that fitted the requirements had long since been settled and exploited. Those that remained had no drinking water or natural harbor, or were far too rugged to be safely inhabited. Officially the project got no further than that.”
She broke off, turned toward Daniel, and said with sudden suspicion, “Is this really all new to you?”
“Yes, but I don’t really see why you’re telling me all this. What happened to the project?”
“There was a report. Which got lost among all the other reports in the archive.” She reached over the balcony railing again and sent more ash through the air. “That was the official version. But one of the delegates, a neuropsychiatrist, couldn’t let go of the idea. An acquaintance had told him in passing about a motoring trip in the Swiss Alps, where he had ended up in a narrow, depopulated valley full of ramshackle barns and an abandoned clinic building. The psychiatrist—my current boss, Karl Fischer—visited the valley and discovered that it was absolutely perfect for the purpose. He set about getting funding, and a few years later Himmelstal was set up as an isolated area for psychopaths, where they could live and be studied. We don’t have any official status, but the authorities in most European countries are aware of us and send us patients.”
“So I’ve ended up in a clinic for psychopaths?” Daniel let out a raw laugh. “That explains why the villagers prefer to keep their distance. But not everyone in the clinic is a psychopath, right? If I’ve understood it correctly, there are plenty of patients suffering from stress-related problems, exhaustion, depression, that sort of thing.”
She looked at him, then smiled.
“Oh Daniel, I…I’ll come back to that. There’s more to explain first. These zones, for instance, do you know about them?”
“I haven’t managed to avoid finding out about them. Particularly the rather unfriendly Zone Two,” Daniel said bitterly, with a gesture toward his injuries. “But you’re welcome to explain more. It would be fascinating to know why you subject innocent visitors to electrical torture and serious burns.”
“That wasn’t intentional and I’m very sorry you were so badly hurt. You didn’t know about the zones, otherwise you wouldn’t have wandered off into them. You should have been told about the risks. I should have told you about them,” she corrected herself. “I should have been more alert, and I should have paid more attention to what you were saying when we spoke. It was unforgivable of me not to warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
“As I said before, the area had to be completely cut off from the outside world. Obviously there’s a natural geographic boundary already in the form of the steep mountains surrounding the valley. But of course that isn’t enough; more barriers are needed. Walls and fences don’t fit the profile of the project. With Zone Two we’ve created an invisible but very effective barrier. The zone runs in a loop around the entire valley, and the ground is mined with electrically charged cables. The strength of the charge isn’t enough to be fatal, but it does make it impossible for anyone to get through.”
“It was certainly enough for me, at any rate.”
“You fell and were left lying in the live area. The guards were a bit too slow getting to you and didn’t manage to cut the current in time. No one’s supposed to suffer the sort of burns you were subjected to.”
“So what is supposed to happen, then?”
“That people are scared off. Stopped. Conditioned. And rendered unconscious if they carry on farther into the zone. The charge is weakest at the edge and stronger farther in.”
“And Zone One?”
“A warning zone. So that no one wanders into Zone Two by mistake. It runs in a loop between the authorized area and Zone Two. Zone One is full of cameras and motion sensors. If you ignore the warning signs and carry on into Zone Two regardless, you set off an alarm and one of the patrolling security vehicles will arrive shortly afterward to pick you up. With luck before you make it into Zone Two, but if the car’s some distance away when the alarm goes off, then what happened to you can be the result. Then of course there’s a Zone Three as well.”
“Of course,” Daniel said sarcastically. “And a Zone Four, and a Zone Five.”
“No, no. There are only three zones. Or three shells, as we usually say. Himmelstal is like an egg with three shells.”
Gisela drew an oval shape in the air.
“Zone Three is another warning zone. Facing outward, toward the rest of the world. So that no poor mountaineer or lost tourist wanders into Zone Two. Zone Three is a large area surrounding the other zones, and it consists mainly of inaccessible mountains. It’s not particularly likely that anyone would arrive that way, but we’ve still put up signs saying that this is a military area, out of bounds to the general public, and that trespassers risk life-threatening injury.”
“A military area? Why bother to lie?”
“Himmelstal is…well, not exactly a secret project, but not quite public either. We hope to become more open when we can demonstrate more research. If we went public today, we’d have to spend all our time and energy explaining and defending it. We can’t afford that. We have official bodies in every EU country behind us, so there’s nothing inappropriate going on. But for the time being we prefer to work with a certain degree of secrecy.”
Daniel looked at Gisela Obermann. She was sitting upright now, and there was a feverish glow in her eyes. In an odd way she actually looked happy. As if she had just seen salvation. Of all the patients he had seen at the clinic, none of them had radiated as much madness as this woman. Was there any truth in what she was saying, or was it all her imagination? Maybe she was actually a patient who for some bizarre reason had managed to gain access to one of the doctors’ rooms?
He looked out over the valley. Veils of cloud were drifting like smoke in front of the giant figures on the rock face to the south. That was where he had made his nocturnal escape attempt through the pale-green meadows and leafy woodland. That was where the guards had pursued him toward the mountain while their shouts and flashlights cut through the darkness. He knew all of this with absolute certainty. And he knew something else: There had been something terrible in among that vegetation. Something that had made him lose consciousness and had given him these burns.
“These zones…,” he said, huddling up under the blanket.
“Yes?”
“You can get here along the road without any problem.”
“If your arrival is expected, yes. But not otherwise. The road is well guarded where it passes through the three zones. If an unwelcome visitor fails to heed the warning signs and makes it to the final zone, a patrol car will soon be there to warn him off. It happens sometimes with tourists who’ve taken a wrong turn.”
“So what about welcome visitors, then?”
“Anyone who has a legitimate reason to visit Himmelstal—staff, supply trucks, visiting researchers, and relatives—has to inform us of his visit in advance. His approach is picked up in good time by the surveillance cameras, and he’s stopped by the guards before he reaches Zone Two.”
Daniel recalled his arrival in the valley. The dark-blue van. The men in uniform who had searched him with a metal detector and gone through his bag.
“If everything’s okay, the current and alarms along the road are switched off so that the vehicle can enter,” Gisela went on. “As soon as it’s through, the current is switched on again and the ring around the area is complete once more.”
“An electric gate opening and closing,” Daniel said quietly.
Gisela nodded and stubbed her cigarillo out on the railing.
“Exactly. Invisible, but effective. Like the system of zones as a whole: invisible, but effective.”
She took out the little case again and put the remains of the cigarillo in beside the fresh ones.
“Himmelstal’s inhabitants don’t have to look at an ugly fence. But they know that the barrier is there, and they respect it. Quite a few have wandered into Zone One, either by mistake or out of some spirit of adventure, and have been stopped there. A few have gotten through the net and made it into Zone Two. But no one who has ever been in Zone Two goes on to repeat the experience! That’s what’s so remarkable. Here I’m talking about people prone to taking huge risks, people governed by instinct, the way most psychopaths are. People who quickly forget an unpleasant experience and are utterly incapable of learning from the past. But no one has ever entered Zone Two more than once.”
Gisela paused and waited for Daniel’s response. He looked at her questioningly. She leaned forward and went on.
“An electric shock is the sort of thing that goes straight into the body’s memory.”
She was staring intently at Daniel to make sure he was listening. She was so close he could feel her quick, shallow breathing.
“That’s the most effective conditioning there is, as any researcher working with animal testing knows. You can be the most deluded person in the world, rearranging your past as much as you like and therefore making the same mistakes time and time again. But you can’t erase an electric shock. It’s etched into your memory for the rest of your life. And this is exactly what we need, in order to set limits for psychopaths: an unambiguous message that speaks directly to the body, ignoring the manipulative nature of consciousness. An experience that a psychopath can never forget or pretend never happened. It’s the sort of thing that isn’t susceptible to that sort of process. It’s a primitive sort of awareness that embeds itself very deeply.”
“Once bitten, twice shy,” Daniel muttered. “A reliable old pedagogical strategy. I have to confess, it’s an experience I could easily have done without. But every cloud has a silver lining. Since I got that electric shock your attitude toward me has changed. You’re explaining things to me, you’re calling me by my real name. It actually looks as though you’ve finally realized who I am.”
She put her hand on Daniel’s blanket in the place where she thought his hand was.
“I’m sorry I didn’t realize before,” she said, with genuine regret in her voice. “I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t sure.”
“So what was it that convinced you?”
She laughed.
“I just told you. No one ever goes into Zone Two more than once. Max went into Zone Two. Then you did. That proves that you’re two different personalities.”
Her choice of words confused him.
“Max went into Zone Two as well?”
“Sorry, of course you wouldn’t know that. It was sometime last summer. He tried to escape through a culvert by the rapids. He picked a time when the water level was low, sawed through the grating, and crawled in. He must have assumed that the zone was only active above ground. But there’s another grate farther inside the drain. There are several more, actually, but he only reached the first because that one’s electrified. The patrol car happened to be nearby and they got him out immediately.”
Gisela Obermann paused and looked at Daniel with sudden anxiety.
“How does it feel when I tell you this?”
“I’m surprised.” Daniel gulped to clear the lump that had come to his throat. “And this happened last summer? I didn’t know Max had been here that long. I thought…”
“What did you think?”
“Never mind. The important thing is that you finally realize that I’m not Max. It’s been horrible, being mistaken for him the whole time. Being accused of lying and manipulating. For a while I actually thought it was going to drive me mad.”
To his own surprise he found himself letting out a dry, croaky laugh, and at the same moment he felt a tear running down his cheek. He quickly pulled one hand out from under the blanket and wiped it away.
Gisela smiled at him sympathetically.
“You’re much nicer than Max,” she said.
“But Max is your patient. It must be a problem for you that he’s finally managed to escape.”
“That’s nothing you need to worry about. Leave that to us. How are you feeling? Are you tired? Burn injuries take a lot out of the body, even if they are relatively superficial. And what I’ve just told you must be fairly disconcerting. Would you like to go back to your room?”
Daniel shook his head firmly. He had no desire at all to go back to the little room in the care center where he had spent the past few days. He would have liked to believe he was dreaming. But the air was so fresh that every breath felt like drinking a mouthful of cool water. Surely you couldn’t experience air that way in dreams? The burned skin on his leg and shoulder ached and stung. He was more awake than he had ever been before.
Gisela Obermann glanced at her watch.
“It’s high time for lunch. Shall I order some food to be brought up for us?”