Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (67 page)

Had it been a new neighborhood, the sight wouldn’t have surprised me. I hadn’t wandered much outside of my familiar territory for the past few years, and many new neighborhoods had been built during that time.

But the buildings I saw from the tram were old. As far as I could tell, even the newest ones were from the 1920s. There were deteriorating low wooden houses here and there along the streets. I had thought that there were only a couple of buildings like that left in the city, preserved as museums. Sheets were hung out to dry in the yards of the wooden houses. The bare branches of overgrown lilacs protruded through picket fences. I couldn’t remember ever having seen such yards or such a neighborhood.

“Excuse me,” I asked the elderly lady sitting next to me, “where is this tram going?”

“Back to the railway station,” she said.

“But the nine hasn’t come this way before,” I said.

She gave me a funny look.

“It has as long as I can remember.”

“Excuse me,” I said again, got up, and hopped out at the next stop. I was curious. I had to be somewhere east of the city center. I tried to look for the shore, but it was nowhere in sight. The streets were lined with small stores, grocers, and old-fashioned general goods stores.

For some reason, my gaze was drawn to the window of one of the stores. I saw a fruit basket and a box of Turkish delights that I had a sudden craving for. All of my attention was focused on that box. I felt as if, long ago, in my childhood, a visiting relative had given me just such a box of candy. My surroundings faded from sight, as if I had suddenly developed tunnel vision. Greed moved me towards the door to the store. I took out a largish bill from my wallet. I was sure it would be enough.

I stepped into the store, which had a vintage coffee advertisement on the wall.

“I’d like to buy that box in the window there,” I said to the saleswoman. “How much does it cost?”

“Seven marks,” she said, an old, dry woman with dozens of long pins in her hair.

I gave the woman my only bill. She turned it in her hands with a confused look. Then she brought it to her nose and sniffed it. Eventually she leveled a stern gaze on me.

“What kind of money is this then?” the woman asked.

“What do you mean what kind of money,” I asked, confused. “It’s a fifty, you can see that.”

She didn’t respond. Her eyes moved from me to the bill and back again. I began to lose my temper.

“It’s legal tender, not a forgery.”

“Not in this country it isn’t,” she said. “Don’t you have any real money?”

“Are you joking?” I asked, flustered. I was getting hot under the collar, and I started to sweat. “It’s a fifty, you must be able to see that, and you said the box is just seven marks. So give me forty-three marks change.”

“You can keep your money,” she said, “and I’ll keep the candy. Or do you want me to call the police?”

“What on earth is going on?” I asked in a panic. I wasn’t just asking the woman, but myself as well.

She didn’t answer, just stared at me even more sternly than before and held out my bill between her thumb and forefinger as if it were contaminated.

I felt a twinge of fear. I could see that she was serious. But what had I done wrong?

I snatched my bill from her hand, completely perplexed, and left the store. I walked quickly, hardly looking to either side, distressed by what had just happened and almost expecting someone to be following me.

I was walking briskly, but the view to my side, which I only sensed faintly, seemed to change even more quickly, as if I were sitting in a speeding car. The next time I looked around me, I recognized the neighborhood and my city. I began to regain my composure.

At that moment I was approached by a bag lady, a habitual beggar. She is a fixture in the city. Threadbare, diminutive, and of an ethnic minority, she spends her days near the railway station and in front of downtown restaurants. For some reason, I find her intensely repulsive, and never give her any money.

Now she was approaching me with money in her hand. She had a bill in her hand, and wasn’t asking me for anything. Just the opposite: she was trying to get me to take it! How strange and upside down! Wrong, completely wrong. Was she mocking me, or did she really think I needed the proceeds from her begging? Did I look so bad already?

Shouldn’t I have at least thanked her for the offer? I didn’t. I stepped aside quickly and irritably, raised my hand defensively, and I know my face was twisted by a grimace.

It wasn’t until I had gotten past her that I realized that the incident was a kind of mirror of what had just happened in that strange store.

I couldn’t get the woman or the phony money out of my head until, at the market square, a flock of pigeons rushed past me like a fountain, spreading into the air like the light gray seeds of a dandelion.

Those despised and persecuted birds, called flying rats by some, are masters of vertical flight. I admire them. The streets are like rock-hemmed canyons to them. The flare of movement, the beating of wings against smoke and air . . .

My thoughts rose with the pigeons to land on the eaves, antennas, chimneys, window ledges. There I left them, among the golden rows of lit windows.

A Finger

Raikka talks so much and so well about so many subjects and he isn’t even out of school yet! The boy knows so much: superclusters and the structure of the universe, which is apparently filled with holes like Swiss cheese, the gradual increase of Uranus’s apparent magnitude, infrared and asymmetrical galaxies. He can give entire lectures on strange radio pulses and vast bubbles, gamma ray bursts, the Omega Point, supermassive stars, and the sudden, sporadic cessation of radiation.

Raikka has already written several articles for
The New Anomalist
that have gotten a great deal of attention. He sounds like a poet when he talks about the pale blue glow of distant galaxies and the existence of vast vacuums. When the expansion of the universe accelerates, he said once, when all the heavenly bodies grow ever more distant ever more quickly, the universe will become ever emptier, colder, darker. It didn’t seem to bother him, though.

He is an amateur of the highest order.

On the second day, he started talking about elementary particles. How taus breeze through the Earth lighter than any other particles, how they spill through us as if we were nothing.

“They have no charge,” he said. “They weigh—if that verb can be used at all about them—only a millionth of the mass of an electron. Somewhere along their journey, they become leptons, which vanish in an instant.

“Try to think of a being that sees differently to us, say, with radio waves,” Raikka once said. “That being would see the metal structures of buildings, but not the masonry, wood, or glass. It wouldn’t see us, either, except for maybe our fillings. To a creature like that, we would be just pieces of metal floating in mid air.

“Did you know that dark matter is invisible, but most of the universe is made of it?” He asked me. “It could be the gravity of other, parallel universes. Light particles can’t travel from one dimension to another. But gravity permeates everything.”

That winter I felt gravity more clearly than ever before. One morning, as I sat at my desk in the office, depressed, with a jug of water in front of me, Raikka walked in. He asked for more time to finish the article about hole teleportation he was working on. His left middle finger was wrapped in gauze, and the boy looked dispirited and pale.

“Were you in an accident? What happened to your finger?”

“Nothing really. The tip was amputated, that’s all,” Raikka said.

“That sounds pretty bad! Lucky it was the left hand,” I said to comfort him. “Does it ache? What happened?”

“Nothing serious,” the boy said. “I stopped by the amputation parlor yesterday.”

“Parlor?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it. It didn’t cost much. It aches a little, but it’ll be good as new soon. Well, shorter, obviously.”

“I’m not following you,” I said. “Don’t tell me . . . dear God, the amputation was voluntary? You
paid
to have it done?”

“Well, it’s not like professionals work for free. It’s like you’ve never heard of this before. Everyone is getting it done these days.”

“Everyone! I certainly haven’t ever heard of such a thing before. Do you mean to tell me that there was nothing wrong with your finger?”

“Don’t you get it? What would be wrong with it? It was a completely normal finger.”

“But what was done to it isn’t normal,” I managed to say. “I’m reporting this. This is a matter for the police, a crime. Professionals do this, you say? Criminals, I call them!”

“They have all the licenses. It’s a perfectly clean place.”

I fell silent from shock and stared at his bandaged stump. Then I lost my temper.

“Get out,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything so perverse. And here I thought I knew everything there is to know about anomalies. This entire city is just one big anomaly. Amputation parlors! Drinking urine on stage! People setting themselves on fire!”

“What are you yelling for?” Raikka said. He had begun to look miserable as well. “I don’t get it—it’s not like it was your middle finger. And the tip isn’t even necessary. You can’t do anything much with your left middle finger anyway,” he argued.

“Oh no? I’ll show you what you can do with it!”

And I did.

“See? This is a human middle finger extended to its full length, fingernail and all. And that’s how it’s going to stay until it gets buried with the rest of me.”

Raikka ran off. I think I had offended him to the core. He was still practically just a child. And how his amputated finger must have ached!

That ache lodged itself in my chest. It was so bad that I had to lie down on the mat for a while. It wasn’t healthy to get so worked up. I was also sad that
The New Anomalist
had probably lost a good contributor. I doubted that Raikka would write any more articles for us on cosmology or the latest trends in alternative physics.

I wanted to say to him, “How could you, who knows everything there is to know about the gradual increase of Uranus’s apparent magnitude, infrared and asymmetrical galaxies, who talks like a poet about the pale blue glow of distant galaxies and the vastness of vacuums, how could you of all people go and have the end of your left middle finger removed?”

Would he answer, “So that people wouldn’t think I’m so weird . . . ”?

Raikka was gone, but I remembered the lonely taus he had told me about, the taus that wander through our city, through amputation parlors and kinky parties and innovation centers at nearly the speed of light, hardly affecting anything, probably hardly affected by anything.

Trillions of them flow through our muscles and fat, our blood and our hard skulls. Then nothing meets nothingness. Nothing happens, and yet does happen. Nothing exists, and yet, something does.

The Moving Image of Eternity

“Everything that is large was once small. Even the universe was once small, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence,” he said. “But that was before time and space. On the other hand, how can anything be called small, if there’s nothing larger than it, if there’s no one to see the smallness? And who could possibly be outside the universe?”

“Some people would say God,” I said.

“But would anything be large or small to God? Actually, the universe was not a point, but a hole, it was a non-thing. When it stopped being a non-thing and became a thing, time can be said to have been born. Time, a shadow that eternity throws on the wall of our cave. Plato, you remember, ‘the moving image of eternity’ . . . ”

He was an expert on time. I called him the Timely Man. There was once a menswear store called that in this city, at the beginning of time . . .

Where did I read this sentence? “We live in the hour all free of the hours gone by.” It’s rarely true, because we so rarely live in the moment: more often we live in our time.

When I was a child, when there was still a store called Timely Man in the city, I would experiment with time. I wanted to know how long the present lasts and what the present really is. I came to the conclusion that it can never last longer than a second or two. I tried so hard to hold on to the present with my eyes and ears, with all my attention, but before I realized, it had already slipped into the past.

It is impossible for us to hold back the flow of time, to be really present, to stretch out the moment without it tearing. Something always happens to break our concentration and push us into the uproar of the events around us.

I dress myself in time first thing in the morning—I wrap a watch around my wrist. Even while sleeping I’m troubled by the bustle of life. But that winter, I began forgetting appointments and meetings. I was supposed to go listen to the Timely Man’s lecture at the Institute of Spiritual Growth and meet him afterwards. But even though I had marked the time and place in my calendar and though I thought I’d checked my schedule, I forgot the appointment. There were days when I couldn’t remember what season it was without checking the newspaper.

And so, the Timely Man waited for me that day in the Institute’s café. I didn’t remember the appointment until the Marquis asked me how the interview had gone, and then I was alarmed.

“It’s a pity you made him wait for nothing, a busy scholar. What’s the matter with you?” the Marquis asked. “You seem so absent-minded and tired these days. Has your asthma gotten worse?”

“No no, just the opposite, actually,” I said. “It’s better now. I’m trying a new remedy, you know, herbal. But it does make me drowsy sometimes.”

I felt my lips sticking together, and took a long sip from my water bottle. The Marquis stared at me suspiciously.

“I think you’ve lost weight. You should get yourself looked at,” he said. “By the way, have you started wearing perfume? There’s a strange smell in the office.”

“No, I don’t wear any,” I said, embarrassed. I realized I was carrying around the stench of datura.

The next day, the Marquis brought the Timely Man with him to the office after treating him to lunch at The Foxhole. I’d do the interview at the office while the Marquis took off again. I didn’t have the courage to ask how lunch had been—I just hoped that the Timely Man considered the establishment picturesque. He looked with polite interest at the products in the parastore that the Marquis forced me to show him. I was happy that the Timely Man didn’t go near enough the bookshelf to set off the rock ’n’ roll fish.