Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (72 page)

Faith is Sick

When I think of Faith and Faith’s paws, I remember Kachalov’s dog, the animal of which Esenin wrote:

Come, Jim, give me your paw for luck,

I swear I’ve never seen one like it.

Let’s go, the two of us, and bark

Up the moon when Nature’s silent.

“Faith is sick,” I told the Marquis over the phone. “Come quickly. I think we have to take her to the vet.”

Faith had once again been at the office for the day. She lay on the dragon mat and panted. Her nose was dry and hot, her gentle, heavy paws, which I liked to hold in my hands, twitched. She seemed to have fallen into some kind of stupor, but her eyes were open. They didn’t react to her immediate surroundings, though. Faith seemed to be looking much further away. She also didn’t seem to hear her own name. She was somewhere far away.

I put my hand on her graying warm chest, and my fingertips felt her old heart racing. Your pump is wearing out, I thought. The knowledge was intolerable.

The world was a much better place with old Faith in it than the world would be without her. The dog’s death would bring a big change in my life, as well.

Then I had a thought, cruel and frightening. When I left, I had put a handful of datura seeds on a saucer that was on the second lowest shelf of the bookcase. My innocent intention was to buy cactus soil and try to sprout them, just for their beauty. At least that’s what I had convinced myself of. I went to look. The stupid fish starting playing and singing, enough to drive a person crazy. I wanted it to be silent forever, so I hit it with the Marquis’s ashtray.

There were a few seeds on the saucer, far fewer than I had put there, and they looked damp. Faith could easily reach the second lowest shelf. For some reason she had gone and had a taste of the seeds, probably while I was at the post office. I hadn’t even thought that she might take an interest in them. I cursed my own stupidity and carelessness.

When the Marquis came, we lifted the animal, heavy with sickness and age, onto the back seat of the car and covered her with a blanket. She didn’t seem to understand or care about what was happening to her.

The Marquis was also miserable. I drove and the Marquis sat in the back. Faith’s heavy head rested on his knee and drool dripped onto his pants, but he didn’t care. On the way, I told him about the datura seeds in a rushed and confused manner. He didn’t have a single word of reproach, but that only made me feel all the worse.

The veterinarian’s waiting room was crowded, and we were forced to wait. I was afraid Faith would die in our arms. The pauses between her labored breaths grew longer. The dog’s breathing had become a measure of time.

As the young vet listened to Faith’s heart, I asked whether she had ever heard of datura and did she know what antidotes to use for its toxins. She shook her head—she’d never even heard the plant’s name.

“Of course, you can always call the Poison Information Center,” I said, “but this is urgent. Give her an antidote for scopolamine and hyoscyamine and nicotine. You must have something suitable.”

“Stomach pump first,” she said.

“Do you think she’ll make it?” I asked after the procedure. Faith looked nearly lifeless.

“It’s impossible to say,” she said. “Her heart is quite weak, as you know. We’ll just have to wait and see. She’ll have to stay here overnight for observation. This kind of thing is always touch and go with such an old animal.”

We left in low spirits, without saying much of anything to one another. I think the Marquis was also thinking that we had seen Faith alive for the last time.

The Psychology of a Plant

I called the Ethnobotanist and asked if I could meet him somewhere.

“Do you want me to write another article?” he asked.

“Actually I need some information on a plant. Or, rather, I need to talk to you about it. I already know quite a bit about it myself.”

“Is it urgent?”

“I’d say so.”

“What plant?”

“Devil’s trumpet—datura.”

“Alright, I’ll come over,” he promised.

At the office, with a fresh cup of coffee in front of him, he skipped the small talk and got straight down to business.

“A very interesting plant, in its own way. As you probably already know, it’s a member of the nightshade family, along with potato and tomato plants, tobacco and henbane. In tropical countries and temperate zones, it can spread like a weed. Beautiful, but to be avoided. I haven’t acquainted myself too closely with it, and I don’t intend to. Maybe you have?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I actually find datura a bit distasteful. Its blossoms are too grand and ostentatious if you ask me. For a herbaceous plant, it’s huge. You probably already know that it’s also poisonous, which is to say it has an extraordinarily well developed defense mechanism. A plant like that is full of energy and aggression. Did you know that it’s considered an evil goddess by some?”

“Why?”

“It’s said that the plant has a criminal past, though datura itself can hardly be blamed for that. In the Middle Ages, particularly in Italy, poisoners used it for assassinations. Datura contains a number of poisons. It also contains Vitamin C, but it’s probably wiser to get that from oranges or vitamin pills. The main alkaloid in datura seeds is hyoscyamine, the same substance found in henbane. The seeds also contain scopolamine and atropine, which have been used as arrow poison and eye medicine. The leaves of the plant contain methanol and hyoscine. The stem contains nicotine and pyridine, umbelliferone and tannin and a couple of dozen other toxins. It does have its medicinal uses, though, as do all poisons. It has been grown in secret gardens and used for religious and therapeutic purposes, such as to treat wounds and internal damage. It dries the mucous membranes. Did you know that . . . ”

“ . . . it has even been used to try to cure asthma,” I said.

“Exactly. Its effects are unpredictable, however. It numbs the senses. Don’t keep it in your bedroom at night.”

“Are you serious?” I asked with mock lightness. “Will it come after me and throttle me in my sleep? It’s only a pretty flower.”

“Only! As I recall, we’ve talked before about how plants and their mentalities are underestimated. As a thinking woman, you shouldn’t fall into that trap. I mean it. Datura smells the strongest at night. Its scent alone can give you hallucinations. Datura breaks down the wall between fantasy and reality, making it impossible to tell them apart. I repeat: impossible! The boundary becomes invisible. You could slip onto the wrong side, so to say, completely unawares. If that happens, there’ll be the devil to pay.”

Then I confessed to him that, from time to time, once or twice a week, I drank tea made from datura leaves for my asthma, or crushed a couple of seeds into powder and then sprinkled them on a sandwich.

“Kind of like a condiment,” I said with a forced laugh. “But I’ve stopped using it, really.”

(“Really” meaning that I still, on some nights, out of habit, put a datura leaf in my tea strainer, just one, and mixed the drink with ordinary tea.)

The Ethnobotanist didn’t laugh.

“Unwise,” he said sharply. “Very, very unwise. I wouldn’t have thought you’d stray into something like that. You’re a grown woman for heaven’s sake! I’m warning you! The datura’s toxins accumulate in the body. Your vital organs will begin start to shut down. You’ll begin forgetting things. You might even forget to take your next breath. The seeds and root in particular are pure poison. Eating more than just a few seeds is certain death, and the concentration of poison in them can vary wildly. Eating them could lead to undocumented, long-term consequences. But it’s the root that is the most dangerous. Keep away from it!”

I began to sweat, but he went on with his merciless lecture. “Do you want to lose your awareness of time and place? Do you want to lose your memory? Suffer from mental breakdowns, perhaps chronically?”

“Of course not.”

“Tell me, have you already had . . . experiences?”

I hesitated.

“I suppose you could say so,” I confessed.

He waited for me to give him more details, but I remained silent.

“Can you be more specific? Have you suffered from nausea? Dizziness? A dry mouth and thirst?”

“You’d think you’re a doctor, not a botanist.”

“Have you?”

He waited, unsmiling, for my answer.

“Well, from time to time.”

“I knew it,” he said. “Dilated pupils? Lost time? Confusion of time and place? Oversensitivity to light and sound? Palpitations? Overly vivid dreams? Communication with people who aren’t physically there?”

I remembered my run-in with Emmi D, who was dead, getting lost, my states of agitation and anxiety, my eyesight problems, some conversations that weren’t conversations at all, and I swallowed.

“I knew it,” he said again, unhappy. “No one can use datura without consequences. You’ve gotten off easy, seeing as you can still carry on a conversation with me. Some people get lost completely in other realities and never return to our shared world. You could have died. Promise me—don’t even look at that flower again. Give it away, or better yet, destroy it. It has too much power over you already.

He was right. But I still didn’t want to destroy my beautiful flower.

The Woman Who Was Four

When someone dies in a movie or on stage, the face of the actor—even smeared with fake blood—doesn’t really differ from the faces of the living. Real death, however, shrinks the face and alters the features. In half an hour, they have become nearly unrecognizable. Their owner seems to have abandoned them, and those left behind by the deathbed cannot help but ask, “Where has she gone?”

All cadavers resemble one another. All that was personal and characteristic in the face is stripped away. It is only then that one understands that it is not so much a person’s features that shape their face, but rather it is the person’s experiences and memories that give the face its unique, familiar, and beloved appearance. And those elements the departed take with them when they go.

It was Sylvia, the woman who was four, who led me to these thoughts. No doubt in part because I talked with the woman, if I remember correctly, in the same week I heard about Emmi’s death. I never discovered whether Sylvia was faking it, sick, crazy, eccentric, or “the real thing.”

I suppose she could also be considered one of the Otherkin. Sylvia was middle-aged and formerly employed in middle management. She had been laid off in the recession, gotten divorced, and then fell deeply into debt. If one were to indulge in a bit of amateur psychology, one might suggest that those experiences played a part in her peculiar situation.

“I am not just one,” Sylvia said. “I am a group of people with only one body. You’re about to ask who live in me. You know my name. I, the one speaking now, have always lived in this body. But I’m also home to an older gentleman, a girl I call Fanni, and a horrible brat of a boy, a real nuisance. Sometimes I think there are still more people in me, but they stay so quiet that I haven’t noticed them.”

I remember Saulus saying that people have seven bodies. And now someone was claiming that one body could hold many identities!

“How long have they lived in you?” I asked, incredulous.

“One of them has been there since the start, since childhood. The other two moved in later.”

She talked about herself like she was a house!

“Would it be possible for me to meet these people?” I asked, curious and disbelieving at the same time. I found the thought fascinating that this person could hold all four seasons, four periods of life.

“Why not—maybe soon if you’re interested. Oh, look, it’s raining,” Sylvia said, got out of the armchair, and went to the window. “I have to go. Goodbye.”

But she made no move to leave. She stayed where she stood, silent, before letting out a heavy sigh. I could only see her neck and back, which now seemed hunched. Water trickled hurriedly down the window pane, each drop forking into two or three branches. The stark view outside the window dimmed, the brick wall and dark sky becoming one. The lamp on my desk seemed to lose its intensity, and the woman’s silhouette seemed to dissolve into the gloom.

“It’s just a shower.”

I was startled to hear a deep baritone reverberate in the room. I hadn’t heard anyone come in, and no one had. He had been there the whole time, I just hadn’t realized it. Sylvia turned away from the window, and I saw her face again, except that it was not hers, not Sylvia’s.

“Sylvia left,” a man said. “I’m Antero.”

Features that had a moment ago looked like the flourishing face of a woman in her prime had become lined and masculine. Her body language had changed entirely. I saw a bent figure, an old man, though one dressed in women’s clothing. I couldn’t get a word out.

“You’re shocked, afraid even,” he said. “I apologize, you must not be used to this sort of thing.”

“You could say that,” I admitted in a shaky voice. “Would you like to sit down?”

I was trying to be polite, though I hoped that this person wouldn’t stay long.

“Thank you,” he said, and sat in the same armchair that Sylvia had just gotten up from. “I won’t keep you,” he went on, as if having guessed my thoughts. “But I could say a thing or two to help you get over your shock. This is natural, completely natural!”

I wasn’t convinced by this claim, it sounded utterly ridiculous.

“The body, if I may be so bold, is a gate, a road wide enough for more than one traveler. In fact, I think that folks are naturally multiple, a family of selves, but our upbringing and schooling trim us down like you’d do to the branches of a tree.”

“Well! That’s a new theory to me.”

“Society tries to fix us as one, always the same. But that’s a big lie, and it won’t work even if you try. If you really looked at yourself, you’d know there’s more than one of you as well. You’ve got both sexes and all ages in you. The person you think you are is just a small part of all your selves. Most folks just don’t want to admit it.”