The Core of the Sun (3 page)

MODERN DICTIONARY ENTRY

eloi
— A popular unofficial vernacular word, first entering the language in the 1940s, for what is now properly called a
femiwoman
. Refers to the sub-race of females who are active on the reproductive market and are distinguished by their dedication to the overall advancement of the male sex. The word has its roots in the works of
H. G. Wells
, an author who predicted that humanity would be evolutionarily divided into distinct sub-races, some dedicated to serving the social structure and others meant to enjoy those services.
Plural:
elois
. Examples:
“A typical eloi has light hair and a round head.” “Elois can legally reproduce.”

Manna,

I remember.

My sister of a different race. My fair-haired sister. My sweet-natured sister.

Round head covered in platinum curls, cute little turned-up nose, narrow shoulders, full breasts, curving waist. Tush like a peach.

When we were children we played children's games. “Aa,” I said, when the block had a letter for that sound on it. “Aa-aa,” you said, rocking the block in your arms, lifting it gently to your breast.

I plucked the comb like an instrument; you drew it through your hair with flirty strokes. I painted a sunset with red water­colors; you smeared vermilion on your lips. I put the pail on my head as a helmet; you took it from me to make a play salad in. For me a pen was a conductor's baton; you used it to poke a disobedient doll and then blew on the spot to make the pain go away.

Oh, my sweet, gentle sister. Your heart was made of chocolate, you hands were full of comfort, your brain was full of pink fluff.

Do you remember our games?

“I'm the princess.”

“I'm the shepherd girl.”

“The prince comes and proposes to the princess.”

“The shepherd girl puts on a disguise and carves a sword for herself out of stone. She tames a wolf and rides it into battle and conquers the kingdom and . . .”

Then you burst into tears.

“I'm afraid of wolves.”

“There isn't any wolf. Not really. It's just a story I made up.”

“Good. I'm the princess.”

“You were already the princess.”

“Now the princess is going to the ball and she is the most beautiful one of all. And everyone wants to marry her.”

“Didn't the prince already propose?”

“Another prince comes, and he's handsomer and richer.”

“The shepherd girl comes to the ball with her stone sword in her hand. And she challenges the prince to a battle for the kingdom!”

“I don't like your sword.”

“It's my turn to make it up.”

“I don't want to have a sword. It's not real. It's just a story you made up.”

“Your prince isn't real, either.”

“Grandma Aulikki. Vanna's teasing me!”

You ran sniffling to your grandmother's arms, and Aulikki looked at me over your flaxen hair, and she smelled angry and sad at the same time. She comforted you, my sweet sister, stroked your hair, hugged you, kissed you, let you go, and gave me a pointed look. I knew what that look meant. It wasn't your fault that we were different.

You came back to me and the smile returned to your face, and it made me want to be the handsome prince and bring a jeweled gown to the princess as a present.

We played and we played and we danced a wedding waltz. You were the princess and I was the prince, and the evening sun came through the window and lit up your hair as if it were made of golden fire.

I miss you so much.

Vanna
(
Vera
)

VANNA/VERA

October 2016

The need for a fix is gnawing at my insides like a ferret. The door to the Cellar is open all the time, ready to swallow me up in its maw. After the incident at the cemetery the flow of the stuff has practically dried up completely.

We've heard about a lot of arrests. Even shots being fired.

Jare finds something every now and then—a jar of sambal oelek or some vindaloo paste—but all the real stuff is off-limits. You can't open the jars—they have to be sold whole; you can't take a cut for yourself.

It won't kill me.

But the Cellar's sucking blackness is seeping out, so greedy that I can hear its rustling, night-colored breath.

The Cellar was created by an explosion.

A blazing hot, violent nuclear charge that instantaneously melted a chamber in the gray matter of my head. It left a smooth-walled hollow, a ghostly, echoing cave with a darkness deeper than the space between the stars.

The darkness of the Cellar lives because it gets its strength from death. The Cellar is where my sister's negation lives, wrapped in a swirl of ink and pitch and coal and soot and the stifling scent of earth.

The door to the Cellar is in the back of my head.

Sometimes the door to the Cellar is made of solid steel with clunking metal bolts and rusty, creaking hinges—heavy. Sometimes it's made of rotten wood, sometimes gauze that flutters in the wind. Sometimes there's no door at all, and the ice-cold wind blows out of it.

That wind brings with it a fist, wet with black fog, a crushing grip that clenches around my mind like the hand of a sadistic child, a cruel child who wants to hear the tortured squeak of a rubber toy when it's squeezed again and again.

At the bottom of the Cellar, dark, ominous water splashes. It seeps out of openings the size of molecules through walls sealed with nuclear fire. I can bear the black wind, the merciless mist, but when the deep water starts to lap at the threshold of the Cellar and threatens to flood the rooms in my head, I know how close I am to drowning. The water's pitch-black surface shining like molten metal rises, and soon a thin, horrible snake of liquid will trickle over the threshold.

I have only one way, one bag of sand to stave off the flood, one method of trying to shove that steel door closed, to slap temporary planks on the rotting wood.

Teach me, chile, and I shall Learn.

Take me, chile, and I shall Escape.

Focus my eyes, chile, and I shall See.

Consume more chiles.

I feel no pain, for the chile is my teacher.

I feel no pain, for the chile takes me beyond myself.

I feel no pain, for the chile gives me sight.

Dear sister!

Just today I felt a vast longing for you.

I'm sure you have no mental image of Spain, because you were so little then. I don't remember much, either, but I do remember that one day our mother and father didn't come home anymore, and everything was confusion and commotion and sadness. A drunken truck driver was driving too fast at an intersection and crushed our parents' car. Things like that can happen only in hedonistic countries. Because we didn't have any relatives in Spain, we were sent to Finland. I was four years old then. You were just a sweet little two-year-old.

I remember how you shrank from Neulapää on that first day, the new smells and strange furniture, the wrong kind of light, the trees in the yard that were too big. You were forlorn and teary-eyed and I tried to comfort you, even though I was worn out from homesickness and the hard journey and everything that was scary and new. It wasn't a simple thing to move from a suburb of Madrid to a little farm in the middle of the Finnish woods.

Aulikki was probably nearly seventy then. She was our only close relative. We had almost no relatives because our father had been an illegitimate child. Aulikki had never married. Maybe our father's father was a minus man or some other shady type. That would explain a lot. I never dared to ask Aulikki about it.

Many other things about Aulikki dawned on me only later. They probably never occurred to you. Aulikki was sent to Sweden as a war refugee in the 1940s, and that was why she was away from Finland when the final sex decree was made law. Her biological parents both became seriously ill when she was about twenty. Her father had kidney disease, her mother cancer. They were both about to die, because the Health Authority said that their illness came from unwholesome, wrong ways of living, so they weren't allowed any treatment by the state. They didn't have any money for a private doctor, and Aulikki returned to Finland in 1954 to help them. I don't understand why she came back. They were both going to die anyway.

But she did come back. She had Swedish citizenship in addition to her Finnish citizenship, so when she decided to stay and take care of Neulapää, she was living under a strange sort of diplomatic immunity that reserved her full citizenship rights. She was even allowed to act as an employer. That's why she was able to hire a young masco graduate from the agricultural school every summer.

Aulikki harvested enough from the vegetable garden to keep her own cellar full and also sell potatoes and other vegetables to a local farmer, who in turn sold them, along with his own berries and apples, at the Tammela Market. We got by as well as we could, and Aulikki got some state child-care money and did sewing in the winter for extra income.

The strongest of all my early Neulapää memories is from when we first got there. We had already started to get used to our new home, to the too-bright nights and the strange sounds of nature. We were playing in the yard when Aulikki came and led us over to the storage shed, and as we got near it she put her finger to her lips. She gestured for us to crouch down and peek under the shed. How delighted we were when we saw a pair of bright, startled eyes staring back at us. A stray cat had had kittens under the shed. Aulikki told us that she'd seen the homeless cat wandering around the edges of the property and thought that it would be good to keep the voles in check, but she hadn't realized it was going to have kittens. The mother cat had managed to keep the litter a secret, but now the kittens were opening their eyes and learning to walk, and Aulikki had found them when she heard a scratching sound and a faint mewing from under the building. The mother cat was away, probably out hunting. One of the kittens stumbled toward us, curious. Its downy fur and clumsy walk, its trembling little tail stuck straight up like an antenna, and its round little head with its almost too-big ears and eyes—its whole soft and delicate and yet intensely energetic presence—flooded me with a deep, sweet anguish.

Later when I looked at you or remembered you, I would feel a splash of that same feeling.

Aulikki promised that we could keep one of the kittens, but just a couple of days after we found them, the litter and the mother cat disappeared. Aulikki said the mother must have become nervous after the nest was discovered and moved the kittens someplace else.

Of course when I got a little older I understood that there were also a lot of foxes in the woods at Neulapää.

Another very powerful early memory is from almost right after we got to Finland, when we had to have our final gender specified. I was already very late because they didn't have rules like that in Spain, of course. The Health Authority sent two child welfare workers to test us.

First they examined our appearance. Round heads, small noses, large eyes, light hair—it all seemed clear. They took photos of us. Then they started the tests.

They showed us pairs of pictures. There would be a tractor and a baby, or an airplane and a flower, or a hammer and a kettle, and we were supposed to choose which picture we liked better. I remember very well how you grabbed the picture of the baby and made your voice even more soft and childish than it really was. “Ooh, ooh, baby, ooh,” you babbled. You glanced at me now and then, and I chose the baby, too, to encourage you. “Pretty baby, nice baby,” I cooed, more to you than to the social worker. I thought the tests must be to find out if we were good sisters. Maybe something bad would happen if we were too different, if we didn't agree. So I chose some pictures even before you did, the ones I thought you would like better. I didn't know at the time how pivotal this would be.

Then the social workers took some toys out of a big suitcase. There was a wooden fire truck painted shiny red that I loved at first sight. There was a doll the size of a real baby dressed in pink. There was a stuffed cat, and they put a tin train engine down next to it. There were blocks with letters and numbers on them and sparkly stickers with pictures of hearts and smiling wedding couples. There was a wonderful wooden wrench and a pretty little ladle decorated with roses. A conductor's hat and a frilly apron. Little bright-colored rectangles that you could connect by pressing them together—the social worker showed us how to do it. You could build anything you wanted out of them, castles and cranes and airplanes.

They told us to choose the toys we liked. You immediately toddled over and hugged the cat—I'm sure your memory of the fluffy, adorable creature toddling out from under the shed was still quite fresh—and then you ran over with the cat in your pudgy little hand and pushed it into the arms of the baby doll and said happily that the baby liked the kitty. I was entranced with the fire truck, and I couldn't help running over to it first and picking it up to look at it. Then I noticed the social workers' response: as if a whiff of tar or smoke had drifted in on the air, like a distant forest fire somewhere off in the woods.

Something wasn't
right.

I let go of the fire truck and it fell to the floor with a thud. I even kicked it a little, as if I'd just realized that, in spite of its bright color, it was a cold, dull thing. The smoky smell cleared up immediately and started to change into something more like the smell of a warming sauna, pine soap and dried birch whisks. I noticed that the nice smell they were exuding grew stronger and lingered when I rejected the tools and trucks and put on the apron and picked up the ladle. I built a circle of letter blocks and threw the little plastic bricks in the middle and mixed them around with the ladle and said I was making oatmeal. I scooped up a ladleful of bricks and offered them to the doll you were holding and told her to be good and eat her porridge.

I saw how one social worker looked at the other one and there was a hint of metal in the air. One of them gathered up all the dolls and stuffed toys—you protested so loudly!—and left the fire truck and the wooden wrench and the bricks and the conductor's hat.

You immediately knew what to do. You were a little copycat, and you put the bricks in the conductor's hat with your chubby hands and started mixing them with the wrench. I was left with the fire truck. It had a folding ladder and real wheels that rolled. I picked it up again.

Grandma Aulikki took a little breath and I could smell something faint, sharp like lemon juice. The social workers' eyes were cold, waiting.

Then I knew what to do.

I pulled the fire truck to my breast and rocked it. I said, “Aa-aa.”

I saw the looks on the social workers' faces and my grandmother's face, and there were two completely different kinds of smells in the air: a sweet, almost overripe smell around the social workers, and a smell from my grandmother like the freshness of laundry dried in the sun.

That was the first time I heard someone use the word “femiwoman.” The other social worker used the word “eloi,” but they were both talking about us.

The social workers didn't give us another glance as they wrote on their papers. They told Aulikki that we would need new names, and that for simplicity's sake they would use the same first letters. I'm sure you don't even remember that you were once Mira and I was Vera. After that we were Manna and Vanna.

The new smell around our grandmother got stronger, like the cleaning fluid you use to scrub the bathroom, but she nodded and smiled and murmured her agreement that the names suited us perfectly.

The social workers gathered up the toys and I was tense, wonder­ing if they would remember the little tin train engine, which had rolled out of sight under the table. They did, and I was terribly disappointed, so disappointed that I was afraid they would notice the dark, earthy smell coming from me.

After that Aulikki called us Vanna and Manna. That same day I named your dolls Vera and Mira, to at least keep our real names that way.

Aulikki didn't care in the least about how she was supposed to raise elois, but I realized that only much later. When I turned seven and was supposed to go to school, she asked for permission to homeschool me. It was a long way from Neulapää to the nearest school, she didn't have a car, and the state school transport would have been an extra expense to society because there were no other houses in the area with school-age children. So she had no trouble getting permission.

Just before the education inspectors came to Neulapää, Aulikki asked me to change out of my overalls and sweater into a dress and patent-leather shoes. She took my erector set and books and wooden train set into the shed and hid them behind the firewood. I was old enough by then that she didn't hide the seriousness of the situation. She told me to sit at the kitchen table and looked me in the eye.

I remember every word of that conversation. “Vanna, there's something I have to ask you to do. I want you to not tell the nice men that you know how to read and count. When they come here I want you to play house with Manna and be polite and smile and be very good and agreeable. Copy everything Manna does.”

“Why?”

She started to laugh. The pear smell of amusement mixed with the lemon of worry. “Never, ever ask ‘why' when they're around. You see, those men don't like little girls who are too smart and curious. Remember the story about the feisty shepherd girl who was really a princess under her ragged clothes?”

“I remember.”