Troll: A Love Story (18 page)

The woman’s getting fretful, feeling side-tracked. “No, that’s not what I mean. Just this, that we won’t recognize the chimpanzee as a person until it rises up against us in rebellion.”

PALOMITA

Ang hiya lalaki, nasa noo. The men wear their honor on their foreheads. Ang hiya ng babae, tinatapakan. Women’s honor is trampled on the ground.

I knew it couldn’t be true. It was too good to be that.

Weeks have gone by, and still he doesn’t come. He doesn’t remember me, and I can’t, I can’t and I don’t want to go through his door any more, not after that hug, which means he’s the one who must make the next move.

Sometimes I ask myself why I don’t go, why I don’t take some cat food again or some home-made cake, but that’s how it’s always been and that’s how it always will be.

We’re those who don’t know their own good; we’re those who have to know our own place, or the world’ll fall apart.

We’re watered-down people.

Men have no sex. Only women have.

And I can’t rise up against Pentti. It’s impossible. It’s forbidden. A woman doesn’t abandon.

But what can I do to him, if he abandons me? If he’s left with no alternative?

And I think about him.

Something inside of me whispers, you only think about him because he’s not Pentti. He’s a door that opened onto a blank wall.

MARTES

When our new client, this hockey team, brought in their brief, they didn’t know what a jackpot they were hitting.

I bring up the best picture onto the screen, a splendid snarl, the most overflowing with contempt for the camera. I isolate the head and paste it into my own Photoshop data file.

Then I clarify the tone and use a couple of filters, solarize it, then cancel that, clear away the pixel dust, draw in a fine line here, another one there, deepen the color of the lines to a hundred percent black.

My scalp stings. My teeth clamp together.

Looking back at me is the troll’s face—wild as hell, the blood-thirsty troll’s snout, tuned to a few lurid lines, tuned until it sings.

“Viivian, come and take a look at this.”

Viivian, Viivian the Assistant, Viivian the Dutiful comes. Viivian whistles.

“Well, now, that’s wicked.”

“Compare it with the first.”

Together we look at the old logo of this ice hockey team that has become a client of ours. A tailed creature’s fumbling with the hockey skates on its legs. Looks like some illustration in a crappy animal story for children.

“This’ll be the best in the fucking league.”

“No question. That lion of HIFK’s a sick kitten beside this.”

“Fuse it with the name logo, Viivian. Cut it onto the old font and then try a couple of new ones, something more robust—you can work out something yourself.”

“Above, below, or around?”

“Might go better around.” With my finger I outline on the screen some curved lines above and below the roaring beast’s head. “The Tampere . . . Trolls.”

“What a bunch of fucking fashion freaks.” Viivian’s sigh is genuine.

“You said it.”

ECKE

I play the mincing parlormaid, and Angel laughs out loud. It’s a real belly laugh, he’s not just humoring me. I serve him his coffee mug with a bow, leaning to kiss his forehead, which has a few locks of hair glued to it.

“Is there a paper?” he yawns.

“A moment, Your Highness . . . Honored sir.”

I bring in the
Morning Post
from the hall floor. It smells of printer’s ink and the damp spring. Angel rakes his hair with his fingers, forming a golden halo, and I love him to bits, until it hurts.

He’s hardly opened the paper when he gives a violent start. The coffee mug crashes on to the floor in three pieces, the brown liquid seeps along the cracks in the floorboards.

“Fuck! No!” he hisses.

ANGEL

He looks at me from the garish advertisement. It’s him.

With a low-browed grimace of a grin, a seventeen-year-old ice-hockey prodigy, garish in red-and-green sports shirt, is glowing with out-and-out fearless puberty—and just about brain enough to read a Superman comic: slightly acned skin, an attempt at a macho mustache struggling for life under his nose. Actually he might be fanciable if his shirt didn’t have that on it.

The thing’s a news item: the new logo design has been praised to the heavens by the team’s management.

It’s sewn on the shirt front. It’s black and white, graphically reduced, a facial shot in the midst of a chaos of spruce-green, blood-red, and sponsors’ logos.

It’s him. Or if not himself some unidentified being painfully like him.

Like my Pessi.

ECKE

“I’ve got to be off right now.”

Hastily I try to fish for some information, but nothing doing. So his brother’s photos have been used without permission? I can see that it’s annoyed him, but why does he have to dash off, and where to, and why right now?

“Home.” Angel’s already pulling his jacket on, his mouth’s tightened into a slit like a knife wound. He’s a bundle of nerves and ice-cold and won’t allow me to touch him.

Slam.

The door bangs much harder than necessary. The echo on the stairway’s the thud of an executioner’s axe.

I stand like a zombie in the middle of the room. It’s as if some unspoken taken-for-granted deal had suddenly been broken by one of the parties, with no consultation on my part whatsoever.

I flop on the bed and draw in a wheezing breath of air. There’s something shiny under a chair. The chair Angel hung his clothes on overnight. I bend down and look more closely.

His keys.

The keys of Angel’s apartment.

Out in the hall I’ve already rung Angel’s cell and listened to the busy signal for half a second when it dawns on me: what a
chance this is to perform a knockout service, a truly super-duper parlormaid stunt. A chance to seduce those bloody blue eyes into that fucking rare but all the sweeter look, when he realizes, just for a second, that I actually exist.

MARTES

“You fucking ape.”

It takes a moment before it dawns on me who’s on the other end. It’s Mikael, the sweet, understanding Michelangelo, exuder of tender breaths and Calvin Klein odors, who’s now brandishing a burning sword. He’s on his cell phone: the traffic’s roaring in the background.

“Fucking shithead. By what right?”

“Every right in the world, my darling Mikael.” I feel such icy contempt for him I can allow myself a phrase I’d never otherwise mouth. “The full rights, here with me, in black and white.”

“Full rights for the Stalker campaign!” His voice is getting high-pitched, and it gives me the creeps to think I’ve ever been in the same room as this fop.

“Teach yourself to read what you’re putting your name to. What we have, on paper, are the full rights, for this office’s use.”

“Thief.”

“Has your nature-photographer brother been kicking up a row? That Russophile who manages to photograph extremely rare wild animals in what appear to be studio conditions?”

I wait a quarter of a second before I give the coup de grâce.

“Or, more precisely, your late brother.”

ANGEL

On the phone, I’m running in and out of the Sammonkatu Street traffic, threading through shopping-laden ladies on the pavement, panicking, gasping for breath. To wait for a bus or a taxi seems unthinkable. I’m imagining: Pessi’s on the sofa asleep—against the white cover he’s a bottomless black hole into outer space. And the newspaper’s on the hall floor, a pale patch of threat in the dim light, the paper where there’s . . .

But I’m brought up short as Martes’ reference to my brother thumps into my consciousness. He pauses a moment, and then his voice has gone back to his previous purring and controlled baritone.

“You said the original photographer was your brother. It so happens that he’s been dead for two years. That I established straight away . . . as soon as complications set in. Do you want to tangle with the law now? Do you want me to stand up in court and say who took the photos and when and where?”

My voice is a mere whisper when I can find it: “And so now you think you can play the whore with those pictures any way you want.”

“I don’t think, I know.”

And his words throw me back again to Pyynikki Square and my gnawing worry. But what is it I’m afraid of? Am I supposing
Pessi’s going to wake up and take the morning paper in his prehensile little paws and start leafing through it, thinking, in his little round head: Gosh, look what’s happening in the world again. Haven’t they settled things with Indonesia yet? And then see the news item and explode into another fit of hideous aggression?

That’s exactly what I am afraid of. That I’m letting him down once more.

“I’ll call your client.” I’m at a dead end, so I can’t do anything but reel off empty threats.

Martes’s fucking equanimity begins to waver a bit.

“I’ll be fucked if I let you sabotage a campaign we’ve planned and sold and in part been paid for! The hockey team’s whole public set-up, from their sports gear to their writing paper and the bumper stickers—can’t you fucking well grasp it? This isn’t some teeny-weeny small-time contract, you know.”

“Do you ever think about anything but money?”

“Do you ever think about anything but that one thing? I’ve never taken it in before—the link between bestiality and pedophilia.”

I suddenly go bright red. It’s as if Martes had landed me one, right in the teeth, with his knuckles.

“It’s nothing of that sort, you filthy-minded shit. Your mind’s such a poisoned sink, you . . .”

Martes interrupts me.

“Start fighting me about this, and I’ll screw the balls off you. Because I know what you are.”

MARTES

My stomach’s a foaming churn of red rage. If Mikael rings the client and starts kicking up a fuss, bang goes this fee. Our good name will be ruined as far as this client goes. Goodbye to the Tops, the year’s Gold Standard, the Clio.

I’m taken aback when he gives a short laugh, quite soft and quite brief.

“What am I, Martes?” he asks, and though he’s still panting he sounds calm and a little sad. “What am I? And what’s our relationship?” His voice is surprisingly untroubled.

“We’ve had no relationship,” I say, and my heart starts thumping harder, and I hate it. “Never.”

His manner’s something I haven’t been able to gear myself up for. His rage, his aggression, I can deal with. I can mouth off sharp put-downs, like anyone else in the communications business, but this sad little melancholic laugh floors me.

“Except for our working relationship,” Mikael says.

“And that ends here, if I’ve anything to do with it.”

“Do you remember that time, after eight pints, by the Tammerkoski railings?”

“For God’s sake, don’t try to drag me in on your own sick fantasies!” I yell into the phone, and naturally just then Viivian walks past the room’s open door. I kick it shut, and my voice is a
whiplash, hissing between my teeth, “Damn it. I want to make this thing clear once and for all, now—”

“No need to. To me it’s plain as daylight already.”

He draws in a breath I can hear. I also hear his voice changing as he moves into some echoing precinct.

“I’ll come back to the question of the rights on those pictures. I have to put a stop to this now.”

Click. The phone buzzes, indicating I should hang up. The sound rises higher and higher until it’s screaming in my ear, so piercing my eyes are about to pop out of their sockets. My cheeks are glowing, and I listen to it, listen to it, until I grasp that it’s telling me what I have to do.

I have to put a stop to this now.

PART V
While the Other Loves the Night

LARS LEVI LAESTADIUS, “COMMUNION SERMON,” 1849

Therefore they are black as Tartars when they come again to rend with their claws the dwellers on the face of the earth, who carry crosses on their breasts. But these creatures of the Underworld are like the forest demons, who howl like wolves when they smell the scent of blood, and some laugh like harlots when the Devil leads them astray.

PALOMITA

A noise. Footsteps on the stairs. I freeze.

Hope. Stabbing pain.

They’re coming up the stairs.

Mikael!

I fly to the door, get up on the stool, and glue my face to the door.

My disappointment’s sickening: it’s some young man I don’t know, dark, wearing glasses. He’s on his way to Mikael’s but doesn’t know Mikael’s not at home.