I can smell that he’s deadly serious. The empty shopping bag and the trowel are lying on the stone border of the grave. I don’t know what else to do but walk in front of him as he follows close behind with the gun pressed against the small of my back. I quickly consider shoving him, kicking him, somehow distracting him and running away, but of course I’m wearing eloi shoes with stiletto heels. I wouldn’t get anywhere before he shot me in the back or caught up to me in a couple of strides.
The open door of the brick men’s restroom looms in front of me like a tomb. Nissilä shoves me inside and closes the door behind us. There are no stalls, just a porcelain urinal and a washbasin. With the gun’s muzzle, he waves me over to stand between them. There’s a toilet in the corner by the door and he stands next to it. Oh no. It’s a restroom for one person at a time. He can lock the door.
And that’s what he does. Click.
“We probably don’t want any visitors, do we?”
I don’t say anything. I keep my body language passive as an eloi, looking at the floor so he can’t see my expression. My thoughts are racing in circles. What does he know? He smells like suspicion and deep hatred, but also a little uncertain.
“There’s something really weird about you,” he says. “Something that doesn’t smell right. That story about the toy train. I asked Manna about it again a couple of days later and she said that she didn’t know anything about your grandmother’s fiancé. She’d probably never heard of him. I know elois have short memories, but if she knew all about it one day and nothing at all the next, then who fed her that story, and why?”
Nissilä tastes these words. He’s not really asking me, just mulling over his own thoughts. I wonder whether I could knock the gun out of his hand if I made a surprise attack—something he would never expect from an eloi—but I would have to get the gun from him. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get out the door before he picked it up again. And just as if he’s read my thoughts he gives the gun a little jerk as if to say, Stay right where you are.
“I didn’t kill her, by the way.”
I flinch visibly and Nissilä loves that he’s gotten a reaction out of me.
“I think I know what it is that’s wrong with you. You’re obviously smarter than an eloi should be. But that’s the hand that gets dealt sometimes. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want such a thing to be known. Jare Valkinen must really be under your thumb. What other reason could he have for sticking his nose into Manna’s case? You talked him into it. He should have minded his own business! That’s always been the code of the mascos—stay out of other guys’ eloi troubles. If a bitch is barren, everybody knows you shouldn’t have to settle for second-rate merchandise. But let’s get to the point, shall we?”
JARE SPEAKS
August 2017
The trip to the Trade Ministry took only forty-five minutes. I got all the papers I needed in what must have been record time. My contact was obviously more interested in my suitcase full of money than he was in bureaucratic red tape. I go back to the car to wait. There’s still plenty of time to make the flight, and the drive to the Tampere airport is quick, since it’s not far from downtown.
I wait five minutes. No sign of her.
Ten minutes pass.
I start to get nervous, but I don’t want to go looking for her because we might miss each other.
Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five.
The agreed-upon hour has passed.
The time ticks by.
This is when one of those decadent state wonder phones would really come in handy.
VANNA/VERA
August 2017
“I’ve got some stuff here that will make you go to sleep. It won’t hurt at all. Then you can go to your sister. That’s what you’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?”
His voice bounces around the echoing room and my senses are like glass needles piercing everything, sharper than sharp. My body is tingling, and there’s a distant, roaring furnace inside me. A bright dizziness sweeps through my head.
The Core of the Sun.
It’s glowing inside me, its fierce, relentless, extreme power penetrating the thin skin of the fruit and seeping into me like streaks of fire.
The lower lip doesn’t lie.
Harri Nissilä notices my distracted expression. “Not interested? What if I told you that things might not go so great for that dear hubby of yours?”
This makes me focus on him, and he chuckles. “A person can get quite a lot done from prison. People sitting in jail have a good network—insider information. I asked around about that overly curious fellow of yours and sent an emissary to keep an eye on him, and sure enough I got a tip that he was mixed up in some very illegal activity. I laid a trap and managed to get some evidence that could lose him his head. A very hot piece of evidence, you might say.”
Although my head is spinning and buzzing, everything clicks into place now. Of course. The stolen Ukko’s Dart.
“That evidence will go straight to the Authority as soon as I’ve taken care of you. Jare Valkinen will spend the rest of his life paying for his social responsibility crimes and for his wife’s murder, although her body will never be found. He might even come to his end when they arrest him, because the Authority doesn’t take too kindly to dealers. Tit for tat, with interest.”
He fishes something out of his pocket. A little bottle and a cotton handkerchief. Chloroform, or something like it. Smart move, Nissilä. Can’t just knock me out in the middle of the cemetery walkway.
But why go to the trouble of knocking me out? Why not kill me right away, since we’re out of sight?
An ice-cold thought rises in my mind.
There must be some reason that I’m more valuable to him alive, at least temporarily.
He can carry me from here to his car, unconscious. In his arms, my face against his shoulder, looking like a damsel in distress, a girl whose feet started to hurt on our visit to the cemetery. Mascos passing by won’t bother to wonder and elois will be jealous, if anything, at the romantic gesture.
Does he plan to use me to extort something from Jare? That doesn’t make sense. Even if he does suspect my real nature, he probably just sees me the way he’s always seen me, as an ordinary, disposable eloi, a piece of biomass, with plenty more to replace her if anything should happen to her.
And why so slow with the rag and the chloroform? Of course, he has to keep the gun pointed at me, but he’s deft at setting the cloth on the back of the toilet and unscrewing the lid of the bottle, watching me the whole time, the barrel of the gun never wavering. He’s practiced opening the bottle with one hand. So why are his movements so slow and heavy, like a film in slow motion? . . .
There’s something going on, something very familiar, though I can’t put my finger on what it is.
Déjà vu.
There’s a swishing in my head and I feel light, so full of endorphins that I’m starting to rise into the air.
The Core of the Sun. Trance possession.
It’s easy now that I’ve done it once already.
The colors are a murky, rough world, half in darkness; the snow scales, stalactites, and towers crooked, twisted; the coral gray and tired. There’s something ugly in this landscape, squid-like, slimy, and I know it’s just my idea of Harri Nissilä, and there he is, an opening filled with a shuddering, convulsing, heaving chunk of something that can only be his pitch-black soul, or mind, or whatever it is, and I’m diving, diving into it like a sperm to an egg, and I’m looking. Looking.
A flash like an impulse, a series of frozen images that I sense more than see. Manna, Manna, Manna. Manna’s hair. She’s sitting at the table at Neulapää, his hand is visible, a cotton cloth, then her head hitting the metal lid of the trunk as she’s stuffed inside, a flash of her curled up there, limp as a corpse, and the trunk closing. Click. The road rushing through the windshiel
d, Harri Nissilä’s hands on the steering wheel, the smell of greed and triumph. Some unknown place. It’s night. Manna lifted out of the trunk, her eyes blinking—she’s alive! Harri Nissilä’s hands, other hands holding out a thick wad of money.
Money.
A hell of a lot of money.
A clink. I snap out of Nissilä’s head. The clink was the bottom of the bottle. He’s poured the liquid onto the cloth and set the bottle back down on the toilet. He takes a step toward me.
“Can I . . . can I have a drink of water?” My voice is trembling, and Nissilä’s eyes narrow.
“Well, hurry up. I don’t have all day.”
That’s a mistake.
That’s a big mistake, Harri Nissilä.
I pretend to raise my hand in fear, to place it on a pounding heart, but I stick it in my bra and lean over the sink. I take hold of the spigot and turn it, whimpering, “What are you going to do to me, please don’t hurt me, please be nice to me,” because that’s what he wants to hear, mortal terror, his place of power, oh, he enjoys it, I can smell it, that’s why he’s not in any hurry, his penis is no doubt swelling as he relishes my feeble, submissive pleas, savors the tingle of it as I bend over the sink, lower, lower, and thank God for these long, polished eloi fingernails, because now there’s a long gash in the plastic bag that I have hidden in my bra, and he hasn’t yet noticed, not yet, as I drop the torn bag of flake straight from my collar into the sink and yank the hot water all the way up.
As hot as it can get.
I stand up, take a deep breath, and hold it.
Now Nissilä realizes there’s something in the sink, something red under the gushing, steaming, almost boiling hot water, and he’s startled, but he doesn’t shoot, of course he doesn’t, I’m more valuable alive, and he steps closer to see what I dropped in the sink, and by then it’s already too late.
Capsaicin steam fills the air, strong, stinging, and in spite of my tolerance my eyes burn and water as if there were acid in the air. I can’t make the mistake of breathing even a tiny bit, not even through my nose. Don’t breathe, don’t breathe, but Nissilä does just what I want him to do, he gasps in surprise, sucking a cloud of capsaicin into his lungs, and his eyes and mouth and nose are in a fog of fire but his autonomic nervous system—dear, dear autonomic nervous system—forces his diaphragm and lungs to gulp for air again.
Nissilä bends over double and coughs as if he would cough his lungs right out through his throat. One quick step, a kick at his hand with my pointy eloi shoes, and the gun clatters to the floor. I grab it—I’m going to have to breathe soon—and I pick up the chloroform bottle and hurl it to the floor, and it lands with a luscious smash right under his sputtering face, and then I go to the door and click and I sail out of the restroom and close the door tightly behind me. Tightly, tightly.
I fill my lungs with the lime-tree-scented August air of Kalevankangas.
I hear spasmodic coughing that ends suddenly, as if cut off with a knife. Something heavy hits the floor.
It’s time to focus.
The Core of the Sun is still producing a fusion reaction inside me. Let it.
I dive into Harri Nissilä’s unconscious mind.
The snow scales and frost stalactites float around me, different now, half melted. The internal glow of the forms is blurred, flickering, fluttering dreamily. I’m soaring. I know the way, dive into the pitch black of his consciousness. Can you ride a human being? I’m going to have to.
He’s an animal. He’s an animal. He’s a sly, greedy little animal.
I straddle Harri Nissilä’s little weasel-like, lizard-like inner self. I press my calves against his sides. I grab the side of his mouth. The creature is limp. This is a mercy, really.
I give a sharp tug. Click.
And his pitch-black soul’s neck is broken.
The piece of paper wrapper is in my skirt pocket, some eyeliner in my makeup pocket. I write in masco-like block letters out of order and wedge it between the restroom’s rain-swollen door and the door frame.
It looks very amateurish, but it might delay them finding him.
If and when somebody does open the men’s room door and sees a masco lying on the tile floor—maybe, hopefully, dead—and the hot water running and a torn plastic bag and the dregs of the chili in the sink and a broken bottle of sedative on the floor, it’ll be something for the sleuths to chew on.
All I can do is hope that by the time the investigation begins we’ll be long gone.
And I run as fast as I can in my eloi shoes.
JARE SPEAKS
August 2017
Finally I see her at the end of the street. I slump in relief. For the first time ever, V has behaved like an empty-headed eloi, now of all times. What’s she been doing, trying on dresses?
When she gets closer my relief shifts to irritation. I can see from her eyes and the sweat on her upper lip and forehead that she’s had a fix, and not a small one. What in God’s name does she think she’s doing? A fix, at a time like this?
She opens the car door and slides into the front seat.
“Where the hell have you—”
“Where indeed.”
“What? What happened?”
“Harri Nissilä happened.”
I gasp. “No, God no. I’ve got the tickets. The plane is leaving in less than an hour.”
“He won’t give us any trouble. Not anymore. Probably. But we can’t leave. I mean, you can, but I can’t.”
I’m so astonished I can’t get any words out.
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“Manna’s alive. Somewhere. I have to find her.”
“What the hell are you babbling about?”
V starts to talk, stammering and stumbling over her story.
VANNA/VERA
August 2017
“I’m going now.”
I look him in the eye, once, and depart.
My boat is light and swift.
JARE SPEAKS
August 2017
Her eyes roll in her head and her whole body goes strangely stiff. She’s hardly breathing.
We should be on our way to the airport.
This can’t, cannot, be happening.
VANNA/VERA
August 2017
Manna, I’m coming.
The Core of the Sun pulses deep inside me and spreads its ancient fire through me.
It’s because of this. This is why chili’s forbidden.
It’s because of this that the Gaians were in such a hurry. Because they didn’t want us to know too much about their ultimate goal.
Leaving my body was just part of the breakthrough. This is what they’re after. Spirit travel. Penetrating the consciousness of others.
I almost laugh out loud when I realize how simple it is. How could I not have understood it immediately the first time I tried the Core of the Sun?
Of course the Authority knows. Of course they have some inkling of it, of the fact that a large enough dose of capsaicin gives a person . . . powers.
Dangerous powers.
Revolutionary powers.
Powers that aren’t conducive to social order.
It’s like giving a terrorist organization a nuclear weapon.
Shaman Nuwat, Shaman Ukwun, I know you only from the pages of a book, for you left your earthly forms long ago. But your words survive, and I grasp them with my mind.
My boat is light and swift!
Core of the Sun,
grant me your fire that I may depart on a long journey;
I wish to rush through every country,
go to the lands where suns are moons.
On the shore of the land of sorrowful evening
is a circle of eternal darkness.
There the light of the mo
on displaces the sun
and there is my sister,
for whom I’ve searched nine lands and nine skies.
The earth races under my belly, my wings devour the air, a bird’s mind is inside my mind like a ticking little heart. I soar on my mount toward my goal, a place where I know I’ll find Manna, her mind glowing dimly in the distant darkness like a slim radio signal: I urge my hollow-boned, luminous-feathered friend onward until my mount begins to fear it’s losing strength, and I slide out fluid as a fish, then tether myself to a trotting elk, and the next moment I’m a racing wolf in the woods.
A gray owl combing the canyons for prey!
I fly on its wings, searching.
Searching nine lands, nine skies for my sister.
Where are you? Where are you?
Show yourself, show yourself, show yourself!
When I finally arrive where Manna is, it takes all my strength not to snap back to where I came from.
I don’t know if it’s been a minute, an hour, a week, or a month since I left myself.
I don’t know if one without a body can vomit.
Harri Nissilä has done some business.
Harri Nissilä has found a niche market.
Harri Nissilä has made lots of money.
Lots and lots of money to play the state lottery.
For some mascos it’s not enough to see elois as lower creatures than themselves. Elois have to be much lower creatures.
They have to be creatures debased.
Creatures with no possibility of rebellion.
Creatures who pay for the most twisted urges of others out of their own skins.
When nothing is enough, nothing ever will be enough.
A domesticated animal like any other. This is how it’s always done. They get smaller, their horns shorter, their snouts flattened, their teeth shrunken, their fur paler, their behavior docile, gentle, meek, affectionate. Dogs, pigs, cows, goats, water buffalo, rabbits, elois.