mourning and weeping
in this vale of tears . . .
I cry to Mary. Not to you who in the last days will weigh our souls. Not to you, angel of the Last Judgment.
ANGEL
And again I close the door, again I escape.
Escape from myself, escape from Pessi.
If only I knew what I was escaping from, what I’m afraid of.
ECKE
Even though he avoids me sometimes.
Even though he’s always rushing off.
These things I don’t think about.
In spite of everything, this is the nearest thing to heaven: Angel’s practically living with me.
“TROLLS AND GUNMEN PLAY HIDE AND SEEK AT PULESJÄRVI”
Finnish Morning Post (March 29, 2000)
In a mysterious incident yesterday at Lake Pulesjärvi near the Lehtisaari campsite two men received gunshot wounds. Surprised by a wild beast, they were struck by the off-target bullets of an unknown gunman, presumed to be attempting to defend them.
These local Pulesjärvi men had long suspected the Lehtisaari campsite buildings were being used as a squat during the winter closure. Inspecting the cabins, they did find several traces of breaking and entering. They also found primitive bedding made of moss and spruce branches.
The dwellings had also attracted animals, for when they opened one cabin door a large troll came running out at them. One of the men tried to aim a shotgun at the threatening animal, but then two shots were fired from the forest nearby. One shot struck him in the shoulder, the other grazed his companion’s shin. The still unidentified gunman, whose target was presumably the troll, was likely to have been wielding a high-caliber hunting weapon or military rifle.
According to wildlife researcher Erik S. Nyholm, it is not uncommon for a famished predator, a lynx for example, to seek shelter in a hay barn or empty storage building, especially when looking for a place to hibernate.
Owing to the premature spring, the gunman’s tracks have not been detectable in the almost snowless forest. The police are investigating the affair.
DR. SPIDERMAN
I lean on the windowsill, pressing my forehead against the coolness of the glass. I’m some sort of tragic figure in a second-rate movie, gripping his ice-tinkling whisky glass and staring into the murky dark, silently whispering Angel to himself. More inaccessible than ever, just now he’s as far beyond my reach as if he were sitting on the moon.
My eyes drag the dim street, and suddenly my thoughts and memories seem to be merging into a double exposure out there: a black shadow.
An almost invisible flickering black shadow—two black shadows, absolutely soundless, economically fluent as flowing water; two pieces of darkness are dissolving in the dusk around the streetside dumpsters.
And I can’t be at all sure: did I really see what I think I saw?
ANGEL
When I get back home, it looks as though Pessi’s decided to empty his litter-box on to the hall floor. I’m getting to know the kinds of tricks he gets up to. I’ve put locks on the cupboards, even the fridge, and I did think I was getting on top of his dexterity.
But fuck it. Now the doormat’s covered with newspaper shreds, so fine they’re almost down to a cellulose dust, and then I realize the paper’s been torn up and chewed, not cut up with scissors, as in Pessi’s litter box.
Pessi’s out of sight, and when I go further into the flat, I realize something terrible’s happened. I see a swelling on the bed from something under the bedclothes: Pessi’s gone into hiding—hiding because of something I know nothing about.
I go over to the bed and gingerly touch the bulge. It starts and kicks and gives a sob, and then subsides again, trembling. I realize Pessi’s terribly upset about something.
I’m stumped. I go back into the hall and start mechanically scooping up the mess of paper—in my hands: I’m not going to risk blocking up the vacuum cleaner with all this stuff. Then my hand comes on a more substantial piece of paper—the glue’s kept it in one piece. It’s an address label. An address label with the name MIKAEL HARTIKAINEN on, my address, and several rows of code. A magazine’s arrived.
It’s the same mag I have in my shoulder bag—one I’m inordinately proud of and therefore bought at a kiosk as soon as I saw it. The back cover shows an advertisement, the one I know I’ll yet grab a few prizes for, the picture I’ve been paid seven thousand euros for.
The best of the pictures. The dark bestial dancer, the paws—no, his hands—stretched out towards the photographer with an expression half-rage, half-love, and on his legs the eye-catching Stalkers.
He’s seen it.
He knows what it is.
He can read pictures.
And he hates them.
Or this one at any rate.
YRJÖ KOKKO, PESSI AND ILLUSIA, 1944
But Pessi scarcely took in that he had only started learning to know himself when he saw his image in the smooth surface of a gloomy, deep pool.
ECKE
There it is in the mag, Angel’s pride and joy.
It’s fine, a hell of a fine picture. Extremely artistic. Part of Angel’s and that fucking Martti’s collaborative world, which I shall never have access to.
At the same time, something’s beginning to nag at my memory: I’m associating the picture with something—something embarrassingly erotic, no, more than that, pornographic, but I can’t recall what. In any case, Angel’s hit the jackpot, the picture’s a sensation, a hit, shamelessly sexual yet without being sexual.
Then it begins to dawn on me.
I go into the sitting room to the cartoon shelf.
I’m positive I’ve got it around, somewhere here. It’s a fantastic rarity, a pirated edition, and probably no more than about a hundred copies of that issued. Found it in Copenhagen, from under the counter—the sort of shop where they don’t usually hide away even the raunchiest stuff.
I turn it up at the back of the shelf, tucked out of sight behind several large illustrated books. The draftsman certainly didn’t have the use of any decent photographs, let alone live models. Comparing the pictures with the Stalker advertisement, I see lots of differences: even though the ad troll seems huge, it’s younger than the creatures in the drawings. They’re swaggering, full-grown, exaggeratedly muscular, exaggeratedly human-looking beasts, endowed with, when considered biologically, outrageous genitals, but then that was the rule with this guy. Page after page, I see how the cartoonist has thrust all inhibition aside and invented frightful, bestial erotica, where the other partners are slim, blond, pouting boys, joyously submitting themselves to all sorts of abuses.
I turn back to the cover: poorish paper, tepid colors, but the text in large, proud letters: TOM OF FINLAND, TROLLS AND FAIRIES.
DR. SPIDERMAN
“Definition always presupposes its opposite,” I say to the woman in the camouflaged combat suit. She’s trying to get me to converse, though what I most long for is just to blunt my faculties here in the Café Bongo buzz and stop myself feeling any more pain. “Define the word ‘normal,’ and you have to define ‘abnormal.’ Define ‘humanity,’ then you have to define what humanity is not.”
“Isn’t that just the same impasse?” she asks.
“Not in my opinion,” I reply. “If you suddenly had to say what’s abnormal, you’d certainly list far fewer things than there are—you’d automatically leave them outside the normal, without listing them.”
The woman’s clearly lost the thread, but she’s dogged. “So, okay, provided you’re defining humanity. Or intelligence. Is a dolphin intelligent? Is an ape? If the criterion’s use of language, then those two, at least, fulfill it.”
“Bees have a language, and yet I shouldn’t go so far as to call them particularly bright. And in addition they also create elaborate building complexes—so there’s another of the criteria proposed: manipulation of the environment. That, too, they fulfill, but even so I wouldn’t let bees enroll at Harvard.”
“Of course you wouldn’t, because it’s more convenient for them to make honey for people. And therefore they have to be what they are, what we’ve defined them as—human property—and humankind is of course lord of creation.”
“As for that, I have to stress that the Judeo-Christian ethic has never had any special force for me as a guiding principle,” I say dryly. “What other religious organization has ever led mankind further from our affinity with nature? As soon as the god of Israel took over the reins, animals were no longer permitted to serve as gods, and all other ritualistic connections between the species, including sex, were excised.”
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.”
r /> 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.”