Pessi’s little red tongue is pushing tightly and sensuously between his fingers, in a single-minded, moist, red-and-black, back-and-forwards movement. I drag him toward me, almost with a wrench, breaking all the promises I’ve made myself, drawing in a deep asthmatic breath of air—and then let go of him immediately, dive out of bed and, hand trembling, legs trembling, dial Ecke’s number. And when a sleepy voice answers, I ask, “Can I come around immediately?”
In the hall, for a moment, I don’t believe what I see.
Easy to believe I’m in the nightmarish continuation of some twisted erotic dream.
About a meter above the floor, on the white textile wallpaper, there’s . . . a painting.
There are evident lines, and even something you could, with goodwill, call the outline of a figure. And once more, somewhere at the back of my cranium, a little warning bell tinkles.
Finnish prehistoric relics.
A rock painting.
Yesterday, agitated and exhausted, I neglected to clean up.
The wall painting has been painted with Martes’s blood.
MARTES
The iodine has turned my skin orange and it still stings enough to make my eyes smart. The scratches are raised at the edges. An awful lot of foreign micro-organisms can be transferred to the victim through animal bites and scratches. So said the nurse at the accident ward, who told me to settle matters between myself and the owner of this rampaging dog.
I shall do, but in my own way. And in my own time. When it’ll be most advantageous.
On my cheek there are four parallel reddening streaks. My temple’s had to have a patch of hair shaved off, and in my own grotesque way I find this punkish slash hellishly cool. Eight stitches have been punctured into it.
ANGEL
Two days I kept Pessi hidden and locked away in my large attic storeroom. He was so distressed and ears-laid-back that I had to bring him back in.
If Martes had wanted to do something, he’d have done it by now.
I’ve made Pessi a present of pastel crayons. Obviously they smell wrong: he doesn’t even pick them up in his paws.
How intelligent is he, really?
Why, when he’s had blood at his command all those times, hasn’t he decorated the bathroom tiles with victory signs—guinea pig and gerbil figures, painted in violently primitivistic strokes?
Perhaps the slaughter and consumption of a little rodent is not such a big deal, not the sort to sing songs about or inspire the painting of frescoes. But the defense of one’s territory, the wounding of a great enemy, that is. Is it?
Or was it a painting, after all? Was it perhaps nothing but fortuitous pawmarks and smudges my guilty and hysterical mind fused into a configuration?
The hall’s fiberglass-treated wallpaper is now clean and shining.
Why didn’t I take a Polaroid?
I place two mugs upside down and quickly switch them about, and Pessi doesn’t point out which has the tidbit underneath but looks at me swiftly, as if weighing the situation up. And then, quick as a flash, he pushes over both mugs, grabs the pat of cat food in his claws, and dashes off to the windowsill to eat it, relishing it like a child with ice cream . . . And I wonder which of us is the fool.
PALOMITA
Sun. I immediately thought how wonderful it is when it’s warm. Warm at last. I opened the window, but outside it’s colder than ever.
How stupid it is to wait.
How stupid it is to think.
I confess to Almighty God
and to you my brothers and sisters
that I have sinned through my own fault
in my thoughts, and in my words,
in what I have done
and in what I have failed to do.
I beat my breast for each sin, as I’ve been taught at Mass, I beat until my hand hurts and my chest hurts, but it brings no relief.
I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin,
all the angels and . . .
I beat, beat, beat, the more because I let my thoughts break off. No, not the angels. From them I ask nothing. At least not from the sun’s own angel, the one who chased Satan from heaven.
I beat my breast once more, so I start to cough, and quietly I try to sing the Salve Regina, which I only remember a bit of.
To you do we cry, your banished children of Eve,
to you do we send up our sighs,
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.”