by Joonas Huhta
A bang sounded through the ceiling.
Probably a squirrel dropped a cone on the plate roof.
Outside, the motion sensor lighting sprang to life.
Konrad looked at the time on his phone display.
6.20 A.M.
Someone was either early, or rabbits and reindeer had found food under the snow in the yard.
A hailstorm started drumming the roof. Rapidly changing weather conditions were something everybody would have to get used to. Extreme weather was soon to be a new norm.
A shadowy figure materialized at the window.
Ruut Stark.
Standing on the terrace, she had her hand raised for an apologetic greeting. Konrad lifted an eyebrow at what she was holding in her other hand.
“Sorry for the ungodly hour,” Ruut said.
“I’m glad you came. Coffee?”
“Please.” Ruut sat at the table, scanning the house. “An addict needs her daily dose.”
Konrad walked to the kitchen, sneezed loudly and studied the coffee machine and tried to fit the filter paper into the machine. His hands shook, so Ruut came and took the filter.
“Rough night?”
Konrad rubbed the back of his head and searched a tissue into his hand for his running nose. “I’ve never prepared coffee.”
“That’s why woman was created.” She quickly evaluated his clothes. “Your coffee machine is older than antique. You might want to take a cold shower while waiting.”
Konrad’s eyes went wide in search for an answer. “How do you know I like cold showers?”
“I have a crystal ball.” Ruut switched on the coffee machine. “Go clear your head. I need to pick your brains.”
Konrad tilted his head with the slow smile that builds and was about to say something but withdrew to the bathroom. Meanwhile, Ruut’s attention was caught a strange painting on the wall, representing the city of Rovaniemi from the bird’s perspective.
Reindeer Antler Plan.
She sat, leaned forward, sliding the chair closer. She had seen pictures about this in local history books, but this was a personal painting. The city center was wrapped inside the reindeer’s head, with the sports stadium as the eye. Roads branching north, west, and south made up the antlers. Because of the grand architecture by Alvar Aalto one couldn’t go anywhere straight. But he had laid the foundation for a tourist hub in the frozen north, and a national goldmine. With tourist flocking by the thousands from all corners of the world, it was easy to claim Rovaniemi to be the resident home of Santa Claus.
Ruut spotted the signature of the painter, and as she leaned closer to decipherer it something rolled in her stomach.
Julia Loki.
She clasped her knees tightly together. The overall feeling of the painting was now a catalyst for murky thoughts. She contemplated the antlers.
After WWII, the demolished capital of Finnish Lapland was laid out as a head of the reindeer to symbolize regeneration and strength.
But in the painting, the antler-roads were partly menacing in red.
Like the Devil’s horns.
“SEXY WHITE BATHROBE,” Ruut said. “Doesn’t even reveal all your leg hair.”
“This is my ex-wife’s. I forgot mine at the university.” Konrad sat and placed a hand on The Wicked Bible on the table. The heat of his hand left a hand mark on the frosty cover. “I still can’t believe I used it as a block.”
Ruut made no comment.
Konrad sneezed. “I don’t even recall the last time I indulged. My tolerance has lapsed.”
She flashed a hurried smile at him, drumming her fingers together.
“Konrad.”
“My wife once stood there at the exact place twenty years ago, the same intonation in her tone, telling me she was pregnant.”
Ruut raised her eyebrows.
“The only time she wasn’t on we-need-to-talk mode. What did you want to say?”
“I broke the code.”
“That’s… wonderful.”
“You don’t sound very excited.”
Konrad sneezed into the tissue. “Elaborate.”
The coffee machine struggled to produce the hot steaming liquid Konrad sincerely hated.
Ruut was once again so close to him that she could take a bite at his earlobe. “You helped me to solve the code in my dream.”
“Really? I thought only God specializes in the impossible.”
“In my dream,” Ruut continued, uninterrupted, “I saw a smashed apple on the ground, a prism inside, and a sky streaked by a beautiful, round rainbow. You were somehow angry, but that helped me to be alarmed and watchful. As you probably know, The Bible doesn’t say that the fruit eaten in the Garden of Eden was an apple.”
“True,” Konrad said, “Where the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was located, an apple is never mentioned.”
“Then I came up with somebody who unwove the rainbow in the 17th century.”
Konrad took a sip from the can. “Who?”
Ruut wrote three letters in her hand.
S.I.N.
“You’re killing me. Tell me.”
“Konrad, we are talking about a man who plowed the deepest track in the history of science, and the one who knew the seeds of religion.”
“Now I know why God holds off answering questions: Tantric storytelling, delaying satisfaction.”
“Last clue. The man knew that an apple didn’t fall far from a tree.”
Konrad’s eyes widened. “You mean the original owner of The Wicked Bible was…?”
“Yes, sir,” Ruut said. “Sir Isaac Newton.”
Konrad mentally sorted out the letters: A SIN IN TWO RACES. He crossed his arms and frowned. “You may be right.”
“I found it hard to believe at first. The Wicked Bible saw daylight in 1631 and Newton made his first cry only—”
“A decade later. December 25. On Christ’s birthday.”
Ruut gave a nudge on Konrad’s shoulder. “Thanks for spoiling my chance to shine, Alexandria.”
Konrad smiled proudly at the comparison to an ancient library once considered the center source of knowledge in the ancient world. “Newton owned a personal library, and he had tens of bibles in store. The vast majority of his books were on the subject of theology. The world remembers him from his tremendous scientific achievements, but he wrote more studies on religion and biblical interpretation and his dark addiction, alchemy. He was a formidable biblical scholar.”
“He was?”
“His interpretation of the Bible differed from that of the Church. For instance, he didn’t believe in the doctrine of Trinity, which defines God as three consubstantial persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
“Simply one of the essence, like the three forms of water: solid, liquid, and gas.” Ruut shrugged. “Or in modern terms: me, myself, and I.”
“Science and religion weren’t at odds for Newton as it was for the Church. He used his scientific works as a means to reinforce belief in the biblical truth. The Bible was true in every respect for him. He had extreme religious views, and knew how religion affected people’s minds.” Konrad went to the kitchen and poured a cup for her. “Consider his famous law of gravity, which is said to have been inspired by the fall of an apple.”
“You don’t believe it happened?”
“Irrelevant question. It’s not important what gave Newton his epiphany on gravity. He deliberately honed the story; over time it got better with the telling. Newton knew the symbolic power of an apple, how it resonated with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge, to the downfall of man. Not to mention the shape of the apple in relation to the law of gravity; the Earth-shaped object being attracted to the Earth. Newton liked giving thorny lessons to the Church, to reveal its wrong interpretation of the Scriptures.”
“You two have something in common,” Ruut said. “By the way, you attacked me in my dream, but I think you were trying to make me understand something.”
“D
istorted memories resurfacing from your subconscious, perhaps?”
“There are so many coincidences. Newton invented the color wheel. There was a prism inside the broken apple...”
“Do you want to know what Newton did to his eyes when he came to the conclusion that light included all the colors?”
“Shoot.”
“He shoved a needle into his eye and looked at the sun as long as he could stand it. He needed information for his new theory of optics to eyesight.”
Ruut squinted her eyes. “No one can escape such acts without permanent ocular damage. But miracles happen.”
“One sees a miracle, the other a coincidence,” Konrad said, sneezing with a cough. “Newton nearly went blind while operating on himself. After staring into the sun, he needed to be in darkened room for quite some time.” Konrad pulled the skin down below his eye with his finger. “Of course, he didn’t shove the needle into his eyeball, but as near the back side between the eye and the bone as he could to stimulate the retina manually. The eye socket was the end of the rainbow, the treasure. Newton was the first to understand the rainbow, a phenomenon that had and has preoccupied human mind throughout its existence. From Aristotle to Descartes, sunlight was considered pure, but Newton proved them wrong.”
“White light is a combination of all the colors of the rainbow,” Ruut said.
“Yes,” Konrad said, “but the rainbow has, unfortunately, a long history of corroding the wheels of rational thinking. It’s the greatest subject of myth and mystery of and a cause of superstitions. Some cultures still like to see the rainbow as an attribute of goddesses and their garments, belts and headbands, and some believe it is a bridge where messengers can bring messages from the gods. In Greek mythology, it was a footpath between Heaven and Earth.”
“God’s rainbow covenant,” Ruut murmured. She moisturized her finger and started turning the pages. “Rainbows are the only sign God has placed in the sky for us. It was originally for Noah and his family, a simultaneous reminder of the destruction of the Flood and that it will never happen again. The rainbow reminds us of His protection. Let me see, Genesis 9… ‘And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, Bring forth fruit, and multiply, and replenish the earth… I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. And when I shall cover the earth with a cloud, and the bow shall be seen in the cloud, then will I remember my covenant which is between me and you’… Ouch!” Ruut stopped, her brows furrowed. “Holy fuck.”
Konrad nearly choked on his Fanta. “Did you get a paper cut?”
“The text is melting.” Ruut raised up her glance. “The letters… I can pull them off like scabs…”
She stroked the paper, spread the blood upon the text.
Konrad’s heart pumped in his chest.
“Interesting,” Ruut said with the calmness of a surgeon in her voice. “Something is coming up...”
Konrad tried to get up to his feet, but his knees were jelly, his legs failed him.
“Another hidden message!” Ruut raised her bloody hands at the delight. She looked up. “You look pale.”
She stretched out her hand, but was too late.
Konrad collapsed head first onto the floor.
9
THE VETERAN’S STEADY hands focused the image under a high-powered microscope. A sapphire blue sphere, all alone in the little frame of cold micro-cosmos. It was not only the future of man but a cure for inhumanity, casting off the bonds of flesh and blood.
A little tightening of moral screws...
The Veteran’s hands unfocused the image. Time was short. The field of moral enhancement was currently unregulated and unsupervised, but once its potential was discovered, humanity would tie its hands into a Gordian’s knot with bureaucracy and ethical thinking. The Ascension to a new and infinitely richer existence was a window of opportunity soon closed.
The Veteran turned away from the microscope, walked through and out his private fluorescent-lit laboratory to his workshop, to his passion. On a workbench, he lit a candle. The hands opened a blueprint scroll and unwrapped it on a table surrounded with drawing tools for finishing his minor craft. The plan was titled Going Clear. The hands laid a Koran on the side of the scroll for a weight and palm-pressed the other end against the table. Then the Veteran opened the Koran to a marked page and read a passage about the ‘Three Dark Stages of a Child’:
“…fee thulumatin thalathin…”
Empowered, the Veteran grabbed tools to carve and polish a puppet, which was but a wooden block eight months ago, while recapping the passage. Threefold darkness—fee thulumatin thalathin—was the origin of every human being, an expression of the three dark regions involved during the development of the embryo:
The darkness of the abdomen.
The darkness of the womb.
The darkness of the placenta.
Modern medicine spoke about the embryological development of the baby in the same manner as revealed over a thousand years ago, when no one had access to such profound knowledge. Muslims considered this as proof that the Word was from Allah, especially because each of the regions consists of three layers, and because a human being is created in the mother’s womb in three distinct stages. Science had verified the ancient knowledge, but the Veteran knew the Divine Messengers, the teachers of the dominant religion, had more in store than was uttered about human potential.
And potential was not about determinism. It was about what can be achieved.
The Creator works in counter-intuitive ways, always acting in the gaps of knowledge...
It was time to bring the Creator on the stage. The hands of the Veteran carefully found its place behind the puppet’s back and neck and raised it gently in the air.
A flawless design. The Veteran needed only to write a message along with the gift before sending the puppet into the morally darkest corner of the world, Rovaniemi. After all, necessity was not only the mother of invention; it was what fulfilled the image of the Creator as the parental figure.
The Veteran relied on the soldiers on the ground, their oath-sworn ability to tie off any loose ends. The plan, once executed, would spin the world into the final confrontation with destiny—the redefinition of humanity.
The Veteran took in control of the puppet and tested its mouth mechanism:
“Si vis pacem, para bellum,” the Veteran ventriloquized. “If you want peace, prepare for war…”
10
SEEK THE MENSTRUAL BLOOD
OF THE SORDID WHORE
WHERE
THE SUN AND THE MOON SHINE ACROSS,
AND KNOCK ON WOOD
TO OPEN THE CREAKY DOORS
OF PERCEPTION.
RUUT’S EYEBROWS WERE heavy with suspicion. The new enigma was as visible as a watermark on a dollar bill. The text was written inside a big but narrow corridor of a thumbprint spiraling like a labyrinth. It sounded nothing like Newton.
How did my blood react to the text like that?
Konrad had fainted at the sight of her blood. She had dragged Konrad on the sofa, checked his pulse and vital signs. The chest of a sleeper was enough proof that he was now resting off the toll of his wee hours.
Ruut’s toes kept curling up on the carpet, a paranoid part of her anticipating Mrs. Loki’s coming home. She pulled her knees together, evaluated the catalog-perfect living room. The books on the bookshelf were not alphabetized but neatly color coded into the colors of the rainbow. She gazed at the family-framed wall. One black-and-white photo portrayed a smooth-cheeked major with a woman, both looking grim. A picture of a NCO—her grandfather she never knew—materialized in her mind, haunting with the same kind of stare as Konrad’s father in the picture. Her grandfather’s medal of honor, acquired by masquerading and sabotaging an enemy air strike plan on civilian targets in the Winter War, was something she always kept with her in her breast pocket. It was a badge on her chest; it made her proud and gave her determination in the work and world d
ominated by men.
She saw Konrad back in the days when he had just been promoted to Principal. Her Swedish teacher had asked her to throw a book on the teacher’s desk, and she had thrown the book, yelling “Catch!”… straight at the teacher’s eye. The teacher rushed away from the classroom, crying like a baby. Konrad came a minute later. He stormed the classroom with the ramrod exactness of a soldier, located her and lifted her desk above his head. He yelled back, “Ruut! Catch!”
The sound of the desk smashing on the floor echoed in her ears. Konrad dragged her through wood splinters and books among shell-shocked friends to the longest detention she could remember.
Principal Konrad Loki.
Pure intensity.
Although she had never approved of his actions, she deserved it. That single act communicated to her that Konrad actually cared.
She connected her thumb and forefinger in a circle and filliped him on the forehead.
Konrad’s eyes enlarged.
“You would make a terrible vampire,” she said.
He blinked five times.
“Forgive me my Freudian slip—Drama Queen—but let’s get back to work.” Ruut showed him the Bible. “Feast your eyes...”
Konrad swung her hand away.
Quickly, red color rose high on her face.
“I don’t want to see any blood,” Konrad said.
“Fainting at the sight of blood isn’t—”
“Uncommon, I know,” Konrad said, deadpan.
She tilted her head. “How are you, Konrad?”
Konrad was bemused at the sudden compassionate question. In Finland, the question was not to be presented lightly. One often got the whole truth. “I’m OK. What does your husband think of you being here?”
She leaned closer, made focused strokes on his forehead with her fingertip.
“What are you doing?” Konrad said.
“Just smoothing up the worry lines.”
Konrad blinked. He grabbed her wrist gently and guided it to rest on the back of the sofa. Giving a spin on her delicate skin around her wrist in his mind, he took The Bible to his lap. She shifted closer to Konrad’s ear and amplified the lines with a serious, disembodied voice.
