The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘That’s right, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?’ Anna-Liisa said sternly, fixing an accusing eye on Ritva.

  ‘Medical examiner, how many times do I have to tell you? Nothing but corpses for me, thanks,’ Ritva replied, hacking up a cigarette-roughened laugh.

  Whenever she ran into Ritva, Siiri reflected that the other woman was young enough to be her daughter. Both of Siiri’s sons had died so long ago of affluenza-related diseases that she had stopped counting the years. And with her daughter unreachable at a French nunnery somewhere, Siiri had, for all intents and purposes, become childless in her old age. But she had no interest in adopting Ritva, peculiar as she was, as a foster child.

  ‘She certainly recovered fast,’ Tauno marvelled, twisting himself around awkwardly onto the sofa. It was the same old couch that had served as the centrepiece for the communal area since the beginning of time, a massive and rather uncomfortable National Romantic behemoth that some dead resident had left behind. At least the furniture hadn’t been replaced with virtual substitutes during the renovation. The baize-covered table had been allowed to remain in its spot in the corner, with its motley collection of chairs that deceased residents’ heirs had turned up their noses at.

  ‘The Holy Spirit healed her,’ Irma remarked cheerfully and crossed her hands, pretending to pray for fresh miracles from above. ‘Perhaps the spirit will heal my digestive tract, too. Sometimes my stomach stews so badly I think I’ll die from the pain. Do any of you ever experience that?’

  ‘My digestion works regularly and effectively,’ Margit brayed, cheeks glowing after her treatment in the massage chair. ‘You should try this chair sometime, too.’

  ‘What you’ve got stewing in there is the Devil. An evil spirit, that’s why it smells so horrible!’ Siiri said. Everyone burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re saying it’s that abusive chair that keeps your intestines in line?’ Irma asked Margit while rummaging around in her bag for a pack of cards.

  ‘Diverticula,’ Ritva said laconically, coughing up a rather large glob of phlegm. She clearly was at a loss what to do with it; apparently it was too large to swallow and she had too much presence of mind to spit it out, despite her general lack of decorum. After a moment’s consideration, Irma sacrificed her lace handkerchief to Ritva’s sputum.

  ‘I can always throw it in the wash,’ she whispered to Siiri so loudly that Tauno smiled from the sofa.

  ‘We actually did see a rat,’ Siiri said, to steer the conversation elsewhere. Everyone was very interested in the animal, and Siiri had to recount over and over how it had appeared like the saviour’s son or a volunteer staff member out of nowhere and inspired Sirkka the Saver of Souls to fall into a neo-charismatic trance.

  ‘They’re everywhere around here. I’m lucky if I can go to the toilet in peace,’ Tauno said. He declined to participate in the card game, as did Ritva.

  ‘I’ve never seen a single one!’ Irma cried.

  ‘They’re here to convert us. To take the few last pennies we have. There’s always an account number at the end of every prayer,’ Tauno continued.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Anna-Liisa’s resonant voice cracked like a whip, for the first time in ages. Siiri was overjoyed, because most days Anna-Liisa no longer bothered to upset herself over illogical leaps in topic the way she used to. ‘Are we talking about rats or the volunteers from Awaken Now! Association?’

  None of them knew what they ought to be talking about or if they were to blame for confusing the flow of conversation. Ritva started explaining that diverticula were harmless yet painful sacs that formed in the intestines, particularly common among women, and could be treated with an operation. Irma pulled out her living will with surprising agility and pronounced that she was prepared to fight to the last fart to avoid surgical procedures. Tauno slouched against a stack of pillows on the sofa and didn’t understand a word of what was going on. He had a difficult time sitting normally, since his spine had been so badly mangled in the war. Anna-Liisa frowned in frustration and ordered Irma to deal.

  ‘Canasta,’ she said, rapping the baize table top with her knuckles.

  ‘I had a very interesting conversation with one of the volunteers yesterday,’ Margit said, as she sorted her hand. ‘It was a man, nearly our age, although he must have been a little younger, but he had impressive whiskers, like a walrus, and the same kind of glasses as President Paasikivi in the 1950s. Have you met him?’

  ‘President Paasikivi?’

  ‘He’s not a volunteer!’ Tauno shouted with surprising fury. Irma was so startled that her cards fell to her lap and her box of pastilles to the floor.

  ‘President Paasikivi?’

  ‘But . . . he doesn’t even live here,’ Margit said.

  ‘Ha! He must be the one who spies on us from the basement!’ Irma exclaimed. She tried to bend down, but her rotund frame refused to cooperate. ‘Dratted pastilles!’

  Siiri picked up the box from the floor and laid out her first canasta. The others were dumbfounded; they’d barely had time to organize their cards.

  ‘You’re cheating!’ Irma crowed.

  ‘You can avoid diverticula by eating a handful of seeds every day,’ Ritva said.

  ‘Why would you want to feed rats seeds?’ Margit asked, a little anxiously. Her hearing wasn’t the best.

  ‘He’s my friend,’ Tauno said.

  ‘A rat?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, this conversation,’ Anna-Liisa roared, slapping her cards back onto the pack, hands trembling. ‘Could you please try to concentrate for a moment! Who exactly is your friend, Tauno?’

  ‘We all are, aren’t we?’

  ‘Silence, Irma. During the course of this conversation we have spoken about intestinal sacs, digestive tracts, volunteers, President Paasikivi and rats, and then Tauno said some specific individual, if not a rodent, was his friend. I’m eager to hear clarification on the matter from Tauno.’

  ‘I’ve heard rats are kept as pets these days. Snakes are also popular,’ Irma interjected, before Tauno could get a word in edgeways.

  ‘Are you saying the rat escaped from a resident?’

  ‘Oiva is my friend,’ Tauno said, with an unexpected reverence.

  ‘You named the rat Oiva?’ Margit asked. Apparently, to her mind, some other name would have been more fitting.

  ‘If I had a rat, I’d name it Musk. Then it would be Musk Rat, like in the Moomins,’ Irma said with a laugh.

  ‘Oiva is no rat,’ Tauno said very softly.

  ‘I’m happy to hear that. My cousin was married to an Oiva for a while, but he was quite the scoundrel, bounced cheques and jumped into bed with any girl to cross his path, so although divorce doesn’t generally sit with me, in my cousin’s case it was the only sensible solution. She was left alone with an enormous brood of children. We did what we could to help her, baked pulla for the poor dears and gave them our hand-me-downs. Is it my turn now?’

  Siiri wondered what was upsetting Irma so. She always babbled uncontrollably when she found a situation unpleasant or embarrassing. But they were just playing cards. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about their confounding conversation.

  ‘No, Irma. It’s my turn. And I meld,’ Anna-Liisa sighed, face pale as death. She had decided to continue playing, by force if necessary. ‘And when it comes to these volunteers, I find their activity entirely unacceptable – if, indeed, it is even legal.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘First you must become an empty vessel, as you can accomplish nothing with your own flesh.’

  The pleasant-voiced man mildly looked every member of his audience in the eye before leafing through the Bible in his hand. It made an amusing sound, a soft rustle-crackle, as his nimble fingers sought the right page. Three old women were sleeping in wheelchairs, confounding the Holy Spirit’s efforts to enter their flesh. But the new resident of the C wing, a Somali-Finnish woman barely seventy years old, hearkened attentively, as did Siiri’s widowed neighbour Eila, a
few residents Siiri didn’t recognize, and Margit. Siiri and Irma sat at a safe distance to avoid being counted as part of the silken-voiced man’s congregation, despite being curious to hear what he had to say. It was a normal Thursday, but the volunteer was dressed in a dark suit; he had left his Sunday shoes at the door and was now standing in his stockinged feet in one corner of the communal area. His voice echoed in the lobby, which was mostly deserted. One old woman who’d forgotten a curler in the back of her head was parked in her wheelchair in the middle of the walkway, holding a robot seal – or rather, a seal pup. It was white and had long black lashes, and if held in human hands, would purr like a cat. If you looked it in the eye or spoke to it in a tender voice, it wagged its tail adorably. But other than this, there were no signs of life in the communal area. No hurried slap of nurses’ sandals, no ponytailed stick-exercise leaders bouncing around fishing for residents to rehabilitate, no chipper-voiced activity directors calling out bingo numbers.

  ‘Romans, chapter eight, verse eleven, is important here. The idea is that if the Spirit of God resides within you, he will quicken your mortal body. If the Spirit of God lives inside you, he will bring you life.’

  One of the women sleeping in front of the preacher coughed, started, and slipped into an even deeper sleep, accompanied by a snore. The speaker’s compassionate gaze lingered on the row of wheelchairs for a moment and then moved on to more fertile pastures.

  ‘He who does not believe in the gospel is damned. Those who believe speak in tongues and lay their hands on the sick so as to heal them. They do not work these miracles themselves; they are worked by the Holy Spirit within them. The Holy Spirit. The same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. The same Holy Spirit that has been poured into us. All we have to do is allow the Holy Spirit to fill our lives and guide us and deny our own will. It’s that simple.’

  ‘Deny our own will? This one is a real blockhead,’ Irma said tactlessly, as there was no call to disturb the others’ contemplatory convocation. The man looked Irma dead in the eye. ‘Oh dear!’ Irma said in a panic, and started touching up her lipstick without a mirror. Thanks to decades of solid experience, she managed it flawlessly. She pinched her lips together to put the finishing touch on her maquillage and flirtatiously returned the preacher’s gaze, but he refused to be unsettled by her feminine wiles.

  ‘Your will is in the Devil’s hands if it prevents you from allowing the Holy Spirit to enter you and fill you. When you are guided by the will of God, you are reborn. The will of God. It is the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit. It is the beginning of a new life and abundance, of salvation and repentance. It all begins with allowing the Holy Spirit in. The Holy Spirit. It’s that simple. Believe, and you shall be blessed with health and strength.’

  The speaker’s audience looked neither healthy nor strong. He had his work cut out for him: he would have to do much more missionary work, preach about the pouring out of the Holy Spirit and the horrors of damnation before this herd of wandering souls experienced the sort of miracle that would even allow them to stand on their own two feet. Siiri and Irma whispered inappropriately, and when they started to laugh, decided it was time to leave. They tried to coax Margit to join them, but she refused; she was focused on fishing around her purse as the preacher had reached the climax of his sermon.

  ‘Feel free to donate any sum; even a mite is pleasing to the Lord. If you don’t have cash, you can make a donation through the Awaken Now! Association website with just a few clicks from the link that reads ‘The Gift of Sacrifice’. It’s that simple.’

  Siiri and Irma made a break for what was left of the dining room, now that the kitchen had been removed, along with the cook and the other human employees. They had been replaced by an automated line where the residents served themselves, that is if they were coherent enough to know what they wanted and where they were. A stack of sticky, machine-rinsed trays stood at the head of the line, after which one equipped oneself with the requisite weapons, in other words forks, knives or spoons, followed by glasses. Up to this point, everything was as simple as coming to Christ.

  ‘Oh, how I despise this contraption,’ Irma huffed, jabbing at the ‘Milk/Non-fat’ button on the drinks machine. Nothing emerged from the rubber teat. Just to be sure, Irma pressed ‘Water/Spring’ a few times and then ‘Milk/Non-fat’ again.

  ‘You forgot to flash your fob. That’s how you pay for your drinks,’ Siiri said.

  With surprising speed, Irma retrieved her fob from her décolleté, like an opera singer revealing a secret letter from between her breasts, and flashed it at the automated machine. A deluge of non-fat milk showered into her glass and over the rim. Siiri thrust her own glass under the spigot, and it filled up too. There seemed to be no end to the stream of bluish liquid. Irma shrieked out every possible command she could think of in her falsetto and turned the milk to water.

  ‘Do you suppose the Holy Spirit did that?’ she said in surprise, filling a second glass with water.

  ‘Press here,’ Ritva said, jabbing the word ‘Exit’ and staunching the flood.

  ‘Thank you so much!’

  Irma took a fresh tray and moved down the line as if nothing had happened. When she arrived at the MealMat, she sighed deeply and glared defiantly at the towering cabinet of gleaming steel. This was their restaurant, cook and waiter in one, as a doctor of technology or what have you had illustrated during his overblown introduction to the miraculous MealMat.

  The machine represented the future of technology; it would solve the problems of globalization and bring production closer to the consumer. The secret to this was an invention called a 3D printer. The residents had gradually come to gather that ‘3D’ was English, like all fashionable abbreviations, and meant three-dimensional. Anna-Liisa had audibly wondered if the abbreviation was written with a capital or lowercase d, and the presenter had eventually huffed that both were used, but the issue was of no relevance. OMG! (Tauno and Margit were sure that OMG was the manufacturer of the MealMat, like BMW or AGA, but Ritva had informed them that it was also abbreviated English and came from the words ‘oh my god’.) The printers could be used to make anything from cars to old people’s meals. Thanks to them, the Chinese no longer needed to work their fingers to the bone for a pittance, since factories were being replaced by handy home appliances. The printer was able to load any manner of implausible materials, which it then transformed into a perfect object, say a stool, a spark plug, or a darling pair of earrings.

  Eventually the machine man had got around to the MealMat. He had explained that it was filled once a week with various powdered nutritional ingredients. Apparently the machine kept the powders edible for thirty years, which had been tested on manned expeditions to Mars.

  It was the latest technology. Everything was ‘the latest’ these days; they heard the term everywhere they turned. The MealMat consultant had reminded them that the machine needed its rest, too, which was why the Swedish 8–4 diet had been adopted at Sunset Grove. The underlying principle of this regimen had been unfamiliar to the residents, and so the by-now-bored machine man had been forced to explain that as well: it meant that from then on, food would only be served at Sunset Grove between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

  To make eating fun, powders of various colours were dumped into the MealMat’s compartments. The customer also got to select the geometry of the food they would be enjoying: broccoli-shaped, something resembling a sphere, tubes, flat triangles or stately pyramids. They all tasted like bland root-vegetable mush, but the residents were used to that. The shapes and colours undeniably brought variety to their mealtimes.

  ‘Green tubes, red triangles and . . . What else? Should I take some white balls?’ Irma pondered as she stared at the MealMat’s screen. Every option came with an illustrative image: all one had to do was press it and the lump formed on the plate, if one happened to get it under the right nozzle at the right time. ‘White balls are no fun; I think I’ll take green balls and . . . Was it red triangles
? Which leaves . . . This is worse than algebra and trigonometry!’

  ‘Just close your eyes. That’s what I do,’ Siiri said.

  In the end, it made absolutely no difference what shape and colour their tasteless baby food was. Anna-Liisa claimed the root-vegetable powder wasn’t even made from fresh vegetables; she had heard that leftover food from nearby grocery stores and schools was brought to Sunset Grove and ground to a pulp, after which a few handfuls of nutritional supplements designed to combat malnutrition and lack of appetite were tossed in the mix.

  ‘Do you believe this is made from food that was going to be thrown away?’ Siiri asked Irma. After a prolonged battle with the MealMat, they were finally sitting at a window table with Ritva, their geometric servings in front of them.

  ‘It has nothing to do with what I believe,’ Irma said. ‘But to be perfectly blunt, I don’t even know what “food waste” means.’

  Siiri had heard about it on television and the radio. Food waste had become a major problem, since people weren’t buying enough groceries from the stores and children skipped their school lunches. This generated skips-full of waste that wasn’t really waste, but food.

  ‘Food that no one else would touch, is that it? Is that what they grind up for us and feed into that printer for thirty years at a time?’

  ‘Imagine, if we didn’t eat these green triangles, they would have ended up at the dump,’ Siiri said, feeling useful. There was all sorts of trouble with waste depots now, too, since there was too much rubbish and it needed to be sorted and treated and recycled. Which was wise, of course: reusing everything. That’s what they had always done back in the day, too. A bedspread turned into a dress, which then became a hat; Siiri had sewn herself stylish clothes this way, over and over again from the same piece of fabric.