The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘Another electricity outage! Now the trams will stop running and we’ll be stuck in Katajanokka forever,’ Irma cried in alarm. ‘And that scamp ate my card! No, wait a minute, I didn’t use my card. But now I’ll never get my money; this contraption robbed my account. What on earth will we do?’

  ‘May I help you?’

  The voice was familiar, and so were the shoes.

  ‘Sirkka the Saver of Souls! I mean, Sirkka . . . you have a last name, too, but I can’t remember it any more. Lehtinen?’

  ‘Nieminen,’ Sirkka said, glancing nervously from side to side without the tiniest trace of a smile. ‘And you two ladies are from Sunset Grove.’

  As if by miracle, Sirkka the Saver of Souls had appeared for a second time to succour them in their time of need, but she didn’t feel like a guardian angel the way the motorcycle-loving Mika Korhonen had, so long ago. There was a coldness to her, a mysteriousness, as if she were hiding something. Was it possible she had a connection to some all-seeing central surveillance that gave the command to come and save them whenever necessary?

  ‘How much cash do you want to withdraw?’ Sirkka asked, without so much as a glance Irma’s way.

  ‘Well . . . why don’t I take out, say, two hundred euros.’

  ‘Two hundred euros?’ Sirkka repeated, raising her eyebrows like Ahaba the caregiving robot.

  ‘Is that too much? Or too little? Maybe I should take three hundred.’

  Sirkka seized Irma’s fob, which was still hanging round her neck over her winter coat. She flashed it once at the ATM and the money appeared in the tray.

  ‘Well, that was handy. Just a flick of the wrist!’ Irma said in satisfaction as she retrieved the stack of notes. ‘How can I ever repay you?’

  Sirkka the Saver of Souls temporarily lost command of her face. She smiled, then grew serious, grimaced and in the end appeared to be laughing to herself. Her eyes were glued to the wad of notes in Irma’s hand, which seemed an irresistible temptation for the volunteer staff member. Siiri remembered how greedily Sirkka had grabbed at Irma’s bag of cat food and started pitying the poor woman, who must have been desperately short of cash. She was always wearing the same clothes.

  ‘Maybe you can help me, too,’ Siiri said briskly. ‘Is it really true that I have to use my Sunset Grove key-fob to withdraw cash from my account? Doesn’t my debit card do anything any more?’

  Sirkka rapidly descended to earth and was herself again. She explained in brusque main clauses that the key-fob wasn’t a key-fob. It was an active chip.

  ‘Aha,’ Irma said.

  While Sirkka withdrew a hundred and fifty euros with Siiri’s active thingy, she explained that the chip contained all the essential information about its bearer, including his or her medical records, and it replaced one’s social security card, debit card, key, identification, everything – even driving licence, if she had a valid one. And of course passport, if they still wanted to travel out of the country.

  ‘Oh, that would be fun! I’ve only been abroad a few times in my life,’ Irma said, staring in admiration at her fob, which had suddenly transformed into a magical talisman. ‘Last time I had a passport must have been in the 1970s. Or was it the 1960s when Veikko and I went to Hamburg and saw some terribly long Wagner opera? Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, doesn’t it last five hours, even though it’s purported to be a comedy? Veikko slept through the first two acts, but I stayed awake, it was such an incredibly gorgeous performance; we didn’t have anything like that at the old Helsinki opera house in the 1960s. Or was it the 1970s?’

  ‘What do we do if we lose the chip? Or it breaks?’

  ‘It won’t break. It’s made of nanomaterial.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘Nanomaterial. Silicon-based fibrils. But you mustn’t lose it, of course.’

  ‘Did you know we had an electricity outage at Sunset Grove today that lasted hours? We’re all wholly dependent on electricity. Don’t you think it’s downright dangerous that the electricity can be cut off just like that?’

  Irma looked at Sirkka the Saver of Souls demandingly, intent on getting a meaningful response out of her. But Sirkka didn’t know anything about the outage. Nor was she clearly particularly interested in what sort of harm or accidents the temporary loss of electricity might have caused in the retirement home.

  ‘But . . . isn’t our research station under constant surveillance? Is it really possible that a serious accident could take place there without a camera somewhere waking up and sounding the alarm? There must be some Beelzebub watching us all the time, as if we were baboons at the zoo.’

  ‘The alarm systems work automatically . . . and of course they require electricity.’

  Sirkka told them she was a volunteer staff member and not actually responsible for anything. She started looking increasingly harried and would have surely rushed off on to more important things, if her gaze hadn’t been so fixated on the bundles of cash in the old women’s hands.

  ‘If you’d like to make a donation, I can be of assistance,’ she finally said.

  ‘Are you short of cash?’ Siiri asked.

  ‘In a pickle, that’s what we call it in our family. My mother always withdrew her entire pension at once from the bank and splurged on oranges, taxicabs, and other foolishness until she was in a pickle. For the rest of the month she ate oatmeal at the Primula Cafe and was satisfied with that. The cafe doesn’t exist any more; it was the one on Munkkiniemi Allée and it’s an estate agent’s or nail studio now. One day I tried to go into that little accessories boutique on the Allée, it’s always been there next to what used to be the lamp shop in the building with Mauno Oittinen’s statue of a little boy and three swans at the top, painted swans, they’re not statues, you see, but can you imagine, there was a note on the door to the boutique that said they were moving online. How stupid. Now some hair salon is going to move in there too, of course.’

  ‘And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the Lord’s: it is holy unto the Lord,’ Sirkka said, still ogling the money. ‘Leviticus, chapter twenty-seven, verse thirty. I’m not asking for myself. I’m in the service of the Holy Ghost, and all donations go in full to the Awaken Now! Association.’

  Siiri and Irma started vocally calculating how much one-tenth of their recent withdrawals would be. At the same time, they pondered whether they should check their account balances and give a tenth of all they owned or if the Association would make do with just a small cash gift. They were teasing Sirkka, of course, which she didn’t grasp; she kept holding out her hand insistently to receive her share of the old women’s money.

  ‘You’re saying you want fifteen euros from me and thirty from Irma? A total of forty-five euros? Oh dear, we don’t have exact change.’

  ‘A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men. Proverbs, chapter eighteen, verse sixteen.’ With every moment that passed, Sirkka Nieminen appeared to be more machine than human. But they couldn’t flash a smartfob at her or give her simple commands. Suddenly a sly look flickered in Irma’s eyes and she said as proudly as a child who has just learned her multiplication tables:

  ‘And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God! Got you! That’s from the Bible, too. I bet you didn’t guess that an old secular lady like me could recite relevant verses off the top of her head. That was from Ecclesiastes. Let’s say chapter three, verse thirteen.’

  Sirkka the Saver of Souls gaped at Irma and still didn’t understand that the elderly women had no intention of participating in supporting the mission of Awaken Now! Association, despite partaking of its bounty every day at their monitored caregiving pilot project. She grabbed at Irma’s money and tried to take one fifty-euro note, but Irma clenched her fist tightly and repelled the attack.

  ‘And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs,’ Sirkka hissed, her eyes slits. ‘E
xodus, chapter eight, verse two.’

  Irma upped her one: ‘There’s your money, take it and be gone! Genesis, chapter twelve, verse abracadabra.’ She let go, and Sirkka the Saver of Souls nearly toppled on her behind, as she was gripping the involuntary alms for all she was worth. After realizing that she had earned the Awaken Now! Association fifty euros as a result of her heated struggle, she pulled herself together and raised a hand. In the other, she clutched her take, knuckles white.

  ‘Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out. Deuteronomy . . .’

  But Irma and Siiri didn’t stick around to listen to chapter and verse. They were in a hurry to catch the number 4 tram, whose bright lights gleamed at the corner of Kruunuvuorenkatu more invitingly than any holiday display. The driver saw the elderly pair hustling over and patiently waited for them. Siiri suspected he recognized her; so often had she ridden in his steady hands.

  ‘Thanks ever so much!’ Siiri said to the driver, and he nodded at them with a cheerful smile. They sat in Siiri’s favourite place, the first row of two seats side by side, and simply panted for a moment, shocked as they were by Sirkka’s behaviour. Religious people were always grasping, of course, but for an adult woman to steal money out of their hands, well, that was unprecedented.

  ‘I had no idea you could recite the Bible at the drop of a hat,’ Siiri finally said, once the tram had snaked slowly down Mariankatu and onto Aleksanterinkatu.

  ‘You have to speak to an enemy in their language, otherwise they won’t understand. I studied my Bible, but I modified it slightly. There’s no mention of money in Genesis, people are just commanded to take a wife or rise up and go. But my God understands ancient texts need to be adapted to the situation.’

  Chapter 20

  Siiri and Irma tried to spend Christmas with Anna-Liisa. Their friend had been so debilitated by the entanglements surrounding the estate that she wanted to stay in bed, and so they had brought her a bit of swede casserole and some sliced ham. They didn’t have much else in the way of holiday cheer except Irma’s green flaptop, which she had regained interest in when she heard it made it possible to celebrate a multi-reality Christmas.

  ‘What in God’s name does that mean?’ Anna-Liisa barked from the depths of her bed. She was very wan and had lost even more weight, despite having always been thin, a real ‘skinned flint’, to use one of Irma’s idioms. She had a copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain on her nightstand, as well as a little notebook and a pencil stub no more than a couple of centimetres long. She was frugal when it came to pencils, sharpening them down to the nub.

  ‘Are you reading The Magic Mountain?’ Siiri was delighted, as she had read it at least three if not four times and never tired of the novel’s narrative, reflections and humour.

  ‘It’s stupendous,’ Anna-Liisa said with a sigh. ‘I’m taking notes, as it’s full of ingenuous little insights. Major ones, too, of course, but one can’t exactly write those down. Has it ever occurred to you that Sunset Grove is the same sort of isolated hospice for anaemic shut-ins as Berghof Sanatorium is in The Magic Mountain?’

  Anna-Liisa hadn’t got very far in her present read, although she already knew the work by heart. She was making slow progress, and the book’s pages were littered with her underlinings, exclamation marks and comments. Siiri felt it wasn’t strictly kosher to deface a book with one’s own commentary, and in the past Anna-Liisa had been resolutely of the same mind, but now had come to the conclusion that no one else would read The Magic Mountain once she was finished with it, so it made no difference what she scribbled in the margins.

  She read them a few select quotes to support her claims. At the beginning of the book, the young Hans Castorp journeys by train to Davos to pay a short visit to his cousin at the Berghof Sanatorium. His tubercular cousin tells him he will have to spend at least six months recuperating, and the notion strikes Hans Castorp as horrific, as six months is a long time, longer than anyone has.

  ‘But time held no meaning for the sanatorium’s patients. Three weeks was like one day. Note that Hans Castorp’s supposedly brief visit extends to seven years. He arrives a healthy man and gradually adapts to Berghof’s customs, identifying so completely with them that he eventually discerns a rattling in his lungs, and that’s the beginning of the end. We never learn if his illness is imagined or real. Company makes the man, if you’ll allow the cliché. As in asylums like Sunset Grove, where we languish with no concept of the passage of time.’

  ‘I’m as healthy as an ox. And not the tiniest hint of a rattle anywhere,’ Irma said, swiping at her tablet with swooping arcs in an attempt to force it into obeisance. ‘Nor are there any mountains in the vicinity.’

  ‘Yes, well. One passage that struck me was the one stating that life at the sanatorium was not real life, nor was it real time. Isn’t that distressingly similar to our own lives?’

  ‘They also drank red wine in the middle of the day, as far as I can recall. Apropos, I brought along a box of nice red that’s nearly full. It’s Italian, soft, and supple, the kind that used to be sold in the bottle with the funny crooked neck, do you remember? But why won’t this contraption find the apps now that would let us celebrate a supernatural Christmas? Abracadabra and voilà – there it is, have a look.’

  Anna-Liisa sighed deeply, closed The Magic Mountain and lowered it to the nightstand as if it were her most precious treasure. Irma stood and spun around in the room with the tablet in front of her face. The screen displayed what they would be seeing without it: Anna-Liisa’s sparsely furnished flat. Upon the death of the Ambassador, Anna-Liisa had given away his gorgeous antiques to his avaricious heirs and moved into a studio. The sole remaining reminder of their brief union was the vast bed where the poor widow was drowning in pillows and blankets.

  ‘Look! This is our real reality, can you see?’

  They looked at Irma in concern, as neither Siiri nor Anna-Liisa understood why Irma was so elated.

  ‘I believe you have a camera in that gadget of yours,’ Anna-Liisa said, as if addressing a five-year-old who had drawn an incomprehensible mess and was asking the viewers to interpret the work.

  ‘Of course. But the mind-boggling bit will appear in just a minute, wait.’

  Irma sat down on Anna-Liisa’s wooden kitchen chair and executed commands on the flaptop with a jangle of her gold bracelets. She told them she learned about the multi-reality Christmas app from her darlings, a few of whom had appeared on her smart-alec wall the day before last. They’d been so thrilled by the app that they had actually deigned to meet Irma briefly at the Fazer Cafe, eaten mounds of shrimp sandwiches and Christmas tarts on her tab and uploaded everything necessary for the game to her computer.

  ‘Then they were in a terrible rush to get going, as all my darlings are spending Christmas together on the other side of the world this year, too. Was it Vietnam, I wonder? Is it safe to travel there? All I remember about Vietnam is that endless war between Nixon and the Soviet Union, and for what? Utterly in vain. Einerlei, they all flew off somewhere and in consolation, my sweet darlings set up this game for me. Now! There we go! It’s working. Look!’

  A video of Anna-Liisa’s studio was still playing on the flaptop, but Siiri, Irma and Anna-Liisa had been joined by a dark-haired young man in military uniform. He was sitting on a chair at Irma’s side, looking perfectly natural. Siiri didn’t recognize him, but before she could ask who it was, all sorts of people started emerging from Anna-Liisa’s kitchen onto Irma’s screen. In the meantime, no one emerged from the real kitchen, not even a rat. Two handsome young men posed hand in hand on the flaptop screen, in all likelihood Irma’s gay darlings that she always spoke of in such loving terms, as well as a few young women with babes in their arms. Irma turned the flaptop camera towards the balcony, and Irma’s retired doctor daughter Tuula appeared there, as if conjured up to have a smoke.

  Anna-Liisa was flabbergasted. ‘What
is this, pray tell?’

  ‘This is a multi-reality Christmas game. This way I get to celebrate Christmas here in your apartment with all my beloved darlings, including Veikko, even though he died ages ago. He’s here as a young soldier, because that’s what he was like when I fell in love with him. Oh, he was so handsome, so manly. And he’s sitting right there next to me.’

  ‘Isn’t this a little . . . macabre?’

  ‘Not at all! My darling Jeremias is a computer genius and he makes games like this for a living. Apparently you can do quite well for yourself with such things these days, since he always has an expensive new car and lots of money.’

  ‘Except when it’s time to pay for shrimp sandwiches and Christmas tarts,’ Siiri said, unable to restrain herself. But Irma ignored the sally. She had made careful note of Jeremias’s instructions regarding her new game, which made one’s everyday reality multi-dimensional, as something Jeremias called ‘enhanced reality’ inserted itself between the real world and the virtuosic world.

  ‘Jeremias said I could talk to Veikko through this game, but I’m not that silly.’

  Irma rotated her flaptop and squealed whenever she came across one of her darlings in the image. It was a parallel reality, that’s what she called it, and was pleased to have remembered such a fancy term. According to Jeremias, enhanced reality was the hottest thing and allowed intimate devices, like one’s phone or tablet, to become magical objects one could use to see into the future and the past. Belongings acquired new layers, and phenomena difficult to perceive with one’s senses became perceptible.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, you’re talking like someone who has found religion. I for one don’t grasp the sublimeness of your artificial reality in the least,’ Anna-Liisa said.