The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘Nothing is as important for people as other people,’ she said, sitting next to Anna-Liisa.

  ‘They certainly forgot that when designing this space capsule,’ Irma huffed. ‘The only living creatures one sees here every day are rats. Where have all of you been hiding this past week?’

  ‘I just saw you yesterday at book club, Irma,’ Anna-Liisa said, sighing deeply.

  Then she called off the game of double solitaire she was playing with Margit. Anna-Liisa was vexed that Margit wasn’t concentrating properly and had left many chances unplayed. The whole point of double solitaire was striking a balance between one’s personal benefit and the common good, but Margit didn’t seem to grasp this, as she served Anna-Liisa all the easy moves on a silver platter.

  ‘Today I’ve done nothing but read The Magic Mountain. I also watched Chaplin’s Limelight. Ritva taught me how to watch movies on my smartwall,’ Anna-Liisa said.

  ‘Limelight! I never would have taken you for a fan of that tramp Chaplin, he’s such a ne’er-do-well,’ Irma said, and helped Margit reduce Anna-Liisa’s pack with a large stack of face cards.

  ‘Despite its humorous moments, it is not, first and foremost, a comedy. You’ll allow a brief refresher, I hope, since it appears you don’t remember. Limelight is the touching story of an old circus artist who can no longer perform and eventually dies backstage. Modern technology came along and replaced variety shows. The story shares many similarities with The Magic Mountain.’

  ‘How on earth is that possible?’ Siiri asked. She could not see how the young Hans Castorp’s obsessive need to cling to the past had anything to do with the death of an old circus performer. But it must have been dozens of years since she’d seen Limelight. She remembered having viewed it with her husband at the Blue Moon Cinema in Töölö, and that had gone out of business half a century ago.

  ‘And there was the Bio Kent cinema in Munkkiniemi, remember, where the Muslim prayer room is now. And the upper Low Price Market is where Bio Riitta used to be!’

  None of them could recall this as clearly as Irma, and even Irma’s funny intuition couldn’t tell them when Bio Riitta had last been in business. But she swore she’d seen several Chaplin films there. Irma wanted to know how she could get movies on her smartwall, too, and Ritva started to explain.

  ‘. . . and first you choose “Media”, and a new site will open on your screen, and you swipe that to access a drop-down menu. It has all sorts of options, like “Photos”, “Music”—’

  ‘Music! Can I watch Mozart on my smartwall?’

  ‘Theoretically you can listen to Mozart,’ Ritva continued, ‘but it depends on what’s uploaded there, and it looks like it’s mostly adult contemporary. I’ve been listening to the Rolling Stones and Peter, Paul and Mary.’

  ‘I see; in other words, rubbish. Luckily my old hand-cranked CD player still works even though it’s not particularly intelligent. How are you doing, Tauno?’

  Tauno seemed reluctant to answer. He glanced anxiously at Irma and Siiri as if begging them not to speak about what had happened in the canteen the week before. Irma understood and threw herself wholeheartedly into coming up with a new topic of conversation.

  ‘Has Oiva been by this week? I haven’t seen him since, since you were . . . since . . . How is Oiva? What about the rats? Why did Oiva make me think of rats, it must have been just some sort of apropos, but about . . . Limelight . . . Anna-Liisa, could you perhaps . . .’

  Anna-Liisa rushed to Irma’s aid and held forth tiredly but tenaciously about Limelight, which was set in the same period as The Magic Mountain, in the years leading up to the First World War. She saw uncanny similarities between that tragic, restless era and the present one. In addition, the proximity of death spoke to her, because in both the novel and the film the characters regarded death as salvation.

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t need to be said that nearly centenarian government expenditures such as ourselves have little comfort other than death and the fact that in this mad society hurtling towards catastrophe we’re the sole group of humans who still remember that life ends in death.’

  Anna-Liisa drew a breath to continue, but instead closed her mouth and stopped. To Siiri it seemed as if she were too tired to go on; the brief lecture had drained her utterly. Concluding her address with death perhaps came as a surprise to Anna-Liisa herself, but her lofty tone made probing deeper into questions of life or art impossible.

  They sat in silence, and it felt nice. Time passed mercifully. When they were together like this, its passage was neither a waste nor the least bit arduous, as it was when day never slid into night or night into morning. And what were they waiting for at those instances anyway? Why did time need to run so swiftly that people were always impatiently anticipating the next moment without enjoying the present one? Siiri smiled happily as she looked at her last remaining friends; Irma was the only one she had known before moving to Sunset Grove, and then only distantly. Chance had thrown her together with these people, who had grown so important to her during the last few metres of a long life. She hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Anna-Liisa in the corridors of Sunset Grove until Irma fell ill and had to be rescued from the locked unit. Back then, Anna-Liisa had been energetic and in love, and now she was a diminished, anxious widow. And what about Margit, who had rubbed her the wrong way until she joined Siiri and her friends during their plumbing-retrofit exodus and who had taken Siiri into her confidence during her husband’s difficult death. Margit was her friend, of course. But Margit had also changed. She was no longer brusque, strong in body and in spirit, but lost and in need of help. Siiri saw no other explanation for Margit’s clinging to a religious cult.

  ‘You mentioned catastrophe, Anna-Liisa. Are you saying there will be a Third World War?’ Ritva asked seriously, and almost excited.

  ‘Oh, I can’t say. War isn’t what it was in the days when I was washing corpses at the Karelian Isthmus. Even war is waged in technological terms these days. There are these cyberwars and hybrid wars, in which manipulating information, system infiltration and psychology are central to the strategy.’

  ‘Where did you come up with that?’ Siiri asked, dumbfounded.

  ‘I keep up with the times. The world will not survive technological dominance, that’s plain as day. Moving on to another matter, did you hear three residents of the dementia unit died during that absurd electricity outage? They were lethally left without medication, monitoring or care. But no one is interested in their deaths. Except the city’s financial manager, and for him it’s a cause for celebration, as now there are fewer near-cadavers that need to be turned by machines.’

  Irma covered her face with her hands. ‘Anna-Liisa! That’s awful!’

  There had been rumours about the dementia unit deaths, but no official notification had been forthcoming from the smartwalls. As part of this pilot project in monitored elder-care, the dementia unit was even more securely locked than it had been in the past; access was strictly forbidden, and not even the volunteer staff members had been seen opening the ghostly automatic door to the vault. The other residents didn’t know who was confined to the dementia unit, how the machines cared for them and who was possibly dead as a result of the technical malfunction. The incident was so surreal it was difficult to find the words to discuss it.

  ‘What is the meaning of old age?’ Anna-Liisa asked suddenly, as if moving on to the next item on the agenda of their little convocation. The others were silent for a moment.

  ‘Could it be accepting that nothing matters?’ Siiri eventually said.

  ‘Yes, waiting for death,’ Margit reflected.

  Irma started getting bored and squirmed restlessly in her chair. ‘Listen here, you apostles of death. We have to come up with something to do other than worry about the Day of Judgment. I can’t stop thinking about the catastrophe Anna-Liisa just mentioned. I think we should start a war here at Sunset Grove. Why wait?’

  The others gaped at Irma, whose eyes were t
winkling with enthusiasm. She dug into her handbag in pursuit of her tablet and found it surprisingly swiftly. She started swiping with sweeping arcs, and it seemed to Siiri as if Irma were declaring war from her gadget then and there. Just like Ronald Reagan, who could have made the Cold War a physical reality with a single press of a button.

  ‘What are you doing, Irma? What are you implying with this talk of war?’ Anna-Liisa’s voice was weak and agitated and it appeared as if she were genuinely afraid.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this caregiving technology tomfoolery. How many more bodies need to turn up, friends, before you’re convinced that cleaning robots and a food printer can’t care for the elderly? The electrical outage was the real guinea pig test in this madhouse. It proved that the notion of replacing humans with machines is dead on arrival. But no one is doing anything about it.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering the same thing, since there hasn’t been anything on the news about the accidents here,’ Tauno said faintly, as if he had given up. Siiri had never seen Tauno like that before.

  ‘No one is interested in a couple of old people who got squished by robots. Or maybe they would be, but talking about it is blasphemy. Technology is the new religion, and when something is as sacred as a religion, you’re not supposed to question or criticize it. Humour is forbidden, too. Beware mocking a caregiving robot!’

  ‘That’s no doubt true, Irma. But how were you planning on starting this war, and what are your aims?’

  Irma didn’t have a plan. She suggested that for starters they pull the plug in the Holy of Holies, located in the cellar.

  ‘One flick of the wrist, and this entire pilot project comes crashing down.’

  ‘Are you talking about the server? What makes you think it’s in the basement?’ Ritva was clearly interested, but the others paid her no attention.

  ‘What a superb idea, Irma,’ Anna-Liisa said sourly. ‘And when four more residents die as a result of your cyberattack, what happens then?’

  ‘Then . . . then we save all the residents and become heroes.’

  ‘I like it otherwise, but the doors need electricity to work, so we won’t be able to open them.’

  Tauno had a point. Siiri smiled at Irma, who firmly believed the time had come to take action. Siiri agreed; this could not go on. But she didn’t know where to start unsnarling this technological tangle. Pulling a plug out of a wall wouldn’t cause sufficient damage, and in some strange way the thought of Sunset Grove suffering a major catastrophe appealed to her, as it did Irma. Long after the others had forgotten Irma’s military strategy and started volubly arguing about the correct answer to a trivia question posed by the smartwall, Siiri closed her eyes and ears and tried to think. ‘Think, think,’ she said out loud without anyone noticing, and felt as stupid as Winnie the Pooh.

  Chapter 26

  The Ukko-Munkki, the old dive bar across from the combined elementary and middle school, was a Munkkiniemi icon like the wooden kiosk, the Kalastajatorppa hotel, the former cadet academy and the cobbler on Munkkiniemi Allée. Siiri had walked passed it since the 1950s, but now she had Irma’s support, and together they stepped boldly into the pub’s infamous cellar. At least the main floor was occupied by a proper restaurant. Siiri and Irma had attended a peculiar memorial service there, during which the deceased’s former co-workers tossed back booze with both hands and the pastor played the saw.

  They stood clinging to each other at the threshold of the Ukko-Munkki like Thingumy and Bob arriving in Moomin Valley and looked around. Most customers leaned in solitary silence against the tall tables, but a few stood in a row at the bar. Some skimmed through the tabloids spread out before them without so much as a glance at the headlines; one pounded at the fruit machine, whose colourful lights provided the only bit of cheer in the room. Even though it was still morning, the bar was surprisingly full, with the smattering of young men staring reverently into the void as if time had blissfully stopped. For a moment it seemed to Siiri as if the ambience in the public house had been lifted directly from Sunset Grove.

  Ritva waved at Siiri and Irma from the brown-and-grey sofa and croaked out a ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’, somehow managing to make it sound much more prurient than Irma’s crowing. The bar came to life instantly. The philosophical souls sunken in self-reflection raised their heads a centimetre, one rubbed his neck and a few stirred sufficiently to order another pint when two women who looked to be about a hundred shattered the bar’s daily routine.

  ‘Hello, everyone,’ Siiri said, giving the walls a broad smile.

  ‘It doesn’t look like this place has been cleaned since the 1950s,’ Irma said. She sat next to Ritva after first swatting at the sofa with her glove as if driving out evil spirits. Siiri hesitated for a moment as to where she should sit, as there was a black smudge on her stool, perhaps chewing gum that had been there for years, collecting lint from the trousers of thousands of customers. She noticed a slightly more tolerable chair at the next table and politely enquired from a man sitting there if the seat might be free.

  ‘Huh?’ he answered.

  Siiri cheerfully thanked him, dragged the chair over and seated herself across from Irma.

  ‘Stop being so snooty. They just remodelled. Now you can even see out the windows,’ Ritva said, laughed hoarsely, and started reminiscing about the old days at the Ukko-Munkki, when you could still smoke inside and employers weren’t so uptight if you popped out for the occasional beer in the middle of the day. ‘The only time the bar emptied was lunchtime, when everyone headed out to eat. Other than that, the place was constantly packed.’

  Ritva called out to the bartender by name, and he generously carried over a cider for Irma and a beer for Siiri, although they should have actually collected their drinks at the bar. Irma’s was served in a pretty glass with a stem, but Siiri was forced to settle for an enormous mug she had a hard time lifting, even with both hands. She didn’t remember the last time she had drunk beer, presumably some summer evening after the sauna when her husband was still alive.

  ‘Yes, ölyt, as my cousins and I used to say. Oh dear, oh dear, my Veikko always drank ölyt after the sauna, too. And he drank it at home on weeknights, too, but moderately, three bottles while he watched the news. And now I miss my Veikko again, my darling husband! We had so much fun together. Do you know that lovely song by Sibelius, “Första kyssen”? I listen to it all the time; I have a superb recording by Soile Isokoski, and “Första kyssen” describes our first kiss during the interim peace down to a T – have I told you about how passionately Veikko kissed me, how manfully?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ritva said curtly. ‘You’ve also told us how he swore when the bookshelf came crashing down on his neck.’

  ‘I have?’ Irma asked, feigning surprise at having ever mentioned the story they heard from her lips at least once a week. ‘But who can be bothered—’

  ‘To tell a dull story, yes,’ Ritva continued.

  ‘Exactly. I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. I always tell my darlings that—’

  ‘Irma, not now.’

  Ritva wanted to get down to business, and it was true that they had decided this conclave take place specifically at the Ukko-Munkki, because the topic was top-secret and could not be discussed among the cameras and microphones of Sunset Grove. Siiri had noticed that Ritva was very skilled with buttons and electricity, and could thus provide crucial information. And everything was more fun whenever Irma was involved.

  ‘You used the word “server”. What does that mean? Is it the same as the Holy of Holies, as Irma calls it?’

  ‘A server controls Internet connections. And it really serves, unlike public health centres or post offices, where the business models are based on self-service.’

  Ritva knew the Holy of Holies existed. All the computers and robots worked at the pleasure of the Great Server. She mentioned components, and Irma started smacking her lips and thinking about the fruit compote they always spiced generously with cinnamon, before drifting off into longing
for her Veikko again and remembering how he had faithfully maintained their compost pile.

  ‘But that was an endless battle against rats. We had to get rid of the compost, because there was no way we could kill them all, and the decomposing delicacies attracted them. This was at our villa, of course; you can’t have a compost pile in the city. Although on the other hand, why not? Since there are already plenty of rats, they wouldn’t be a hindrance.’

  Ritva coughed for a moment, drained her pint and fetched another. Then she went on at length about the world of buttons and gadgets. For the most part, she used incomprehensible terms like ‘operating system’, ‘application software’ and ‘internal database’, which led to Irma flipping over her coaster to play a solitary game of Words in a Word. Siiri got the impression from Ritva that the Great Server miraculously brought all these long terms together and caught them up in some sort of net that created its own little universe, their Sunset Grove.

  ‘Sunset Grove might be buying this service or tailoring it themselves.’

  ‘Tailoring?’ Irma interrupted. ‘That makes me laugh. Everything is tailored these days, and I doubt Jerry or any of his friends has ever set eyes on a real tailor. And architecture, isn’t that also a word applicable in just about any context these days?’

  ‘Architecture refers to the operating environment. And orchestration is used when discussing division of labour,’ Ritva said. She had sucked down half of her second pint and sank into a reverie. Suddenly she said: ‘I would have so loved to play the violin, but my mother always wore trousers. Our maintenance man had such pretty hair, too, when he let me paint my party frock and I never learned to ride a bicycle. I just went off to school.’