Someday Jennifer

by Risto Pakarinen

He came back immediately: Already got that covered, but I’ll keep you in mind.

  Of course he already had that covered. He’d set up his own company. I was the competition.

  It did sting that I hadn’t been invited to his goodbye drinks, but then again, I hadn’t been to the office in . . . months? A year? And it wasn’t like I was always out on the town, or inviting people to my place. I knew that a busy social life requires effort, that friendship is a two-way street, and in some ways I’d sort of just faded into the background. My school friends had all dispersed, then my university friends, then my work friends. Walking through the office earlier on, I’d barely recognized anyone. I didn’t have a girlfriend, or the couple-friends that come with that. I didn’t have any hobbies that brought the opportunity for meeting new people, and calling up old buddies to sit in a bar chatting about how much fun life used to be in our teens and twenties had lost its appeal after a couple of decades.

  I ordered another beer, telling myself that I needed to stay hydrated because twenty-four degrees Celsius in September was unseasonably warm—damn climate change—and Retrobar had no air conditioning. Even though I wasn’t wearing a jacket, I was sweating.

  When I got my beer, I tried to engage the barman in conversation.

  “Warm, eh?”

  He looked worried. “The beer?”

  “No,” I said with a laugh. “The weather.”

  He looked relieved and walked away.

  I dug my laptop out of my bag, opened a browser tab—next to the Facebook tab I already had open—and typed in http://192.168.0.1/~peks/time.html. I pressed Enter and was doubly surprised: one, that I’d remembered the URL correctly, and two, that I was greeted with a grey screen that had big blue numbers on it: 15:45:03, it said.

  That was all. No date, and with the exception of the small envelope icon on the bottom of the page, no graphics.

  I laughed out loud, and then flicked over to the Facebook tab and pasted the URL into my status field. I wanted to show everyone that I had made something worthwhile. That I had been cutting-edge once. I thought of what Johan had said, back at the coffee machine: “You’re literally looking at a piece of internet history.”

  Deflated, I deleted the post. Closed the Facebook tab. I wasn’t going to beg for “likes” on a stupid site. Suddenly, the virtual world just didn’t seem . . . real enough.

  “Hey,” I said. The barman looked up, as if to confirm that I was actually talking to him, and not myself. “Have a look at this,” I said, as casually as I could.

  “Something wrong with the beer?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. I just want to show you something.”

  The bartender walked over to me. On the screen above him, “Doc” Brown parked his DeLorean in front of a nightclub in the Huey Lewis and the News music video.

  “Do you know what this is?” I said, and turned the laptop toward him.

  “The time?”

  “Precisely.” I grinned.

  He folded his arms.

  “See, this is a bit of a big deal, because this clock, this site, has been running for nearly thirty years. It’s probably the first public website in Finland,” I went on, when the bartender didn’t say anything. “I built it.”

  “So you’re a dotcom billionaire?”

  “I just think it’s funny that it’s still there,” I said, a little weakly.

  “So you’re not a dotcom billionaire?” he said, disappointed, and walked back to polish some more glasses.

  “No, but I could have been,” I muttered.

  I pulled out my phone and sent another WhatsApp message to Pauli: First round on me. And the last.

  I kept staring at the phone. One grey tick for sent. Two grey ticks for delivered. Two blue ticks for read.

  Pauli is online.

  Pauli is typing . . .

  Pauli is online.

  Last seen today at 3:49.

  The seconds on the clock on my screen kept ticking away: 34, 35, 36 . . .

  I closed the laptop and picked up a copy of yesterday’s newspaper that was sitting on the bar. A diplomatic war was raging between Washington and Moscow. “Sabre-rattling,” they called it. The stock markets were jittery and people warned of another recession—“boom and bust cannot go on,” they said (again). Pollution in the seas was reaching what environmentalists were calling “the point of no return.” With a horrible sense of foreboding, I flipped to the jobs pages. “Tomorrow,” I muttered, and skipped over to the comic strips—at least good old Phantom was still out there, saving the world—and then spent a couple of minutes filling in the crossword. I always managed at least a few of the cryptic answers, and then after that had fun trying to fill the other spaces with any words that would fit. There were no empty squares in my crosswords, ever. It’s not like anyone comes around to check the answers, is it?

  I took another sip of beer and thought about Tina. Surely Tim, her husband and the father of my lovely niece, didn’t have to stay late at the office every single Friday? In fact, I had once—well, twice—seen him in the pub a few blocks from their house, having a quiet pint, but I also knew (probably better than anyone) that Tina could be a handful. As far as I was concerned, Tim earned his Timmy-time. And, thinking about it, Tina probably knew that it was a little white lie, but let it slide. Our family’s very good at that kind of thing; the old family rug is lumpy and bumpy thanks to the decades of minor disputes that have been swept underneath.

  The thought of Tina made me smile. Although she was the only person in the world who could make me so angry I would throw things, she wasn’t bad, as sisters went. And it was nice that I got to see her so regularly, even if spending Friday nights with my family did make me a bit of a loser.

  Friday night! I looked at my phone again. Somehow Retrobar had sucked nearly two hours of my life from me.

  Running out the door, I texted Tina and told her I was on my way. It was a sunny early-September afternoon, and from the train window, I could see joggers running around the bay, around and around, thinking they were going forward but always ending up back where they started.

  All that work—for what?

  Chapter 3

  I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

  TINA OPENED THE door dressed in a Nike T-shirt and tights. She was wearing a Nike baseball cap, with her ponytail sticking out in the back, and pink Nike sneakers.

  “Hey,” I said, taking it all in, “congratulations on the sponsorship deal!”

  She looked at me with a totally blank expression on her face, the way big sisters do to their idiot younger brothers. “Gotta run, my hot yoga class starts in eight minutes. Sofie’s in the living room playing, but she’s supposed to stop in ten minutes, so please make sure she does. See you in an hour,” she said as she grabbed her hoodie.

  “Nice shirt, by the way. What’s the occasion?” she yelled as she dashed out.

  “Oh, just a meeting with a client,” I said. The Retrobar booze was wearing off and I was craving another drink. Unfortunately, that was out of the question. While I didn’t exactly think Sofie would disapprove, I also didn’t want to be slurring my words and going on about ridiculous stuff. In the kitchen I splashed water on my face and made a coffee.

  Sofie was a smart kid, and something of a miracle baby. Tina had been in her late thirties when she’d given birth to Sofie, and by that point she must have thought she was never going to be a mother—especially since she’d spent her twenties doing . . . let’s just say “enjoying life”: backpacking the world, smoking things, going through a long list of boyfriends. But she was a mother now, and a very proud one at that.

  “What are you playing?” I asked Sofie as I grabbed the other controller from the floor.

  “Lego Harry Potter,” she said without taking her eyes off the TV.

  “Can I be Dumbledore?”

  “If you want to . . . but I only have ten more minutes of game time.”

  “Well . . . maybe we can stretch it a bit,�
� I said with a grin.

  “I’m not sure that’s such a great idea, Uncle Pete,” she said primly. “Kids shouldn’t spend too much time in front of screens. It gives us behavioural issues.”

  She sniggered.

  “Hmm. Okay. But if you think about it, if I’m playing too then you’re only doing half the playing, so really you should get twenty minutes.”

  “Uncle Pete,” Sofie said, scandalized. “You’re sneaky. But I like the way you think.”

  “So, can I be Dumbledore?”

  She raised an eyebrow, shifted along on the sofa.

  About half an hour later, as we were doing battle with a large Lego troll, she said, “You haven’t asked me how school’s going.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Should I have?”

  “Normally it’s the first thing you say. ‘How’s school, Sofie? Learn anything interesting lately?’”

  I chuckled. She actually did quite a good impression of me.

  “How is school?”

  “Boring. Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “Sure . . .” My mind swam. Perhaps it was the beer fighting with the coffee, but I couldn’t focus on anything other than trying to avoid the troll’s massive Lego club. Embarrassed, I decided it best to embarrass her. “Got a boyfriend yet?”

  “Of course. But I’m not telling you about him, because you’ll tell Mom.”

  I was shocked. “No I won’t!”

  “You tell Mom everything.”

  “Not if you don’t want me to. Of course I wouldn’t.” Distracted, Dumbledore took a direct hit and spun into a wall. Sofie giggled.

  I loved the sound of her laughter, so I did it again.

  She giggled again.

  “Anyway, you never tell me about your love life, Uncle Pete, so why should I tell you about mine?”

  I tried to distract her by crashing Dumbledore into a wall again. This time, though, she didn’t giggle, and with no energy left, Dumbledore lay down and died. Sofie looked away from the screen long enough to raise a cold eyebrow at me.

  “That seems like a natural break in play,” she said, zapping the TV off.

  EVER SINCE SOFIE was little, Tina had made a point of supplementing her education so she could “reach her full potential.” Each morning, Tina would open Wikipedia, click on “random article,” and then teach Sofie about the fact that turned up. It was a trick she’d learned from our father, except that he had used random articles in Reader’s Digest—although sometimes he just read the jokes out loud. Since I’d been forbidden from asking Sofie about school, I asked about the day’s Wikipedia lesson instead.

  “Oh, it was really interesting. It was about the human brain. Do you know the peak age of human brain processing power?”

  “Not sure, because I haven’t reached it yet,” I said, trying to duck the question. But when she looked at me with her big blue eyes, I had to give it a shot.

  “Yeah, no, I don’t know. I guess your brain stops growing at the end of your teens? And then maybe you spend a few decades filling it with facts and learning how to use it before you get too old and you start to . . . I don’t know. Maybe sixty?” I finally replied.

  “Do you want to know the answer?” Tina asked from the kitchen. I hadn’t heard her come back in, and was secretly relieved that we’d already switched off the television.

  “Sure,” I said as Sofie and I mooched toward the kitchen like cats hoping to be fed.

  “It’s eighteen.”

  “Long time ago for you, then,” I said, in an effort to gain the upper hand.

  “Not as long as it’s been since your last date,” Tina shot back.

  “Whoa, pump the breaks there.”

  “Sorry, but it’s true, isn’t it? You haven’t had a girlfriend since . . . whatshername? Johanna?”

  “I remember Johanna,” said Sofie. “She always wore those funny dresses.”

  “Wow, you have got a good memory,” said Tina. “You must have only been five or six.”

  When she put it like that, it did seem like it had been quite a while.

  “Come on,” said Tina, reaching for her laptop. “Let’s create a dating profile for you. Let’s do it right now.”

  “What? No.” I laughed weakly. “What is it with you guys tonight? Can’t a man have a non-existent love life in peace?”

  Tina fired up her laptop, slid on her glasses, and looked at me over the top of them in a way that was 100 percent Mom.

  Tina and I couldn’t have been more different. She was a tall, blonde hippie girl with big brown eyes and the mouth of a sailor. She’d tried to curb her swearing when she became a mother, and then again when Sofie was old enough to repeat words back to her, but it hadn’t lasted long. I was a short, quiet, rational, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy. Tina had been the school figure skating star; I was the guy who worked part-time at Video 2000, the local video store. In the Hollywood high-school movie of our teens, she was the nice, kind-of-popular girl, and I was the shy, kind-of-nerdish boy. And when I say “kind-of-nerdish” what I mean is that I was a straight-A student with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture who was (as Dad would put it) “a champ at those computer things”; I wasn’t the most sporty, or good-looking, or popular, but I had some good friends, and if you wanted your Spectrum computer modified, I was your geek.

  “Right,” Tina said. “We need to make a list of your best qualities.”

  “Oh, stop it. I don’t believe in internet dating. First, I know how algorithms work. Plus, I’m old-school that way. I’ll meet someone if and when it’s meant to be—”

  “What, working from your living room? Ms. Destiny isn’t going to just ring your doorbell one day. You need to be proactive, Peter.”

  “Plus, I could never write one of those embarrassing sales pitches anyway—there’s nothing special about me.”

  “I can do it,” Tina said, and mimicked typing on her laptop. “A somewhat attractive professional—what are you again, a ‘web architect’? . . . I’ll drop ‘web,’ too geeky—architect in his mid-forties seeks a special someone to . . . what is it that you like to do?”

  “I’m not doing this, Tina.”

  “He likes to play video games with me,” Sofie chirped in. “We nearly got past the troll.”

  “. . . someone special to adventure through magical lands with. Guaranteed reply to . . . who’s your favourite actress?”

  “Ally Sheedy. Lea Thompson. Rachel Ward.”

  Tina stopped her fake typing.

  “Wow,” she said, and looked at me over her reading glasses again. “Just wow.”

  “Wow what?”

  “Are you living in 1985 or what?”

  I felt myself blush.

  “What’s wrong with 1985?”

  She put down the laptop. “Nothing’s wrong with 1985. Apart from, you know, the hair. The clothes. The music.”

  “Hey! Some of the best music—no, the best music was made in the 1980s.”

  “People always say that about the era they grew up in. Look at Dad.”

  “Pah. What does he know? It was all old crooners and doo-wop. And what do the kids have now?”

  “Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran,” said Sofie, not looking up from her phone.

  “I rest my case,” I replied, not really familiar with anyone she’d just mentioned.

  Tina rolled her eyes.

  “Hey, do you remember Seppo Laine?” I asked. “The science teacher?”

  “No. I had Hilda something for science. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just thought about him earlier.” I sighed, sinking back in my chair. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the past today.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason, just . . . it just seems so long ago.”

  “That’s why it’s called the past.”

  I was trying to open up to her, but she was—either ignorantly or willfully—failing to help.

  “I was thinking about some of the choices I’ve made. Things I could have maybe done bette
r.”

  “Oh, tell me about it. Do you remember that time I wore my bra over my clothes because I wanted to look like Madonna?”

  Sofie looked up from her phone.

  Tina didn’t flinch. “You’d have done the same, darling, only I doubt you could have carried it off.”

  Sofie went back to scrolling.

  “What about movies, then? Surely you agree they were better when we were growing up. They had proper storylines—adventure, romance—not just special effects and mindless action.”

  “Can you guess who I’m going to say you sound like? I’ll give you a clue: it starts with D and ends with ad.”

  I groaned. She was right.

  Tina got up, put the laptop away, and began to prepare for dinner—which for her meant opening packages. Unlike our mom, Tina wasn’t much of a cook. Then again, she was Tina, so her precooked meals were low-carb, low-fat, high-octane. Thinking of Mom’s cooking—meatballs and “smashed” potatoes—made my stomach growl.

  “But don’t you think it would be nice to go back?”

  “Back to Kumpunotko? That’s a good one.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “Think! Tim and me in Kumpunotko? Next door to Mom and Dad?”

  She had a point. Tina and Mom had always had a fairly tempestuous relationship—mostly down to Tina, I seem to remember—and I could hardly picture them settling down as happy neighbours. In fact, they hadn’t spent much time together at all in recent years. Of course, Mom loved being a grandmother to little Sofie, but there was a certain frostiness between Mom and Tina. I wondered if there was something under that old family rug that I didn’t know about.

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant, wouldn’t it be great to be back there? Life was easier back then, without, you know, social media and the constant overanalysis of things . . . and the idea that North Korea might nuke us all at any moment,” I added, slightly more miserably than I’d intended. I could see Tina losing patience with me.

  “Listen, Peter. When you have kids, you stop looking back. You look forward to watching them grow.”

  “But you must be worried, no? I mean, climate change, wars, spies, missile tests. I have to say, I never thought we’d be back to giving people instructions on what to do during a nuclear attack,” I said.