Then she saw something round. A perfect yellow round shape. Another circle was within it, completely black. She saw this for only a split second, but the image burned in her mind clear and bright like an ember in the darkness, as if a voice much older than Sagal’s had spoken to her: “This I’ll remember. This is important. This is serious. Forget everything else.”
Run.
Sagal screamed, not knowing why. She turned around and began to struggle toward the shore through the reeds. Her legs knew exactly where the sounds were coming from, and it was perfectly fine for them to run toward the commotion. The higher the waves were behind her, the faster she ran.
When she reached the shore she leaped over rocks and fallen tree trunks without looking back. Her vision was blurred by exhaustion, but she could see a human-like figure ahead of her. It didn’t matter who it was. Just let it be anything but whatever was behind her.
Her legs caved in. Sagal fell over in mid-run. Her wrist ached, but the pain registered from a distance. She saw legs in front of her.
Mira’s legs. Sagal had always envied those shoes.
She tried to spit on them, but only managed to drool on her chin. Her spit slowly reached the ground. She tried to stand up, but her wrist couldn’t take her weight. Mira reached over to help her. Sagal slapped her hand away. When she finally stood up and leaned against a tree, she screamed all the possible curse words she knew in Finnish and Somali at Mira.
Mira just stood there, facing the sea and listening to her. Sagal jumped and turned around. The reeds waved wildly. Something had to be walking through them.
“What is it?” Sagal yelled and began to retreat.
“I don’t know,” Mira replied.
She sounded tired, beaten. Not like the Mira Sagal knew.
“I really don’t know.”
Mira looked pale. Or perhaps not paler than usual, but the dark blue under her eyes made her skin look ashen. Sagal looked toward the sea again. Seeing Mira’s face helped to make sense of the world again. Nothing was approaching them. It was just the wind rustling in the reeds and creating waves.
“I don’t know what it is,” Mira repeated.
“What is what?” Sagal asked, because she couldn’t see anything.
Mira raised her hand. She pointed at Bondorff Island. They saw the roof of the villa behind the waving reeds. Sagal had to turn her gaze away. She walked up to Mira and looked into her eyes, closer than ever before—so close that she could see Mira’s tiny blood vessels, that fragile, light-red conjunctiva leading into her light-blue eyes, making them glow in ways that a thousand years before the cellar would have made Sagal squeeze a blanket between her knees at night.
“It was your fault!” she yelled. “Do you have any idea what it was like?”
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t—
“My mom and dad must have called the cops, and I’m going to tell them everything!”
Mira’s face remained expressionless.
“It’s taken care of,” she said. “The police aren’t looking for you.”
“I’m sure they are, and then you’ll have to tell them about your little gang and you’ll all go to—”
“I told your mom that you were staying with me.”
Mira’s face was still void of any emotions. It was frozen ash.
“I told them you were pregnant and that we’d take care of it.”
Sagal forgot to breathe. Her ears began to ring with a high-pitched whine.
“She understood right away. She called the cops and said they found you, and promised to come up with a story for your dad and brother.”
Sagal opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say. She realized she hadn’t completely shed the darkness of the cellar. It would follow her and lock the doors for her without asking her opinion.
“And because she didn’t kill you, you get to go home.”
For a second Sagal thought Mira meant her dad.
“Kill me?” she shrieked.
How could Mira be so calm? She was clearly horrified and torn to pieces, yet looked like an emotionless insect or a martyr or a snake in hibernation.
“Who didn’t kill me?” Sagal asked hoarsely and more politely than she meant to.
Mira was still in hibernation, immobile. Then she nodded. A minuscule movement toward the Bondorff villa.
“What is she?” Sagal asked.
The memory of the lump in the cellar stirred, just a short glimpse in the beam of the flashlight. Yet it made Sagal’s skin crawl, and her shoulders shot up to her ears. She had to press her fists into her chest. She wanted to curl into a ball.
Mira shrugged. “Nobody knows,” she said. “She kills children. But she spared you.”
The wind pushed the reeds down to the ground, revealing the villa on the island behind them, and Sagal thought about Mira and the countless, faceless others and how they controlled the wind. She saw a dim light in the second-floor window. And shadows, pacing the room. Figures scurrying around like moths stuck inside a lampshade. For the first time since she escaped, Sagal remembered the woman who had saved her.
“There was this one—”
“She had to go there,” Mira interrupted her. “I led her there, but that’s none of my business.”
Sagal repeated these words silently, trying to comprehend the contradiction.
“You say you led her there,” she said, “but it’s none of your business?”
“That’s right,” Mira said.
Sagal looked her straight in the eye. Mira looked back in a haze of cigarette smoke and blood vessels that contained hundreds of planets and new worlds beyond them. It was the expression of the terrifying and wondrous core of her secret, slimy cruelty.
“But it is your business,” Mira said.
Sagal realized Mira had lifted her hand toward her. She had something between her fingers, obviously meant for her. An envelope. The paper looked bumpy and damp. Mira’s long, beautiful fingers trembled. Her entire arm shook—the same arm that had always calmly lifted a cigarette or a joint or a bottle of cider, even when a fistfight broke out around her and blood had stained all their picnic napkins.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Sagal asked.
She was shivering. The morning light was no longer warm.
“None of my business,” Mira said.
She pointed over Sagal’s shoulder.
“The envelope was over there.”
Sagal looked and saw the large beech, the Octopus Tree. Exactly where it was supposed to be, not in the reeds.
“It’s your business now.”
Sagal didn’t know what she meant, the tree or the envelope. Maybe both. She didn’t want either. She didn’t want to touch the envelope. It smelled of the cellar. Its damp surface was disgusting. In some bizarre way it reminded Sagal of old skin, powdery and fragile.
Mira spread her fingers and let the envelope fall on the ground.
Sagal watched as she walked away. She was suddenly overcome with sorrow. She was no longer afraid, just sad.
The envelope rested on the moss. It had been opened. Maybe Mira had read it. It might give Sagal some meaning or provide instructions on how to operate this stupid planet where she had been left alone to survive.
She leaned over and picked up the envelope.
The treetops behind her rustled and waved.
Thunder boomed in the distance.
ANTS DEVOUR THE MOON
Ants were slowly devouring the moon.
This image was crystal clear and remained so, although all other thoughts meandered, died, or repeated a memory like on a broken tape. The memory of the girl’s hair in the low rays of the summer sun. Her hand slowly reaching to push strands of hair behind her ear. The memory of sand castles crumbling down and how the woods smelled after a thunderstorm.
The ants swarmed inside the moon’s craters. They gnawed at its core. They worked nonstop while the world kept turning.
They worked slowly, because the ants were so tiny you could only see them as a shivering swarm where the surface of the moon was slowly corroding. At first it looked like the ants would take forever, or at least for so long that anyone witnessing it at that moment wouldn’t stick around for the outcome.
Then suddenly, one of the moon’s eyes was gone. Its mouth was gone. Only thin shreds were left behind, like a shattered wasp’s nest.
Restlessness was settling in. First to go were the memories. If the moon disappeared as well, what would remain?
Samuel opened his eyes in an unfamiliar room. He tried to push himself into a sitting position, but something resisted. A light yet determined touch pressed on his chest.
“Just rest now,” his dad said.
Samuel relaxed and fell back on the bed. Aki sat next to their dad, who wore the same smile he’d seen on his mom’s face in her final days.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“At the hospital.”
“What happened?”
His dad took his time answering.
“Jape from next door hit you with his car,” he finally said. “He was drunk. He had no license, either. As soon as you’re feeling better, we’ll go and have a little chat with him.”
“Are my legs all right?” Samuel asked and lifted his head. “Am I going to be in a wheelchair?”
“No.” His dad laughed. “You will need crutches for a while. But most of the time you’ll get to take it easy and lie in bed and listen to that shrieking you call music. Aki and I will bring you food.”
Samuel calmed down. He looked up at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of the hospital. Beyond them he heard a white hum that he could hear only if he really paid attention to it. It reminded him of television screens and their snowfall of static. He pulled his hand from under the blanket and touched his head. He could feel the gauze, but only faintly. His fingertips felt numb.
“Just a little bump on the head,” his dad said. “Nothing serious.”
Samuel let his hand fall to his lap. He looked at his little brother.
“Aki, you must be so bored right now,” he said. “You didn’t have to come.”
“I’m fine,” Aki said, absentmindedly playing with a rubber band he’d wrapped around the metal rungs of the bed.
An awkward silence hung in the air for a while. His dad straightened his back. Then he crossed his arms. Then he uncrossed them and cleared his throat.
“About that girl.”
He crossed his hands, then pulled them apart as if he were caught praying.
“They want to ask you more about her.”
Samuel looked at him. The last shreds of the consumed moon flashed in his mind. Maybe it was a face, after all.
“What girl?” he asked.
There had been eyes and a smile.
But that was data, not a memory. The memory had been gnawed away.
Samuel lived the good life.
He started high school and finally had some room to breathe—Jape and his gang of idiots were gone. He had always known that somewhere out there was a world brimming with freedom and better people. After high school he wanted to move out and didn’t care where. The cubes of the Patteriniemi buildings were his prison, and the wind that blew from the sea still smelled of mud. Even their neighbor, old Grandma Huhtala, passed away. It was a world in its death throes.
Samuel moved out as soon as he turned eighteen. He wasn’t accepted into a university, so instead he studied at a nursing school and graduated with a specialization in geriatrics. He had to do something to get away.
Others said it was his calling. Samuel knew how to interact with old people. He knew exactly what to tell them and how to exude kindness in those thirty seconds he could spare to chat in the corridors on frantically busy days. As the years turned into decades and beyond, he occasionally thought of his dad. They sometimes talked on the phone, but Samuel didn’t go back home to see him. He held old people by the hand, people who had once laughed in the low glow of a summer night without giving death a single thought, and now Samuel was there to lead them from the unbearable pain into the unknown. He was there making amends.
The good life.
He met Krista at Harri’s bachelor party, which had none of that gender-segregated bullshit or stupid, embarrassing stunts. They sat on the seashore late at night, Samuel demanding her phone number. He saw his dad at his own wedding for the first time in ages. He looked visibly older, confused and desperate to make up with Samuel. What did I do to you? his face seemed to ask, but that could’ve just been Samuel’s guilt talking. When he hugged him, he tried to will the darkness that had developed between them to disappear, but instead it just grew. The darkness disgusted him. He could smell the sea in it. The mud mixed with clay that rose to the surface on those slow, gray, cloudy days whenever he’d gone for a swim in Suvikylä.
Then Aada was born. Samuel’s world quaked as he held the small, wrapped creature who smelled of milky vomit in his arms. Then there was Iines. Now there was a family he had to take care of, people whose needs came before his, even if he sometimes made mistakes. Those rare hungover mornings were nothing compared to the inevitability of taking care of those who were helpless.
The good life.
Samuel watched his life through glass, as if he were peering into an incubator. He touched the cold, smooth surface where he hoped to find skin and warmth. Every night he woke up to make sure he had locked the door—sometimes two or three times during difficult times. Krista was a light sleeper and complained. Samuel claimed he didn’t remember getting up. It felt good to say that, although he remembered his movements in the dark house the way people remember an inconsequential detail. He forced himself to remember the image of the moon from his window, along with the relief he’d felt when he could walk around without a care in the world, back when he had no responsibilities. The feeling that he didn’t need to decide which was more important: making sure that the door didn’t let anyone in, or that it would not let him out.
The good life meant that locks would never break.
But then that phone call came.
“Dad is—”
On the surface everything remained the same. The calendar on the break-room wall, with the Christmas party already marked down although the season was three months away. Someone in the ward asking him to call an elevator. His computer hummed. He needed to pee. The absentminded worry that the ache in his left eye was an onset of Horton’s syndrome. The illusion of a parking garage where something irreversible would happen.
The locks opened.
Behind the door were approaching headlights. Like two moons.
LUCKY GIRL
The Inspector already saw from afar that he’d come too late. A police car was parked between the garages. A few natives circled it, sneaking glances toward the woods.
The Inspector parked away from the scene, took his briefcase from the trunk, and lit a cigarette. He took his time finishing the cigarette before he made the phone call.
“I’m here,” he said. “A bit late.”
He heard an unhappy huff from the other end of the line.
“Folks from the criminal-investigation unit or just some baggy pants?” the voice asked.
“The car belongs to baggy pants,” the Inspector said. “Nobody else is here.”
“Good. I’ll call the Vaasa office—you just get those guys the hell away from there.”
The Inspector hung up and crushed the cigarette under his heel. He took the long way round to the shore to avoid the relentless gaze of the natives. When he got to the foundation of the burned house, he stopped and signed a cross over his chest. He hadn’t ever really enjoyed any of his assignments, but burning that man inside his li
ttle cabin had been exceptionally nasty. The Inspector stopped again at a small grave, where a little cross made out of old window siding read “Arvid” in cursive. The Inspector placed his hand on the mound, then continued on. As he pulled his wading boots on, he looked toward the island where two police officers loitered in their baggy blue coveralls. What a pity that the police these days looked like underdressed sewage workers. The Inspector’s wading boots were lined with cashmere.
“Find anything?” the Inspector hollered as he approached the shore.
His boots didn’t even get wet as he hopped from one rock to another.
A policewoman with a long ponytail turned to look at him. The other officer, a man, apparently hadn’t heard the question. He continued to crouch in the reeds.
“And who are you?” the woman asked.
The male officer lifted his head above the reeds.
“One of you folks,” the Inspector said and clambered onto the shore.
He knew his outfit would impress them. A tie and wading boots. A contradiction like that usually did the trick.
“What do you mean, ‘one of you’?” the male officer asked.
He was now standing up. He waved his arms around like a boxer looking for action.
“I just came to tell you that this guy has been sighted elsewhere,” the Inspector said.
The officers looked at each other.
“Where?” the woman asked.
“On the ferry to Sweden.”
The Inspector lit another cigarette.
It was evident that his response wasn’t satisfactory. He also noticed that the female officer dangled a rubber boot in her hand. That would cause some problems.
“Is this sighting confirmed?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
The officers looked at each other again. The cute little Sherlocks and Watsons of mundane crime. They were putting two and two together within the limits of their knowledge, pondering questions that were beyond the reach of their consciousness, which was already too preoccupied by questions like what to eat for breakfast and who should pick the kids up from daycare. The Inspector wished they at least had the balls to smoke cigarettes or get into fistfights at hot-dog stands outside bars instead of hopping onto stationary bikes.
The Black Tongue Page 24
