Your birthday was chosen as the wedding day. The groom might have had something to do with that decision. Many elois think that choosing the bride’s birthday to be the most important day of her life is the height of romance, but there might have been practical reasons to do it that way, because then you can celebrate two annual events with one party, and one gift.
Be that as it may, the symbolism of the day turned out to be horribly wrong. It wasn’t the beginning of a new life for you; it was the initiation of a countdown to departure.
Aulikki sat in the wedding chapel, frail, gray, and straight-backed. I had called her before the invitations were sent and told her that Harri’s parents were paying for the wedding and that it would be indelicate to mention the matter to anyone—people can be sensitive about traditions. Aulikki laughed and said she understood.
Two days after you became Mrs. Nissilä, Aulikki died.
In one blow I lost two-thirds of what I most loved in life—Aulikki and Neulapää. You were the third.
Literally in one blow.
Aulikki died of a skull fracture. You may recall that it was officially recorded as the result of a fall on the front steps at Neulapää. I’m sure she wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway, but somehow . . . somehow I couldn’t help thinking how convenient that death was for Harri Nissilä and his wife.
Aulikki had two heirs, you and me. But because we were both elois, ownership of Neulapää passed to the nearest legally competent relative—your husband, Harri, and thus to your benefit.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think you could have wished Aulikki any ill. You were thoughtless sometimes, thin-skinned, occasionally even lapsing into meanness, but there wasn’t a trace of true, calculating cruelty in you.
It was shameful, low, paranoid of me to even think how easy it would have been for Harri to go to Neulapää—a place with no neighbors anywhere nearby—to visit the old woman, get to know his ersatz mother-in-law. How he would have seen the land, calculated its value. Gotten an idea.
It was after Aulikki died that I first saw the Cellar.
It was as though a little sun inside me had collapsed into a black hole, melted the gray matter in my head, and formed a passage to a chamber somewhere on the other side. Created a smooth-walled cavity, an open, echoing cave with a darkness living in it deeper than the space between the stars.
The darkness of the Cellar was alive. It got its power from death.
Black water stirred on the floor of the Cellar. And the water was rising.
Jare was alarmed at the state I was in, with no speck of joy, never the slightest of smiles. He urged me to cry away my sorrow but I couldn’t. It was as if all the water in my head was needed to fill the dark hollow of the Cellar, to make the little black ripples on its surface rise inside my skull right to the top, to whisper, Pointless, and Meaningless, and Evil, and Guilty! Guilty!
He was worried not just about my psyche but also about the fact that I could hardly drag myself to school, let alone work. A couple of sizable deals went off the rails and his reputation as a dealer was starting to suffer.
I should have kept working. At Jare’s suggestion, I had signed up for an installment plan with the Wedding Planning Bureau. It was the only way an eloi could spend that much money without arousing suspicion. There was still a lot of it to pay off.
It must have been in the early-morning hours. Nothing felt like anything, but a stray hyena was scratching at something under my heart, tearing up my insides. I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know if I even wanted to sleep. My sleep was a kind of stupor that did nothing to refresh me, interrupted by long stretches of lying awake, staring dry-eyed at the ceiling of the darkened room. Nothing mattered. I thought about the knives in the kitchen.
One knife in particular. Because of my kitchen skills class, I knew how to draw a knife across a whetstone at just the right angle. The blade of my best knife was so well sharpened that all you had to do was let it fall on a tomato and the fruit would divide in two with such breathtaking ease that the victim would hardly notice its horrendous wound, the gush of red liquid from between its two halves.
That knife would be my way out. I didn’t think about you, or Jare, or what you would think of that solution. My only thought was to get out of the Cellar, to empty that black water out of my head one way or another, even if I had to slit my throat to do it.
I turned on the light in the kitchen. That’s how I know it must have been autumn.
I was looking for the knife when I saw the little bottle sitting on the counter with a bright-colored label that said “Pain Is Good.”
It was chili sauce smuggled from the United States that Jare had bought and left at my apartment until he found a buyer for it. I’d promised to find a good place to hide it, and once he’d left I had forgotten about it.
I needed to put it somewhere before I got out the knife and did what I had to do. I had nothing left to lose, but if the bottle was found in the apartment after I died, it would cause the Health Authority to investigate Jare.
I thought about what to do with it. The surest solution would be to put it in a bag with a couple of stones for weight and toss it in Näsijärvi. The lake would be frozen over soon. By the time it was found, if it ever was, the trail would be cold, literally.
Why not send myself out the same way? That would make the world inside my head and the world outside my head one and the same: soothing, numbing black water.
I picked up the chili sauce, but my fingers were nearly numb already—clumsy, twitching—and the bottle slipped out of my grasp. I watched in horror, paralyzed, as it turned over in the air and fell straight onto the durable, easy-to-clean tile floor.
The neck of the bottle broke off. Dark brownish-red sauce splashed over the floor and onto my feet. I bent instinctively to pick up the shards of glass and got some sauce on my fingers. Without thinking I shoved my finger in my mouth and licked it clean.
The shock of pain was so awful that it pushed everything else aside. It was like a radiating, rhythmic flogging that penetrated my mouth and my throat and my whole body. It started at the tip of my tongue, crawled its way to the root, and then thundered through my gums and palate in a screaming treble, all the while filling my mouth with a deep, dark red, a twilight of rumbling bass, almost lower than human perception. And as I shouted out loud and groaned and tried with shaking hands to cool my mouth with water, bread, anything to cover up the burning, I realized something amazing.
It was like a hot wind blowing through the Cellar.
As if a door to the Cellar had opened and a little sliver of merciless desert light had passed through it—cruel and hard, but light nevertheless. My heart was pounding, pounding like crazy, pounding like something thrillingly alive, and second by second my thoughts were becoming clearer. I was able to think of more than just the pain in my mouth.
I looked at the puddle of sauce on the floor.
I thought about the knife.
About its meticulously sharpened blade.
About how that flawless blade could scrape up every little drop of the sauce.
And not let it go to waste.
That bottle of Pain Is Good had to be worth thousands of marks. But Jare wasn’t even shocked or upset that I’d broken it. His sincere sigh of relief that I was feeling better was like a breath of birch leaves and lakeshore breeze.
At first I didn’t think to tell him that I had saved the sauce. I’d gathered several tablespoons of it up in a little cup. The skin on my bare feet was tender as if it were sunburned. I knew now that one drop of the stuff was enough for what I later would come to call a “fix.”
I realized that I had to tell him.
I said that I would only use capsaicin now and then, when I needed it, that I could quit any time. I knew a lot of our customers said the same thing—they were just “chillers,” occasional users, just havi
ng fun.
The feelings Jare was exuding were so complicated that I couldn’t quite pick out the different scents. There was tart, citrusy fear and worry, and the smoky smell of surprise, and sometimes a flicker of his familiar lavender-apple-rosemary.
“Like I always say, V, a good dealer never touches the stuff.”
I told him it was just a temporary thing.
But I can’t lie to you.
It didn’t stop there. You probably guessed that.
I love you, my sister.
Vanna (Vera)
JARE SPEAKS
December 2016
While I’m arranging to have Neulapää transferred into my name, business really picks up.
The fresh score I got from the Gaians is starting to run out as they gradually wind down their greenhouses to get ready for the move. It’s hard to grow in the colder winter months anyway. But there’s as much flake as anyone could possibly want. I get a new batch from them every couple of months. I don’t have to pay them anything for it; it’s their advance payment for rent at Neulapää.
We’re making amazing amounts of money.
Instead of using the bulletin boards, V and I have a new way to find customers that is simple but effective. We use the personals. The ad is always purportedly taken out by an eloi, since we’re naturally looking for mascos. The wording varies, but the key point is that the ad always uses the word “hot” or “burning” or “fiery,” as in “Beautiful eloi is ready for a fiery relationship with someone ready to take the plunge.” We change the name and the coin-operated postbox every time, and V always goes to collect the replies. The authorities aren’t interested in the romantic exploits of an eloi. I don’t worry much about the security cameras. V’s always dripping with makeup and hair spray, in a corset with cleavage, looking like one of the fashion dolls that little elois play with. She wears clothes from FemiDress, the state store. She fits the description of a thousand other elois. Ten thousand.
Of course we get a lot of responses from mascos taking the ad at face value. But the respondents who know what’s what play the game right. They write as if they want to get to know her, but they sprinkle their letters with lots of words having to do with heat: talk about being on fire, about a hidden flame, use the kind of code I learned from Mirko. “Do you have the hidden treasure I’m looking for? Will you whisper in my ear, ‘You’re getting hotter’?” Those are the ones we write back to in a way that will still sound like romantic overtures if the letters fall into the wrong hands, but includes hidden information about bulletin board locations, identifying pictures, key words. When a potential customer shows up at the refreshments bar, a few exchanged words make it clear whether we’re on the same page. Only then do we arrange where to meet for the first deal, which often leads to a regular customer relationship.
No one’s interested in why an eloi who’s engaged, or even married, would be placing ads in the personals. A free, unregulated mating market is to everyone’s eusistocratic advantage. An eloi looking for companionship outside of marriage might have extremely loose morals, but if it provides another, unmarried masco some satisfaction, what’s the harm in it? At worst it could cause a little scuffle between two men. It’s ten times more common for a masco to be looking for next year’s model.
Consistent quality is our selling point. It used to be, especially before V was in on the game, that I’d be sold half-fake stuff, adulterated with formic acid or some other substance that stings the mouth to fool inexperienced users into thinking it was capsaicin. When V’s tolerance started to increase she realized the potential of the vaginal test. The level of capsaicin doesn’t have any connection to the taste, and the real stuff can only work on the mucous membranes in one way. But the Gaian stuff is always good. You don’t even have to test it.
My travel fund keeps growing and growing. That’s mostly thanks to V. It’s still nothing near as much as I need, but at least I can see that the goal is attainable. Over the past couple of years at least two guys I know in a roundabout way have been transferred abroad from the Food Bureau by greasing the right official wheels. One went to Tokyo to spy on the matsutake mushroom market and the other to a factory in Germany where they process Finnish blueberries into health lozenges.
Our newfound wealth doesn’t show. Sometimes I buy a book for V; sometimes we go to the movies. Of course V isn’t that interested in the short romances and melodramas geared toward the eloi audience, and the war movies full of acts of heroism and patriotism made for the mascos bore her pretty quickly, too. We mainly do it just so that we can be seen in public as a couple.
I’ve heard that in the hedonist countries drug dealers drive fancy cars and wear tons of jewelry and drink expensive alcoholic drinks and dress like kings.
I wouldn’t trade places with them. Right now the most important thing is that V is all right.
Dear Manna,
Do you remember the weekend in October when I was helping to dig up the rutabagas and put them in the cellar?
When Harri came into the living room at Neulapää with a red toy train in his hand?
I still get the shakes when I think about it.
At first I didn’t understand why you and Harri wanted to keep Neulapää. I thought Harri would sell it immediately. But then it occurred to me that Neulapää was Harri and Manna Nissilä’s country house. A powerful status symbol. A villa, a dacha, almost an estate, at the edge of nature, where the two of you could promenade up and down the paths arm in arm and invite city guests in the summer to enjoy the cool greenery and birdsong, the scent of lilacs and the shade of the apple trees.
I’m sure that’s what Neulapää seemed like to you. To be the mistress of Neulapää was like a story in Femigirl magazine, a place where the lady of the estate could sip chilled mint coolers in the gazebo with friends. Femigirl gave you the idea that getting married would change your life into a fairy tale; once a masco came along, control of an eloi’s life was outsourced and the crazy, chaotic world became clear and orderly.
But that’s not what happened.
You called me often after your wedding. Almost too often, though I was always happy to hear your voice. It usually had something to do with summer chores. You couldn’t remember when it was that the vegetables Aulikki planted should be harvested, or you’d forgotten how to preserve them. Should this go in the cellar or the freezer? How do you make sauerkraut again?
Oh my delicate, wide-eyed, endearingly energetic kitten. Of course I would come on my weekend off to help you out. Brother-in-law Harri strutted around the place like any city masco, knowledgeable enough about pipes and wiring and the secrets of light switches but happy to leave the gardening to us elois.
We weeded and harvested, picked berries and made juice, shelled peas. I offered my advice, gave you little tips, but also took care that I didn’t talk too theoretically or knowledgeably when Harri was around, remembering to lisp and end my sentences on a shrill pitch. I acted like a chimpanzee doing tricks she’s been taught through frequent repetition. But all my effort went down the drain when Harri walked into the room with that toy train.
I exuded fear as bitter as cranberries.
Harri shook the toy train in front of us as if it were covered in blood, as if it were an amputated hand. He asked you sharply if Aulikki had babysat any masco children.
You shook your platinum curls, sure of yourself for once, at just the wrong time. “Nope! No way! There was no one here but us elois!” you said.
Harri’s sandy-colored eyebrows scowled. He’d found other boys’ toys in the attic as well. Letter blocks. Even some sort of toy gun.
I started to feel dizzy. What a stupid mistake we’d made, Aulikki and I.
Elois have difficulty lying. You immediately turned to me and said, “I’m sure Vanna knows why.”
I looked at Harri with my big blue eloi eyes. “They must be Grandma Aulikki’s fia
ncé’s things. She was going to get married once but the masco skipped out on her. When he left she still had all his old things. And she saved everything. She saved her old ballroom gowns, too.”
The dresses were a nice little jab. Harri didn’t like talking about those dresses, not at all. I had a hunch that selling those dresses hadn’t been your idea. Harri looked at me narrowly and the soil smell coming off him was so strong that I thought he might be ready to dispute what I’d said. But there was also a strong smell of lemons, which told me that for now he was simply suspicious.
“Grandma Aulikki was so silly,” I said, and giggled, though my heart was frozen through. “She had a fiancé—I mean, like, a real fiancé, not our grandfather—but that was decades ago. And she was going to have a baby with him, but the baby was never born, it was a miscarriage, so Grandma Aulikki never got married because the masco didn’t want a wedding if there wasn’t any baby,” I babbled excitedly, feigning an eloi’s relish for gossip. “So she went a little nutty and saved his toys, thinking that he might come back someday and make another baby with her. Isn’t that pathetic?”
I flashed a look at you, desperately hoping that you would follow the herd like a good eloi, and you did.
“Yeah. That’s what happened. Just like she said. Exactly like that. Pathetic.”
Harri’s tense shoulders relaxed and he exuded a scent of laundry dried in the sun. He believed us.
“Grandma Aulikki was such a silly head!”
I stretched my face into a grin. You did too, like a mirror image.
“She really was a silly-billy head!” you said.
You saw your reward in my face, took Harri by the arm, and lifted your shockingly beautiful, cherubic face toward his and laughed, happily and loudly. “We had just about the dumbest, silly-billy-headedest granny in the whole world!”
Then you disappeared.
I already had the Cellar inside me, but oh, how it dug itself deeper, how much darker and broader and hollowly echoing it grew.
The Core of the Sun Page 11
