The Atlas Moth
by
Maija Haavisto
Smashwords edition
Copyright Maija Haavisto 2010
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1.
The snowflakes descend on the street as a flock of little white butterflies. "You are not beautiful or unique snowflakes", I whisper to them. Little by little the snow covers the garbage on the street, the last cardboard shells and plastic cones. Every one of those shells still houses traces of heavy metals, barium and strontium and perhaps other things whose names I have forgotten. Every year dozens of tons of these poisons are discharged into the sky to produce patterns of different colors. What a waste. I’d have come up with better ways to use them.
Three people were relieved of their lives at the intersection of the years. Two were mugged to death and one was found in the snow, frozen to death. This kind of thing happens. The amount of stupidity in the gene pool dwindled temporarily, but there will always be a thousand times more. The world will never change, obituaries disappear in obscurity.
For me the last day of December was a day just like any other, spent with motion pictures and online discussions. At nine in the evening I went to see Venla on the second floor. She hadn’t been aware that it was the last day of the year nor did she really care—why would she. We had a few cups of rosehip tea and some sandwiches. Venla fell asleep before the fireworks started. I watched them for a while, but my thoughts were mostly wrapped in their heavy metal content.
When I got home I made a New Year’s resolution. It’s about time to get done something I have been procrastinating for quite a while.
The microwave oven clangs to let me know that my pasta dinner is ready. The vat is loaded with ham, heavy cream, onion and salt. The package didn’t list the amount of cholesterol. Most likely there is quite a bit of it, maybe a hundred milligrams and it clings eagerly to the walls of my arteries.
The more unhealthy a food is, the more delicious it is and the more satisfied I am after gobbling it down. Dad said that donuts are an excellent food, since they have the best ratio of price and calories. Since his stroke he hasn’t really touched donuts. Despite his atherosclerosis dad will outlive me. Men in their fifties are hardy as willow.
My dear mother made sure that we were eating healthily, though she wasn’t obsessed about it. We were to eat fruit and vegetables daily, as well as rye bread. I thought it was crazy to eat something just to live longer, especially since such food tends to be unpalatable. I hid carrot pieces and turnip slices in rack-like grooves under the kitchen table, they are probably still there. That table has likely avoided coronary disease and colon cancer better than most of its kind.
Maybe there are things I fear, but death is not one of them, and life is just a byproduct. I get a reprieve from it every night. It just takes one, sometimes one and a half, tablets of Rivotril to be free. It is a false death, a substitute death, but good practice for the final trip.
Rivotril causes physical dependence, but it does not matter. The GP refills my prescription without any hassle. Rivotril and Oxamin, my vitamins. One of them I’m not hooked on yet, as I take it fairly irregularly. Benzodiazepines are pretty useless anyway. You cannot even kill yourself with them, unless you get a truckload of the pills poured on top of you.
When I take a tablet, I don’t have any dreams. It is like a piece of heaven, nothingness. I go to bed and wake up in the morning, with only a void inbetween. Today I have to get up earlier than usual, because I am going to meet someone. Frankly I couldn’t care less, but Sanni wants to meet me and I didn’t know how to refuse.
I stand in front of the main railway station at 2 PM sharp. Maybe she has forgotten, maybe she won’t come. My wishes are useless, I can spot the green poplin and burgundy corduroys from far away. She has hung a colorful scarf round her neck, the kind that looks very itchy, and on her head she has a beret with a topknot. Sanni looks and sounds younger than her age. Compared to her I am like a single mother in her thirties. Even her hair is braided like a schoolgirl’s, only the teddy bear pins are missing.
Sanni whirls as she tells me about her Christmas holidays, blissfully unaware of my tenseness. Skiing in Lapland with her boyfriend after Christmas, New Year’s with her boyfriend and I guess she narrates a novel full of what has happened to her and them, the story goes in one ear, panics and flees back out. Every now and then there is a creative break, during which I’m supposed to either talk about my own life or comment on her stories. My repertoire includes "yes", "great", "really?" and "hmm". Switching between them using different intonations creates a powerful illusion. I have years of practice with this. There’s a reason why Sanni always wants to see me: I’m such a good listener, that’s what she says.
I have no idea about the choreography of this meeting, but luckily Sanni does. She leads me through the busy center to Annankatu, a street with plenty of mostly Asian restaurants. It has snowed a few inches during the night, but the snow has been trampled into an unappealing gray slush. We head into a small Chinese restaurant. I’m not a big fan of Chinese food, but I guess I’m not a fan of that many other things either.
Chinese restaurants are cheap. Sanni isn’t poor, but I am. It is considerate of her to remember such things. I cannot even remember when I’ve last eaten out.
I’m not sure if Sanni timed our meeting between lunch and dinner time on purpose, but if she did, it failed. The little restaurant is full, not a single free seat. We have to wait for a free table for almost a quarter of an hour. I feel thirsty. I stare at my watch looking at the minutes go by, wishing I’d taken an Oxamin.
I order pork jiggling in soy sauce, Sanni picks tofu jiggling in soy sauce. If you are what you eat, I’m becoming a lardy sow. Ham on Christmas, then ham pasta and now sweet and sour pork. Cholesterol is guaranteed and the soy sauce ensures that the meal is also rich in salt and monosodium glutamate. I pluck the bamboo sprouts from the sauce and arrange them into a neat row on the edge of the plate. I’m not a panda.
Eating silences Sanni and I can concentrate on processing the stimuli from the environment. The food is quite decent. It reminds me of the sweet and sour sauce that my mother used to cook, a long time ago.
In spite of the silence Sanni dines painstakingly slowly, one vegetable piece at a time. I’m finished long before her. I could have eaten with chopsticks and still beaten her. I place the fork and the knife at five o’clock on the plate and fold the napkin on top of it. I should say something. My hands sweat and tremble slightly, but no one pays attention.
All possible discussion topics that cross my mind are flawed. The only thing I can think about is death and matters related to it, and you don’t talk about them with Sanni or anyone else. Back in high school we could talk about so many things. We talked about guys, the future, colors, movies, aesthetics and current events. We spent the evenings on the phone, if something had been left unsaid in school. Sanni was different. I was different.
After Sanni has finished the voluble chatter resumes. At times I force myself to listen. She asks me when I am going back to work. I reply that I am not going to. I get a torrent of grumbling in my face, about how I am still young, I should get an education. I could apply for the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, the Academy of Fine Arts, or perhaps a community college. I could, but I won’t, so many things I could do, but I don’t. Choices cannot be avoided.
Your creativity is leaking away, says Sanni, sighing. I don’t understand the concept of creativity.
The waiter brings us a bill on a plate. There are two pieces of candy on top of it and I take them both. They probably taste like soap, but it’s still candy. I want out. Sanni wonders why I’m leaving so soon. She had something planned for us. I don’t bother to explain.
The window leaks slightly at the seams, but luckily the radiator emanates warmth. Humans look ugly and deformed in their winter clothes. They are missing a tail and wings.
I can’t understand why everyone seems to be hurrying somewhere, but then I remember that many work or study. Some people have someone to rush to. What a peculiar idea. I might imagine scurrying for Venla and even that would be in vain, as there are only two floors. If she called me with urgent trouble I would run the stairs. When there is an emergency you have to run. Otherwise you might as well move as slowly as possible.
Elevators are fairly unsafe as places go. They are like airplanes, they can fall. You can be trapped inside. In this building neither possibility is particularly dangerous, as there are only five stories. At most a fall would cause a few broken bones and an insurance claim. According to the metallic plate the elevator was last inspected for safety in 1999. I don’t know if that’s a lot or a little time. Also, the elevator is not a solid metallic booth, but made out of wood and glass, with an argyle grid in the front.
Were the elevator to be stuck between floors, I could just wait there calmly and gracefully until I spotted someone to ask for help. Of course, what would really happen is that I’d get a panic attack and burst into tears. When I was rescued I’d be hysterical, wailing and trembling, even if I’d only been trapped for minutes.
I am careful not to drop any hair on the keyboard as I operate on my split ends. At times I find myself immersed in peering at bundles of hair for minutes at a time. There is no new email in my inbox. I read the new messages posted on my discussion forums and when there are too few of them, I check the previous ones again, in case I didn’t read them all, even though it’s clear I did.
2.
Someone said on an online forum that hell is freezing over in Helsinki. I haven’t seen any other hell than this one, so I can’t be sure how accurate that is. My thermometer says it’s -21C, and there’s some windchill on top of that. When I walked home from the grocery store I lost sensation in my fingertips and when it returned I got some hardcore pins and needles.
Hypothermia would be an interesting way to die. There have been suicides by crawling inside a box freezer in wet clothes. This is particularly handy, if the freezer has a lid that locks automatically. Too late for regrets. There are obviously some downsides, too. If for some reason you fail, you will likely lose some limbs. The feet aren’t all that important, but it would be quite a drag to lose your hands, not to mention how much it would hinder the next attempt. Additionally, the body would likely cut down on cerebral circulation, leading to a state of confusion—perhaps even hallucinations—at the last moments, causing you to miss the best part.
I felt like a good person for doing the grocery shopping for Venla in this weather. Obviously she did not regard it as highly as someone else might have. After witnessing both of the wars, temperatures like this are nothing. Even worse, my trip was in vain, as Venla’s granddaughter Irma was visiting and had brought food with her.
Irma has droopy cheeks and a narrow mouth. She doesn’t bear much resemblance to her grandma. Maybe there’s something similar about their eyes. I don’t have a clear opinion about Irma and on the whole I know little about her. 52-year old physiotherapist, lives in a yellow house, maintains a stable and satisfactory relationship with a balding husband. She follows a healthy lifestyle, so she will probably muddle along for a few more decades. Most likely cause of death perhaps breast cancer, depending on whether she’s on HRT or not.
Irma used to visit her grandma every day. It is just half a kilometer trip, but probably still an arduous routine. Now she has reduced the frequency to a few times a week. I have become Venla’s primary caregiver. For Irma my death will be quite a blow, as it will mean daily visits for her again. I’m not saying that Venla won’t miss me, but after outliving her parents, three siblings, two children and one grandchild, does one friend make such a big difference?
Irma has brought a Bundt cake, with currants and dried fruit. Old women bake cakes like that, except for Venla, she doesn’t like raisins. My granny used to bake them too. Now she has dementia and she drools while speaking.
Irma makes tea for us and coffee for herself. I lift Venla from the bed to the chair, so that she doesn’t have to walk. She is even lighter than one would expect. Time erodes people, and when you are old enough you weigh nothing. It’s comforting to know that I will never be as frail.
The rosehip tea tastes bitter. There isn’t much for us to talk about. Irma shares a tale about her client who dropped an iron on her stomach. The iron wasn’t on, though, which makes the story much less interesting.
Three generations around the table, and one more missing between each. Despite her healthy lifestyle Irma appears older than she is, her mousy hair already striped with grays. Venla, on the other hand, looks young for her age—or should I say less old.
When we met for the first time I thought she might be perhaps eighty. I still remember the dragging sound that scared me in the attic. I froze in place, my hands started to shake and my heart pounded like a jackhammer. The haunting moment seemed to last forever. After seeing the shadow of this ghost I could already sigh with relief, as it was very small. The woman who cast the shadow was also quite small. She saw that I had been alarmed by her presence, even though I tried to pretend I hadn’t.
I was taken aback by the rustling sound, I said.
Might have been the wings of history rustling, she said and laughed.
I asked her if she was out there to fetch winter clothes. The woman who had introduced herself as Venla shook her head and said she didn’t really go out. It sounded strange, as even I tend to venture into the outside world every now and then. It also turned out that Venla had indeed been looking at the wings of history. Closet #12 contained the biggest butterfly collection I had ever seen. Not that I have seen any other butterfly collections, but I doubt I’d ever encounter one as magnificent as this. The large brown cardboard box was full of wooden frames. Under the glass every frame contained a butterfly, impaled with a needle, one of each kind. The labels where the species names had been written with ink had turned yellow, but the butterflies were still life-like and their colors untarnished.
We browsed through every single butterfly. After that Venla was so exhausted that I helped her home and stayed there for several hours. I forgot my winter coat in the attic, but I didn’t care. Since then I have visited Venla almost every day. At home she only has one part of the collection, an atlas moth (Attacus atlas) in the uppermost drawer of her wooden desk. It’s the biggest butterfly in the world, but it looks pallid with its brown wings, a bit like Venla. She is too old to fly.
The butterflies weren’t collected by Venla but by her ex-husband Hannes, who died way back several decades ago. When Venla said she was 98 years old I didn’t believe it at first. It made her the oldest person I’d ever met, and she was still living at home. She doesn’t think it’s much to brag about, though—you’re only old when you’re past the one hundred mark.
I got to hear fascinating stories about catching butterflies. You wouldn’t think that such heavy duty poisons are needed to snuff out a little insect. Earlier they used to use such toxic chemicals as chloroform, tetrachloroethane and even potassium cyanide, but nowadays ethyl acetate is preferred. Ethyl acetate and tetrachloroethane would only give you unpleasant symptoms, but with chloroform and cyanide one could kill not only a common blue butterfly weighing less than one gram, but also a human being, quickly and peacefully. I should have been born a few decades earlier and become a butterfly researcher. Or a butterfly. Even without poisons they usually only live for a few days. Venla still has one year and four months to go.
At the door Irma asks me if I can imagine taking care of Venla for a week or two in a few months, as she would love to take a holiday to Malta together with her balding husband. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me. Irma sighs in relief, smiling. I feel like I’m bursting from the sense of altruism, the second time in one day. I am too good for humankind.
Unbeknownst to her, Irma reminded me of a project I have been planning for a while. I am going to write down all the dangerous items in my apartment. My PC shall help me carry out this demanding task. With its help it will be easy for me to count the items and organize them in alphabetical order, reverse alphabetical order and any other formation as pointless and futile as possible. Computers are beautiful things: you can organize life and death with them and they are never wrong any more than right.
Even though my apartment only has one room, I still can’t decide where to start—the bathroom, the lobby, the kitchen or the actual room. After some contemplation I settle on the lobby. The coat rack bears an umbrella, but it is collapsible and lacks the sharp metal tip. It cannot be used to imitate one of the most ingenious assassinations in history, the murder of Georgi Markov, which was carried out by hiding a needle filled with ricin oil in the tip of the umbrella and jabbing him with it in the morning rush. I don’t think I could assassinate myself. I guess it would require some kind of a split personality.
Besides the umbrella the lobby contains coats, coathangers and two pairs of shoes sewn by the little hands of Asian children. The coathangers could be used to perform a self-lobotomy. The shoes might turn out fatal for someone suffering from severe rubber allergy. Overall my lobby seems like a very safe place. I’m disappointed.
The bathroom seems a little more promising. You can drown in the toilet bowl, is that an item? The hairdryer could be yanked into the bath tub which I unfortunately don’t have. The toilet cleaner is definitely a bunch of toxic glop. The ladyshave would be suitable for wrist slitting. The skin toner found in the cupboard lists an ingredient I once verified to be highly poisonous and the deodorant contains butyl alcohol. The skin cream includes apricot seed oil among its ingredients, does that contain cyanide? I’ll skip it this time.
The toilet brush and the towels are not added to the list, even though they could theoretically be used for self-destructive purposes. The shower might work for drowning. I once read a story on an online forum about two young women who had locked themselves in the bathroom, sealed the seams of the doors and tried to fill the entire room with water. It ended up taking quite a while and in the end they opened the door. The apartment had become a pretty seascape. The downstairs neighbors were not very amused. I don’t know if the women have since been more successful in their endeavors.
I move into the actual room sadly aware of its state of disarray. However, this shock is unlikely to be of the life-threatening kind, at least for anyone but my mother.
There are two gold-tinted hooks embedded in the ceiling. I have often thought about hanging myself from them. They probably aren’t meant for this purpose, but it is a bit peculiar to be just a coincidence. The television can ignite a fire, and the computer too. You could also strangle yourself with the various cords and wires. By choking on the ADSL modem cord you would literally be choking on information, and while dying you’d feel the ones and zeroes enmeshing around your neck at the speed of two megabytes a second.
Other potential deadly weapons found in my room include scissors, nail cutters, a thick permanent marker, a plastic bag, a light bulb, a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a roll of tape, a table, five pins, a box of matches, a mirror, an extension cord and the windows. I’m not sure how dangerous acrylic paints are. Composing the list begins to feel frustrating when I realize that almost every single item here is life-threatening when used wrong—or right, as I’d put it. I can’t even bother going to the kitchen when I remember all the dishes, knives, cheese graters, ovens and stuff.
There’s still room for improvement, however. The electric stove could be replaced with a gas-powered one, and the shower booth could use a piece of high-voltage electronic equipment. As for plants, some philodendrons, flamingo lilies and of course a cardboard palm. A guillotine could be installed into the door frame of the front door.
I want to die now. I don’t want to wait a minute more. Why does it have to take so long?
Mom calls me and asks if I want to go to theatre to see one of Moliere’s plays, as her friend fell ill at the last moment. I reply that I am too exhausted from taking an inventory of my apartment. She sounds annoyed. The ticket will go to waste, and it wasn’t cheap. That’s what infuriates me about her. I would be glad to go see the play, but not with a ticket that I got just because someone else couldn’t make it.
Mom never asks what’s up with me any more. She has learnt that it doesn’t get more descriptive than "nothing".
3.
Life has begun to seem meaningful. I whack my head into the wall and still the feeling won’t pass. This serious condition has been going on for a few days and is only getting worse. The strangest thing is that it all began with me finding an online discussion forum about suicide. I have even neglected Venla and only visited her in passing.
This strange sense of a meaning is something I’ve had once before. I had been accepted to the high school I wanted to go to and had the first serious crush of my life, on a person who was unlike anyone else. I decided not to die, but changed my mind just a few months later. It was almost six years ago, and it’s been three years since I graduated from the high school that was supposed to solve all my problems, as did the guy who was supposed to solve all my problems. In a way he did do it, by confirming that I had been right about life all along. Later there was a second guy, but he never managed to change my opinion one way or the other. The first guy had a name, but the second one didn’t, I’ve already forgotten it. It could be that he never existed in the first place.
I prefer online discussions to those in real life. You don’t have to worry whether your hair is alright and what is the proper size of the neckline. On some forums the problem was with men who started trying to chat you up if there was any chance that there was a woman behind the username. I got messages where I was asked to have some "special fun", or to try out someone’s new satin sheets. I replied that I was a 15-year old girl and my parents would contact the police if I received any further messages of such kind. It always stopped them short.
That problem is in the past. I decided to drop all my old communities and join Lemming Cliff. It is meant for talk about suicide, but other topics are of discussion are game too. Moderators remove any spam and harassment, but nothing else is touched. Nothing is taboo.
Am I depraved for voraciously reading through these posts for hours? They make me want to die. These people, my new friends, they suffer, they don’t want to die and yet they have to, they have an unrelenting, deadly illness. I have to understand them all.
Lili is 13. She is planning to die. There isn’t much difference between the two of us, just eight years and a few thousand kilometers. I’d kind of like to meet her, but I fear it would be like looking in the mirror and seeing my own younger self. I don’t know when and why something went wrong with me. I was a fairly normal child. I guess the change must have occurred before puberty. I do remember either at the end of primary school or when I had just started secondary school watching Animal Planet with a classmate of mine and she couldn’t bear looking at lions tearing up antelopes, but I found it fascinating.
When I think about it, I’ve never lost anyone close to me. Both of my grandpas died before I was born. My granny (the not drooling one) died of cancer a few years ago, but I had only seen her as a little kid, so we could hardly be said to have been close. Miraculously I’ve managed to avoid the deaths of anyone else I knew. The only one I remember was in primary school, my friend’s best friend, who was hit by a reversing truck. The guys made a gag about it that went a bit like the old "Come on, ketchup" joke.
I didn’t go to her funeral. I’ve never been to one. My idea about them is solely based on books and movies. People dress in black, sit there all pious and somber, the priest throws some sand—or is it soil?—on the casket and then I guess hymns are sung, but I don’t know what it’s like in reality. Do people cry for real? Is it mandatory to pretend that you’re grieving even if you aren’t? I guess laughing at a funeral would the worst possible breach of etiquette. You can’t laugh at death, that would be a sign that you aren’t afraid. Laughing in a church is like showing disdain for your life, punishable by fireballs and deploring glances.
Besides Lili, Sandra wants to die too, and Steph and David and Grete. I’m in a hurry to make friends with them.
These words aren’t just empty rambling, it’s not a ploy. The day I joined the forum there was a message about the death of a former active member. Canadian schoolboy, towhead with tousled hair and a shy smile in the school photo, twin sisters, brains splattered all over the walls of a middle-class home, that’s how I picture it. The family is grief-stricken, his website read "Happy Doomsday to me", but the parents demanded the site be closed.
I chose my username from Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. Aino, the sister of Joukahainen, drowns herself so that she wouldn’t have to marry a really old and shriveled shaman type guy called Väinämöinen—now that’s my kind of a girl. My new identity already feels more comfortable than my own name, though they can use that one, too. I miss these people. I wonder if they miss me?
I get an email from Grete. Her English is quite poor, but it doesn’t matter. Grete asks me how long I’ve been depressed. I don’t know what to answer, I don’t think I am. She tells me about a violent father, a violent boyfriend, the death of her mother, the ordinary story that’s never ordinary.
After I’ve thought it through I write her a reply. I explain that death has intrigued me for years already and how it just feels like the right choice, that there’s nothing I want from life, that I had a mostly normal family and I’ve never been used or abused. I don’t even use antidepressants. Basically I’m a spoiled kid. It takes me two screenfuls of prose to write all of this, which isn’t so swift as I have hardly written anything in English after high school.
As I wait for the reply from Germany I read more of the messages on the board. Besides different cocktails of medication and other methods of suicide they also discuss more normal topics, like music, movies and co-workers. I can read up on those later.
I have got a few follow-ups to my posts, they seem to be saying that I’m welcome. I find a link to a page that showcases almost two hundred different suicide methods, mostly poisons. I have to use a dictionary to decipher it. Many plants have strange names and it’s not always easy to find what they are called here.
Outlook hands me a surprise by notifying me about a new message. Grete has already replied to me. "I am sorry with you", she writes and whatever she means by it, it can’t be anything bad. This encourages me enough to send private messages to a few other people as well. It is four o’clock in the morning, I fetch a jar of ice cream from the freezer and eat it all.
4.
I always feel stupid when Irma calls me. Still I’m happy that it’s her and not anyone else. Irma asks me if I’ve changed my mind about her going on vacation. For a moment I don’t quite understand what she’s talking about, until I remember Malta. If at all possible, she adds meekly, she would like to undergo the trip in the near future, with everything being fine and all.
"Everything being fine" refers to Venla of course. I took her to the doctor a few days ago. Irma offered to take her, but Venla wanted to go with me. I was proud of both of us. Not many people her age can get to a health center even when assisted and not many people would be keen on assisting. It was her first visit to the outdoor world in several months. Admittedly it’s not a long trip, two stops in the bus and a hundred meters by feet, but the walking part takes a lot longer than the bus ride. Venla is ashamed of her cane.
In Helsinki pensioners get no discounts when traveling with a single ticket. I think it’s wrong, Venla is so small she should qualify for children’s fee.
As we queue to the reception desk a middle-aged woman hollers out all her numerous ailments to everyone present. We don’t even make it to the desk when the doctor already calls out for Vaherma. I follow Venla to the lion’s den.
The doctor is so young that he could be Venla’s great-great-grandson. He looks like he’s thinking the same thing. I expect him to ask Venla to stick out her tongue and say "aaah", but that doesn’t happen. He asks Venla about her health. She has nothing to say. This isn’t enough for him. Surely there have been some pains or aches at least? Yes, there has been the occasional leg ache, Venla admits and now the doctor is satisfied and writes something down.
The cuff is wrapped around Venla’s stick-thin arm and he pumps it into a reading of 120/80. It is a good reading, even we mortals know that much. Next the doctor wants to jab Venla. It scares me, doesn’t he understand that she could break. But everything goes just fine. When I turn my head back to the doctor he has already capped all the tubes. The blood looks very normal for blood, a deep crimson red. It surprises me that I expected anything else. What other color could it have been?
The doctor asks if Venla needs some medication. No thanks. I could have taken a whole bunch of prescriptions, but no one is asking me. Thank you and have a nice day. Our fifteen minutes is over and we’re propelled out of the door. The walking diagnosis manual woman is still in the waiting room. Based on the look on her face she is about to die, at the very least. I’d offer her candy if I had any.
The results of the blood tests are in and according to Irma they were fine. Venla’s cholesterol levels are excellent, her sed rate is normal, blood sugar a little high and hemoglobin a little low, but nothing alarming. She emphasizes the word "alarming" as if it is a secret codename for Venla being half-way to the grave, but with an expiration date far enough in the future so that she won’t drop dead for a few more weeks and Irma can have her vacation. Still, I can’t think of any reason not to let her have it.
I’m reserving the tickets for the 21st, she says and asks me to mark it in my calendar, as if I have one. It turns out the place where they’re going isn’t Malta as I thought, but Yalta. To the question I’m not asking she answers that it is located on the coast of the Black Sea. So I will have to watch out for any plane accidents in that region. Does one need stopovers to get to Yalta? I wouldn’t know, but I assume they do.
Venla smiles when she hears about Irma’s trip. The smile is a mix of happiness for Irma for getting the trip she has been waiting for, and happiness for getting rid of Irma. Or that’s how I intepret it. It’s not like she’s supposed to have anything against her granddaughter, but you never know.
Can you sleep over at my place during the trip? Venla asks buoyantly like a little girl asking a friend over for a pajama party. There is an extra bed in her apartment that no one ever sleeps in. Despite this it always has freshly laundered bedsheets. Venla taught me how to press sheets with a mangle. Before that I didn’t even know what a mangle was.
Not long ago my first reflex upon getting home was to turn on the TV on a random channel. Today I’ve lost my remote control and I don’t even care. The most important thing is to power the computer on and check for new messages. There are two new emails in my inbox and dozens of new posts on Lemming Cliff, as usual. I don’t think I’m an Internet addict, I’m just addicted to whatever gives my life some meaning. Reading the messages and answering them makes time pass quickly, thus making for shorter days.
I’ve learned plenty of new words. I know what suspension hanging, hemlock and deadly nightshade are. I have also figured out that for many people death is a difficult subject, not at all as simple as it is for me. Many things can be very difficult, like going out, making phonecalls or talking to your parents. I write a message where I invite everyone to visit my place should they ever come to Finland.
The next day I’m going to rent a bunch of movies recommended on the forum and watch them as a marathon. I’ll have great company: a big bag of chips, a jar of sour cream and an extra large bag of licorice. In the rental store I face a problem. Leaving Las Vegas is on the shelf, but I’ve already seen it several times, and the same goes for Dr. Strangelove. The staff hasn’t even heard of most of the films on my list. I’ll have to settle on just getting Whose life is it anyway and Ordinary people.
I make a dip by squeezing three garlic cloves into the sour cream. There are some pros to having most of your social contacts located on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. I take a comfortable position in my armchair and watch sculptor Ken get paralyzed from below his neck. His girlfriend is a typical annoying bimbo who thinks this isn’t such a problem, as they can still cuddle and smooch just fine. Luckily Ken is a decent person who wants to die. I thank my far-away friends for this excellent choice of a film.
Sadly I never get to see whether Ken kills himself or not, because my DVD player commits suicide before he gets that far. The appliance makes a few crackling noises before going silent for good. It is snowing on my TV screen. The violent cessation of my movie experience irritates me much more than the DVD player going bust. Now I’ll never find out whether Ken got out of the hospital. Did he die? Or was there a crappy ending? I could probably find some spoilers, but I want to see it with my own eyes.
Licorice raises blood pressure. I eat the whole bag in one go. I have done this before and felt very ill, which is also what happens now. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they are performing server maintenance on Lemming Cliff and the site is unaccessible. I feel so anxious that I have to take an Oxamin. Lemming Cliff can’t be the only message board. It just wouldn’t make sense that every human being in the world capable of thinking was there.
For the first time in a very long while I start painting. I only have one empty canvas left but it’s enough, it takes many hours to finish one painting. My technique seems to have gone missing, I no longer remember how to mix paints to get the colors I want, how to dilute them the right way, let alone how to transform my vision to the gessoed canvas. I paint a sculpture similar to one I saw in the movie, with a purple background. In the art classes in high school the teacher always complained about my "obsession" for different shades of purple. At one point I even wore mostly purple, but I got tired of it because there are hardly any other colors that go well with it.
I use a lot of paint almost without diluting, it smells of solvents and poisons. The thick paint makes the picture look chunky. The brush strokes are clearly visible, creating a supposedly artistic impression. Artistic is just another word for bullshit, art is nothing but a lie.
I give the picture to Venla as a gift, maybe she’ll appreciate the chubby and awkwardly shaded figure. She is surprised, she didn’t know that I paint. That’s not so weird considering I haven’t painted anything during the whole time we’ve known each other. It’s easy to see that in her eyes I transform into a more interesting person, an artist. When I was younger that epithet brought me nothing but trouble. Wacky artsy-craftsy girl, thinks she’s better than others because she’s in that school. To my parents I was a daydreamer. If I really was so into scribbling, I should go into graphic design.
Mom used to call my pictures scrubby, too weird—I think she’s managed to avoid modern art—and Sanni thought they were too gloomy. Venla does not tend to pass judgment. The painting gets her approval and I hang it on the wall, above the guest bed. Could I paint more pictures for her? Maybe someday. I don’t know if I have enough self esteem to resume my artistic pursuits. It was probably just a phase in my childhood and teens, maybe it’s time to move on.
I can’t help it but dig up a box that hasn’t been opened since I moved here. It contains charcoal and pencil drawings and paintings made many years ago. They haven’t been framed and many are still unfinished, some only have a pencil sketch on the canvas waiting to be painted. They are good paintings, better than the newer works in the cupboard.
In my self-portrait I have sharp fangs and fiery red lion hair. That was the period when you had to have a bizarre aesthetic, paint melting watches and deformed faces. The most important thing was to get to use a wooden easel and to mix the colors on a palette instead of a disposable plate. Even that was better than the current goals, now it’s important to eat the maximum amount of unhealthy food and to be online as much as possible. My self-discipline has become slack compared to the times when I still used to brush my teeth regularly.
My head is bursting with ideas. I can’t concentrate on painting any longer, but perhaps I could write something. My obituary has been waiting to be started for weeks. I couldn’t find any online tutorials for obituary writing. Writing has never been one of my strongest skills. There has to be some trick to it, some kind of a trade secret that would make it as easy as falling off a log.
Can an obituary be in the first person? Hi, I am Piia. I am a 21-year old woman from Helsinki. My personality is open, kind and down-to-earth. This is what I’d write if I was participating in a beauty pageant, but death is not a beauty contest, there are no ranks given and no extra points for a perfect white row of teeth. Which is good.
"One of the most notable persons in this country has passed into eternity. Piia will always be remembered as someone who had no authorities. She knew how to make others feel uncomfortable and only with luck avoided being mugged. The high points of her short and succinct life were the second place in a drawing contest in 9th grade and almost winning the Nobel prize in physics.
"In a Seventeen magazine attitude quiz Piia scored the maximum of 80 points, with the description ’Your buddies know you as the jinx gal, the one who dresses in black for the spring festival and sucks on a lemon wedge for breakfast. A smile can be an exotic sight on your mug, but even a grump should occasionally do some stretching on the corners of the mouth. Maybe you’ll find even lads catching on to your new cheery image’. This is how they described the least known Finnish celebrity, whose sudden passing was a major setback for the candy industry of the country."
I’m laughing so hard that my cheeks hurt. Maybe I do know how to write after all. I’m particularly proud about the fancy words like "succinct" and "passing".
5.
Irma’s and Jussi’s plane to Kiev leaves tomorrow. Venla’s fridge is full of food she doesn’t eat, food meant for me. It’s just like when my parents travelled to Rome when I was 15. They were convinced that there was no way I could get by for a week by myself—my mom even wanted to get me a babysitter, but luckily my dad managed to thwart this plan. Loads of fuss, dozens of yellow post-it notes full of phone numbers, bad conscience for leaving. Should something happen, I won’t call.
We agreed with Venla that I’d only make day visits on the first four days. After that I will stay there the following three days and nights, sleeping in the guest bed which again has new sheets—pressed by me—and the last four days Venla will be staying alone again, as usual. I wonder if she still feels bad about sleeping without Hannes. Some things never get easier, that’s what I’ve heard from many people on Lemming Cliff. There are some that only get worse. I hope that’s not the case with Venla, but that, like many other things about her, I will never find out.
The chances of dying like her husband did are less than 1 in 100,000, but someone always has to hit those odds. Hannes had such a great fear of dentists that he was anesthesized for a routine tooth extraction. While unconscious he went into a cardiac arrest, after the tooth had already been removed. He was 63. I guess for most people this would be the ideal way to die, out cold, never finding out.
The odds that Irma and Jussi will die in a plane accident are even less than that, one in several millions per flight. There are two flights: one from Helsinki to Kiev and a second one from Kiev to the city which has a difficult name, and of course another two upon their return. It’s more likely that something will happen to them while on their way to the airport. There are no mentions of Ukraine in the news. I picture Irma’s and Jussi’s relationship florishing, whatever that means.
If I had a partner (as if), I wouldn’t let them convince me to travel. I don’t even know what one is supposed to do with guys, I guess I’ve forgotten what I did back in the day. I guess I we went to movies and smooched and stuff. Jaakko also took me to art galleries and cafés and historic places. The whole point of human relationships is a bit of an enigma to me. With Venla we hardly ever do anything. Many people would probably find that boring. So would I, if Venla wasn’t so fascinating even when she says nothing. Most people aren’t.
She asks how much time there is left. About 450 days, I answer after counting. It seems more than she’d expect, even though from what I’ve heard time passes much more quickly for old people.
No, you’re not about to end up in a nursing home, I say assertively. Not a chance. They’ve let you stay home until this age, why would they want you out now? It is a crappy argument, but she accepts it.
Venla’s sole remaining child is in a bad shape and has been in a nursing home for years. The place is located in Haapavesi, more than 500 kilometers from Helsinki. Venla has only travelled there once. Probably not too many people in nursing homes are visited by their parents.
You have no idea how awful it feels to look at your own daughter in such a state, Venla says and sighs. Saime lay there almost completely unable to move, mostly blind from the cataracts that no one wanted to operate on. She could hardly recognize me. Her memory didn’t extend past five minutes, she even smiled in a different way from before. If I was in possession of any stolen goods or the regalia of the Russian czar family, I would have Saime store them, as no one could extort any information from her.
Maybe it’s good that Saime lives so far from here. Otherwise Venla might ask me to accompany her for a visit, and I just couldn’t do it.
The elderly are left alone when they become difficult to understand and difficult to look at. Venla has offspring in four generations and she’s only met one of her great-great-grandchildren, as a newborn, and I don’t count babies as human beings. You can’t force people to visit. Being related is just a formality and formalities never yield anything of value. Family has never meant anything to me except for the necessary evil (and necessary money). Losing Venla would be a much bigger blow than all of my relatives dropping dead at once. It would take a big bomb blast to kill my relatives on my dad’s side though, there are so many of them.
Maybe I hang out with Venla just so that I’ll become a better person—will I? Her company molds me, reminds me how unimportant we are and still in some way meaningful. My reaching for a Bundt pan from the cupboard makes her happy. She bakes a cake, even though it’s me who really bakes it, beats the sugar and eggs and digs up the other ingredients from the cupboard. The words "thank you" have a strange toll coming out of my mouth.
I haven’t told Venla about the online discussions and I don’t plan to. I doubt she even knows what the Internet is or has ever used a computer. I think she’d have liked it a lot if she was a bit younger. Maybe she could have even found a new husband.
I was right in that there are other online forums for people capable of thinking, even in my own country. It turns out that one of the members of Lemming Cliff is from Finland. She gives me the address to a Finnish message board called Cyanide. It only has a fraction of the members of Lemming Cliff, but they are from the same country as me, almost like neighbours. Someone mentions a troublesome incident in a McDonalds where I’ve once eaten a McChicken, which is almost like I know him. Maybe I’ve met some of those people on the street, without knowing it.
Besides Sanni there’s one very annoying person who fancies stalking me via the phone. It’s been a few months since Milja-Emilia last called. She has probably tried to reach me, but I haven’t really bothered to keep my mobile charged. I hope she thinks I’ve got a life and stops calling. I’ve even considered changing my number just because I haven’t been able to tell her how much her marathon gossip sessions irk me.
In my mind I’ve diagnosed her as bipolar. Every other call sounds overwhelmingly like the whining of a drunken 15-year old, while the rest are her hyping about sunshine and the cuteness of her neighbour. Lately the amount of whining has decreased, though, since she’s now dating that neighbour. He is Italian and doesn’t know any more Finnish than Milja-Emilia knows Italian. The estimated time left for the relationship is until either one learns the other’s language and Milja gets through with her ramblings.
Somewhere inside me I hear a voice saying "Look who’s jealous now?"
6.
I can’t go sleep over at Venla’s without my Rivotrils. If I skip a tablet, the world begins to wobble and my hands start shaking like I have Parkinson’s. It is just a medication like any other, I try to convince myself.
Old people often take sleeping pills. Venla doesn’t, she has no problems sleeping and six hours a night is enough for her. Her days are an amazing 18 hours long, it’s crazy. There is no way one can figure out something to do for so many hours.
Luckily I get to sleep as long as I want to. Venla promised to rattle as quietly as possible and so she does. When I wake up up at ten she has long before taken her medications and eaten her morning porridge. There’s some of the latter left in the pot, it’s still warm, but my stomach needs something more robust and I wolf down three ham sandwiches.
I’ve never really given a thought to how Venla spends her days. She says she doesn’t really do anything. She listens to the radio and watches TV, performs routine household chores and sometimes solves crossword puzzles. On top of the laced tablecloth on the the sofa table sits an old Husqvarna sewing machine covered with a plastic hood, but she’s no longer able to use it. I could have it if I wanted to. I’d like to ask whether one can sew shrouds with it. Knitting is something Venla doesn’t do. That’s something for little old ladies.
When Venla notices that I’m getting bored she digs up the Chinese checkers board. It’s been a while since we last bounced the marbles. I expect Venla’s skills to have gone rusty, but she takes the first game, collecting marbles in rows so huge I could only dream about building. The next game I win because she gets too greedy, and the next one and the one after that. Then she doesn’t want to play any more and I tease her that she’s a bad loser.
Venla misses her butterflies, or maybe they are missing her. I take her to the attic. It’s not such a big endeavour, but I wonder why she can’t keep them near and dear to her. You could fit the frames on the walls. But she says that it can’t be done. If we did that there would be no more exciting trips, scrabbling to the attic to cough dust and the thrill of opening the box.
Venla quizzes me about species and gena of the different butterflies. I know the Finnish names for most of them, but there’s no way I could remember the Latin ones. I suggest that the common blue butterly is called Aurora borealis and this seems to amuse Venla. Yes, of course I know that the Aurora borealis means the Northern lights.
After we return to the normal reality the temptation of the Internet gets too much for me. I explain something about housework and disappear, leaving Venla twiddling with the marbles on the board. You’d almost think she was already longing back to the attic.
I have no new email, but after reading all the new messages on both forums and replying to the most important ones the day has already changed. I am neglecting my friend to be able to chat with my other friends. What an outstanding social life I have. Venla is probably sound asleep already, I have to sneak back quietly.
Venla lies awake in her bed, she has propped herself up in a half-sitting position with pillows and is clutching on the blanket with whitened knuckles. Something is clearly very wrong. Call an ambulance, she says and I don’t make any stupid questions or stop to ponder whether I have the courage to call. If Venla dies it’s my fault and this is not just mandatory self-blame, it really is my fault.
The emergency dispatcher asks what’s the matter, but I don’t know the answer, I’m too scared to think, I just say they must hurry. If they come a minute too late, Venla will die. I’m too afraid to talk her. Every word she’d say would waste her energy and then it is doubly my fault if she doesn’t make it.
When the ambulance arrives Venla is alive and conscious. She has been watching me without saying a word through the whole time, which seemed like an eternity. I have had at least a million panic attacks and my face has probably swollen intoa giant red raisin from all the crying. No one makes the slightest gesture to comfort me. It would be too much to even ask for.
Venla gets up from the bed by herself and lies down on the stretcher calmly and gracefully, like an oracle. Am I a member of her immediate family, they ask me. Yes, I am, I reply and then off we go, with all the flashing lights and wailing. I have never before been inside an ambulance and I think I could have skipped it altogether.
Venla does not have a heart attack, merely some electrical problems in her heart. The drip trickles an antiarrhythmic medicine into her veins, the elixir of life. She is calm and looks very old, like someone who is going to die very soon. But Venla doesn’t die, she is still breathing and her heart is beating normally, she lets me listen to it. It beats very slowly, but that’s supposedly normal when you’re old, and the medications can make it even slower. No one says a word about calling Irma. It’s a long way to the Black Sea.
I popped two Oxamins while waiting for the ambulance and now I crash onto a chair. Apparently some kind soul moves me onto a couch without waking me up. When I do wake up I’m lost. I immediately know where I am, but Venla has disappeared. She must have died during the night, but no one has the heart to tell me, they are hoping I won’t notice. Can I at least see her once more or have they already moved her into the mortuary? Tears aren’t far and they can’t be pushed back, they flow all the way down to my shirt. The world grinds to a halt, but only for a moment. A nurse convinces me that everything is alright while giving me the look of pity, like I was a little child. I hope I look very small.
We find Venla, asleep. She has been given sedatives. When she wakes up she’s a bear with a sore head, and I get all of that on me while the nurses smartly step back. I grab her hand and don’t let go of it, I let her wriggle, she won’t keep at it for long. She mutters that she’s angry about the way she was silenced. I nod. There are two things that Venla hates: lying and mistreatment of the elderly. I hate them too.