You may be asking why Aino and your son have to be mixed up in this. We removed them specifically to protect them and to keep innocent bystanders out of this little opera of ours, which only pertains to those involved. For logistical reasons we first took the boy from your front yard, then invited your wife to where he was a little later on. You can rest assured that they will be treated well. You have my word on it. They are in fact quite comfy. I haven’t the slightest desire to add to the weight of my sins—quite the contrary, if you do your part in this atonement project of ours, the whole affair will come to seem a great, exciting adventure to your family, travelling to the world’s most pleasant and exotic locales! (Is it true, Olli, that your wife has never been any farther than Sweden? That situation has now been remedied!)
Of course, we also want to make it easier to do what needs to be done—if you don’t want to do this for yourself and for Greta, do it for your family. Think of it however you like. But forget about moral considerations—you simply have no choice but to follow the script we’ve written for you. You and Greta had a beautiful love story; we understand that now. It’s time your story had a beautiful ending.
26
THE BLOMROOSES’ LETTERS made Olli sick. After he read them the first time he went and threw up, then he had diarrhoea. When he came back to the computer he almost deleted them. But then he printed them all, in two copies. He might need them later as evidence.
Olli sits on the bench, mulling over the encounter he’s just had. His first mission.
It’s still just as confusing, but at least he knows now what it’s all about. And he’s started to do something about it. It beats being in the dark, unable to act.
It is some consolation that as long as he follows the Blomrooses’ “script”, nothing bad will happen to Aino and the boy. The script is a good thing, ultimately, so he ought to stick to it. Because it has the plot twist that once Olli fulfils his role and helps the Blomrooses atone for their deeds, he’ll get his family back and everything will go back to the way it was. The End.
Olli walks over to the steps and climbs back up to the top of the Ridge. The steps have been here for eighty years. At first he thinks about his feet, and then about everyone who has, like him, walked these steps, or will walk these steps in the decades to come. Or maybe centuries—where are stone steps like these going to go, even in a town that eats its own history?
The person he’s known as—Olli Suominen, publisher and member of the parish council—is just one of innumerable people who will at some point in their lives find themselves trudging up the Harju Steps. Every one of them will carry with them dreams, worries, problems, plans, memories and sins that they think unique, meaningful, enduring. Every one will cling to life and be scared to death of change, which nevertheless must come to everyone, as sure as death.
The city at the bottom of the steps is changing all the time. The days, the seasons, the generations in succession. Only the Ridge and the steps remain the same.
According to The Magical City Guide, a cinematic life is best achieved at places like the Harju Steps:
In such places, the temporary phenomenon known as human life is put into perspective by time and by large physical elements, just as it is by the ocean, or a mountain. Paradoxically, the transience and fundamental meaninglessness of human life when seen juxtaposed with phenomena that reflect eternity can be the necessary starting point for cinematic meaning fulness.
Olli is struck with a fit of fatalism that makes him calmly smile. It’s pointless to brood on it. Like everyone else who walks these steps, he has to accept his fate. No matter what happens, in the end no one will remember or care whether this strange episode had a sad or a happy ending. Until then, he’ll play his role as well as he knows how, and then he’ll either get his family back, or lose everything.
The thought feels cinematically liberating. He even feels a little spurt of joy as his body adjusts itself to better withstand the ordeal. When he gets home, he walks out to the recycling bin and tosses in Ageing with Dignity, with its warnings about endorphin and adrenalin addictions dangerous to the middle-aged:
Endorphins (endogenous morphine, or morphine that originates within the body) are peptides that present as opioids in the brain, pituitary and other parts of the nervous system. Endorphins bind to opioid receptors, and have a variety of effects including the reduction of pain. Adrenaline, or epinephrine, on the other hand, is a hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in times of stress. Adrenaline increases physical performance and feelings of well-being. It can accelerate heart function, expand the bronchial tubes and increase energy by altering the metabolism of sugar. It is clear that a middle-aged man who experiences endocrine and adrenaline cravings and intoxication can be susceptible to overestimating his abilities, and thus lose his sense of reality and rationality and make fatefully poor decisions.
Walking past the observation tower Olli sees his reflection in the window and it amuses him. He looks like a character from an old movie. He thinks he understands now what he was reading about the deep cinematic self. Naturally he’s still deeply worried, but at the same time part of him, surely his deep cinematic self, would seem to be feeling a sort of aesthetic pleasure that something has happened to break the ordinary routine of his life.
Intoxicated by this feeling of profound meaningfulness and fatalism, and perhaps also by his own endorphins, he descends the Harju Steps into Mäki-Matti. Dramatic music plays in his head. He senses his surroundings with uncharacteristic clarity.
As soon as Olli got home his anxiety returned. His stomach started to hurt. He felt faint. He crawled onto the sofa and whimpered like a sick dog.
It was slow continuum attachment again, getting him in its clutches:
Slow continuum attachment affects a person like gravity. It shoves a person’s face into the dust of the everyday, the ashes of dreams. It persuades us to be content with our fate like a humble beast of burden and put aside the possibilities that every moment of life offers. The cinematic way of life is liberation from the slow continuum. Instead of unavoidable obligations, a person can learn to see all possibilities, even impossible ones, and live them out in a cinematic aesthetic spirit. All that’s necessary is to dare to pick the pears hanging from the branches of life’s tree and take a bite. Of course, that demands a lot—your whole life, in fact—but in the end it’s nothing more than a choice.
Olli pressed his trembling hands against his face and was afraid he would be squashed under the weight of the thoughts in his head, and lose himself in their seeping darkness.
When dusk fell he had recovered enough to go upstairs and read his new instructions on Facebook.
27
THE OUTDOOR SEATING at the kiosk in the old church park was chosen as the stage for the next meeting.
The first week of August was restless and crowded in Jyväskylä. The mass event known as the Neste Oil Rally was happening. It attracted car-racing fans from around the world, and for a few days the city was full of people, cars and all sorts of vendors. During rally week Olli usually avoided the downtown area and took a taxi to and from work. He couldn’t bear the crowds of drunken bar-goers who did bring money into the city but also pissed in the streets, disturbed the peace, broke bottles, littered and clogged traffic.