‘On the way home, I couldn’t get the woman’s face out of my mind. I had the impression I had met her in some street market in the country. I don’t know why, but I imagined her sitting wrapped in a black cloak selling green and red peppers. I’m certain that three or four signs of bad luck had conspired to put me in this mess. But anyway, listen, you won’t believe what happened next. As usual, as soon as I got back to my flat, I took off all my clothes. I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the thing running towards me from the sitting room. I jumped into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I was like someone who’d seen the Angel of Death. It was a wolf. A wolf, I swear. But you’ll say that maybe it was a dog. After looking through the keyhole several times, I spotted it again and I knew very well what it was. I was really shaking. There was a terrifying silence for some minutes. After looking through the keyhole several times, I could see it — I was sure it was a wolf. I could hear it panting, then I saw it sniffing my trousers and underpants at the front door. After that it sat down and started to stare sadly at the bathroom door.
‘A wolf in the city centre, in a block of flats, and in my bloody flat! I sat on the toilet seat and began to think: no one but me had a key to this flat, I live on the fourth floor, and even if we assume, okay, that it could fly and had come in through the balcony, the door between the sitting room and the balcony was always closed. I pissed without noticing I was doing it. I sat there as if paralysed, naked on the toilet seat with a wolf in my flat. How absurd! I began to blame and curse myself. Why did I strip off like a whore whenever I came into the flat? If I’d had my mobile with me, I would have called the police and it would all be over. What kind of shitbag am I? An unemployed drunk, cruising the bars to pick up a living. And from whom? From wrecks no less rotten than me; people from under whose feet the new world of glitter has pulled the carpet, like, for example, that fat woman in her late thirties looking for a casual fuck with an immigrant refugee who doesn’t have a screw left that’s not loose. We’re the ones who don’t have delicious tight arses. We just have arseholes to shit from. But fuck that.
‘Even the woman I met that day, the one with the face punctured with needle holes, didn’t take up my invitation. She moved to another table and waited for better rubbish to come along. If she’d accepted my invitation to fuck and come back to the flat with me, she would have run off and called the police or the neighbours. Perhaps the wolf would have eaten her. What wolf? Impossible. There must be some mistake in the facts of this case, or some hallucination. I was speaking like this to my image in the mirror.
‘I looked through the keyhole again. It was crouched in the same place. There were only a few hours left till morning. I thought that tomorrow someone would be worried I was missing. Of course it was a ridiculous idea, and my only aim was to give myself some false consolation. Because I’ve been living alone for years, and I only know freaks that haunt the most secluded bars, and they’re like me — loners who scrape together a livelihood where they can, or else slope back to their dirty beds to be consumed by sadness the long night through. The only ones who might knock on my door are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they stopped coming a while back. Perhaps they’ve had enough of my constant mockery of their Lord. There was a time when they would swamp me with their books and magazines. One thing I liked in those magazines was that desperate attempt to link the discoveries of science to the stories in the Bible. Two beautiful women from the Jehovah’s Witnesses used to visit me regularly. My sick imagination made me welcome them warmly. I thought that establishing a serious relationship with them would lead to passionate lovemaking. Imagine. The two Jehovah’s Witness women, naked in my bed. One of them sucking my cock and the other giving her clitoris to my tongue while reading a passage from the Bible. We used to talk about lots of things. The subject that interested me most was the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood transfusions. I used to joke with them and say that blood is delicious and it’s what vampires drink. I used to talk to them about the importance of blood.
‘“The Director of the Bio-Ethics Centre at the University of Pennsylvania says in complete scientific coldness, ‘The importance of blood in healthcare is comparable to the importance of oil in the transport sector. Just as billions of barrels of oil are extracted every year to satisfy the human demand for fuel, about ninety million units of blood are drawn from volunteers to save mankind. That vast amount of blood is equivalent to all the blood in the veins of eight million people.’ Nonetheless, blood stocks seem to be insufficient. Just like oil. There are constant warnings about this shortage.”
‘This cocktail of scientific information or, to be more precise, pretentious waffle, was so that the Jehovah’s Witnesses would know I really was an important person before I came to Finland and began to stagnate. I told them I was an expert on Hebrew and that I translated secret reports for the Ministry of Defence and the Intelligence Agency. To make my professional life sound more exciting, I added some adventures, detective book stuff. With them I would prattle on at length, making up stories and mixing serious talk with nonsense. I would pose questions too, and answer them myself while the women sat there like doves of peace. They would smile as if they had just arrived from heaven.
‘“But what if a deadly plague broke out across the world and everyone needed new blood?” Before the older woman could guess the answer, I would say, like an expert explaining genetic science, “Without a doubt, a new global war would break out. But even so, there’s no need to worry because, if a war for blood did break out, I think it would be a clean war in which they would ban the use of traditional weapons, or modern weapons, or even paring knives. So the war would be like a game of American Football and the soldiers would wear padded sports clothes. Of course there would be no point fighting a war in which blood flowed for no purpose, at a time when the world was in dire need of it, so there would be no toleration or mercy towards soldiers who used weapons of any kind. But what kind of war would that be? Fuck that. The aim of the fighting would be to capture as many of the enemy troops as possible. The troops would clash, and each side would try to capture the other’s troops and then move them away in trucks that would wait in the rear lines. It would be the last war and it would come to an end when the last person gave blood. The trucks would take the captive soldiers to blood donation centres and the blood would then be distributed fairly among the population…”
‘But we’ve strayed from the subject. Is my chatter making you dizzy? Fuck that. Okay. Anyway, there I was, talking to myself and shaking. “The wolf, my god, the wolf! Why doesn’t it move from its place?” I wimpered. Why doesn’t it at least go to the kitchen to look for something to eat? All it did while posted in front of the bathroom door was sniff my underwear, then stare at the door with murderous eyes. Of course, it was a shitty idea for me to leave the forest and come back to live in the city. Damn those blood-sucking mosquitoes. Did you know it’s the female mosquitoes that feed on human blood, while the male drinks only the sap of plants and the nectar of flowers? I spent more than five months in the forest, catching fish every day in the nearby lake and in the evening translating an interesting book on the grammar of the Hebrew language. I was happy in my seclusion, with the gifts of the forest, oblivious to the world of humans. I would drink red wine, in moderation. But the disaster was that none of the creams with which I covered my face and body deterred the mosquito attacks. And how could I relax when a swarm of them was hovering over my head all day long like Christ’s halo in those old paintings? At night the female ones got through the sheets like armoured vehicles and sucked my blood greedily. The landlord made fun of me when I told him about the mosquitoes. He said they must like me a lot. And finally my sufferings from the mosquitoes were topped by a severe stomach ache. The doctor told me it was just my irregular diet and I should eat more vegetables. He also said it would be best if I went back to the city and mixed with people. The stomach clearly suffers when you live in isolation. I also gathered from him that I had started to talk about myself in a peculiar way. In short, he believed I needed a psychiatrist. Okay. I’m a good listener most of the time and I appreciate advice. But I only stuck to the first half of the doctor’s advice. I came back to the city and went back to mixing with the dregs of secluded bars. Without a drink, the world needs a bull-fighter. With a drink, the world is a farce that only needs more clowns. Fuck that.