This is clearly a difficult subject for her. I can see it from her expression, her body language. Her glass is almost empty.
‘Would you like me to get you another beer?’ I ask.
‘Do you think that will help?’ she asks. ‘I should drink myself into getting started?’
‘What I meant was—’
‘I know what you meant,’ she smiles. To me, the smile could almost be described as melancholy. ‘No, thank you. I think I’m good.’
‘I have problems too,’ I say.
Laura looks at me but doesn’t say anything.
‘I think everybody does,’ I continue. ‘But maybe that’s a conversation for another time. I solve my problems with mathematics.’
‘All your problems?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s … an interesting way of thinking. But I don’t know what maths has to do with me staring at that wall in the adventure park and just … staring at it. I look at it, and it’s so demoralising.’
‘Because you’re looking at it as a wall,’ I say. ‘It’s an unknown variable. The wall is x.’
‘The wall is x?’
I nod.
‘At this point, I would take a step back. I’d look at what information I have available at the moment, what conditions have been proposed. I would consider whether I have encountered the same problem before, or the same problem in a different form. If I can’t solve the whole problem in one go, can I solve part of it? Does the solution to the partial problem give me a clue, a key to solving the next part of the problem?’
Laura says nothing, but it looks like she’s listening.
‘I would choose the sketch I think will be the easiest to realise,’ I continue. ‘Then I would look at the sketch and choose the part of it that is easiest to realise. Then I would draw up the simplest plan of how to go about realising the sketch, examine the plan, then carry it out without giving it too much thought. In that way, I would have at least one new tool before trying to solve the larger problem.’
‘In a way, I know all this,’ she says.
‘But do you actually do it?’
‘No,’ she says with a shake of the head.
‘Mathematics can help us here too. Just follow the plan.’
‘And I’ll find out what x is?’
‘I can’t promise you that,’ I tell her honestly. ‘But based on the factors that I know and feel, especially the extra-mathematical ones, I think it’s possible, even probable. Like I said, you’re extraordinary.’
We sit in silence.
‘What do you do when you discover you’re interested in someone?’ Laura asks. ‘Do you think of them as x too?’
9
The train seems to be floating. The lights of the houses and office buildings twinkle, flash and flicker in the dark autumn night as though someone were throwing them around, trying to hit the train. But the train is flying, and nothing can strike it. It is quarter past eleven at night, my cheeks simultaneously warm and shivering. Laura Helanto’s peck on the cheek travels with me in the train at light speed.
Strangely, I can’t seem to recall our conversation in any semblance of a logical order. My mind is a confusion of short, technicolour, kaleidoscopic fragments, some of which rewind to the beginning and repeat themselves again and again, generally overlapping with other short fragments. I even feel slightly out of breath, though I’m sitting still. I’m not sure of all the things I talked about. Particularly hazy is the bit when, as we were saying goodbye outside the train station, Laura moved close to me, thanked me for the evening, which she said had been very nice in a good way, then kissed me on the cheek as if we were somewhere in central Europe. I have a vague recollection that, after the kiss, I said something about how the probability of the murals being a success was around a 120 percent. I don’t know where the words came from. That doesn’t sound like me; it sounds more like something my former boss Perttilä would say, but I believe I really did say something to that effect. I don’t even remember walking to the platform or stepping on this commuter train weightlessly flying through the night.
I can still hear Laura in my ears when I recognise the familiar station name shining in blue and white as the train pulls in. We have reached Kannelmäki. I jump up and barely make it out of the train before the doors slide shut. I walk down the stairs, all the while perplexed at my dreamy mood. I almost missed my stop. When has something like that ever happened before? Never, is the answer. It’s almost as though I am walking just above the ground. Just like the train a moment ago, it feels like I’m floating.
The night is chilled, but there’s no wind. Autumnal nights have a distinctive smell. The first fallen leaves, wrinkled in the frost, the moist earth, the air, pure from the rain. I look diagonally across the street to where an illuminated letter H glows above the door to my stairwell, and I can already envisage Schopenhauer’s protests at my late arrival and try to think of a way to make it up to him. I walk out onto the pedestrian crossing when I hear a car behind me and see someone exiting the pool of light emanating from the letter H. I say exiting, because I realise the person must have been standing there for a while and only now moved. I recognise him at the moment the car’s bonnet and its blinding headlights stop so close to me that I could lean over slightly and test the temperature of the hood. I stand on the pedestrian crossing between AK and the SUV.
Again the air inside the SUV bears the strong reek of aftershave. The air conditioning blows frozen air at my feet just like last time. AK isn’t holding me by the hand, but this time he’s placed his forearm along the back of my seat so that it runs behind my head. It’s an unpleasant feeling, as though at any moment his fist might strike my neck like a snake, grab it, bite and squeeze. Lizard Man is driving. The nocturnal streets and roads are empty, and he’s not sticking to the speed limit as scrupulously as before.
One thing is clear: Lizard Man and AK are devoting a lot of their waking hours to me, which leads me to think that either they consider me a priority or they simply don’t have anywhere else to go. I’m not about to debate this aloud. Right now, there are more urgent matters to deal with.
‘If this is about getting the bank started…’
‘It isn’t,’ Lizard Man replies.
‘Then can I ask what this is about?’
‘Any guesses?’
‘I don’t like guessing things,’ I say. ‘Especially not in situations like this where I don’t have the faintest idea how many variables my guess would be based on.’
Lizard Man shakes his head. I can see his eyes in the mirror. He is smiling. The smile is anything but friendly. He remains silent. I think of the two previous occasions on which I’ve found myself sitting in this SUV. First the trip to the shores of the lake, then to the barn. I don’t have pleasant memories of either excursion. Soon we will be somewhere in the back of beyond in Vantaa, I don’t know where.
The houses disappear behind us, those up ahead are industrial buildings. It’s almost midnight, so most of them are dark. First we pass a couple of larger buildings bearing neon logos of companies that I recognise from vacuum cleaners, drinks bottles and running shoes. After that the names become more descriptive. The dominant format seems to be surname plus some defining feature: tyres, machinery, painting and decorating. Beyond that the names disappear altogether. Now there are just unmarked buildings: some completely dark, some lit in a dim, yellow night-time glow. Eventually we slow down, drive in through a gate in a wire fence and stop at the end of a long row of cars. The motor is switched off. AK walks round the car and opens the door for me.