I knew it was fashionable to talk like this, I knew Perttilä had taken countless courses on the subject. Naturally, I couldn’t imagine the two of us naked in the middle of the woods. But there was a bigger, more fundamental problem with his manner of speech: it didn’t impart information, it didn’t resolve anything.
‘I don’t follow,’ I said. ‘And I don’t understand why the system wouldn’t…’
Perttilä gave a friendly chuckle. His head and face were one and the same thing: he shaved all his hair off so he was completely bald, and when he smiled you could see it at the back of his head.
‘Hey, sorry, sometimes I get a bit carried away, I’m so used to opening up, I forget to give people space,’ he said in a voice that even a year ago he didn’t have. A year ago he spoke like everybody else, but after attending all those courses his tone was somewhere between reading a bedtime story and negotiating a hostage situation. It didn’t fit with what I knew about him. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I want to give you space. You talk, I listen. But before we get started, there’s something I’d like to ask you.’
I waited. Perttilä rested his elbows on his knees, leaned forwards.
‘How have you been finding our new set-up here, the teamwork, the openness, doing things together, sharing knowledge in real time, the whole community vibe?’
‘As I’ve already said, I find it slows down our work and makes it more difficult to—’
‘You know, the way we’re all in this together, we get to know one another, we can feel each other’s presence, learn from one another, bring our sleeping potential to life?’
‘Well—’
‘People say they’ve found their true selves,’ Perttilä continued. ‘They tell me they’ve reached a new level of awareness, not just as mathematicians and analysts but as human beings. And it’s all because we’ve made a point of breaking down boundaries. All boundaries, internal and external. We’ve risen to a new level.’
Perttilä’s eyes were deep-set, the dark eyebrows above them made it hard to read his expression. But I could imagine that, deep behind his eyes, a fire roared fervently. Uncertainty scratched its nails down my back again.
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I find it hard to assess these … levels.’
‘Hard to assess…’ Perttilä repeated and leaned back in his chair. ‘Okay. What kinds of tasks do you feel ready to take on?’
The question blindsided me. I could hardly keep my hands in my lap.
‘The tasks I already have,’ I said. ‘I am a mathematician and—’
‘How do you see yourself fitting into the team?’ Perttilä interrupted. ‘What do you bring to the team, the community, the family? What’s your gift to us?’
Was this a trick question? I opted for full honesty.
‘A mathematical—’
‘Let’s forget the maths for a minute,’ he said and raised his right hand as if to stop an invisible current running through the room.
‘Forget mathematics?’ I asked, dumbfounded. ‘This job is based on the principles of—’
‘I know what it’s based on,’ Perttilä nodded. ‘But we need a shared path that we all walk along together, whether it’s with maths in our arms or something else.’
‘Our arms? That’s the wrong body part, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘This is about logic. We need a clear head.’
Again Perttilä inched forwards, placed his elbows on his knees, leaned first to the side, then struck a pose. He held a long pause, then finally spoke.
‘This department was stuck in the mud when I took the helm. You remember, everyone shut away in their own little rooms, working on whatever, and nobody knew what anybody else was doing. It wasn’t productive, and there was no sense of community. I wanted to bring this group of pen-pushers and astrophysicists into the twenty-first century. Now it’s happened. We’re flying, flying up towards the sun.’
‘That’s inadvisable,’ I said. ‘Under any circumstances. Besides, even metaphorically speaking, it’s—’
‘You see? That’s exactly what I mean. There’s one guy always pushing back against everything we do. One guy still sitting in his own little corner calculating away like fucking Einstein’s long-lost cousin. Guess who?’
‘I just want things to be rational, sensible,’ I said. ‘And that’s what mathematics gives us. It’s concrete, it’s knowledge. I don’t know why we need all these internal children, these … mood charts. As far as I can see, we don’t. We need reason and logic. That’s what I bring.’
‘Brought.’
That one word hurt me more than the thousand previous words. I knew my professional calibre. I could feel my pulse rising, my heart racing. This was wholly inappropriate. The uncertainty passed and was now replaced with irritation and annoyance.
‘My professional skills are second to none, and they have improved with experience…’
‘Not all of them, apparently.’
‘What we need nowadays—’
‘What we need nowadays is something different from what people needed in the seventies,’ said Perttilä, now agitated. ‘And I mean the nineteen-seventies. Or shall we go even further back?’
I realised that the shuddering of the password box was only the beginning. And I knew this side of Perttilä. This was his real voice now.
‘Now listen up. As senior actuary, you can have exactly what you want,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be a team player. You don’t have to use the intranet. You can sit and calculate things all by yourself. You can have your own room too.’
Perttilä sat up straight. He was sitting right on the edge of his seat.
‘Everything’s been taken care of,’ he continued. ‘Your office is on the ground floor, the little room behind the janitors’ desk. You can even shut the door. There’s a notebook and a calculator. You don’t need the intranet. Your task is to assess the impact of inflation from 2011 on insurance premiums in 2012. The material is all on your desk. If I remember, there are about sixty folders.’
‘That’s not at all sensible,’ I said. ‘It’s 2020. Besides, that was already calculated when we defined the insurance premiums for that year…’
‘Then calculate it again, check everything was as it should be. You like that kind of thing. You like mathematics.’
‘Of course I like mathematics…’
‘But you don’t like our team, our openness, our dialogue, the way we communicate, open ourselves up, explore our emotions. You don’t want to let go of yourself, you don’t trust the moment, you don’t trust us. You don’t like what I’m offering.’
‘I don’t…’
‘Exactly. You don’t. So…’ Perttilä reached over to his desk ‘…there is another option.’
He handed me a piece of paper. I quickly read it. Now I was no longer irritated or annoyed. I was flabbergasted. I was furious. I looked up at Perttilä.
‘You want me to hand in my notice?’
He smiled again. The smile was almost the same as at the beginning of our conversation, only now it lacked even the faint, distant warmth I might have detected only moments ago.
‘It’s a question of what you want,’ he said. ‘I want to help offer you different paths.’
‘So, either I conduct meaningless calculations or I take part in amateurish therapy sessions that jeopardise our attention to serious mathematical thinking of the highest order? The former is pointless, the latter leads only to disorganisation, chaos and perdition.’