The feeling is intoxicating, yet at the same time very liberating. My hands know where they are supposed to go, what they are supposed to locate, how to act under the present circumstances. When our mouths momentarily separate, we let out sounds, the kind of sounds I would prefer not to make during the daytime. Then Laura moves sideways, gently pushes me onto my back. Her wild hair tickles my chest and stomach. The tickling causes shivers to run the length of my spine. After that, Laura’s mouth and tongue find something new to wrestle with, and that something makes me forget I ever laid eyes on Gauss’s equations. All I can see is my bedroom ceiling, illuminated by the strip of moonlight beaming in from the living room, and I can’t even really see that.
The closer we get to black holes, the more time slows down and material condenses. Just as I am about to fall into the chasm beyond the event horizon, ready to experience the fate that awaits me inside the black hole, where I will be crushed into a speck smaller than a pinhead and merge with the endless darkness there, I realise that I must wrench myself out of this ungovernable state and back towards gravity as we know it.
I tell Laura that I think a certain reciprocity is only right and proper. She might have giggled, I’m not sure. She might have said something too, but I don’t understand what because part of me is still attached to her tongue. In any case, we swap roles.
In a way, I wish our waiter were here to witness this. Laura tastes better than any of the dishes or wines we sampled earlier this evening. And judging by the noises she is making, her fragmented half-sentences, I conclude that she too must feel a certain satisfaction that we didn’t pick the sixteen-course menu after all; we would still be in the restaurant. Now the cost–benefit ratio is at a level with which both of us can hopefully be much happier.
After this, we press against each other again, and here my archer’s bow tension comes into its own. I am able to operate at a satisfactory intensity. I’m not very experienced at what we are doing, but maybe I don’t have to be. Laura’s volume, the way she pulls me towards her, grips me with her fingers and sinks her nails into my various appendages, strongly indicates there is a significant probability that I am at least partially succeeding in my current task.
We perform a few variations on ways of experiencing each other. The changes are not very big, they seem more like corrective movements, the way you might add decimals to a calculation depending on how exactly you wish to express a number. Laura lets out a long, shrill, profound cry, like a simultaneous show of surrender and victory, while I notice a hitherto unfamiliar grunting emanating from my throat, a sound that for some unexplained physiological reason lasts much longer than the air in my lungs.
I can hear Laura breathing beside me. It feels as though there is something more real about it, more important than anything else right now. I don’t know where all these new feelings have come from, these peculiar ideas and observations. At the same time, my skin is beginning to cool. The duvet is in a pile at the foot of the bed. I sit up slightly, find one corner of the duvet and pull it towards us.
‘Do you think it’s time to roll over and start snoring?’ Laura asks.
Her question is perfectly reasonable. It’s very late, and there is a direct correlation between an optimal sleeping position and our quality of sleep. But right now, that is of secondary importance. I don’t want to catch a chill, I tell her, particularly in view of our business activities.
‘That’s one I’ve never heard before,’ she says, rolls onto her side and props herself on one elbow. Her face is above mine, so close that again I can feel its glow. She smiles. ‘But you don’t look like you’re about to ask me to stay the night.’
‘The commuter trains aren’t running at the moment, so you’ll save a considerable amount of money if you stay here until morning,’ I say, and it all feels wrong. Of course, it’s true and it would be the sensible thing to do, but it doesn’t express what I’m really feeling or what I want to say. I look at Laura. ‘There’s nothing I want more right now than for you to stay here next to me, so that I can … sense you.’
The words come from somewhere unusual. They are the result of neither critical thinking nor computational processes, but all the same these are the words I want to say. It’s probably best to say words like this lying on my back, I think suddenly, because they bring about that same dizzying sensation that I have been suffering from of late. Laura smiles, snuggles closer.
‘It’s just as well I asked Johanna to watch Tuuli tonight,’ she whispers. ‘I was hoping you’d say something like that.’
20
There isn’t a cloud in the sky, the placid air is full of September bite, and the morning sun is atypically generous for the time of year. I can feel the warmth on the left of my face as I walk from the bus stop towards the adventure park. The morning feels flawless in every way, as though it too has experienced something irrevocable, a crucial sea-change from its last attempt. Naturally, today I see everything through some kind of filter; I realise that. It’s as though I am slightly outside my own body, and the feeling is both elating and nerve-wracking. It fills my chest with prowess and something I might even call happiness. But at the same time, it feels as though I have laid myself bare, vulnerable to something as yet undefined, as though I have reached a hand into the darkness without knowing what it is I expect to find.
The overall feeling is jubilant nonetheless, as though I have won a secret competition, and the only people who know about it are those who received a secret invitation. Something like that. These thoughts are hard to control or guide. They are different from my normal thoughts; in fact, they are not really thoughts at all, more like peculiar spurts of energy, flashes, gentle bolts of lightning. I walk quickly in long, light steps. I think about how my concept of a date has changed most fundamentally. Though, naturally, only in certain respects. Yes, I want to go on another date, but only with Laura Helanto. Otherwise, my notion of dates remains the same: I wouldn’t attempt to recreate the intimacy of last night with just anyone. To me, that still seems like playing with low odds.
I am very late by the time I reach the edge of the adventure-park car park, but it doesn’t matter. I have a new-found strength, I’ll make up the…
A cold wind whips through my shirt and jacket.
I feel my tie tightening though I haven’t touched it. I’m sure that even the blue of the sky loses some of its brightness, that the only cloud locates the sun and purposely obscures it.
Nothing darkens a morning like the sight of a police inspector.
Osmala is standing almost diametrically in the middle of the car park, right at the spot where a large YouMeFun flag would normally be fluttering in the wind. Of course, it isn’t fluttering because, to my understanding, it is still in the laundry after the flagpole came down, and the new flagpole hasn’t arrived yet. And Osmala has already clocked me. He waves. I wave back and walk towards him.
Standing in the middle of the car park in his grey blazer and badly fitting light jeans, he blends in with the surroundings about as well as the Easter Island statues. By that, I don’t mean that nobody knows where he came from or who hewed him in rock, but there’s a certain statuesque austerity and mystery about him. The chilly morning has pinched his ears and the end of his nose, leaving them fire-engine red. They make for a surprisingly refreshing detail in his otherwise grey and angular features.