‘There’s always the third option,’ said Perttilä and nodded in the direction of the sheet of paper.
‘Precision requires precision,’ I said, and I could hear my voice quavering, the blood bubbling inside me. ‘You can’t achieve inscrutable exactitude in correlation matrices with the KonMari Method. I cannot be part of a team whose highest ambition is going on a sushi-making weekend.’
‘There’s a small room for you downstairs…’
I shook my head.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just not sensible. I want things to be sensible, I want to act sensibly. This agreement is … More to the point, it says I would have to give up the six-month severance pay to which I am entitled and that my resignation would be effective immediately.’
‘That’s because this would be a voluntary decision,’ said Perttilä, now in that soft voice again, as though he very much enjoyed the sound of it. ‘If you want to stay with us on this floor, tomorrow morning there’s a compulsory, three-hour seminar on transcendental meditation, which will be led by a really excellent—’
‘Can I have a pen, please?’
From their faces, I could tell the others already knew. I had just one personal belonging at my workstation: a picture of my cat, Schopenhauer. I emptied my leather briefcase of work-related papers and dropped Schopenhauer’s picture into the now-empty case. I took the lift down to the ground floor and didn’t so much as glance at the janitors or the door behind them. I stepped out into the street and stopped as though I had walked right into something, as though my feet had stuck to the ground.
I was unemployed.
The thought seemed impossible – impossible for me at least. I’d never imagined I could be in the situation of not knowing where to go first thing in the morning. It felt as though a great mechanism keeping the world in order had suddenly broken. I glanced at the watch on my wrist, but it was just as useless as I’d imagined it to be. It told me the time, but all of a sudden time didn’t have any meaning. It was 10:18 a.m.
It seemed only a moment ago that I was pondering the difference between conditional probability and original probability and was trying to find a way to define mathematical independence in complementary events.
Now I was standing by the side of a busy road, unemployed, with nothing but a picture of my cat in my briefcase.
I forced myself into motion. The sunshine warmed my back, and I began to feel slightly better. As Pasila train station came into view, I was able to see my situation more pragmatically, applying logic and reason. I was an experienced mathematician and I knew more about the insurance industry than Perttilä’s team of functionally innumerate psychobabblers combined. I began to relax. Before long I would be calculating for his competitors.
How difficult could it be to find an insurance company that took both itself and mathematics seriously?
It can’t be that hard, I thought. Soon everything will look much clearer.
Quite simply, everything would be better.
3
‘Your brother has died.’
The light-blue shirt and dark-blue jacket only enhanced the third shade of blue in the man’s eyes. His thinning, wheat-blond hair combed over to the left looked tired too, somehow wilted. The man’s face was pale, all except for the bright red of his cheeks. He had introduced himself and told me he was a lawyer, but his name seemed to have disappeared with the news.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said in all honesty.
The taste of the morning’s first cup of coffee still lingered in my mouth, and now it took on something new, a tinny, almost rusty aftertaste.
‘Your brother has died,’ the lawyer repeated, trying perhaps to find a more comfortable sitting position on my couch. At least, that’s what his movements seemed to suggest. The autumnal morning behind the windows was cool and sunny. I knew this because I’d let Schopenhauer out to sit in his favourite observation spot right after breakfast and walked straight to the door as soon as the bell rang. Eventually the lawyer leaned forwards slightly, propped his elbows on his knees. His jacket tightened around the shoulders, its fabric gleaming.
‘He left you his amusement park.’
I spoke without even thinking. ‘Adventure park,’ I corrected him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘An amusement park is like Linnanmäki, like Alton Towers. Rollercoasters and carousels, machines that you sit in and let them toss you around. An adventure park, on the other hand, is a place where people have to move by themselves. They climb and run, jump and slide. There are climbing walls, ropes, slides, labyrinths, that kind of thing.’
‘I think I understand,’ said the man. ‘Amusement parks have that catapult with bright flashing lights that throws people into the air, but an adventure park has … I can’t think of anything…’
‘A Caper Castle,’ I remembered.
‘A Caper Castle, right,’ the lawyer nodded again. He was about to continue but looked suddenly pensive. ‘Well, an amusement park could have a Caper Castle too, I suppose. Like the old Vekkula in Linnanmäki. You had to climb in and keep your balance, and by the time you came out at the other end you were drenched in sweat. But it’s hard to imagine a simple catapult in an adventure park, all you do is sit down and experience a momentary shift in gravity … I think I understand the difference, but it’s hard to find a clear dividing line…’
‘My brother is dead,’ I said.
The lawyer looked down at his hands, quickly clasped them together.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My condolences.’
‘How did he die?’
‘In his car,’ said the lawyer. ‘A Volvo V70.’
‘I mean, what was the cause of death?’
‘Right, yes,’ the lawyer stammered. ‘A heart attack.’
‘A heart attack in his car?’
‘At the traffic lights on Munkkiniemi Boulevard. The traffic wasn’t moving, someone knocked on the driver’s window. He was adjusting the radio.’
‘Dead?’
‘No, of course not.’ The lawyer shook his head. ‘He died while he was adjusting it. A classical channel, I believe.’
‘And he’d made a will?’ I asked.
To put it nicely, Juhani was a spontaneous, impulsive person. He lived in the moment. The kind of forward-planning required to draw up a will didn’t sound like him at all. He used to joke, saying I would die of stiffness. I told him I was very much alive and not at all stiff, I just wanted things to occur in a good, logical order and that I based all my actions on rational thinking. For some reason, he found this amusing. Still, it should be said that though we were the diametric opposite of each other, we were also brothers, and I didn’t quite know how to take the news of his passing.
The lawyer reached for his light-brown leather briefcase, pulled out a thin black folder and flicked open the bands at the corners. There didn’t seem to be very many papers inside. The lawyer examined the uppermost document for a long while before speaking again.
‘This will was drawn up six months ago. That’s when your brother became my client. His final wish was very clear: you are to receive everything. The only other person mentioned by name is your brother’s former wife, whom he explicitly disinherits. There are no other relatives; at least, he doesn’t mention any.’
‘There are no others.’
‘Then everything is yours.’
‘Everything?’ I asked.
Again the lawyer consulted his paperwork.
‘The amusement park,’ he stated again.
‘Adventure park,’ I corrected him.
‘I’m still having difficulty appreciating the difference.’
‘So there’s nothing in there except the adventure park?’ I asked.