This is wholly irrational.
And yet…
This is the end.
On this gloomy, drizzly afternoon, the cemetery in Malmi is almost devoid of people. That’s because everybody is dead, Juhani would quip, I know he would. But Juhani is quiet. He is ash in my arms. The urn, with Juhani inside it, arrived at the cemetery in the funeral home’s own black hearse. I carry the urn in the crook of my right arm. It is surprisingly heavy. An employee from the funeral home follows me at a polite distance: a youngish man wearing a hat and sunglasses, despite the weather. The walk is relatively long. The umbrella in my left hand seems more eager to fly off in the wind than to remain in my hand and protect me from the rain.
We make several ninety-degree turns on the way, we stop, then take a few careful steps across the sodden lawn and arrive at a small hole in the ground. The earth around the hole is fresh and muddy. I glance behind me, and the quiet man dressed in black appears beside me almost instantly, I hand him the umbrella and he holds it over me. The urn is attached to a string, which I wind around my right hand. Then I begin to lower the urn. But not quite yet.
I stop, and it feels as though everything else stops too. I look up.
Thousands of graves, the diagonal rain, the tall stone wall, the highway behind it. Tree trunks black from the rain, wreathes heavy from the weight of the water. A solitary candle in a lantern like the last spot of light in the world. Then – because everything is still – I see movement. About thirty metres ahead and to my right, someone in a raincoat moves, turns and remains standing on the spot. The raincoat’s hood is pulled over his head. Maybe the man has finally found the grave he was looking for. Or then again…
I have the sudden feeling I am looking at Lizard Man’s back. The posture is the same. Further off, I see a group of people walking more or less in my direction. I look up again at the lonely figure; he too appears to notice the arrival of the group. He starts moving, walking away. The briskness of those footsteps reminds me of Lizard Man too. The figure disappears behind the hedgerow before I can be sure. The group of mourners has changed direction. I look at them from the side. One of them is carrying an urn. It’s perfectly possible the person they are here to grieve protected me.
The dead save the living.
But I don’t give the matter another thought.
The afternoon is dark and grey, my suit is soaked through.
I am here to bury my brother.
The string is taut as the urn calmly descends into the bosom of the earth.
The urn reaches the bottom of the hole, the place from which it shall never return.
I let go of my end of the string. And I let go of something else too. I’m not sure whether I say this out loud or not, but at least mentally I say to Juhani, whom I will never see again in any mortal form: I couldn’t do it.
I simply couldn’t save the adventure park, I couldn’t even save myself. It just wasn’t possible. I tell him straight up that I can’t think of anything else, I can’t bear anything else. And how you ever thought I might be able to pull it off using simple logic, well…
There’s just no logic to it.
There’s no logic to anything.
And there is no logic anywhere because nobody seems to need such a thing.
Look around you, Juhani – not down there, not at the dark urn or those clayey walls, a bit further up, if you are in another form somewhere or have reached a higher plain of existence – and you’ll see that nothing that happens here is profitable in any way, shape or form.
Look at the world.
Schopenhauer was right all along. Only the unborn are happy.
Life isn’t a loan; it is a payment fraud. It is a project, lasting on average seventy-five years, whose sole aim is to maximise our own stupidity. And yet, that’s exactly what we seem to crave. Look at the choices we make. If we are healthy, we make ourselves ill by smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and over-eating. If we want to bring about societal change, we vote for options that make our situation worse. When we should be thinking about what is rational, people start talking about how they feel. The most important thing is making sure that nothing rational accidentally happens. The most successful people are those who talk the least sense and blame everybody else for it. One plus one is not two, Juhani; depending on the day and who is speaking it can be whatever the hell you want it to be.
And I’m supposed to succeed in a world like that – by using logic.
I take a deep breath.
I’m almost sure I haven’t been speaking out loud. I stand at the edge of the pit a moment longer, follow the droplets of rain as they disappear into the ground. I have made up my mind. We return to the car park, where the man from the funeral home takes his black hearse and I take a white cab.
Back home, I slide my damp suit onto a hanger, wipe clean my shoes, make some tea and sit down at my computer. I click open a browser that won’t reveal my IP address and an email address that won’t reveal my identity. I remember Juhani showing me how to do this, how to operate on the web without leaving a trace. At the time, I thought it was just another fad, one of thousands of things that vied for Juhani’s attention. In light of recent events, I wonder whether remaining anonymous online was more than just a hobby for him.
Be that as it may, this message needs to come from someone other than me. It needs to start a chain reaction in which I too will get caught up. The message is ready to go. But I don’t press ‘send’ quite yet. I’ll do it in the morning. I want to be there when it happens.
The recipient of the message is one Detective Inspector Pentti Osmala of the Helsinki organised-crime and fraud units. I still have his card. The message states that, rumour has it, one of the freezers in the adventure-park café might contain the body of a person who might be of interest to the police.
27
It is a bright morning and the autumn sun, low on the horizon, blinds my eyes and warms my face as I step out of the taxi, a self-imposed security measure I’ve now decided to take. The car park is empty, the tarmac smells of the overnight rain. The adventure park looks smaller somehow. Of course, it is still an enormous box that fills my field of vision from north to south, but now it doesn’t feel so commanding, so overbearing. It doesn’t have the same grip on me; I’m no longer carrying it on my back.
Something, somewhere, has changed.
I think it’s probable that that something is me. I check the time on my phone. The message was sent forty minutes ago.
Inside the building, I bump into Kristian almost instantly. He is coming from the direction of the staffroom and is walking towards the entrance hall. Upon seeing me, he smiles straight away. I smile back. His smile is extremely broad. My smile feels light. His smile quickly disappears as he opens his mouth to say something, but I manage to get in first.