Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “Why Loogaroo?” I ask. The recorder in front of me is rolling and humming.

  When she speaks, something shiny flashes in her mouth. Her tongue, too, is pierced. She says she was named after an ancient legend. Long ago in the Caribbean, there lived a woman called Loogaroo. This woman would shed her skin at night and turn into a flame and search for blood to drink.

  “But Loogaroo had a strange habit, a sort of compulsion, which would halt her in the middle of her hunt.”

  “Yes?” I ask, when Loogaroo falls silent.

  “If she happened upon a pile of sand, she would stop and count the grains. People who were afraid of being attacked by Loogaroo at night could leave a pile of rice or sand in front of their door in the hope that Loogaroo would stop to count the grains and forget her thirst.”

  “Do you count grains of sand?” I ask.

  “Don’t we all?” she asks in turn. “Recount our own deeds?”

  The answer takes me by surprise. She looks sad and a bit more human than before.

  “How often do you consume human blood?” I ask somewhat harshly, perhaps to hide my surprise.

  I feel embarrassed when she responds, “Do you really expect me to answer such an intimate question?”

  “You agreed to this interview, and our readers no doubt expect exactly these kinds of questions,” I defended myself. “In an interview with a real vampire—which is what you claim to be—I think the question is valid. If you prefer, we can proceed on a general level.”

  “I’d prefer that.”

  “Alright, how often do vampires consume blood?”

  “There’s no exact rule,” she replies. “Some fast for up to six months, but there are also those that need a weekly dose. But all of us must consume blood from time to time. Otherwise we die.”

  “In what other ways do vampires differ from humans?”

  “In many ways. I’m sure you know that individuals like me hate sunlight and have excellent night vision.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I admit.

  “Our optic nerves can process low levels of light more efficiently, and therefore we’re able to see better in the dark than humans,” Loogaroo explains. “Too much light, on the other hand, causes an overload of information, headaches, and visual impairment. Many of us also easily get sunstroke, sun rashes, and heatstroke. In general we are more energetic by night than by day, unlike humans.”

  I notice that this is the second time that she’s said “humans” instead of “other people.”

  “Do I have this right—that you don’t consider yourselves human?” I ask cautiously.

  “I don’t,” she answers firmly. “We are of another race. Our hearing is better, as are our reactions. We’re faster, stronger, and healthier than humans. We recover from injuries and illnesses faster than humans. We live substantially longer.”

  She doesn’t look at all healthy to me, anemic and a bit lethargic really, but maybe that’s because the sun hasn’t set yet. She’s just woken up. And maybe she hasn’t had her dose of energy drink in a long while? The thought makes me uneasy.

  “I am a Classic,” she says.

  “And what does that mean?” I ask her. “I’m not very deeply acquainted with vampyrology.”

  “It means that I’ve become a vampire through infection. I’m not a Natural Born. A retrovirus infection is required to turn a human into a vampire. That can be a long process. but sooner or later, the person’s chemistry changes irreversibly.”

  A retrovirus infection! Though the recorder is running, I write this down in my notebook and feel very old and worn out. Dear God, the things one must do for a living!

  The sun sets and I get tired, but Loogaroo seems livelier and more excited. Her lethargy seems to have passed, her eyes glimmering black and gold. She even smiles, shaking her thick, silky mane from time to time.

  “You do understand,” she says, “that the need for blood is biological, not just psychological. You must also remember that true vampires are always unpredictable. We are potential killers. When our energy levels drop, when the hunger for blood becomes unbearable, we can’t help but satisfy our needs.”

  “Even if it would lead to irreparable consequences?” I ask.

  “Even then,” she says. “Those kinds of consequences can’t always be avoided.”

  “Should I be on my guard now,” I ask her and give a somewhat forced laugh.

  She doesn’t react to my remark at all, just fixes me with the same superior and distant gaze, as black and pale as before.

  After a long pause she remarks, “Haven’t you considered that humans also drink and eat each other? They all draw vitality, memories, thoughts, love, and hate from each other? It cannot be helped.”

  Again she takes me by surprise. A minute passes before I’m able to get back to my questions.

  “When you said that you live longer than humans on average, how long do you expect yourself to live? Over a hundred years?”

  “Accidents can happen, of course,” she answers. “Vampires, too, can be run over by a car. We can be killed, even if it isn’t all that easy. But in any case, at least a hundred years.”

  “And how old are you now?”

  “Seventy-three years old,” she says. “Seventy-four next month.”

  She looks completely sincere, the devil. I don’t even laugh, I only raise my eyebrows. She really does take me for an idiot.

  “Well, I think this is enough,” I say and turn off the recorder. “I’ll send you the interview to review.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she says.

  I realize that she’s completely uninterested in whatever I’m going to write. She has already turned her attention to the coming night.

  In the Wrong Line

  Today I passed a line that stretched around the block. It was taciturn and orderly. No one tried to cut, they all waited patiently for their turn. What were they waiting in line for? Everyone knows, but no one likes to talk about it.

  The line shouldn’t even exist, but it forms there every day nonetheless. It’s partially the same line as yesterday, partially it’s new. It seems to grow a little bit longer every day. People wearing summer clothes in the winter and winter clothes in the summer, swollen ankles and sneakers with the heels cut off to make them fit. Tired young mothers and worn-out old mothers, baby carriages, wheelchairs and walkers, hung-over old men and drunk young men, faces with foreign features, the smell of cabbage and garlic, vodka, urine, and layers of sweat dried into filth.

  No one in the line has eyes, they all look away. Many of them have turned their faces to the wall or covered them from passing gazes with hoods and scarves. Many of them are wearing sunglasses even though the day is overcast.

  I don’t have the heart to say what they’re waiting in line for. It’s one of the city’s shared secrets.

  Today the line is particularly quiet and grim. The people in it avoid looking around.

  I had nearly passed by, when one of the women in the line, maybe second or third from the front, struck me as familiar. I looked back and saw a forehead, a slender nose that I knew well, cheeks still round and unwrinkled.

  Impossible! I had to be mistaken. But there I was, in broad daylight, seeing that pretty face with my own eyes. It was her, Viveca, my old classmate. I had just seen her last week at a concert of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. She and her husband, a permanent under-secretary of state, had season tickets.

  In school, Viveca was always the first to get the latest brand-name clothes. When she grew up, she started dressing only in black and white. It was known that she had two cars, one white, the other black.

  Today she had broken her routine. She was wearing a blue quilted jacket and a brown, fuzzy woollen hat. They didn’t look like Viveca’s own clothes, more like a costume. She turned and suddenly had eyes. I know she saw me—I saw the flash of recognition behind the mascara of her eyelashes. She made no move to greet me, just the opposite—she bent over to rummage through the b
ag at her feet. It was certainly Viveca’s own, no ordinary shopping bag, but an elegant designer label, genuine leather. That bag confirmed her identity to me.

  I got the message: she wanted me to move on, and I did.

  My heart raced in my chest as if I had had a serious fright. “I’m going, I’m going,” I whispered to myself. I stopped two blocks away, in front of the window of a thrift store. There was a sign in the window, “Closed due to a heart attack.” I felt like I was having one as well.

  Did Viveca stand in that line regularly, or was this a one-time experiment? She must have been standing there for a long time to make it all the way to the front. Maybe she had been commissioned to write an article about the line for some paper and she wanted to imbue it with extra authenticity by pretending to be one of its beneficiaries? But what paper would commission her to write an article? It didn’t seem likely. As far as I knew, Viveca had never been a skilled writer, nor had any interest in being one.

  Sometimes foreign organisms are found in places where they don’t belong and can’t survive. A jaguar in a suburban forest, a giant frog in the footwear section of a department store, a Carcharodon megalodon in the cholera basin. But this was a person who was completely out of place. Her presence was more than a mistake. It was indecent, practically a crime.

  Kinky Night

  “Here’s your ticket,” the Marquis said one day and shoved a piece of paper at me.

  “A ticket for what?” I asked and took a closer look at the paper. It was a ticket to the Kinky Club’s Industrial Fairy Tale with Fetish Science Fiction.

  “I want a short article on the city’s kinky scene,” he said.

  “You go then,” I said. “I don’t feel like it.”

  The Marquis had suggested at many editorial meetings that The New Anomalist should start a column for deviant sex, or at least that we should publish something on the subject every now and then. “We have to expand our readership,” he insisted. “When something stops growing, it withers away,” he would say. I was of the opinion that branching out in that direction would actually drive away part of our readership.

  The Marquis didn’t listen, of course. And so I found myself at my first and last kinky night, watching a cabaret titled Glam HC Sex Industrial. To be completely honest, maybe I was a little curious about what was in store.

  The young audience was dressed in black costumes decorated with shining metal. The only colors in sight were their red, blue, and green hairdos.

  On stage, a man—I’m sorry, in this context the correct word is slave—was sucking the toes of a tattooed woman. It went on and on. The woman gyrated and made small, supposedly erotic noises as the man slurped on each toe in turn. I got extremely bored, and I thought that the slave and his mistress must also be eager for the performance to end. I was sorry I hadn’t brought the Voynich manuscript or my knitting with me.

  Once the toe-sucking had been completed, the woman urinated on her slave. He drank it. This elicited resounding applause from the audience and recaptured my attention.

  Had I had my knitting with me, I might have felt like one of the la tricoteuse, the women who would sit by the guillotine knitting during the French revolution. I remember reading that in the Nazi concentration camps, the most sadistic guards served the same drink as one of their fiendish methods of torture. And now people were paying to watch it being gulped down on stage and applauded.

  I was already very uncomfortable when a woman in a white thong walked on stage artfully twirling a shining knife. She had a slave, too, this one a girl. The woman cut a heart into the skin between the slave girl’s naked breasts. Blood trickled, and the “torture” continued with more cuts to the stomach and buttocks.

  More people came on stage dressed in spiked collars like badly behaved dogs and Loogaroo. Disgusted, I watched as they pierced each others’ nipples and genitals to their hearts’ content. Spiked clubs and other equally inappropriate objects were attached to sensitive places, but the climax was yet to come. The audience really came alive when one of the men set himself on fire. As the flames rose, I heard cries and squeals from the audience, not of horror, but of pleasure.

  At this point, I finally got up and left. I had never felt older or colder than at that show. I had no intention of writing a single word about it. I sent a message that same night to the Marquis that he could forget about sending me to investigate any more industrial sex.

  That night I ground up three datura seeds and ate them quickly with yogurt. I felt I needed them.

  Phony Money

  I was reading a book on the tram. It had a peculiar title: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I was completely absorbed in my reading, and when I lifted my eyes from the book, the city blocks I saw from the tram window were completely unfamiliar to me, and I realized that I’d missed my stop.

  Had it been a new neighborhood, the sight wouldn’t have surprised me. I hadn’t wandered much outside of my familiar territory for the past few years, and many new neighborhoods had been built during that time.

  But the buildings I saw from the tram were old. As far as I could tell, even the newest ones were from the 1920s. There were deteriorating low wooden houses here and there along the streets. I had thought that there were only a couple of buildings like that left in the city, preserved as museums. Sheets were hung out to dry in the yards of the wooden houses. The bare branches of overgrown lilacs protruded through picket fences. I couldn’t remember ever having seen such yards or such a neighborhood.

  “Excuse me,” I asked the elderly lady sitting next to me, “where is this tram going?”

  “Back to the railway station,” she said.

  “But the nine hasn’t come this way before,” I said.

  She gave me a funny look.

  “It has as long as I can remember.”

  “Excuse me,” I said again, got up, and hopped out at the next stop. I was curious. I had to be somewhere east of the city center. I tried to look for the shore, but it was nowhere in sight. The streets were lined with small stores, grocers, and old-fashioned general goods stores.

  For some reason, my gaze was drawn to the window of one of the stores. I saw a fruit basket and a box of Turkish delights that I had a sudden craving for. All of my attention was focused on that box. I felt as if, long ago, in my childhood, a visiting relative had given me just such a box of candy. My surroundings faded from sight, as if I had suddenly developed tunnel vision. Greed moved me towards the door to the store. I took out a largish bill from my wallet. I was sure it would be enough.

  I stepped into the store, which had a vintage coffee advertisement on the wall.

  “I’d like to buy that box in the window there,” I said to the saleswoman. “How much does it cost?”

  “Seven marks,” she said, an old, dry woman with dozens of long pins in her hair.

  I gave the woman my only bill. She turned it in her hands with a confused look. Then she brought it to her nose and sniffed it. Eventually she leveled a stern gaze on me.

  “What kind of money is this then?” the woman asked.

  “What do you mean what kind of money,” I asked, confused. “It’s a fifty, you can see that.”

  She didn’t respond. Her eyes moved from me to the bill and back again. I began to lose my temper.

  “It’s legal tender, not a forgery.”

  “Not in this country it isn’t,” she said. “Don’t you have any real money?”

  “Are you joking?” I asked, flustered. I was getting hot under the collar, and I started to sweat. “It’s a fifty, you must be able to see that, and you said the box is just seven marks. So give me forty-three marks change.”

  “You can keep your money,” she said, “and I’ll keep the candy. Or do you want me to call the police?”

  “What on earth is going on?” I asked in a panic. I wasn’t just asking the woman, but myself as well.

  She didn’t answer, just stared at me even more sternly than be
fore and held out my bill between her thumb and forefinger as if it were contaminated.

  I felt a twinge of fear. I could see that she was serious. But what had I done wrong?

  I snatched my bill from her hand, completely perplexed, and left the store. I walked quickly, hardly looking to either side, distressed by what had just happened and almost expecting someone to be following me.

  I was walking briskly, but the view to my side, which I only sensed faintly, seemed to change even more quickly, as if I were sitting in a speeding car. The next time I looked around me, I recognized the neighborhood and my city. I began to regain my composure.

  At that moment I was approached by a bag lady, a habitual beggar. She is a fixture in the city. Threadbare, diminutive, and of an ethnic minority, she spends her days near the railway station and in front of downtown restaurants. For some reason, I find her intensely repulsive, and never give her any money.

  Now she was approaching me with money in her hand. She had a bill in her hand, and wasn’t asking me for anything. Just the opposite: she was trying to get me to take it! How strange and upside down! Wrong, completely wrong. Was she mocking me, or did she really think I needed the proceeds from her begging? Did I look so bad already?

  Shouldn’t I have at least thanked her for the offer? I didn’t. I stepped aside quickly and irritably, raised my hand defensively, and I know my face was twisted by a grimace.

  It wasn’t until I had gotten past her that I realized that the incident was a kind of mirror of what had just happened in that strange store.

  I couldn’t get the woman or the phony money out of my head until, at the market square, a flock of pigeons rushed past me like a fountain, spreading into the air like the light gray seeds of a dandelion.

  Those despised and persecuted birds, called flying rats by some, are masters of vertical flight. I admire them. The streets are like rock-hemmed canyons to them. The flare of movement, the beating of wings against smoke and air . . .