Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  My thoughts rose with the pigeons to land on the eaves, antennas, chimneys, window ledges. There I left them, among the golden rows of lit windows.

  A Finger

  Raikka talks so much and so well about so many subjects and he isn’t even out of school yet! The boy knows so much: superclusters and the structure of the universe, which is apparently filled with holes like Swiss cheese, the gradual increase of Uranus’s apparent magnitude, infrared and asymmetrical galaxies. He can give entire lectures on strange radio pulses and vast bubbles, gamma ray bursts, the Omega Point, supermassive stars, and the sudden, sporadic cessation of radiation.

  Raikka has already written several articles for The New Anomalist that have gotten a great deal of attention. He sounds like a poet when he talks about the pale blue glow of distant galaxies and the existence of vast vacuums. When the expansion of the universe accelerates, he said once, when all the heavenly bodies grow ever more distant ever more quickly, the universe will become ever emptier, colder, darker. It didn’t seem to bother him, though.

  He is an amateur of the highest order.

  On the second day, he started talking about elementary particles. How taus breeze through the Earth lighter than any other particles, how they spill through us as if we were nothing.

  “They have no charge,” he said. “They weigh—if that verb can be used at all about them—only a millionth of the mass of an electron. Somewhere along their journey, they become leptons, which vanish in an instant.

  “Try to think of a being that sees differently to us, say, with radio waves,” Raikka once said. “That being would see the metal structures of buildings, but not the masonry, wood, or glass. It wouldn’t see us, either, except for maybe our fillings. To a creature like that, we would be just pieces of metal floating in mid air.

  “Did you know that dark matter is invisible, but most of the universe is made of it?” He asked me. “It could be the gravity of other, parallel universes. Light particles can’t travel from one dimension to another. But gravity permeates everything.”

  That winter I felt gravity more clearly than ever before. One morning, as I sat at my desk in the office, depressed, with a jug of water in front of me, Raikka walked in. He asked for more time to finish the article about hole teleportation he was working on. His left middle finger was wrapped in gauze, and the boy looked dispirited and pale.

  “Were you in an accident? What happened to your finger?”

  “Nothing really. The tip was amputated, that’s all,” Raikka said.

  “That sounds pretty bad! Lucky it was the left hand,” I said to comfort him. “Does it ache? What happened?”

  “Nothing serious,” the boy said. “I stopped by the amputation parlor yesterday.”

  “Parlor?”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about it. It didn’t cost much. It aches a little, but it’ll be good as new soon. Well, shorter, obviously.”

  “I’m not following you,” I said. “Don’t tell me . . . dear God, the amputation was voluntary? You paid to have it done?”

  “Well, it’s not like professionals work for free. It’s like you’ve never heard of this before. Everyone is getting it done these days.”

  “Everyone! I certainly haven’t ever heard of such a thing before. Do you mean to tell me that there was nothing wrong with your finger?”

  “Don’t you get it? What would be wrong with it? It was a completely normal finger.”

  “But what was done to it isn’t normal,” I managed to say. “I’m reporting this. This is a matter for the police, a crime. Professionals do this, you say? Criminals, I call them!”

  “They have all the licenses. It’s a perfectly clean place.”

  I fell silent from shock and stared at his bandaged stump. Then I lost my temper.

  “Get out,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything so perverse. And here I thought I knew everything there is to know about anomalies. This entire city is just one big anomaly. Amputation parlors! Drinking urine on stage! People setting themselves on fire!”

  “What are you yelling for?” Raikka said. He had begun to look miserable as well. “I don’t get it—it’s not like it was your middle finger. And the tip isn’t even necessary. You can’t do anything much with your left middle finger anyway,” he argued.

  “Oh no? I’ll show you what you can do with it!”

  And I did.

  “See? This is a human middle finger extended to its full length, fingernail and all. And that’s how it’s going to stay until it gets buried with the rest of me.”

  Raikka ran off. I think I had offended him to the core. He was still practically just a child. And how his amputated finger must have ached!

  That ache lodged itself in my chest. It was so bad that I had to lie down on the mat for a while. It wasn’t healthy to get so worked up. I was also sad that The New Anomalist had probably lost a good contributor. I doubted that Raikka would write any more articles for us on cosmology or the latest trends in alternative physics.

  I wanted to say to him, “How could you, who knows everything there is to know about the gradual increase of Uranus’s apparent magnitude, infrared and asymmetrical galaxies, who talks like a poet about the pale blue glow of distant galaxies and the vastness of vacuums, how could you of all people go and have the end of your left middle finger removed?”

  Would he answer, “So that people wouldn’t think I’m so weird . . . ”?

  Raikka was gone, but I remembered the lonely taus he had told me about, the taus that wander through our city, through amputation parlors and kinky parties and innovation centers at nearly the speed of light, hardly affecting anything, probably hardly affected by anything.

  Trillions of them flow through our muscles and fat, our blood and our hard skulls. Then nothing meets nothingness. Nothing happens, and yet does happen. Nothing exists, and yet, something does.

  The Moving Image of Eternity

  “Everything that is large was once small. Even the universe was once small, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence,” he said. “But that was before time and space. On the other hand, how can anything be called small, if there’s nothing larger than it, if there’s no one to see the smallness? And who could possibly be outside the universe?”

  “Some people would say God,” I said.

  “But would anything be large or small to God? Actually, the universe was not a point, but a hole, it was a non-thing. When it stopped being a non-thing and became a thing, time can be said to have been born. Time, a shadow that eternity throws on the wall of our cave. Plato, you remember, ‘the moving image of eternity’ . . . ”

  He was an expert on time. I called him the Timely Man. There was once a menswear store called that in this city, at the beginning of time . . .

  Where did I read this sentence? “We live in the hour all free of the hours gone by.” It’s rarely true, because we so rarely live in the moment: more often we live in our time.

  When I was a child, when there was still a store called Timely Man in the city, I would experiment with time. I wanted to know how long the present lasts and what the present really is. I came to the conclusion that it can never last longer than a second or two. I tried so hard to hold on to the present with my eyes and ears, with all my attention, but before I realized, it had already slipped into the past.

  It is impossible for us to hold back the flow of time, to be really present, to stretch out the moment without it tearing. Something always happens to break our concentration and push us into the uproar of the events around us.

  I dress myself in time first thing in the morning—I wrap a watch around my wrist. Even while sleeping I’m troubled by the bustle of life. But that winter, I began forgetting appointments and meetings. I was supposed to go listen to the Timely Man’s lecture at the Institute of Spiritual Growth and meet him afterwards. But even though I had marked the time and place in my calendar and though I thought I’d checked my schedule, I forgot the appointment. There were days
when I couldn’t remember what season it was without checking the newspaper.

  And so, the Timely Man waited for me that day in the Institute’s café. I didn’t remember the appointment until the Marquis asked me how the interview had gone, and then I was alarmed.

  “It’s a pity you made him wait for nothing, a busy scholar. What’s the matter with you?” the Marquis asked. “You seem so absent-minded and tired these days. Has your asthma gotten worse?”

  “No no, just the opposite, actually,” I said. “It’s better now. I’m trying a new remedy, you know, herbal. But it does make me drowsy sometimes.”

  I felt my lips sticking together, and took a long sip from my water bottle. The Marquis stared at me suspiciously.

  “I think you’ve lost weight. You should get yourself looked at,” he said. “By the way, have you started wearing perfume? There’s a strange smell in the office.”

  “No, I don’t wear any,” I said, embarrassed. I realized I was carrying around the stench of datura.

  The next day, the Marquis brought the Timely Man with him to the office after treating him to lunch at The Foxhole. I’d do the interview at the office while the Marquis took off again. I didn’t have the courage to ask how lunch had been—I just hoped that the Timely Man considered the establishment picturesque. He looked with polite interest at the products in the parastore that the Marquis forced me to show him. I was happy that the Timely Man didn’t go near enough the bookshelf to set off the rock ’n’ roll fish.

  The Timely Man had studied cosmology, received his doctorate early and with honors, and been given a tenured position at a respected university. But one of his classes had caused serious controversy, an academic scandal of sorts, after which he thought it best to resign. The Timely Man drifted out into fringe research, forced to lecture at institutions of questionable repute, and publishing articles in magazines and journals just like The New Anomalist. His lecture at the Institute of Spiritual Growth was called “The Possibility and Impossibility of Time Dimensions.”

  I was relieved that the Timely Man accepted my profuse apologies with such grace. In fact, it seemed like he couldn’t wait for the chance to give another lecture. My notes from our meeting don’t do him justice: they only touch on a couple of the thoughts he presented. He also talked about dualities, Maxwell’s equations, and D-branes. Most of what he said was far over my head due to my limited understanding, poor education, and mental state that day. I’m sure there are people who would say that there’s no point in trying to understand the Timely Man’s opinions, because he had drifted out of the scientific community, into the large and motley congregation of independent thinkers. But in our meeting, he emphasized that more and more scholars were supporting similar positions.

  “One could say—and it was actually already proven back in 1949—that the passage of time is just an illusion,” he said. “You’ve heard of superstring theory, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sorry to say I haven’t.”

  I’ve noticed that this is a phrase I’ve had to repeat over and over again in the company of various experts.

  “Superstring theory claims that elementary particles are not points, but vibrating strings. According to the theory, we have ten dimensions of space, six of which are so compactified that we can’t see them. But this theory has had to be abandoned. M-theory states that there are actually eleven dimensions. But then there is F-theory, which is the one I subscribe to.”

  “And what does F-theory maintain then?” I asked.

  “It holds that there are a total of twelve dimensions in the universe, two of which are dimensions of time,” he explained. “Usually, you see, it’s thought that space can and must have many dimensions, but that time has just one.”

  “Do you mean that, according to F-theory, there is a dimension where time doesn’t flow from the past into the future?”

  “That, too. But I’m inclined to trust that this particular hypothesis tells us something more specific about the universe than previous ones.”

  “And so effect wouldn’t actually come after cause, is that it? That would create some real trouble,” I said. “Contradictions and paradoxes. The kind of science-fiction stuff that can’t be taken seriously. I’m sorry if I’m expressing myself crudely.”

  “A paradox for us, in any case,” he said. “There’s no escaping that.”

  “But if one could undo what has been done . . . ”

  “To us, time means always being carried, whether speeding or crawling, in the same direction, which we call the future. Every moment we leave the past behind us, in a place we cannot return to, whereas in space, we can move forward and backwards, up, down, and side to side. But if there is another dimension of time—as there is every reason to believe—we could also move diagonally . . . ”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “We could step aside when threatened by an unpleasant event . . . ”

  “ . . . like death?” I blurted out.

  “Yes, like death, for example,” he agreed. “Or, if the need were to arise, we could retreat, loiter, stay in place, or charge forward, just as if time, too, had its own landscape and geography. We might to some extent be able to choose our pasts, because information could also travel from the future to the past.”

  “But how could we access such a dimension?”

  “Well, that’s the hard part. In this universe, at least.”

  “That’s knowledge that humankind could really use. I mean, it would change everything. It could solve nearly all our problems.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” he said. “Would it help us? Would we live our lives any more wisely? And if we didn’t have shared time, would we even be living in the same world?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “maybe it would actually lead to deeper unhappiness than ever before, chaos and unheard of agonies. What if everyone decided not to die, how would there be room for anyone new to be born?”

  “It’s entirely possible,” the Timely Man said, “that we’ll never have an alternative direction for time. It’s possible that each universe has a unique combination of dimensions of time and space . . . Let me show you.”

  The Timely Man asked for some paper and began drawing diagrams. His verbose explanations were lost on me completely.

  All I could take in was his voice, not what he said. Suddenly, in the company of this stranger, I was overcome with sympathy. Though I was looking past him and his papers, into the hazy cold of the winter day, I saw him as a being of time, and I saw myself as one as well. I could see him lengthen and thin out and lose his identity.

  How deeply people put out roots into the place that becomes time. His beginning is as far away as mine, in the misty birth of the species and beyond, in the gaseous clouds of newly forming stars. The Timely Man is long as a sounding line, as a fishing line sinking into precipitous depths of unknown matter, the darkness of light years.

  The beginning is so very far away, I thought, but the end is always near. That’s what time means, to humans.

  The Old Woman Ahead of Me

  I see that old woman nearly every day now. I flinch when I see her walking ahead of me, always ahead of me. I’ve never yet caught a glimpse of her face.

  A rosy scalp shows through her silvery white hair, carefully curled, but quite thinned already. She looks fragile and stooped, clearly very old. That considered, it’s amazing how quickly she walks. She can keep up the same pace block after block. And how admirably certain and determined her movements are! She never hesitates at crossings, she seems to know where every street leads. She must have lived in this city a long time, decades, perhaps all her life.

  I’ve followed her a couple of time, just to see where she’s going. I’ve tailed her, spied on her, I’m ashamed to say. But I have nothing to show for it.

  What a strange old woman! There is something eerie in the whole phenomenon. Whenever I take it upon myself to follow her, I soon lose sight of her in the swarming crowd. I can’t keep up with her a
t all. Just when I think I’ve managed to get alongside her, she’ll turn in toward a metro station and the escalators will whisk her out of my sight, or she’ll duck into the revolving doors of a department store. I’ll follow her to the cosmetics department, where people are listening to the product demonstrator’s gospel, but all I’ll see are adolescent girls, young women, and middle-aged women. She’ll have lost me again.

  Sometimes I try to be clever and rush down a side street to be able to walk down the boulevard in the opposite direction and come face to face with her. But when I turn, out of breath, onto the boulevard, the old woman is nowhere to be seen. I’m left standing, baffled, in front of a shop window containing disembodied legs dressed in this season’s pantyhose.

  A day or two will pass, and once again I’ll see the old woman’s back. As I step in one door of the café, she’ll be stepping out the other. As I step down from the tram, she’ll be climbing aboard. I finally found her standing still one day on my way back from the bank. She had stopped at the corner, waiting at the crosswalk as the traffic lights shone red for pedestrians. There she was—I was sure I’d finally catch her!

  But as her thin neck was nearly in front of me, and her silvery curls almost tickled my nose, the light changed. She crossed the street at a run, but I stumbled. I made my way slowly, as if the air around me had thickened into a dense and sticky substance. A tram hid her from view for a moment, and when it had passed, the old woman had pulled her disappearing act again.

  Frustrated, I swore, “Don’t think you’ve gotten away. I’ll catch you yet, and we’ll meet each other face to face!”

  The Mouse, the Wolf, and the Nightingale

  This spring, before putting anything in the trashcan in the cupboard under the sink, I knock on the cupboard door. Is anyone home?

  I know it’s a very odd thing to do, but it serves a purpose. The cupboard is inhabited, at least from time to time. There is hole under the kitchen counter that the drainpipe disappears down. A mouse uses the hole to get to the delicacies in my trashcan. I knock on the cupboard door to warn the rodent. I don’t want to catch it off guard—nor do I want to be caught off guard myself, unpleasantly startled to see it leap out of the trashcan when I open the door.