‘Are there three jokers in your packs? Usually there are only two,’ Siiri mused.
‘Hmm, maybe the third one is the spare card, but I always use all the jokers. They’re my favourite card.’
‘As far as I’m aware, jokers are not used in solitaire.’
‘Pshaw, Anna-Liisa! You can do whatever you want in solitaire, because you play it by yourself. That’s what makes it such fun. I use jokers, and then when it gets too difficult, I cheat a little. But just a little.’
‘Let’s get back to the topic at hand, please. We were discussing the virus.’
Irma believed it was all due to the computers. She had heard from her darlings that computers spread viruses, and now that Sunset Grove had been turned into a space station, the logical explanation was that the electronics were spreading viruses to the residents.
‘Perhaps that’s the whole point, for us to die of machine-induced lorovirus!’ Irma laughed heartily, wiping the tears from her eyes with a lace handkerchief. ‘Döden, döden, döden.’ She rolled her eyes to look as scary as possible.
‘What do you make of our little Jerry?’ Siiri asked, when it felt like an appropriate moment to move on from microbes and conspiracies. She knew nothing about viruses, but she washed her hands five times a day and had been healthy for decades. In retrospect far too healthy, of course, seeing as how she was still alive.
‘We could stop washing our hands,’ Irma proposed. ‘You’re the one who said it.’
‘We’ve already covered viruses; now we’re talking about Jerry Siilinpää.’
To Siiri’s surprise, Anna-Liisa took an extremely positive view of the young man. She admitted Jerry’s use of Finnish was peculiar, but felt he was a good person at heart and a product of his environment. Siiri thought back to the photograph Irma had found somewhere on the Internet with her flaptop, the one of the Ambassador and Jerry together taken during the retrofit of Sunset Grove. Could it be possible that Anna-Liisa was defending the lad out of loyalty to her husband?
‘It’s not as if he can help it, the fact that people speak like children irrespective of setting, even in Parliament: hey guys, best ever, what’s the vibe and what have you. Jerry is adapting to his surroundings, unlike us, who speak an ancient dialect, especially Irma. Language is constantly changing, which is what makes it such a fascinating reflection of the times. Of course I personally mourn the disappearance of the possessive suffix, as evidenced in the speech of our previous prime minister, but then again he appeared at official events in knee-breeches and summer shoes, so it’s not as if we need to take him very seriously.’
‘The prime minister? If we don’t take the prime minister seriously, then who?’ Siiri cried. Just the day before, she and Irma had watched a parliamentary session and been very satisfied with all of the ministers’ behaviour and attire. But she had to admit that she had not, perhaps, paid sufficient attention to possessive suffixes.
‘I’m not following this conversation at all. Aren’t we talking about Jerry? I think he’s a very nice boy,’ Irma said, cheating herself at solitaire and trying to cover it up so Siiri and Anna-Liisa wouldn’t notice.
They swiftly came to the unanimous conclusion that, despite his incomprehensible jargon and whirling arrows, Jerry had their best interests at heart. He sincerely believed in modern technology. He had probably gone through a lot of trouble to acquire so many backers for the pilot project in monitored caregiving, and perhaps all this foolishness would actually lead to Finland becoming an international lodestar in elder-care. A spiralling cost would turn into a source of wealth: what could be more gratifying?
‘And these volunteers? Did Jerry procure them? Or come up with the whole idea?’ asked Anna-Liisa. She viewed them with a deep suspicion.
‘I doubt it. Jerry doesn’t seem . . . charismatic that way,’ Siiri said. ‘My understanding is that it’s very difficult to attract volunteers to unpleasant places like this. I mean retirement homes.’
‘Has anyone seen Margit lately?’ Anna-Liisa suddenly asked, uncharacteristically leaping from one topic to a third. The tremor in her hands was more marked than ever, and Siiri suspected this was one reason she had refused to play cards, in addition to the viruses. Perhaps her shaking hands could no longer hold cards.
No one knew anything about Margit. She hadn’t been seen in the communal area for days, even in her automatic black artificial-leather massage chair, and it had been ages since she’d made an appearance in the dining room. Then Irma remarked that Ritva hadn’t asked any of them to join her for a pint at the Ukko-Munkki for quite some time, either.
‘Should we be worried about them?’
‘Yes, perhaps they also caught a stomach virus from these dratted contraptions,’ Irma suggested, but Anna-Liisa had her own theory.
‘I suspect Margit has joined the ranks of these volunteers.’
‘That’s nice,’ Irma said casually, exchanging a nasty king for a smiling joker and slipping the king under her behind. In her view, it was a purely positive, if rather surprising, development if Margit, whom she considered a rather selfish individual, had taken up volunteer work and would be helping more severely incapacitated residents, now that the primary source of assistance at Sunset Grove was a smartwall. Anna-Liisa feebly protested, but Irma didn’t let her get a word in edgeways. She launched into a long-winded reflection as to whether they should have a bad conscience for gossiping at the baize-covered table instead of helping the robots assist their sickly neighbours. ‘Was Jerry referring to our old card table with all that talk about rusticity? What do you suppose? I certainly have no use for rustic furniture; I’m a city girl, not some bumpkin from the suburbs.’
Then Siiri remembered the seal pup lover sleeping outside the elevators on the fourth floor. She had left the poor woman alone in the corridor. Perhaps she should go back and check on her? Surely they could voluntarily do that much to help the volunteers?
‘Why bother,’ Irma said. ‘Sleeping in the corridor isn’t dangerous. Play a round of double solitaire with me.’
And so they played, with Siiri losing badly to Irma. She was unable to concentrate, and her thoughts meandered down unpleasant paths. She thought about Jerry Siilinpää in his funny footwear, glanced in concern at Anna-Liisa, who sat in silence for the duration of their prolonged game, and pondered the viruses lurking about Sunset Grove before her thoughts circled back round to Margit’s mysterious disappearance. She found it impossible to bring order to her reflections and shifted the cards mechanically around the table. By the time they finished the third round and Irma exulted in her victory by singing the prelude to Charpentier’s Te Deum, Anna-Liisa had drifted off in her chair.
Chapter 9
Siiri and Irma decided to take a tram to go grocery shopping; it was more exciting than walking to the nearest Low Price Market. The tram took them to a bigger supermarket on Mannerheimintie practically door to door, and the trip was as fun as riding the roller coaster at Linnanmäki theme park back in the 1950s.
Navigating your way around a new store was always difficult at first. It was impossible to find what you were looking for, especially when the store was larger than the old Seutula airport back when they had last had occasion to set foot in it, perhaps in the 1970s, before their husbands retired and still travelled abroad on business from time to time. Irma remembered that her lovely Veikko always brought her expensive perfume from his travels, but for the life of her Siiri couldn’t remember having ever been given any gifts by her husband.
‘Maybe he didn’t bring you anything,’ Irma said. ‘If he was a tightwad.’
Siiri almost took offence, because her husband hadn’t been the least bit stingy, just a sensible, responsible individual, and in the 1970s such people didn’t splurge on luxuries. One had to be thrifty and carefully consider what was necessary. Back then, there was no talk of consumer overspending or a citizen’s obligation to put money into circulation; instead, headlines discussed the oil crisis that meant frivolities
like leisure flying and motorboat races were forbidden. But Siiri decided there was no point getting upset with Irma, because she couldn’t see Irma. Instead, Siiri was confronted by the shelves in front of her, which held more varieties of salad dressing than her husband’s study had books. And that was a lot.
‘What on earth was I supposed to buy?’ Siiri thought out loud, paralysed by the sight of the bottles. She turned around and saw twenty yards of potato chip bags.
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ Irma’s cheerful voice was echoing from the north-east. Siiri headed for the familiar sound, passing the handmade chocolates and endless rows of pasta in various shapes and varieties. Irma had discovered the free samples, where a friendly-looking Asian woman was offering insect-based foods to interested shoppers. A young man who smelled powerfully of alcohol and claimed he was going fishing was waiting in line with Irma to try the mealworms.
‘Try one, Siiri! It doesn’t taste nearly as bad as it looks and sounds.’ Irma crunched the worms in satisfaction and then selected a grasshopper. The consultant explained to her how to prepare a delicious and nutritious meal from insects. ‘Oh, I know it’s ecological and healthy, but all we eat at our retirement home is mashed food waste from the dispenser and cat nibbles,’ Irma said, and to Siiri’s relief her friend didn’t buy any insects.
They dragged plastic buckets around behind them, miniature shopping trolleys of some sort for smaller purchases. The other customers were pushing around gargantuan wagons they shovelled food into as if preparing for months-long stays in a bomb shelter. Irma started relating a younger cousin’s account of the bombing of Helsinki and how he had climbed out of the Tiilimäki bomb shelter during an air raid to watch the searchlights criss-cross the skies of Helsinki. When two beams caught a Soviet plane in their crosshairs, it was shot down and the sky exploded in a shower of colours.
‘My cousin always told the story so vividly, how it had made an indelible effect on him, and then years later, meaning just recently, he had got his hands on the diaries of his brother who had died at the front, and this story was in there. In other words, it wasn’t his own memory, even though that’s what he’d believed all these years.’
‘That’s what memory is like,’ Siiri said. ‘My husband used to tell my dreams as if they were his own.’
‘Yes! And now they’re keeping tabs on our memories. If you don’t instantly remember your social security number or the maiden name of the minister of internal affairs, they prescribe you Alzheimer’s medication. It’s insanity. Now what on earth where we buying?’
They both decided to buy half a litre of milk, blood pancakes that were about to expire, rye crisps, eggs and instant coffee. Irma intended on also fishing around for some pound cake and other goodsies. But they couldn’t find any of the items they were looking for. They wandered and wandered, without ever seeing a salesperson they could ask. Even the insect consultant had packed up her bits and bobs and fled by the time they returned to the intersection near the pasta aisle thirty minutes later.
They persisted in their hunt. They decided to start from the western edge of the supermarket and systematically walk down every aisle from end to end. It couldn’t be a more laborious undertaking than slogging through snowfields on wooden skis in barely above freezing temperatures, which they successfully survived in their middle age. The soda section was immense, and they gladly left it unexplored. At its eastern edge they entered an unpleasantly cold pocket, and just as Siiri suspected, they were approaching the freezers and dairy products. Somewhere among the ice cream chests and shrimp towers, they found a corner jam-packed with various milk products, milk-like products and light margarine.
As they walked south down the fifth aisle, they stumbled across the prepared foods, which they had to scour for some time before discovering traditional blood pancakes. There weren’t any that had just expired, and so they took full-price packages. Occasionally they lost their plastic baskets, and Irma realized she was hauling the wrong basket behind her, as she hadn’t been shopping for chaga mushroom powder and twenty-two bottles of beer. They desperately hawked the beer and dehydrated health-food to oncomers to no avail. In the end, they came upon their baskets in the orange department, which they couldn’t remember having set foot in. Three enormous Ugli fruits had appeared in Siiri’s basket, which she hid among the biscuit packages in mortification. But since serendipity had led them to this oasis of fruit, they decided to buy bananas and apples. Weighing them was difficult, as they couldn’t remember the right codes, and when they did the apples tumbled from the bag to the floor and the machine weighed them incorrectly. Just before giving up, they finally got the machine to weigh them accurately, but then discovered it was out of pricing labels.
‘I’ll manage without apples,’ Siiri said with a huff, abandoning the apples and rustling plastic bags on the automatic scale. After scrounging together a random collection of items, they reached their limit. They wanted to pay but couldn’t find the cash registers anywhere. They spun around between the candy shelves and the deodorants, until a friendly lad with metal spikes in his face told them that the automatic cash registers were immediately to the right, next to the pornographic magazines and artificial flowers.
‘Aha, so we get to try communication without emotions and misunderstandings,’ Siiri said as they fearlessly approached the cashierless cash register. All they found was an uncomfortably low machine that had a limited ability to read the prices of their purchases. First they had to open a plastic bag and stretch it across a rack; their own shopping bags were not acceptable. After that, they waved their purchases at the device like they waved their fobs at their doors at Sunset Grove. Occasionally the machine would whine and flash, at which point they were allowed to transfer the purchase into the plastic bag. Even though Jerry Siilinpää had specifically said machines didn’t have feelings, theirs got upset seven times, at which point it made an unpleasant noise and refused to cooperate, just like a poorly raised three-year-old. When this happened, a schoolboy wearing clothes that were too large for him would appear, turn off the machine, turn it on again, and start the process over again from the beginning, without saying a word. Seven times.
Once Irma got her purchases into the mandatory plastic bag, it was time to pay. The machine offered options, and Irma shoved her debit card into the slot that looked like the right one. It wasn’t the right one, though, because the machine spat the card angrily to the floor. Irma tried to pick it up, but couldn’t reach it no matter how hard she stretched.
Then a pair of garish green high heels appeared before them, and a familiar woman with black hair bent down, retrieved the card, and handed it to Irma.
‘Sirkka the Saver of Souls!’ Irma cried thoughtlessly, because that wasn’t really the volunteer staff member’s name. Sirkka looked at them suspiciously, clearly not recognizing Irma and Siiri as acquaintances from Sunset Grove. She simply introduced herself as Sirkka, and when she and Siiri shook hands, Siiri’s purchases tumbled from the flimsy plastic bag to the floor. Once again, Sirkka bent down politely to gather up their belongings.
‘How kind of you. Buying food this way is quite a challenge for us,’ Siiri said apologetically.
‘I didn’t catch your last name. Do you use it?’ Irma asked amiably. ‘Not everyone does these days.’
‘I’m Sirkka Nieminen,’ the woman said. ‘And now I remember you from Sunset Grove. You were present when I was blessed with the gift of the spirit and the Holy Ghost entered me.’
‘Yes, it was that rat.’
‘I haven’t seen you for a while. Have you been busy elsewhere?’ Siiri asked, hoping to move past any misconceptions involving the rat and the Holy Spirit.
‘I don’t have anything in my life other than Awaken Now! I do what the Holy Ghost obligates me to. It’s a gift that has been given to me. It’s that simple.’
‘Aha, well then. Do you suppose you could help us pay for these purchases? You see, it isn’t that simple for us.’
Sirkka
the Saver of Souls gave them a disconcerted smile, flashed blood pancakes and milk cartons at the infrared eye and paid for the purchases with Irma’s fob, which to Irma’s surprise served as a payment method. Siiri and Irma took their plastic bags and thanked Sirkka, whose sacrificial mindset had been of concrete service to them both this time.
‘Jesus said: “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” John, chapter six, verse fifty-five.’
‘Is that so? We’ll be on our way now, to go and warm up some blood pancakes. Eating printed food every day gets a little tedious.’
‘I’ll bless your food.’ Sirkka lowered her hand to their bags. ‘“This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.” John, chapter six, verse fifty-eight.’
‘And so the blood pancakes became wafers,’ Irma said, yanking her bag away. Then she cast herself and Siiri out of the consumer’s paradise.
Chapter 10
An announcement glowed on the lobby smartwall:
‘Good morning! Died today: Suoma Marketta Leppänen. Awaken Now! offers its condolences!’
Siiri wouldn’t have known who Suoma Marketta Leppänen was without the accompanying photograph of the deceased. The petite white-haired woman was sitting in a wheelchair with a seal robot in her lap. The only thing missing was the curler.
‘Death shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man with grey hairs. Deut. 32:25.’
A picture of a candle next to a bouquet of white roses flickered beneath this meditation. In the bottom corner, a little garden gnome cried its eyes out. Siiri stared at the image and felt the thrum in her head grow stronger and herself get dizzy. She had to sit down. The only free seat in the vicinity was Margit’s beloved massage chair, which Siiri collapsed into before she passed out. Had she passed a corpse in the corridor as she was rushing downstairs to play cards? How was it that she hadn’t noticed that the woman in her wheelchair was dead? Or had the white-haired old lady genuinely been asleep at the time, with death not reaping her until later? And did any of this matter in the end? The woman was ancient and tired, and barely spoke two words to anyone, just cuddled with her toy. Perhaps dying in a wheelchair wasn’t the worst alternative. Despite the logic of her explanations, Siiri couldn’t rid herself of the unpleasant notion that she had neglected another human being. What action should she have taken if she had realized the seal pup owner was dead? Where in this e-chip merry-go-round did one report a cadaver one had stumbled across in the hallway? Who came to collect those who succumbed in their smartpants, the elderly who died on their own, and in their own time?
The End of Sunset Grove Page 7