The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  Suddenly Siiri noticed a sign on the first door in the corridor. It read ‘Self-Service First Aid’. It was Director Sinikka Sundström’s now-redundant former office that had been converted into a storage room. Strange that Siiri had never paid attention to it before; one would think that she would have made a note of such a spectacular Words in a Word term. She knocked on the door and opened it. The lights inside the room came on automatically. Self-Service First Aid turned out not to be a cache of bandages and gauze, as Siiri had assumed, but stocked with computers. The largest screen in the room greeted those seeking emergency assistance:

  ‘Tomorrow, by that time the sun be hot, ye shall have help. 1 Sam. 11:9.’

  ‘That’s not going to do us any good. The sun doesn’t shine here in November, and it won’t be hot for some time. Maybe in June,’ Siiri said sourly to the screen, and started studying the device. It must have been one of the humanized gadgets Jerry Siilinpää had been advertising, which meant she was supposed to talk to it.

  ‘I. Didn’t. Catch. That. Please. Speak. More. Slowly.’

  Siiri couldn’t think of how to explain to the machine that a confused daytime dancer was sitting on an abandoned walker in the middle of the lobby, bleeding from his nose. The machine needed clear, simple instructions stripped of emotion. She decided to try one word. She bent in closer to the gadget, felt stupid, and hoped that not too many people were watching her foolishness through the surveillance camera. She loudly stated:

  ‘Blood.’

  ‘Donate. Blood. Go. To. Station. Two.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, what a blockhead. Who would want blood donated by a ninety-seven-year-old?’

  ‘I. Didn’t. Catch. That. Please. Speak. More. Slowly.’

  ‘NOSEBLEED!’ Siiri shouted while looking around to see if there was even a sink in this purgatory.

  The machine had been struck dumb, but text appeared on the screen: ‘They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not. Psalms 115:6.’

  The next kiosk would have allowed her to conduct an electronic health check, and the next helped you fill a tooth or insert an implant, complete with instructions and all the necessary equipment. In the corner of the room stood a blood pressure gauge and scales, along with a blood-sugar-level detector. A stack of tiny cotton pads for wiping the blood from needle-jabbed fingertips stood on the table. Siiri snatched a fistful, turned back to the first kiosk and thanked it for the edifying chat.

  ‘Thanks. Be. To. God. In. The. Name. Of. Our. Lord. Jesus. Christ.’

  The machine had found its voice again: a low baritone whose phrasing lacked both legato and aspiration. Siiri slammed the door to the Self-Service First Aid behind her and rushed back to Aatos’s side, but apart from the abandoned walker, the lobby was as unpopulated as it was dim. Only the offended cleaner sobbed faintly in the corner, as the smartwall at the heart of the space tried to calm it.

  ‘Grace be with you, mercy, and peace, from God the Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love. 2 John 1:3.’

  Siiri looked at the little flashing device, whose work she had so callously interrupted. She felt disconsolate, as if the simplest task had grown overwhelmingly difficult. There was no help to be found anywhere, and the latest craze to strike these screens, the ever-changing Bible phrases, made her more disoriented than ever. She bent down to the cleaning robot, looked at the controls, and found a big round power button at the back. She pressed the button, patted the robot, and said:

  ‘Why don’t I show you a little mercy.’

  Chapter 13

  On a dark, seemingly endless November day, Siiri and Irma had settled into Siiri’s armchairs for a peaceful lunch. It was a little uncomfortable, but because change was supposed to be invigorating, they wanted to eat somewhere other than the dining table from time to time. Siiri dropped a dollop of lingonberry jam next to her liver casserole, and Irma spread butter on hers. Neither one spoke. The moment was a little awkward, as Irma clearly had no interest in discussing her dancing excursion with Aatos, but Siiri felt a brief exchange regarding the previous afternoon’s episode would have been appropriate.

  ‘Oh dear, real butter certainly is goodsies. No low-fat margarine for me; I want butter. And no health nut is going to tell me butter will kill me at this age. What if we had a baguette for dessert, with a thick layer of butter and some sugar sprinkled on it? I love the way it crunches. Did you and your children ever satisfy your sweet tooths with that back in anno dazumal?’

  They sat in silence again. The lack of chatter stopped bothering Siiri, because Irma appeared to have wholly recovered from Aatos’s assault. It was good to eat together. The prosaic presence of a beloved friend was soothing, and Siiri was happy again, so happy that she felt a little hum in her upper abdomen, even though they hadn’t exchanged any words. A glance out of the window did nothing to clarify whether it was night or early morning, but they had no doubt it was the perfect moment for lunch. One of the glazed balconies at the end of the building blazed like a beacon; the resident had left all the lights on, and anyone who cared to could see the empty wine bottles stored on the balcony, heaps of plastic bags stuffed with them, and, as a cherry on top, a stack of beer crates, the old-fashioned kind one no longer saw at the supermarket. The resident had also arrayed the balcony with generously sized pants and bras she was presumably airing. Siiri wondered whether the apartment belonged to Ritva Lehtinen, but then recalled the horror shows from the previous summer and realized Ritva lived in the apartment opposite, one floor up.

  Suddenly a young woman in a white lab coat appeared on Siiri’s wall and said: ‘Aha, it looks like we lost the connection. Wait a second . . .’

  The image disappeared. There was some faint buzzing and humming, and Siiri caught a glimpse of a fragmentary Bible phrase, but before she could even begin to decipher it, the woman in the lab coat returned in unnaturally large scale. She looked straight into Siiri’s room and frowned.

  ‘For some reason I can’t see or hear you, and no one’s answering at VirtuDoc mobile chat. So let’s just continue; the important thing is that you can see and hear me. If for some reason you can’t, just end the session. I see there at the bottom of the screen that we still have a connection . . . So we were discussing some symptoms that are in all likelihood side effects of the medication . . .’

  ‘Oh, this is exciting! I wonder whose doctor’s appointment we’re participating in? What do you think, are we here realistically or virtuosically?’ Irma said, remarkably restored.

  ‘In real time or virtually, you mean. I don’t have the foggiest idea.’

  They were whispering just to be sure, but the mobile remote doctor clearly couldn’t see or hear them any more than she could see or hear the poor soul whose appointment they had involuntarily invaded.

  ‘Is that how you contact a doctor here?’ Siiri whispered. She had never tried VirtuDoc, because she had no interest in visiting a doctor to hear how she should change her lifestyle and install pointless accessories in her heart. Such things were for the middle-aged. Only once had she and Irma amused themselves by pressing the buttons at the MeDoc kiosk in the lobby, but Irma suspected that was something different.

  ‘You don’t see anyone’s face at the MeDoc kiosk. You just talk with a computer. You tap in your questions and symptoms and the machine picks an answer at random. Don’t you remember? You entered constipation, and it suggested a laxative, which was sensible of course. A lot faster than begging for the same information from a health centre.’

  ‘These sorts of . . . I mean this, what you were talking about, a certain sexual overactivity and even . . . hypersensitivity that expresses itself in, for example . . . prolific or . . . prolonged erections, are . . . very common among men who take these medications, unfortunately.’

  ‘It’s some man who has a perpetual erection!’

  ‘Shh, Irma, we can’t let ourselves get caught.’

  ‘In your case, I see se
veral suspect prescriptions . . . or their combined effect . . . this mood stabilizer for one, hmm . . . and risperidone treatment or . . . this Alzheimer’s medication, it’s hard to say . . .’

  ‘The poor man has Alzheimer’s, too!’

  ‘Irma!’

  The doctor glanced down to look for some piece of patient information she was lacking. She stalwartly maintained her position in front of the camera, head upright but a little tilted, even though she could have easily bent down over her papers. They could see a fat, green pharmacopoeia from 2010, folders in various colours and a row of photographs of smiling children. Siiri counted three children, but it was hard to say if one of them appeared in more than one photo.

  ‘Terribly young to be a mother,’ she said.

  ‘Or a doctor,’ Irma added.

  ‘I’m most liable to think it’s the Alzheimer’s medication . . .’ the doctor muttered. Her words tumbled out slowly and almost inaudibly: cholinergic and neural pathways, probably not priapism, possibly relaxation of the iliac artery. They pricked up their ears and leaned in, as if that would help them to hear more clearly. ‘Have you experienced dizziness, exhaustion, trouble with your vision, diarrhoea, nausea? Agitation, aggression? Anything in addition to these constant and prolonged . . . umm . . . erections?’

  ‘The poor thing! All those symptoms from a medication!’ Irma bellowed so loudly in Siiri’s ear that it hurt.

  Then the doctor abruptly disappeared from the wall. Siiri and Irma didn’t make a peep, as they were sure that they were being watched. Irma slowly lowered the plate she had licked clean to the coffee table and stared guiltily at the smartwall, as if she’d been caught doing something very naughty indeed. They heard a faint thunk. Then Siiri dared to breathe again, too, as she believed the unpleasant episode had come to an end. But she had barely got her thumping heart to steady before Aatos Jännes’s face was staring at them from the wall. Irma squealed and Siiri thought she would faint. She rested her head against the back of the armchair, closed her eyes and slowly counted to ten. She hoped that when she raised her head, Aatos Jännes would have disappeared from her life for good.

  ‘Can he see us?’ Irma asked, frozen on the spot, dropping the words from the left corner of her mouth so only Siiri would be privy to her fearful question.

  ‘Can you see me now?’ Aatos’s voice was less confident than normal, and he stared straight at Irma and Siiri from under his luxuriant eyebrows. He had been to the barber since the last time they had seen him; they could tell because his eyebrows had been trimmed to an even length.

  ‘No,’ Irma said seriously.

  ‘Yes, I can see you,’ the doctor’s voice said.

  This time they didn’t see the VirtuDoc, just the patient. The doctor sounded agitated and fed up. She clearly didn’t know how to use the device and was eager to move on to something more challenging than conversing over a satellite connection with a sexually over-active World War 2 veteran who was suffering from dementia. The doctor said she could adjust the dosage of Aatos’s prescriptions to reduce the harmful side effects, but that would decrease the medications’ effectiveness as well.

  ‘So, doctor, you’d like me to choose between a constant erection and losing my memory?’ Aatos smiled flirtatiously, and they knew which alternative he would choose.

  ‘I’m not . . . wouldn’t exactly put it that way. This medication slows . . . the advance of Alzheimer’s and . . . for you the symptoms have appeared to have stabilized . . . considering your age. But we’re talking about a . . . progressive . . . terminal illness . . . what I mean to say is, it’s incurable.’

  ‘No need to take my age into consideration. Any thirty-year-old would be proud of this. I’ve got a raging hard-on right now. Would you like to see?’

  Irma squealed again and covered her eyes. Siiri lost the fifth-octave A and grabbed her friend’s arm.

  ‘How do we exit this appointment?’

  ‘We can’t. Let’s just suffer through to the end,’ Irma whispered, pulling her lace handkerchief from her sleeve. She blew her nose so forcefully they were afraid they’d be detected, but to their misfortune the scene on the wall continued to unfold undisturbed.

  Aatos had risen and was fumbling at something in a way that prompted the doctor to raise her voice.

  ‘There is no need to take off your clothes. We are remote!’

  We are remote, if only Anna-Liisa had been around to witness that. The doctor ordered Aatos to sit down immediately and bravely held forth on various forms of mental and physical sexual function. They heard the terms ‘frontal area’ and ‘diminished control’, ‘impulsivity’ and ‘involuntary vulgarity’, ‘improperly folded proteins’ but also ‘virility’, ‘frustration’, ‘risk of stroke’ and, finally, a list of peculiar abbreviations.

  ‘You could do an online . . . ADSC-ADL interview, a series of CERAD tasks and an MMSE test, so we could get the status . . . an understanding of the disease’s . . . current manifestation. You do have . . . your login information, don’t you?’

  Aatos was silent and looked straight ahead without moving, as if he were deaf.

  ‘I’m going to send you . . . your login information, it should appear on your smartwall . . . now. Can you see it? As I said, this priapism . . . these symptoms, the prolonged erection . . . is very . . . typical with Alzheimer’s medication and could . . . intensify. In your case . . . considering your age . . . we could gradually wean you off the medication.’

  ‘Does it make women more active, too? There’s no sign of that around here. Or else none of these goddamned cock-teasers take Alzheimer’s medication. Could you prescribe something for, say, Irma Lännenloimi, she’s one good-looking filly.’ Irma blushed in pleasure and was immediately taken aback by her reaction, remembered the scene in the taxi and dived into her bag to rummage around for something she might have lost.

  ‘His brains have clearly moved to his privates. Can’t even remember my name. Lännenloimi! What a ridiculous name, don’t you think?’

  Siiri smiled. She had absolutely no interest in being tormented by Aatos Jännes’s dementia-driven sexual fantasies in her final retirement years. By now the doctor’s tone was curt. She told Aatos she would decrease his dosage substantially, because she didn’t view its benefits as meaningful at this stage of the disease. She disagreeably reiterated the incurable nature of Alzheimer’s and Aatos’s advanced age. The only thing missing was a prognosis of the patient’s imminent death delivered in medical jargon. Siiri started feeling sorry for Aatos Jännes, who was staring at her from the smartwall in a state of discombobulation as he tried to grasp why the young female doctor wanted to strip him of his one last source of joy.

  ‘You’re saying no more hard-ons?’ Aatos desperately repeated the rhetorical question while gripping some ambiguous clump of fabric, apparently a foot rag or the like that served as a security blanket.

  ‘It won’t be long before he’s asking for his mummy again,’ Irma whispered, clearly not feeling the slightest sympathy for her dancing partner.

  And then the image vanished as unexpectedly as it had appeared during their lunchtime tête-à-tête. To brighten the mood, an aphorism appeared in its place:

  ‘For the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed. Isaiah 65:20.’

  They stared at the smartwall without speaking. Siiri thought about Aatos Jännes, his inappropriate behaviour, crude groping, illness and treatment. She tried to picture what Aatos was doing in his apartment at that very moment. Was he reading the same Bible passage they were, without understanding its applicability to his life? She doubted he had started testing his memory electronically, as the doctor had ordered.

  The pin-drop silence continued for quite some time, until they caught a faint scratching from the kitchen. Siiri and Irma remained motionless in their armchairs, like unwilling participants on some unpleasant group tour. Surprise after surprise kept appearing before their eyes while they just sat
there. Not that this last one was exactly unanticipated; they both gathered that their old friend was scrabbling about the rubbish receptacle in the kitchen, the fat rat who, whiskers covered in fruit soup, bolted lightning-fast into invisibility when Siiri finally pulled herself out of her chair and opened up the door to the cabinet under the sink.

  ‘At least you’re a living, breathing rat in the flesh, not some remote virtual creature,’ Siiri said, without feeling the slightest repugnance for her uninvited guest. She set out a bit of hardened cheese on a plate and left it next to the bin.

  Chapter 14

  Anna-Liisa and Irma, model rehabilitation-group students from the old stick-exercise days, had, through the guidance of a few biblical phrases, discovered the fitness console centre on one of the first-floor corridors. They wanted to show it to Siiri too, even though they knew she felt moving for the sake of moving was silly. Siiri simply couldn’t grasp that people ran on the spot in display windows to become healthier and live longer. Picture-window athletics were a relatively recent phenomenon; before, gyms were in basements or otherwise hidden from view, but now people wanted to be permanently on display. Gyms and glazed balconies had become stages, street-level storefronts had become attorneys’ and accountants’ offices, with white-collar workers gawping at their phones for the whole world to admire.

  Siiri had only ever run when she was in a hurry, or when she saw the pedestrian light turning green – then it was always worth taking a couple of quick steps. She felt no great need to get into shape to die as healthy as possible, and had no intention of sweating on a treadmill.

  ‘But this is fun, and nothing fun is pointless,’ Irma said, theatrically opening the door to the mysterious room by waving her fob in a grand arc at the blob on the wall.

  Inside they found surreally bright light and seven large screens, the sort that were just a moment ago called flat-screen TVs and at some point merely televisions. A red mat stood on the floor in front of each of these screens. Only one of the machines was in use: a shaky old woman stood at it, clutching her walker with one hand and brandishing a small white baton in the other. She swatted it around as if she were being attacked by winged demons. The severity of her dementia was hard to judge.