The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘When you put it that way, it sounds nice,’ Siiri said, as she had genuinely felt Margit could use something of the sort in her life. They, the random band of friends Margit had left to her, had not been able to provide the security and the meaning Margit craved from life.

  But Anna-Liisa was not softened by Margit’s revelations. ‘How much have you donated to this security network of yours?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Margit said. Donations were voluntary, and if someone did as much good for Margit as the Awaken Now! Association had, she was happy to support its valuable work. ‘As you know, I don’t have any children and I can use what little money I have left as I see fit. I can’t take anything to heaven with me, and I don’t need anything. My deeds will be rewarded in heaven.’

  An awkward silence fell. Siiri sensed that Anna-Liisa had a tart remark on the tip of her tongue about channelling money straight to heaven, but Margit’s pious sincerity staved off any jibes. She herself was curious to hear more about Awaken Now!, and the relieved Margit gladly shared the little that she knew.

  ‘I’m not actively involved in the association itself. I’ve been a little selfish in simply seeking their help. But this lovely woman that you might have met, Sirkka, has told me a bit about their work. Pertti is rather discreet, you see; he doesn’t like discussing anything but matters of religion during prayer circle, which I like.’

  ‘All he’s spouted about in my presence is inheritance law; he hasn’t quoted a single word from the Bible,’ Anna-Liisa remarked coolly.

  ‘Yes, he has an eye for what interests people,’ Margit said. She had heard from Sirkka that Awaken Now! was originally an American congregation that had come to Finland in the 1980s. The association was active in charity work and did an exemplary job carrying out the congregation’s social responsibility work. Elder-care was dear to its heart, as were dogs and whales, and even though Sunset Grove was the first retirement home it was monitoring in Finland, Margit had heard that several others around the country were in the works.

  ‘Yes, I understand elder-care is the most profitable business sector in the Nordic countries at the moment,’ Anna-Liisa interjected.

  ‘I think it’s lovely that Awake Now! is fiscally responsible as well. When you donate them money, you can be sure it will be used wisely.’ Margit was still unable to explain where the association’s funds were actually directed and the nature of its involvement in Sunset Grove’s operations, other than foisting Bible phrases and prayer circles on residents in hopes of extracting eventual alms. In the end, Margit grew upset in the cold cross-fire of Anna-Liisa’s arguments and burst into tears yet again. It was very distressing. Irma, who had followed the conversation with uncharacteristic restraint, felt bad enough to offer Margit her lace handkerchief and tender consolation. Siiri felt utterly helpless and couldn’t get a word out.

  ‘All right, I believe that’s it for our book club today,’ Irma said, drowning out the prayer Margit was muttering to herself. ‘I must say I enjoy re-reading old books, because I can’t remember anything I’ve read any more. Oddly enough, the same doesn’t apply to music. Have you noticed? Music sinks in somewhere so deep that Mozart’s compositions are an integral part of me now. I’m positive that even if I grew so demented I were nothing but an unconscious carcass planted in my smartbed, I’d recognize Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, so remember to play it for me when I’m incapable of asking for it. Now I’m babbling again, forgive me. Perhaps you could come to my place, Margit, for a glass of wine and some liver casserole? You’ll feel better. Would you like to come too, Siiri? We can leave Anna-Liisa to rest here, you look so tired, and it’s no wonder with bow-tied imps like that skating in and out with their brazen papers. Excuse me, Margit, I don’t mean to offend you, but this Pertti of yours hasn’t treated Anna-Liisa as lovingly as he has you. Or would you like me to bring you some wine and liver casserole, Anna-Liisa? I’d be more than happy to. Could you please hand me back my handkerchief, Margit? It’s my mother’s and very dear to me.’

  Margit was just slipping Irma’s beloved memento into her handbag, but she handed the damp linen back to Irma. She declined the offer of wine, as upon her enlightenment she had turned her back on alcohol, although no one had specifically urged her to. It had just seemed like the right thing to do. Margit glanced at her gold watch from Spain, which Eino had given her at the onset of their blissful retirement years, and noticed she was late for her afternoon prayer circle. She scurried out, leaving her friends to jointly ponder the day’s adventures that had invaded their lives, even though their intention had been to quietly read a German novel about life in a sanatorium on the cusp of the First World War.

  ‘You know,’ Anna-Liisa finally said. ‘You know, another reason The Magic Mountain is an appropriate work for our lives is that it depicts the moment before catastrophe strikes.’

  Chapter 23

  Experience Director & Front-Line Support Jerry Siilinpää had invited the residents of Sunset Grove to an informational session titled ‘Rats Among Us?’ All able-bodied were present; even one straight-A student from the dementia unit had hauled herself to the back of the auditorium in her electric bed. She had oxygen whiskers in her nose that kept slipping out, despite Tauno’s best efforts to hold them in place.

  As always, Jerry enthusiastically jumped right in. ‘Yeah, so hi everyone, great to see such a big crowd here today!’ He appeared agitated, punched one hand into the pocket of his overly snug sports jacket, took it out, tugged the jacket straight with his other hand, swivelled his head as if it had got stuck in the jugular notch, and got down to business. ‘Rats. That’s right, rats have been seen here at Sunset Grove. Someone had even reported them to the city. But no worries. Let’s just say that rats are pretty innocuous animals.’

  ‘Innocuous? They carry all sorts of diseases, from the plague to Ebola,’ Ritva shouted in a raspy voice from the back row. Siiri thought Ritva had decamped for the more efficient environs of manual caregiving units, as it had been ages since there had been any sign of the coroner. But here she was among them, the same as ever – with the exception of the sun visor, which had been replaced by the kind of cap one used to see on working stiffs at service station bars, in observation of winter.

  Ritva continued: ‘There was a nasty stomach virus going around here; I had to go to the hospital for IV hydration. Couldn’t it have come from the rats?’

  The room erupted. Everyone had something to say about diarrhoea and the stomach flu; someone claimed that someone else had died from the most recent virus, and many remembered their experiences with rats from decades past, from a time when Jerry Siilinpää’s grandparents were still attending grammar school in the countryside.

  ‘Hey, guys, come on, hey, can I get you guys to pay attention for a sec?’ Jerry shouted from the front. ‘OK, so there have been some sightings of rats. The inspector didn’t find any, BTW. But let’s say someone has seen a couple of rats, that doesn’t make this some epic nightmare, like, worst ever or anything. And the stomach flu is totally normal in places like this.’

  The audience rejected this perspective as well. Suddenly every other resident had seen several rats, and Margit managed to project her voice above the others’, as she hauled her massive carcass to a standing position in the front row and described at length how a large, filthy rat had attacked her when she was taking out the rubbish.

  ‘It jumped out at me when I opened the bin lid. I still don’t understand how I didn’t have a heart attack then and there. God was with me.’

  Aatos Jännes wanted to speak briefly on the reproductive capacity of rats and substantiated his claims with statistical information that was initially quite convincing, until he meandered into a comparison of the rutting periods of various mammals and started fantasizing about how, of all species, only man mated continuously and for pleasure.

  ‘That’s not true!’ Tauno brayed, fanning his arms furiously. He launched into a verbal volley against Aatos in retaliation for p
ast offences, and reminded the audience that the lions of the savannah mated with any lioness who happened to walk past without reproductive intent.

  ‘I’ve also read that, as a matter of fact, quite a few of our local mammalian species mate for the sheer joy of it, too,’ Anna-Liisa said, catching Siiri and Irma completely off guard. They had never imagined their friend would have the energy to come down to the auditorium, let alone get caught up in a debate regarding the mating habits of animals. But Anna-Liisa seemed like her old self in her black mourning garb, with her hair nicely combed. She was sitting at the rear of the room in an otherwise empty row, and her voice was once again audible and authoritative. ‘Fidelity to a mate has not been observed in most species, which is yet another indicator that our notions of animal sexuality have been profoundly romanticized to comply with Christian conceptions of the family. I have understood, for instance, that it is not unheard of among willow tits for two males to mate with each other. Assuredly something other than reproductive urges is involved in that instance.’

  ‘Exactly! Which brings us to the matter at hand!’ Tauno bawled. Jerry Siilinpää was engrossed in the world of his smartphone and didn’t appear to hear. ‘We’ve been locked up with robots and religious fanatics in an artificial environment where diversity commands less respect than it did in the military during the 1960s. Robots is what they are, every last one, the food printers, the sweeping machines and the volunteers who heal through the power of the Holy Spirit. They even recite their scriptures like robots.’

  ‘Yup, point notated,’ Jerry said. He had been paying attention to what was going on in the room after all.

  ‘Notating is documentation according to a system of notation. A composer notates, but you note,’ Anna-Liisa observed.

  ‘That’s what they’re like,’ Irma whispered to Siiri. ‘My darlings can be having five different conversations on the Internet, watching television, eating and talking with me on my smart-alec screen. Sometimes they’re even more absentminded than I am, but I don’t like to criticize them, because they’re so patient with me, even though I’m such a . . . a . . . for Pete’s sake, a . . .’

  Siiri stepped in to help: ‘Forgetful old lady.’

  ‘Yes. A forgetful old lady. Now how did that slip my mind?’

  ‘Exactly. So you guys know a ton about rats. Let’s brainstorm this case a little and start by zooming in on the real problem. Here.’ Jerry drew a shapeless lump on the flipchart, which might have been a rat or some other action point. ‘What do we see here?’

  He looked at his audience, undismayed by the reception his brainteaser had received. The dementia unit’s valedictorian had fallen asleep, and Tauno couldn’t get her oxygen whiskers to stay in place. He had to prop himself up next to the hospital bed in his peculiar hunched-over stance and hold the tube to the snoring woman’s face with one hand. Siiri felt Tauno could have freed the sleeping dementia patient, because she could hear her breathing perfectly well without any extraneous apparatus. Margit had dozed off in the front row, and Anna-Liisa’s vigilance had waned; she was getting tired and suddenly looked rather pallid. Smiling mysteriously, Aatos Jännes scratched out something into a pad of paper he pulled from his breast pocket, tore off a corner of the sheet, folded it, and told his neighbour, a dotty old man with Type II diabetes, to pass the note on.

  ‘Just like a naughty schoolboy!’ Irma huffed.

  ‘Or Count Almaviva,’ Siiri said, as the note made its threatening approach.

  ‘Nonsense. The Count doesn’t write a single letter in the Marriage of Figaro – although he receives plenty, of course. One from Figaro and another from Susanna, but that one was dictated by his wife.’

  Jerry Siilinpää tried to rouse his audience: ‘Why don’t I make this a little easier for all of us. So there are a few rats. What’s the big deal?’

  The note had reached Siiri, who to her great relief read Irma’s name on it. She wouldn’t have known what to do if Aatos Jännes had tried to woo her with one of his salacious rhymes. Irma took the note and blushed, but didn’t open it.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she sighed, clutching the folded note to her breast. Siiri thought she could sense Jännes’s greedy gaze on the back of her neck.

  ‘Exactly, rats are kinda gross, even though we don’t have any reason to feel that way. I mean, come on, some people keep rats as pets. It’s the latest. But I’m getting the vibe that our pilot cohort in monitored caregiving isn’t so stoked about welcoming our little friends. So let’s open a case. What do you say, guys?’

  ‘Stop yakking, for crying out loud,’ Tauno shouted so loudly that the snoring dementia patient stirred in her bed. ‘Kill them and be done with it.’ The oxygen-whiskered valedictorian whimpered.

  ‘Right. I’ll draw a cross here, so we can all get a handle on our veteran’s approach. And now if I pick it up from Tauno’s item, I’d say: why not.’

  ‘You’d say or you’re saying?’

  This was Anna-Liisa’s voice, by now fatigued but still emphatic. Irma tried to unfold the note in a way that would keep its contents private from Siiri. Siiri followed along as Jerry unravelled the case and inevitably advanced towards killing the rats, which one would think would have been obvious with a less rigorous audit. Out of the corner of her eye, Siiri monitored Irma, who read the message hidden in her palm, blushed even more deeply, smiled girlishly, glanced over her shoulder and nodded in Aatos Jännes’s direction, in a sign of either submission or gratitude. Lord help us, Siiri thought and felt the blood rush in her ears until it completely drowned out the fifth-octave A. Had Irma completely forgotten the sort of man Aatos Jännes was?

  ‘Why the hell are you wasting our time with this gibberish when you could have just called the city sanitation department and brought in a professional exterminator to take care of the problem?’ By now Tauno was roaring so violently that saliva sprayed to the floor.

  Jerry Siilinpää thanked Tauno again for the valuable comment, took it from there and started talking about participatory decision-making. This meant that even minor decisions were no longer made using common sense, but as many people as possible were gathered together to throw out spontaneous cogitations, which were then drawn on a flipchart in arrow and lump form.

  ‘I mean, it’s not like this is the Soviet Union, right? Community is the key word, and experiential expertise is what matters,’ Jerry explained, looking genuinely interested. An experiential expert was anyone impacted by the matter at hand; in this case, the residents of Sunset Grove. ‘In other words, the primary experiencers. Which means you.’

  ‘You want me to tell you where your focus is?’ Ritva blurted out.

  ‘What about the rats? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to survey their experiences, too?’ Tauno asked, to rousing applause and an explosion of laughter.

  ‘Exactly. Right, right.’ Jerry started pulling himself and his belongings together on the lectern. ‘Let’s just say that commitment is at the core of participatory decision-making. The experiential experts commit to the decision, and every phase of the decision-making process is documented in open data. Transparent management without any organizational charts, the latest. But why don’t we gradually start wrapping things up here?’

  Jerry seemed even more agitated than at the beginning of the session. He paced back and forth in his gorilla feet before announcing the rats would be exterminated, the rubbish bins would be removed to make way for automated waste collection and the topic of the next resident evening would be a small survey of the future of health and caregiving technology. He gave a friendly wave, called out bye now, and left. Then Sirkka the Saver of Souls appeared out of nowhere and suggested they all pray together and afterwards collect donations.

  The majority of the audience felt their limbs miraculously invigorated when Sirkka launched into an intercession on behalf of the alcoholic son of someone she knew. Siiri and Irma caught up with Anna-Liisa at the door, but Margit remained planted in the front row, collection box in hand
, inviting uncertain sheep to join her flock.

  ‘Would you prefer to join me for the poetry club rather than stay here and pray?’ Aatos Jännes asked, eyeing Irma lustfully. He was standing outside the doors to the auditorium, handing out slips of paper to passers-by. Siiri took one, read the clumsy attempt at verse printed on it and gathered that Jännes was serving as the leader of the poetry club. The clever fellow. An unbroken parade of female lovers of lyricism wandered from the door to Aatos’s salon, as he called the former magazine nook in the common room.

  ‘I understand perfectly well if you’re more fond of German prose, but I’m going to have a look,’ Irma said hastily, following the others. Siiri and Anna-Liisa stood in the lobby, stunned.

  ‘I can’t keep up with what’s going on here any more; I feel so incredibly powerless,’ Anna-Liisa said in exhaustion. She was so drained by all that had happened that Siiri had to lead her to her flat and her bed, where she fell asleep the moment she collapsed on it. Siiri stayed there for a moment watching her dozing friend, the pale, emaciated old woman who was no longer herself. Not that any of them were any more. She was equally startled every time she saw herself in the mirror; she didn’t think of herself as being so shrunken and shrivelled.

  Just as she was on her way out, Siiri noticed some papers on the nightstand. It was a will, its cover sheet branded with the eye-catching logo of the Awaken Now! Association, and a quick scan was enough for Siiri to gather that the document transferred Anna-Liisa’s entire estate as well as that of her deceased husband, including any furniture and possessions, to the association at the moment of signing. Anna-Liisa was mercifully granted the right to stay in her flat at Sunset Grove for the rest of her life.