The End of Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘Second floor. Let’s take the elevator,’ Irma said, with a press of the round button. ‘Aha, this one doesn’t know how to converse like our clever dumbwaiters at Sunset Grove.’

  On the second floor they stepped into a slightly smaller lobby, which also suffered no lack of august ambience. Alvar Aalto certainly knew how to elevate the mundane into the stately, Siiri thought as she paused to enjoy the view of the harbour. It would have been a beautiful seascape if the nightmarish cruise ships and enormous Ferris wheel didn’t gobble it up, leaving the eye no room to take in anything else. Two broad corridors led off from the space; they were lined with cell offices. Siiri remembered this from the 1960s, when the building was held up as a trailblazer of modern workplace culture. A cell office meant that first you stepped into a foyer that served as a common reception area for the other rooms. The building’s top floor, the fifth, differed from the others in the opulent materials used in its interior decor, and the sixth floor led to a restaurant that was surrounded by a terrace. Different materials had been used on each floor as a hierarchical device that let employees know their place in the grand scheme of things. The floor might be travertine, oak parquet, concrete mosaic, soft carpet or mundane linoleum, as it was here on the second floor. There was no point dreaming of leather sofas surrounded by wooden panels and copper lighting fixtures down here. The doors were also plain painted wood; gone were the bronze and the lacquered mahogany of the lobby.

  Awaken Now! had taken over several cells on the second floor of the Sugar Cube. Irma barged fearlessly into the foyer of the first and interrogated the woman sitting there as to where she would find the upper brass. The child looked like a secretary in her tight skirt suit and bobbed hair.

  ‘We want to talk to Zeus or Wotan or whatever your leader is called. Where can we find Valhalla?’

  The woman slurped disinterestedly on a two-litre beverage bottle filled with normal water and stared at her computer while tapping something out.

  ‘You guys make an appointment? You have a slot booked in his Outlook?’

  ‘We’re here now, online,’ Irma answered, unperturbed. ‘The name is Lännenleimu, Irma, and this is my friend Siiri Kettunen. Shall we wait here?’

  The secretary pounded away at her computer, her pretty forehead furrowing uncertainly, then sucked on her massive baby bottle and stood.

  ‘Just a sec, I’ll go and ask if he’ll see you.’ Apparently they had stepped right into the wolf’s den – or rather the Verwolf’s, as Irma said. There weren’t any chairs to sit on, so they leaned on their walking canes and stared out at the street. Suddenly the receptionist was standing behind them; they could tell by the gulping sound she produced while slaking her interminable thirst.

  ‘So, like, yeah, it’s fine,’ she said so curtly they thought they’d misheard. ‘The director’s on the third floor, just look for Sanario Senilitas. You can take the elevator.’ The woman pointed her baby bottle towards the north-west; clearly this was all the assistance she intended on offering her elderly visitors.

  They travelled soundlessly up a storey and arrived at a parquet floor, so one level more important than the previous. They were immediately greeted by the bright, screaming logo of Sanario Senilitas, and thanks to the guidance of the hierarchical architecture had no trouble finding the most important cell. The door to the rear chamber had been left invitingly ajar. No Cerberus stood guard, and so they stepped briskly into Pluto’s maw, prepared to speak German, Swedish, Latin or English, if the situation so demanded. The large office contained a compact sofa set and a sizeable table clearly not designed by Alvar Aalto; it was a cheap cherry-veneer monstrosity imported by the new tenant. Sitting behind the desk was Jerry Siilinpää.

  ‘Jerry! Are you the one in charge of all this?’ Irma cried spontaneously and in such a shrill voice that the tuft on Jerry’s head trembled and the lad stood in alarm. He was wearing the same too-tight suit he’d sported at the Sunset Grove rat session, a nametag around his neck and his rubber gorilla feet. Now he leapt out from behind his veneer desk to greet Irma and Siiri, neither of whom he recognized.

  ‘Jerry Siilinpää, hi there. Are you from Sunset Grove, the Last Leg or Hospice of Hope?’

  ‘We’re from where we’re from. Mostly Helsinki,’ Irma answered defiantly. ‘We wanted to see the chief of the Awaken Now! Association, but the secretary on the second floor foisted us off on you.’

  ‘Yup. I’m the area director for Sanario Senilitas Finland. It’s an international corporation open to all investors. As a matter of fact, at this very moment we have a massive IPO in the works, you two could get a valuable portfolio for a good price. It’s basically a hundred per cent secure, mega-profitable, because looking ahead, elder-care is going to be a huge, huge global business.’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy with my old portefeuille,’ Irma said icily. Jerry looked at his audience, two angry-looking senior citizens, and continued his employer’s routine presentation.

  ‘The group owns an international chain of elder-care facilities, all fully automated monitored-care units equipped with the latest technology. A turnkey service concept based on a franchising model.’

  ‘So . . . you’re not our Experience Director & Front-Line Support after all?’

  ‘Yes, exactly right. Experience Director & Front-Line Support is part of the job description when you operate locally down at the grassroots level.’ He paused to scratch himself uninhibitedly, and when no one said anything, he reassumed control of the situation. ‘So what’s the deal, what do you ladies have on your mind?’

  ‘This religious cult, it’s robbing us of the last of our money, not to mention our love for life. What do you have to do with it? You don’t seem like one of them . . . You’re . . . our Jerry. The project manager from the plumbing retrofit . . . And weren’t you in business with the Ambassador, Onni Rinta-Paakku, our good friend who died just as we were getting to the bottom of his shady dealings at our pornographic lair in Hakaniemi?’ Irma blabbered so boldly that Siiri had to take a seat. She thought it indelicate to link Jerry to past sins they had no intention of digging up again.

  ‘Okey-dokey, so that’s what’s on your mind. Why don’t we take a minute to brainstorm this together? Have a seat and take a breather.’ Jerry’s face was bright red as he sat across from Siiri on an upholstered sofa hauled in from some bargain basement, a piece of junk too soft for anything but lounging. He tried to offer them slices of tropical fruit from a bowl on the table, but they declined. They had come to complain, not to be appeased. ‘Just so you know, Ambassador Rinta-Paakku and I sold our shares in Sunset Grove to Sanario Senilitas during the renovation. Onni’s death created a bit of a mess, but no worries, we brought the deal home without any major headaches.’

  ‘Onni owned Sunset Grove? I don’t understand anything about anything any more,’ Siiri said.

  Irma seemed clear-headed and unfazed by what Jerry was explaining. She looked the lad calmly in the eye and loosed such a verbal deluge that Siiri knew it would take a long time before any of them had a chance to think. Irma spoke in broad arcs, starting from events dating back years and waving her hands. Siiri shut her eyes and listened to the jangle of the gold bracelets and let the sun shining through the window caress her face.

  Gradually Irma approached the present day and made careful use of Jerry’s favourite expression, ‘the latest’, without the lad realizing it had taken on an ironic cast in the old woman’s mouth. Irma remembered many details with an admirable accuracy, the machine-induced deaths of the elderly residents, the exact date of the electricity outage and the number of victims, a few of the silliest Bible phrases, Margit’s ecstatic conversion, the crushing of Tauno and Anna-Liisa’s spirits and all the other spiritual and technological violence that had victimized the residents of Sunset Grove.

  ‘So we’re here to tell you we won’t stand for it any longer.’

  ‘Yup yup, right,’ Jerry said, unsuccessfully trying to dislodge a pineapple fibre stuck between
his front teeth with his pinky nail. The strand dangled unpleasantly across his teeth and made Siiri concentrate on all the wrong things again. ‘Sounds pretty bad, if what you’re saying is true.’

  ‘If what I’m saying is true?’ Irma stood up, and for a moment Siiri thought she meant to wallop Jerry with her handbag. ‘It most certainly is. I’m presenting a thorough and detailed complaint about the operation you’re running from your veneer desk. And since you don’t understand anything, you little dumb-dumb, I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen next. You’re going to press a button somewhere and turn off all the contraptions, click!, and forbid volunteer preachers from ever setting foot in Sunset Grove again. They’re not even volunteers! So stop forcing them. My darlings have informed me the rents and service fees at Sunset Grove have risen sky-high as a result of this new cloud service. Before long we’ll all run out of money, and how will you earn your bread then? And if every last penny of ours isn’t swallowed up by self-service fees, some curly-haired scoundrel comes around demanding it for charity. Do the owners of this Senilitarium here belong to this religious cult? Aren’t you ashamed? Are you some sort of CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR?’

  At the climax of her sermon, Irma’s voice rose to alarmingly strident heights, her face darkened, and she pointed an accusing finger at Jerry. Siiri found the climax ill-considered.

  ‘Wars will never come to an end without conscientious objectors. If all young men refused to bear arms, the world would be a much better place,’ she observed.

  ‘Don’t get caught up on bagatelles, Siiri. We’re not fixing the entire world right now, only the way old people are treated in Finland, and we cannot allow it to slide into a tax haven run by religious fanatics.’

  ‘Umm, yeah . . . I mean, no, I did my military service. Officers’ training, actually, exactly right.’ Jerry stretched out his hands and cracked his knuckles loudly. He said he was just doing his job. ‘Hey, look, the world’s changing. This is the latest: strategic operations based on high-tech thinking. It’s all about streamlining processes in a resource-efficient AI environment. Yours truly just coordinates the operational activities at the local level in accordance with the group’s mission.’

  Jerry didn’t appear to know what was going on at Sunset Grove in the name of his mission. Irma told him how the religious fanatics took advantage of lonely, weak old people, promised them security and a place in heaven although all they had to offer were random snippets from a two-thousand-year-old collection of fables and a cloud service in the Ivory Coast.

  ‘Don’t you understand, you poor child, that it is irresponsible to run a nursing home for severely demented patients with a couple of cameras and a fob?’

  ‘I’m not loving your take on things, I have to say. According to studies sponsored by the company, the caregiving technology works flawlessly, is reliable and risk-free and brings epic savings. There’s no proof that the deaths of those hundred-year-olds were caused by technology. I mean, hey, come on, can’t a hundred-year-old die in peace?’ Jerry picked up the plot from something Irma had said and asked for a little common sense on the other side of the court, too, as if they were playing a match of two-on-one tennis. When it came to the whole religion thing, Jerry felt it was everyone’s personal matter. He went on and on about the ethical principles of Sanario Senilitas, to which the group was mega-committed; it included environmental destruction, world peace and ruination as well as respect for the individual in a single sentence you could share with others, hey, why not. At one point he talked about his grandmother, who was semi-religious but never butted into Jerry’s life. According to him, the senior scene was involved with the religious crowd on a bunch of levels, which was why he had a hard time getting what Siiri and Irma were so worried about.

  ‘But OK, I’ll start a ticket, and the quality standards team will investigate the case through the normal processes. If something turns up, it’ll be documented and reported. Sound good? And BTW, the Sunset Grove dementia unit was ramped down last month because it wasn’t profitable. We have to keep trimming the excess, that’s the latest. Concentrate on what we do best, focus on our core competence.’

  ‘Excuse me? You’re saying the B wing is empty? The dementia unit doesn’t exist any more?’

  Irma couldn’t keep up either. It was somehow illustrative that none of the residents had noticed the shutting of the locked unit. It was completely isolated from the rest of the facility, and the dark, silent desolation there hadn’t set off any alarm bells in the other residents’ minds.

  ‘Where are . . . where did you move the dementia patients?’ Siiri asked. But Jerry just shrugged and explained that the city carried primary responsibility when contracts for tendered service were discontinued, and that health and social services re-evaluated the placement needs of the demented residents in the context of the budgeting framework. He momentarily mulled terminal repositories, contribution-based funding schemes and models of responsible municipalities and assured them that in-home care was the solution to many problems. Then he glanced at the bare wrist of his right hand and slapped his thighs. They were very muscular.

  ‘So that’s where we are! Our time slot is closing here; I have to get to a marketing meeting in the online conference room, so if you wouldn’t mind showing yourself out.’

  ‘Showing yourselves,’ Irma said in Anna-Liisa’s honour.

  Chapter 33

  Like all Helsinki basements, the cellar was damp and stuffy. Siiri thought it curious that the attics of old buildings always smelled completely different from the basements, but you never came across either smell anywhere else. The aroma of the attics was tinged with wind, brick and dust, that of the basements with moisture, jam jars and old soil. Irma was holding a torch she had inherited from Anna-Liisa, and Siiri had the hunting knife in her bag. That was the extent of their defensive paraphernalia, and Siiri felt her heart pounding so furiously that she was afraid it would burst out of her chest.

  ‘Can you hear my heart beating?’ she asked Irma as she followed her down the long damp corridor.

  ‘Of course not. I’m not deaf, but I’m not a stethoscope either. Are you afraid?’

  ‘A little, yes. But listen, why don’t we turn on the lights? Do we have to wander around in the dark with a torch?’

  ‘As you like,’ Irma said, sounding disappointed. ‘I was thinking creeping along in the darkness would be more exciting.’

  Irma stopped so suddenly that Siiri bumped into her. It was a harmless collision, as Irma was soft and round. They laughed cheerfully as they nearly pitched over in the darkness and ended up in an embrace instead, but in the confusion, the torch Irma was holding fell to the ground and went out. All was pitch black. They groped the mouldy walls searching for a light switch, and had nearly given up hope when the lights came on.

  Only then did they see that the basement was strewn with abandoned walkers and wheelchairs. In addition to the random collection of idle mobility aids dotting the corridors, equipment had been piled high in two doorless cupboards. Three-point canes, the odd crutch, and a toilet seat booster jutted from the jumble, but it was difficult to make out any other details. Dusty cobwebs accentuated the assemblages that could have been acclaimed art installations in some other context. A nearby nook was packed with apparently decommissioned skeletal robots. Some were missing a limb, others had been crammed into awkward kinks and all stared back lifelessly and eerily from their spherical eyes. They had stumbled upon a graveyard of medical equipment and technology.

  Suddenly it seemed to Siiri that one of the Ahabas moved. She panicked, thinking the robots were alive and might attack trespassers, in other words them, like in some blood-curdling sci-fi movie. But such fantasies were childish, of course. She pulled herself together and put on a brave face.

  ‘I’m glad you found the light switch,’ she said gamely to Irma, who looked dumbfounded.

  ‘I didn’t find it. I thought you did!’ Irma whispered, her eyes wide in terror, moving her lips e
xaggeratedly so Siiri would understand even if she couldn’t hear. ‘Someone else is down here.’

  ‘Or else they have automatic lights that react too slowly,’ Siiri said in a normal voice, prompting Irma to hiss angrily and clamp a perfumed hand over Siiri’s mouth.

  ‘Hello? Who’s there?’

  They started. Had someone followed them into the basement? The man’s voice carrying from the stairwell sounded vaguely familiar. Before long, a figure emerged at the end of the corridor.

  ‘Mika! Mika Korhonen!’ Siiri cried out in relief. Their guardian angel never let them down. How did he always know when to appear to succour them in their greatest need?

  Mika was wearing his black parka and big dirty boots and hauling along his rat extermination box. Irma looked relieved, too, even though she wasn’t as convinced as Siiri of the convict’s magnificence.

  ‘What the hell are you two doing down here?’ Mika yelled as he approached, arms protruding from his body in the manner of American weightlifters and Russian wrestlers. He must have got a lot of exercise during his time in prison, brawny as he was now. When he reached them, Mika slammed his box down on the floor so roughly that a dust cloud billowed up and the bang echoed emptily along the corridor. One of the automated dwarfs in the cupboard opposite collapsed and whined faintly.

  ‘We’re looking for the Holy of Holies,’ Irma said before Siiri could think of how to best explain their silly spying expedition to Mika. ‘It’s a server and it’s located down here somewhere. We know because all the cables and wires lead here, and Siiri almost made it down here with a maintenance man who came to replace a cable during a repair.’

  Mika scratched his bald pate and smiled as if he were going to burst out laughing. But he didn’t say anything; he had always cultivated an air of mysterious reticence. It was part of his extraordinary charm, along with his blue eyes and big hands.

  ‘There’s no server down here,’ Mika finally said. ‘But there are plenty of cables, so in that sense you’re on the right track. Why are you guys looking for the server?’