Helsinki Blood iv-4

by James Thompson

  My cuts were all superficial and stopped bleeding on their own. Still, I covered the chair with an old blanket in case they opened up again. Exhausted, I got a beer and poured another kossu. I sat down and thought it through, narrowed down the suspects of who might be harassing me. There were too many to even make an educated guess.

  Cleaning up the mess caused me to mistime the drug-alcohol combination. I fell asleep in my chair with the pizza uneaten.

  3

  Katt’s favorite spot, when I was in my armchair and in a reclining position, was to lie with his ass in my lap and his torso sprawled on my chest, staring up at me. He wanted to be petted, or for me to at least keep a hand on his back. He hated it when I slept. It interfered with his receiving attention. When he could no longer stand the boredom, he woke me each morning by climbing to the top of the chair and used the back of my head and neck as a scratching post. I looked like a pack of small, angry rodents had mauled me. That morning was no different.

  When he was convinced I was awake, he grew content and took up his second-favorite position. From atop the chair, he placed his front paws so that they hung over my shoulders, as if to choke me, nuzzled his head against my neck and napped. I considered teaching him to stop scratching me by doing what he hates worst, squirting him with a spray bottle of water, but couldn’t do it. After all, he’s my best friend. Besides, he’s too stupid and obstinate to learn much of anything.

  I let Katt snooze for a few minutes, then got up, limped to the kitchen with the aid of my cane and made coffee. Then hobbled back the way I had come, went out to the balcony and smoked a couple cigarettes while I drank a cup. I wanted to maintain some semblance of dignity and refused to smoke inside and stink up my home, so I tended to chain-smoke when I went to the trouble of making it outside. I came back in and looked around. Tufts of cat fur and glass fragments were in corners and under furniture. The place needed a thorough cleaning. I couldn’t push the vacuum cleaner around well enough to get under furniture, in corners, against baseboards, the places where most of the dirt collects.

  I needed to make a call and get the window replaced. I promised myself I would call a cleaning service and get the place back into shape again, too.

  I turned the radio on and one of the big hits of the summer was playing. “Selva Paiva”-“Sober Day”-by Petri Nygard. The song celebrates the rapture of being shit drunk. Aggravated, I put on Johnny Cash, American Recordings.

  I took my morning dope. It knocked the edge off my pain and made my muscles relax, and moving my jaw hurt less. I sucked down a protein drink for breakfast. I was trying not to drop any more weight. Katt sprawled across me while I browsed the daily newspaper. A key turned in the lock of the front door. I took my.45 Colt from under the seat cushion.

  Most wives, after abandoning their husbands, would call before visiting and ring the door buzzer when they arrived. In strolled Kate, without warning, to find a pistol trained on her.

  I put my Colt back in its customary place under the seat cushion. Kate pointed at it. “Are you out of your mind?” The look in her eyes was one unfamiliar to me.

  “Events of late have made me cautious,” I said.

  Kate killed a man out of necessity. She saved all our lives. The trauma of what she’d done, though, threw her into a dissociative stupor.

  I never should have let Kate leave, but how was I to stop her? Maybe I could have requested that her psychiatrist institutionalize her for a time. Leaving home soon after a psychological breakdown might have warranted it, but the shock of watching her walk out the door rendered me incapable of action. Afterward, for a while, she was distant, uncommunicative, but seemed stable enough. I often asked her to come home. She never refused, just said she wasn’t ready for that, needed some time alone to think. I could accept that, it was reasonable.

  When she started sliding downhill, I didn’t see it for what it was: a headlong plunge into post-traumatic stress disorder. She started calling, often late at night. Sometimes she would scream at me for ruining her life. Sometimes she cried and begged forgiveness. Either way, I told her I loved her and asked her to come home. And she did, every third or fourth day, so I could see Anu. The first couple times she sat, often wordless, for an hour or two, while I doted on our child. The third time, she was unresponsive when I spoke to her. She put her arms around me and cried for a long time before she left.

  The fourth time was bad. When you know someone really well, they don’t have to speak or even move. Their eyes will tell you everything. The look in Kate’s eyes told me she was in trouble. She had called the night before, at two in the morning. She didn’t speak when I tried to get her to explain why she was so upset. She seemed unable to articulate words other than “I’m sorry.” I listened to her bawl for over an hour, and then she hung up without saying good-bye or good night. This scared me. I tried to call her back. Her phone was switched off. When she showed up the next day, she had found her voice again.

  Anu was in her pram. Kate parked it in front of me, placed an overstuffed bag of her things beside it, then gave our apartment an inspection walk-through, as I would a crime scene. The kossu and beer I hadn’t finished before I fell asleep the night before were on the table beside my chair. As luck would have it, the song “Delia’s Gone,” about murdering a lover, was playing at low volume. The booze and music didn’t make a good setting.

  She nodded toward the beer and Koskenkorva. “You’re drinking in the morning,” she said, distress in her voice. “Are you drunk now?”

  “I’m not drinking. They’re unfinished leftovers from last night.”

  This, of course, gave the impression that I’d passed out in a drunken stupor. She looked at the shattered window. It disturbed me that she hadn’t noticed it as soon as she walked in the door. This spoke of some kind of impairment of her powers of observation. Her tone jumped from distress to alarm. “What have you done? Did you break it while you were drunk? You have cuts. Have you harmed yourself?”

  “Clearly,” I said, “I did nothing stupid, or the glass would be outside on the pavement, not here on our floor.”

  She didn’t seem to process this obvious truth. Her eyes narrowed, disbelieving, and then she switched topics as if the window was forgotten. “You’re Anu’s father and have a right to see her. This is your visitation time. Are you mobile enough for that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look awful.” It was only a statement. I couldn’t read her emotions from her voice.

  She didn’t wait for an answer. “You can’t live in here, and it’s not safe for our child.”

  “Someone threw a brick through the window. I’m not able to clean well. I’m not mobile enough.”

  She took out the vacuum cleaner and made the floor spotless in fifteen minutes, did a far better job than I did in over an hour the night before. She put it away and sat on the stool in front of me.

  “What kind of condition are you in?” she asked.

  I didn’t understand why she asked me this. I had explained my condition and prognosis to her during previous visits. I repeated them to placate her.

  “I’ll recover. My limp will be worse, and I have some nerve damage in my face. It’s impossible to say whether the nerves will heal or how well, if further surgery will be required, and if so, whether it will help. My main problem at the moment is that I’m in a lot of pain. I feel like I’m getting worse instead of better. I think it’s my imagination, just the pain wearing me down.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked like she meant it, but she wasn’t sorry enough to come home and help me when I needed her the most. But I wasn’t worried about myself for the moment. Grave concern about her mental health took precedence.

  “Have you been to see Torsten lately?” I asked.

  Torsten Holmqvist, her psychotherapist. One of the best in the business. I was also once one of his patients.

  “What passes between my therapist and myself isn’t your business.”

  “I ag
ree,” I said. “I only asked if you’ve been seeing him.”

  “Yes, your crazy fucked-up wife has been a good girl and attended her therapy regularly. Are you satisfied?”

  Now sarcasm. She was sprinting through a gamut of emotions so fast that it was impossible for me to keep up with them. I could think of a thousand reasons, but I wanted to know specifically what had caused her feelings toward me to become so harsh, and why it happened so quickly. “Kate, why are you so furious with me? Why won’t you come home?”

  She smiled and slowly shook her head, as if I were an idiot and failed to understand the most simple and evident truth. “You’re the detective, why don’t you figure it out?”

  I ignored that. “Do you remember the island and the events that led up to you becoming ill?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  I didn’t think she remembered, or at best, her memories were fragmented, or she wouldn’t question why I sat with a pistol at hand. I didn’t push it.

  “Did I ever tell you how much I hate Finnish windows?” she asked. “What the hell kind of windows are hinged at the side and only open to forty-five-degree angles?”

  “The kind where life revolves around winter and you need triple-glazed glass.”

  “Except for the one big window,” she said, “which opens wide, but can’t be left open because it sits so low to the floor that someone would tumble out of it.”

  “Because it gathers all the light possible in a place where there’s precious little of it much of the year, and if it didn’t open wide, you couldn’t clean it.”

  “You have an answer for everything.”

  “No. Just for some practicalities.”

  “Windows are supposed to open upward and wide, so you can safely air out the goddamned house.”

  “I’ll speak to the building commission about it.”

  She seemed not to hear me. “I have some errands to run. Are you able to care for Anu for a few hours?”

  A sarcastic tone had crept into my voice. I replaced it with an affectionate one. “Yes, darling, I am.”

  The use of an endearment threw her off kilter and she didn’t know how to respond. It sometimes seemed she wanted me to be angry, as if she needed my anger to validate her own. But I wasn’t angry, only frightened and sad. She paused to regroup, and when she finally spoke, her tone had changed. Reason, perhaps even some affection, had crept into it. “Please get someone in here to clean the place.”

  “I’ll call someone today and have it cleaned so that it’s presentable when you and Anu come back next time. I would like it if I could have regular times with Anu, maybe two or three times a week, instead of this system of you just showing up with her.”

  She ignored what I thought a reasonable request. “There are eleven pizza boxes in the kitchen. I didn’t count the beer cans. You have a right to see Anu, but this isn’t a proper environment for a child.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “That’s the problem. Your best is bad because of your injuries. I’m concerned that you’re not up to taking care of her.”

  “I’m capable,” I say.

  “Do I have your word about that?”

  “Yes. You have no cause for worry.”

  “Let’s try it now and see how things go,” she said. “I’ve brought all her necessities.”

  An odd thing to do for a short visit. And, of course, Anu had a lot of things here as well.

  I wanted to ask her questions. Do you still love me? Do you want a divorce? I felt, though, that her current emotional state might cause her to answer in the affirmative, and if I waited until she was further along in her therapy, she might feel differently. I wanted to tell her how much I love her and that I wanted her to come home, but thought she might spit the sentiments back in my face. So I let it go and didn’t try to connect with her.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She said nothing. She stood, did an about-face with military precision. Her heels clicked on the floor as she marched out. I got up, went to the balcony to smoke and watch her walk away, down the street toward the tram stop. My intuition told me something was drastically wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Kate loves candles. I lit one, put it on the dining room table and promised myself I would keep one lit until she came home for good. I had an ominous feeling of foreboding, certain that I was going to burn up many more candles before my family situation was resolved. If it ever would be.

  I tried to decipher the subtext of our conversation, could think of little else, but I was clueless. I called Torsten to ensure she had told me the truth about attending therapy. He said that she had. Patient-doctor privilege precluded further discussion, but he asked me why I was checking up on her. I said her condition worried me. After a thoughtful silence, he thanked me for calling and rang off.

  I was powerless to do more. I had the window replaced and the house cleaned, fretted, and watched Animal Planet with Anu and Katt.

  4

  My intuitive fear proved correct. Kate didn’t return for Anu. She, Katt and I slept in my armchair together. I was equally thrilled to be reunited with my daughter and frightened about the well-being of my wife.

  Anu woke me in the middle of the night. I went to the kitchen to warm some formula for her. I looked at my wristwatch. It had stopped. The battery was probably dead. It was a TAG Heuer that Kate gave me for an anniversary present. I took it off, laid it on the counter, removed a meat hammer from a drawer and pounded the shit out of it. Tiny gears and springs zinged and sproinged around the kitchen. I decided it was properly tenderized and tossed it in the garbage.

  The banging scared Anu and made her cry. I took her the bottle, comforted her, quelled her tears and fed her. I needed to work on the anger issues I kept telling myself I didn’t have. I realized that I didn’t know what Anu should be eating at six months. I wasn’t sleepy and checked Wikipedia. It was time she began with some solid food. I would buy some baby food, or, with so much time on my hands, maybe make it for her myself.

  In the morning, I changed Anu, had coffee and cigarettes. I was worried sick about Kate. Was she putting me through some sort of test? Was she safe? I thought about calling the hotel, about hunting for her, but this might be a failure of the test, if it was one. I promised myself I would wait a few hours, then do whatever it took to find her.

  As I had for weeks, I turned the course of events that led up to this family disaster over in my mind, tried to pinpoint the moments where I went wrong and set this debacle in motion.

  My thoughts were always random and scattered. Kate and I had faced many trials in the two years of our life together, not the least of which was the discovery of my brain tumor. It caused a personality change graphically illustrated by my complete and utter disregard of the law in organized-crime fashion. These choices suggested a man not in complete control of his faculties. Had I now regained control? I didn’t know. Perhaps partially. Pain prevented calm and rational thought.

  The facts, as best as I understood them, still exposed little to me about where and how I went wrong. I recognized, though, that there were two poignant reasons for this. One, I was too emotionally distraught to analyze much of anything. Two, I’m not a fucking psychiatrist. I understood a couple things. My experiences and actions, even though they were the result of brain trauma, had changed me.

  I would, for instance, kill without hesitation for my family. Arvid Lahtinen, Second World War mass murderer, expert in such matters, good friends with my grandpa, also a mass murderer, and myself as well, told me killing was in my family blood. That to kill I only needed a sufficient pretense to preserve my self-image as a protector of people. I saw now that I would have made many of the same choices pre-surgery that I made post-surgery, but would have constructed a pretext to defend my actions. Post-surgery, I no longer needed a pretext.

  Anu and Katt had both been quiet while I thought. Damned courteous of them. Katt had some kind of sixth se
nse about Anu. He kneaded me with his claws and purred with enjoyment while he scratched and tormented me, but never did so with her. The smell emanating from Anu told me it was time for a diaper change. I decided to give her a bath as well, after which I would search for her mother. Anu hated baths, screamed bloody murder when I wet her head. I heard myself sigh. The process of struggling with her in the bath would be difficult in my state. I had to admit, I was nearly an invalid.

  I picked up my bad leg with both hands from the stool and lowered my foot to the floor. Bending the knee sucked. I slipped her carryall over my neck and slid her into it, then with care forced myself to a standing position. I took my cane and we headed off to her bedroom for changing. Katt followed us. The crash of glass scared the hell out of us. I left Anu howling in her crib and hurried to investigate.

  The new window had exploded inward and the object that broke it was spewing mist beside my chair. I recognized it for what it was: a tear gas grenade. It would be screaming hot. I held my breath, whipped off my T-shirt, reached over, snatched it up with the cloth, and flung it back out the broken window onto the street below. I glanced down at the street and sidewalk. They were empty. No innocents were being poisoned.

  Given my condition, I had dealt with it fast, before it permeated the apartment. I closed Anu’s bedroom door, then opened the balcony door and all the windows in the house. We had gone from bricks to tear gas in a couple days. I wondered what the hell would be next.

  I went to the bathroom and, when I was done choking and crying, ripped all the bandages off my knee and took a shower so I could touch Anu without getting tear gas on her. Then I went to the living room to assess the damage. Being left alone in her crib again angered Anu and she shouted. She has a real pair of lungs for a tyke, and it grated on me.