by Leena Krohn
“An object in a virtual vacuum is stored perfectly. Nowhere could be safer. Take a small atomic bomb, say on the scale of Hiroshima, or even a bigger one, maybe five thousand megatons, and detonate it next to an object in a virtual vacuum. What happens?”
“You tell me.”
“Nothing at all! And imagine how cheap it would be to send spaceships deep into space, into other galaxies. No fuel costs!”
“Imagine!” I repeated out of politeness.
“Speaking of transportation, did you notice that there was an interesting test on the beltway a while ago? They tested an autopilot system.”
“On the beltway? Was it last spring?” He had my attention now.
“I think so. They closed it from traffic for a couple of hours in the early morning. A dozen or so cars drove several miles without drivers, just using on-board computers. Really advanced technology! Soon no one will need driver’s licenses!”
This piece of news cheered me up considerably. I hadn’t told anyone about the phantom convoy, because I had convinced myself I was seeing things. I had tried to forget what I had seen, just like many other chaotic and dreamlike events that year.
Raikka had already moved on to another subject. He promised to write an article about how to extract energy from a vacuum for our next issue, and one on the relationship between consciousness and random systems for the issue after that, and for the June special issue . . .
I stopped listening to his promises. I couldn’t help thinking about the vision that was actually real. It proved to me that the city itself had begun to resemble a giant hallucination, and that it was getting harder and harder to tell private and shared delusions apart.
A Visitation
One cold night, when I got home from a long day at the office, a strange woman, dressed in white, was waiting for me in my bedroom. I wasn’t frightened, just surprised. I couldn’t tell whether the woman was young or old, ugly or beautiful. She was sitting in front of the window on the stool that I had inherited from the kitchen of my childhood home. The darkening sky was behind her. Because the evening light streamed into the room from behind the stranger, I couldn’t make out her features. My datura plant had long bloomed and flourished on that same stool, until the day I took it out to the summer house and abandoned it to the night frost. However, I still had a jam jar full of dried datura leaves on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. Its lid was shut tight, and I should have wondered why the whole room seemed filled with the smell of datura that evening.
“Who are you,” I asked, “and how did you get inside?”
“That’s not important,” she said.
“Oh yes it is,” I said. “I didn’t invite you, and I want you to leave.”
Paying no attention to my command, she said, “Have you ever thought that someone who has never seen cannot know what blindness is. And if everyone else is blind, they’d never know they’d missed anything. The same is true for all the senses, of course. We could draw far-ranging conclusions from this fact, but do we have the courage to?”
“It’s late,” I said. “I don’t have the energy for philosophical discussions. I’m going to bed.”
And as if it were completely normal that, in my bedroom, sitting on the stool I had inherited from my parents, was an uninvited woman in a white dress giving a lecture, I got ready for bed. I undressed, brushed my teeth, washed, put on my nightgown, fluffed up my pillow, and drew the blanket up around my neck. All the while, the woman in the white dress droned on. I didn’t feel particularly unbalanced at the time, which I now find very strange.
“Do we ever mourn,” the woman went on, “that we lack a lateral line system, or that we aren’t able to find our way as well as migratory birds or that we can’t use seismic waves like elephants? No, we don’t feel like we’re missing anything, we don’t desire more sense or more senses. And yet, other species have numerous senses that would reveal reality to us in an entirely different light. Not only that, but many of the senses we share are much more acute in them. That means they have information that we lack. It means we can’t even imagine what the world would be like if we had senses that we lack. It means that we don’t understand reality nearly as well as we think. No, we don’t understand it at all.”
“Actually, can you imagine,” I said, turning onto my side to face the visitor, “That I know all about that. I’ve been thinking a lot about those sort of things. You speak as if with my voice, but I still just don’t have the energy to listen to you . . . ”
During those years, it seemed like everywhere I went everyone was lecturing me, wanting to teach me, even preach to me, as if I was still a schoolchild, one in need of remedial education even. But this woman was saying aloud what I had been thinking to myself.
“You’ve learned to look around you in a certain way, you’ve been told what to see, and that’s what you see,” she went on. “You have been taught to hear and react to certain sounds. Others you avoid hearing. Don’t be afraid. If you want to, you can see and hear differently, more accurately, more perfectly.”
Half asleep, I heard, “Haven’t you ever thought that all those people who experience hallucinations, something that other people don’t experience, have actually discovered a new sense or at least that their existing senses have become more sensitive? I know you are one of those people. Embrace the change! Seek out new alternatives! There’s no reason to assume that so-called delusions are mistaken observations, false interpretations of reality. At times, they provide information that would be impossible to receive with normal senses. Hallucinations could be observations that we normally ignore, because they disrupt our received understanding of reality.”
“Exactly,” I nodded. “That’s just what I’ve been thinking.”
“The flower you saw as a child . . . ”
“You mean. . . . How do you know about that flower, the crown imperial?”
“That doesn’t matter. Trust your eyes! Heed the testimony of your senses! What you experience is always true. This is important. This is a fundamental truth.”
She was gone. I wasn’t surprised by that either. I just fell asleep in my bed, which had become a merry-go-round.
“Thus unenlightened, lost in error’s maze”
“What on earth are you doing?” someone asked. Was it the person who I always felt was sitting in the back seat, even when I knew I was driving alone?
“What do you mean what am I doing?” I answered. “Can’t you see I’m driving. It’s an emergency. Don’t distract me.”
I had never driven so fast. I was terribly frightened, but I knew that I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t sure where I was going or why, but I knew I had to drive, to keep the car on the road even at that speed. The road must have been surfaced with quiet asphalt, so silent was the car as it sped on.
“You’re not in a car. We’re at the office. You’re sitting in the armchair and you’re sick,” the Marquis said. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Don’t, they make so much noise, no ambulances, and I’m already driving myself anyway.”
Now I understood why I was in such a hurry.
You know what happened after that. I was in treatment for months. Malignant changes were found in my blood, my heart had been damaged, my fatigue was chronic. But the worst was the fear that took hold of me as I began to understand that I was losing my grip on the shared world. I couldn’t be sure whether the conversations I had were real conversations or just projections of my own thoughts. I couldn’t be certain that the people I met were flesh and blood. My memory, the anchor that bound me to shared perceptions, had come loose. I was adrift.
Was it you who, when things were at their worst at the beginning, visited me and read to me aloud. It helped. Was it you who read this verse:
“Thus on a stormy sea my bark is borne
By adverse winds, and with rough tempest tost;
Thus unenlightened, lost in error’s maze,
My blind opinion, ever dubious strays.”
The truth is always shared. A reality that belongs to only one person isn’t real.
As my sick leave continued and my recovery dragged on, the Marquis was sorry to have to tell me that we could no longer continue working together. I agreed. I didn’t even want to think about The New Anomalist.
I was put on a disability pension, and for over ten years now, sanatorium visits and outpatient treatment have given my life its rhythm. Many times, I found myself in the line where I once thought I saw my old schoolmate, Viveca.
I haven’t kept in touch with the Marquis at all, but I’ve heard that The New Anomalist is still coming out. To my surprise, I’ve found that I miss many of the magazine’s contributors, young Raikka, Saulus, Mr. Chance, even Loogaroo.
I spend more time in the city than before. I sit in the parks or in market cafés, I wander through libraries and bookshops, galleries, sales, open lectures, flea markets, taste tests, and product demonstrations. In the evenings, I go to cultural events that are free or nearly free. It does no good to be holed up inside four walls.
My hair has thinned and lost its color. Whenever I can spare the money, I go to the hairdresser to give it a bit of volume, and also because I enjoy talking with the Hair Artiste. Yes, her, the angel boy’s mother, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the hairdos of the independence day ball. She still receives some clients at her home. She meticulously curls my thin hair, and sometimes refuses to take my money.
Though I stopped using datura ages ago, though I bid farewell to my flower, the woman in the white dress still visits some evenings and sits in the corner of my room. She hasn’t grown any older, though I still can’t see her face, as she always sits with the light behind her, and when I turn on the lamp, she has already turned her back to me. Her breath smells of datura, but its stink now makes me shudder.
Often she just sits there without saying a word, but sometime she opens her mouth and continues her lessons.
“I’m not listening to you,” I say. “You’re a temptress, an evil goddess.”
Then I head into the city or take a bath, read, call my sister, turn on the television, and make a cup of tea—real tea.
Sometimes the woman vanishes instantly. Sometimes dawn will break before she goes, taking the stink of datura with her.
With a Finger to His Lips
I had agreed to an early meeting at the library café, and I took a shortcut through Dufva park. I was early, as I often am these days, and the weather was wonderful, so I decided to sit for a moment on a sunny park bench on which someone had abandoned a free paper. I started leafing through it to pass the time. The city’s main eastern artery was just a couple of hundred yards away, and the morning rush hour was just getting started. The elated song of starlings and chaffinches mingled with the ceaseless rumble of traffic.
I was reading an article about a government cloud-seeding experiment that had led to the deaths of hundreds of people, and I thought that even the most paranoid of The New Anomalist’s readers wouldn’t have thought to suspect anything of the sort. Suddenly I heard a swish. Startled, I looked up. The shadows of the trees moved back and forth on the gravel of the park path as before. A girl sped past me on a scooter, hair streaming in the wind. On another park path, a mother bent over to tie a different child’s shoe laces. A hot air balloon was sailing past the fresh gold leaf of the cathedral’s dome, and, above it, a jet left a foamy contrail.
But something had changed. It took me a moment to realize what was going on. A great silence had descended. The familiar landscape of sound had been wiped away. The scooter turned and the girl rushed past my bench in the other direction, but the wheels made no sound as they rolled on the gravelly path. The jet flew over the city in silence. It was as if all the most everyday sounds had been sucked out of the city and sealed in an invisible container.
Everything began to seem like a silent movie. I got up, uneasy, and put the paper in the garbage can next to the bench without it causing the least rustle. I looked past a row of budding trees to the street, where people were hurrying to work, school, and the stores. The traffic lights turned green, and the unbroken lines of cars jerked forward, but my ears couldn’t make out a thing—no sounds of tires, motors, or footsteps.
It was oppressive. I shook my head, lifted my hands to my ears and patted them. Had something happened to both my ears? Was it possible to suddenly just go deaf?
A movement made me look back. On the bench that I had just left now sat a man in a grey suit with an old backpack in his lap. Where had he come from all of sudden? There was something familiar about him. He raised his hand in greeting to someone and nodded to me. Or was it me he was greeting? I looked around, but as there was no one else nearby, I nodded back, though uncertainly and nearly imperceptibly. Because of my nearsightedness I didn’t recognize him right away.
I hesitated before approaching the bench. The man rose, lifted a finger, and motioned for me to follow him. Now I recognized him: the Master of Sound, the mumbling man, as gray as ever. I found I was happy to see him after so many years.
The Master of Sound walked purposefully ahead of me, carrying his backpack, and I followed, unquestioning, as if in a dream. There is a round glass-roofed stage in the park for bands to play on. The view from there took in the park, the market square, the boulevard, even the harbor. The Master of Sound climbed the short steps onto the stage, put down his backpack, and turned to face me. He spoke to me from the stage, or maybe he whispered, but I couldn’t hear a word, not even mumbling. I pointed to my ear and said, quite loudly I think, “I can’t hear a thing.”
And I couldn’t, not even my own voice. That made me unhappy.
The Master of Sound put a finger to his lips and flashed a mysterious smile. He gestured for me to come closer. He seemed to have something to show me. He began rummaging through his backpack.
His mouth opened again. I followed the movement of his lips, and I thought I could read the words: “Here it is!”
The Master of Sound lifted up a canister, similar to the one he had shown me at the office, though much larger. I understood that it was the new model of the Sound Swallower that he had promised to come show me long ago. Now it was finished. Now it worked. You didn’t even have to lift it to your ear—it worked from a distance. The Sound Swallower had devoured the clamor of the city. Maybe all its residents were now living in the same silence.
My face must have reflected disbelief and confusion. With graceful gestures, the Master of Sound led me to understand that he had something else in his backpack to show me. He plunged his hand into the bag again and brought out a long object wrapped in tissue paper.
“Is it a new device?” I tried to ask.
Maybe the Master of Sound heard my question or read it on my lips, because he nodded. He slowly formed a new word on his lips. I thought I saw him say: “Im-age Swal-low-er.”
But when he had opened the package, I was confused. It wasn’t a device at all, it was a flower.
He was holding my flower, the first one, the one I knew was unknown. I was certain that it wasn’t just the same species, but exactly the same specimen. It glowed with the same light as back then, every panther spot was in place, every speck of pollen where they were once before. How had he gotten a hold of the flower across a distance of so many years? How had it stayed fresh after all this time?
I tried to ask him, but he put a finger to his lips again. Then he made a gesture that encompassed the entire view before us and pointed at the flower of my childhood. He lifted it to my eyes so all I could see was the flower’s deep blossom.
What light came streaming from the flower! It filled my eyes, my head, spread throughout the park like a radiant cloud eradicating all shadows and outlines, even the flower’s own colors. It absorbed the trees, the streams of cars and people, the apartment buildings, department stores, factories and cathedrals, even the sea and the spring. Nothing was spared.
Now I was deaf and blind, but someone touched my hand in t
he milky silence, and led me forward, perhaps down the same steps I had ascended to the stage. Though I had lost my most important senses, I wasn’t sorry or afraid. I felt that whoever was leading me wasn’t the Master of Sound, but the flower itself. Its leaf rested in my hand like another hand and took me towards the ultimate secret of existence, and I was willing to trade all that had come before in exchange for it.
This state was pierced by a scream that made my ears pop open again. A girl’s crying restored the lost city. Its sounds rushed back, and once again I heard life’s counterpoint. The fog cleared around me. The girl was the same as the one who had sped up and down the path on a scooter just a moment ago. She had fallen right in front of me and hurt her knee on the gravel. A thin trickle of blood ran down her tanned shin.
I meant to help the sobbing girl up and ask, “Are you alright?” I wanted to, but I hesitated and missed my chance. She had already stopped crying with a short hiccup, gotten back up on her scooter, and soldiered bravely on. I wasn’t needed.
I looked around, trying to find the hand that had led me and the Master of Sound. I wanted an explanation, I wanted the flower for myself, but it was too late. The Master of Sound had taken it with him.
About The Author
Leena Krohn (born in 1947) is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, artificial intelligence, and issues of morality and conscience. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Tainaron shares some affinities with the work of Kafka, while being utterly original. Each section of the novel illuminates the next, with the weird element serving both as strange adventure and parallel to the real world. It is one of the most important works of post-World War II dark fantasy.