Piia Leino

WINNER

• PART 1

GRAY

When Akseli needs to rest his eyes, he watches the beggars.

There were four hundred to start with, a hundred along each side of Hakaniemi Square, but some of them may have died. They let the Siltasaari Street side of the square into the market hall first, then everyone else in clockwise order. The last row won’t fit inside. They sleep on the square under faded orange market tents and green garbage bins tipped on their sides. One bin with a missing lid has a red-checked oilcloth thrown over it.

It’s well into April, but the beggars still sit bundled in heavy clothes. There’s a breeze blowing in from the sea. Even Akseli, who doesn’t go outside, can feel it. The cold nips at his ankles through the floorboards, climbs like a sadness up his body and into his mind.

He stands in front of the window, raises his knee and twists to touch it with his elbow, returns to starting position, repeats the motion with the other knee. He’s already tiring out, but he holds fast to the count, saying the numbers in his head so loudly he can almost hear them: eight… nine… ten. The worker fitness exercises aren’t pleasant, but they’re mandatory. The price you pay for life in the flesh. According to the teachings of The Light, muscle is just the mind’s modeling clay, and maintaining it is part of your job. The part about the mind’s modeling clay is something a famous runner said more than a hundred years ago. The Flying Finn. Akseli can’t recall his name at the moment, but anyway this Finn knew what Akseli knows: flesh is a burden that the mind drags along behind it.

Akseli switches exercises. He presses his fingertips against the cool floor and raises up on tiptoe toward the ceiling. The crunch of his back feels almost good. The beggars are still sitting when the first distant rumble begins. The guards are supposed to empty the square when there’s a cloudburst, but they’re still slouched against the wall of the market hall. They might be asleep. There are two guards, and the thought flashes across Akseli’s mind that the people on the square could ambush them, take their weapons, kill them. But that obviously isn’t going to happen. Who would bother to rebel anymore, and why? A wet gust rouses the guards and they straighten up and wave the ragamuffin crowd forward. The people start to stream into the hall and the rain patters against Akseli’s window, but he barely notices. He keeps up his calisthenics at a steady rhythm, scattered thoughts flickering. There used to be thunderstorms only in the summer, he thinks. He’s not sure. But he remembers lightning over his great-grandmother’s oat field, remembers that it was an unusual thing, exciting.  Now the sky breaks up regularly in a rainy season that lasts far more than half the year, and the city is used to being shaken by thunder.

Akseli is out of breath. The back of his head feels hollow. His blood can’t keep up. He has to do it, though. Twenty repetitions of each exercise. If he’s not fit for work, he won’t be able to do his job, and if he doesn’t do his job, the university won’t pay him his five-hour daily trip to Heaven. Without Heaven there would be nothing but the bug-blackened walls and the dispatch that brings food once a week. Would he stare out the window and chew on his cricket porridge till the end of his days, or would he have the courage to open the window and jump into the void? Would jumping from here kill him instantly, or would he just lie on the ground until he bled dry?

Akseli folds a towel over the rough floorboards before starting his sit-ups. His bones can’t take the floor. In the middle of his crunches a fly buzzes at his face and breaks his rhythm and he loses count, panics. He doesn’t want to do a single crunch too many, or too few. He can just barely do the mandatory amount. He does a few more anxious curls and slumps to the floor. He sees a dead cockroach in the dust under the bed and remembers seeing it many times before.

When the tears start, Akseli realizes they have been just under the surface all the time. He could lay here on the floor for the rest of his life, curl up here with the cockroach, but in Heaven soft rain is waiting, and wind, and birds singing, and he isn’t ready to give up yet. He wrenches himself upright and sits down in the chair, sweating. He picks up the glasses from the floor and puts them on. One more hour and a half, then another round of fitness, then Heaven. He can do it, if he just remembers where he left off.

Lady Gaga rises up out of a swimming pool wearing a one-shoulder leather suit and a strange helmet. She plays cards, twitches her hips in a beach chair, stares intently into the camera as if inviting Akseli to join a game that ended long ago. The velocity of the video is dizzying. The rhythm pounds, Lady Gaga’s clothes change, she poses at the card table with an enormous dog, dances with a crowd of people, and it’s all about her, about her slick surface and how Akseli rates her power of sexual attraction. Women’s beauty was accentuated back then by scanty clothing, processed hair and face paint, and Lady Gaga has lots of all three.

Akseli has watched this file dozens of times. It still feels disagreeable, crammed to bursting. It tries to capture the viewer’s interest in the fashion of its time, with great quantities of visual stimuli. It was only when the virtual worlds came and the files could appeal to all the senses and use biofeedback that the pace of the files slackened to a meditative level. A relaxing feeling of well-being in place of an agitating lust for pleasure. Akseli pulls a blanket over himself to ward off the chill in the room and tries to concentrate, but he can’t get hold of his thoughts. He has been wearing the glasses for days, watching music videos, full-length movies, and silly short ones called porn. Sometimes the people in the videos go straight to the act, but usually they’re focused on display; the women adorn themselves and the men test their strength in fight scenes. In some of the longer movies they have offspring, but there’s not much discussion of their birth rate.

In the files from the turn of the millennium, there isn’t the slightest reference to the future. People pour forth their desires or senseless jealousies. They’re terribly energetic. Aside from sexual intercourse, the thing that seems to motivate them most is the possibility of acquiring possessions. For female characters, colorful shoes and dresses are actually more exciting than a potential mate. In one file, four women have sex with numerous men in New York City–before the wave, of course. But the greatest pleasure for them seems to be the uncomfortable-looking shoes in growth market display windows. The very sight of them makes the women squeal and clap their hands.

Akseli ought to start his report, but his head is foggy. It’s impossible to imagine where such desire could be channeled nowadays. Would women reject Heaven and hit the town looking for clothes and shoes? Would they demand husbands, cream layer cakes and snow-white dresses? Would the men kill each other? What would he do? Would he want to mate, or kill, or go after power and risk his own life? Akseli thinks he knows one thing that would happen: he would leave his apartment. And if he would, so would other people. Vast numbers of people would flood into the streets–people who didn’t have to be there. They would do something. But Akseli couldn’t imagine what.

Iina steps out onto the cobblestones, startled by a warm spring breeze that carries the stink of rancid seawater, seagull soup, and garbage. There’s also a whiff of smoke from the north part of town where open fires aren’t banned. In the blocks occupied by The Light there’s no need for fire because the electricity generally works without any outages and the garbage on the streets disappears somewhere.

The sky is deep blue like it was before the war, and yet very different. Utterly indifferent. Iina forces herself to concentrate on avoiding the cracks in the asphalt, placing her wooden shoes down carefully step by step, squeezing her fingers tight against the handle of her basket. The fear doesn’t go away, but she keeps it under control, one step at a time. As always happens when she’s outdoors, images flash across her mind and then disappear. A twisted body on the cobblestones. The stinking breath of a starving neighbor. A leather-clad victory parade. The worst images are the ones she didn’t see but only imagined, over and over. Her father’s last moments. Marius captured.

Everything at the market square is familiar. The food stalls near Cholera Slip, the flea market vendors set up next to the road. There are two guards on duty, both slouching, middle-aged men, their bayonets gleaming in the sunshine. Iina hates them out of habit, but there’s no strength in her hate. There are a few customers. A stooped woman is standing at the nearest stall, poking at the seagulls. The vendor has piled the birds on the table with their wings spread so they look like they’re flying, perched on each other’s backs. Iina imagines them piled up and up like a white layer cake that reaches to the sky, like some strange, genetically modified creature too large to be a morsel for any predator. The gulls’ red-rimmed eyes are open and still moist; unmistakably fresh.  There was a time when Iina would have paid anything for just one gull, peeled the hide expertly from the flesh, cooked it quickly, and gnawed every string of meat from the bone.  Now she doesn’t have to. She just wants something easy to serve to Jalo, to fulfill her duty and be left alone.

Iina stops at the next stand and stares at the dark, round loaves of bread, but can’t look the vendor in the eye. To open her mouth feels beyond her capacities.

”Cricket loaf?” the man asks.

Iina glances at him. He’s so tanned that he looks foreign. He couldn’t be, but the mere possibility is startling. It’s a reminder that outside the city-state walls there almost certainly still are foreigners, and maybe also former Helsinkiites. Maybe even Mom, Mikki, and Marius.

The vendor sizes Iina up, concludes she has some means.

”Fifty marks a loaf. Do you want one?”

Iina shakes her head and retreats, frightened away by the high price. He can see right through her. Scarcity demands vigilance, shoulders tight and eyes peeled, but her madness is cotton wool that slows her movements and fogs her mind. Her years of dependence on Jalo have made her soft.

She can already feel a stab of longing for Heaven. If she were there, she would be alone, but with other people. In Heaven there is no shortage of anything, no need to go shopping and eye other people as if they were wallets of money. No need to hurry. No shoes that chafe.

”I’ll be there soon,” Iina tells herself. ”I just have to finish these errands.”