There were no mirrors upstairs—not in his room, nor in the bathroom he used almost exclusively. Instead, they were downstairs: in his sister’s room, on the wall of his parents’ bedroom, in the small downstairs toilet, and above the washing machine in the bathroom, mounted on the yellow tiles. And those, well, he couldn’t do anything about those. His parents and sister had quietly put them all back after he once unscrewed them. But he didn’t care, didn’t explain himself either. He simply went outside, hands in his pockets, walking into the fields. The matter was never discussed again.
He usually woke up early, as early as his parents heading off to work and his sister on her way to school. He descended the stairs to the smell of coffee already reaching him halfway down. He greeted his father, who stood with his back to the table, slicing tomatoes and red peppers onto a yellow plate from Arabia. His mother arrived around the same time, hair sticking up, yawning at the end of the table. His sister was already drumming her spoon against the edge of the newspaper, chattering about school and Scouts, unbearably loud as always. The kettle hissed and fogged the black window, and the radio was on. It felt good to sit there, almost like he was heading out too. But when the car doors slammed and the yard emptied, he limped back upstairs, sank into his bed, and slept for another hour or two.
As he fell asleep at night, he thought about his sister. About that time he had carried her overstuffed bag and sleeping roll to the cargo hold of the coach bus and waved alongside their mother and father as the bus pulled away from the curb like a ship leaving port. He remembered her waving from the window, a little girl in her blue Scout scarf disappearing into traffic. He turned over to shake the years-old image from his mind because these days his sister mostly just annoyed him. But right away, he had to allow a drowsy thought to slip onto the papers. They didn’t even need a name anymore; the papers had become a category of their own, and there were piles of them in the dresser drawers. Stacks on the tables too. He gave them a particularly angry grunt before falling asleep.
The papers hadn’t changed in two years. They still coldly spoke of serious neuropsychological impairments and the possibility of lifelong disability. Every now and then, he leafed through them, hoping for some miracle, that the words might have changed. He had even dreamt of such a thing. Butterflies emerging from a plastered penis. He had woken up startled. The images lingered briefly in the dimness of the room. The dreams about his injury used to be entirely different. In those, he simply got better, and in the end people would marvel, in a tone of mild fatigue, at how he’d survived with so few consequences. Light finally rose to window level. He pulled the blanket higher. Sometimes, as morning broke, he felt a strange flicker of belonging. As if the same bright light—at home and in the schoolyard—somehow connected him to others. His reason told him such thoughts were nonsense. Even if in his mind the same groups of teenagers kept gathering in the same spots day after day, he was painfully aware that the vocational class had in fact already scattered into the world.
*
There was a time when he slept almost the entire day. From morning till night, in a deep, uninterrupted slumber. His body ached from lying in bed, the sheets slick with skin oils. That disgusted him, because he was actually a clean person, someone who used to spend nearly an hour a day showering. These days, however, his body no longer demanded the rest that his damaged brain had once so desperately needed. He could hear better now. Like the scurrying feet of mice on the brown paper covering the attic floor. And the hypnotic hush of his own breathing against the blanket. He knew he would have to get up eventually. Lying down was when the demons found him; all the strange images of what had happened, the sudden stabs of fear, like knife wounds. Their traces could leave him leaking unease for hours. He went to make more coffee and eat. He still ate whatever was around, even though he’d claim to his mother that he had made a real lunch again—that same old nonsense he was used to saying.
*
He would take his coffee and bread into his sister’s room and rummage through the drawers. Then into his father’s study, where he’d boot up the computer with bread still in his mouth and scroll through Facebook updates—at least that one person’s. And he’d snoop through his father’s search history, even though he knew it was boring: entangled human bodies excited him now about as much as mating animals on a Finnish nature documentary—and that, even to himself, was alarming! Now he wondered whether his father would try to act cheerful again when he came home—a word that made him twitch lately. He swallowed the last crumbs of bread and clicked through to some rock on YouTube. From Slayer’s 200-beats-per-minute blast-beat drumming he took real pleasure. His eyes closed. The raw screaming over the music felt like his own voice. He was so enraged by the whole family’s strange cheerfulness, which he found deeply twisted. Like when their mother, once again, would spend the evening industriously filling out rehab applications and appeals for care benefits under the living room’s small lamp. On the table would be stacked Basics of Neuropsychology, Rehabilitation of Brain Injuries, and other thick volumes. And his sister would smile like someone possessed, sitting next to their father on the couch, mock-arguing over the TV remote.
*
As evening came, he might hear his parents talking in the bedroom:
“So you really think things are fine like this?”
“I can’t worry all the time!”
“Well, I’ve noticed . . . You go jogging!”
“Miisa, we can’t . . . ”
The bed creaked.
“Come on now . . . I can’t take this!”
“Miisa, you . . . ”
The mumbling became unintelligible.
“ . . . Yeah,” his father cleared his throat. “Well, we go on anyway.”
*
The quieting evening revealed what it was really all about. After the lights went out, a crushing black chasm opened up between the lines of everyday life—one they tried to keep at bay during the day with forced cheerfulness. But at night, it wouldn’t stay away. Water ran somewhere, and his sister washed her hands—who knows for how long. His mother lay in silence, turned away from his father, and his father just as silently lay with eyes open. And he lay in his own room in his usual fetal position, the one he often curled into.
*
They’d been going fast on the straight stretch—let’s say a hundred and forty? Or hell, maybe even a hundred and sixty? Jyri had just stepped on the gas. The boys were in full-blown chaos mode. That’s how you got rid of sorrow too! Who had said that—was it Markku? The record was probably Markku’s: a hundred and eighty. Even Crazy-Markku had to slow down then, as the hills started to rise. Three humps in a row, steep enough to make your stomach drop, especially going downhill. That day, a red tractor with a hayload had been crawling up one of those hills. The driver’s hat bobbled above the seatback as Jyri downshifted, planning to swing out into the oncoming lane for the pass. The speedometer read 120 km/h. He had silently watched the car’s wild swerve into the opposite lane, its near miss in front of a dark blue Volvo’s nose, and its veering off the road—over the ditch, through the fireweed and cracking willows and whatever else was there. But the whole time, it felt like the car was inevitably heading toward that glacial boulder—one that, he would later feel, had been placed there at the end of the last Ice Age just to wait for them.
*
Now he wandered through the downstairs rooms, thinking about his homework. It was his mother and the rehab specialists’ invention; he always had a few assignments to do. That was how they tried to keep him active—by writing notes and attaching pictures to them to make planning actions easier. He felt a strong aversion to them, even though he completed the tasks, even rushed through them, because more than anything he feared that his mother or someone else—anyone—might see just how hard it still was for him to get things done; how slow he really was; how once he had mopped the floors before vacuuming, and how even now he might still pour coffee grounds into the brewing water if he didn’t stay alert. Today’s task was doing the dishes.
*
Drool had slipped unnoticed from the corner of his mouth onto the left side of his face—the paralyzed side. The slack muscles didn’t hold saliva, and accidents happened. In those moments, it felt like he’d been caught off guard. As if he’d secretly imagined himself unchanged, only to be proven wrong. He had just started washing the dishes. He stopped mid-motion and flung the dish brush into the foam, where it splashed and crackled. He wanted to curse. But what would it have changed? He picked up the brush again, only to flinch when he caught sight of his reflection. The downstairs bathroom door had been left open, and in the mirror was a boy whose skull was bare on one side, smooth as a bird’s egg and dented, like it had been struck with a hammer. Even his body looked strange—somehow slanted. He shut his eyes to escape the image, but now he felt dizzy and a little nauseous: even behind closed eyelids there was no hiding from it. The injuries had been many and varied. At first, he mostly just vomited. Vomited everywhere. He had no balance whatsoever. He rolled around on the lawn, constantly feeling as if he’d just gotten off the worst ride at Linnanmäki. Directions were hard to grasp. What was up, down, left, or right. When he got a little better and could stay on his feet, he still managed to get lost in the nearby supermarket—even though it didn’t really have that many sections—and the nearby woods were still off-limits, even though he used to know those paths by heart. His memory still stuttered, and he couldn’t even tell hot from cold with one hand. His left hand could easily burn on a stove plate if he wasn’t always vigilant about that sort of thing. When he opened his eyes again, he was struck by the thought that no one had invited him anywhere in a long time. At first, he had tried calling people, but they always seemed to have plans—plans that were difficult for him to join, anyway. So he had said, okay, okay, maybe I don’t have time after all. And then he stopped calling altogether. As if he were getting back at them somehow. But that, really, was the worst of the injuries—loneliness. Even if it didn’t show on the outside.
*
He lay down on the couch to rest—just for a moment, or so he told himself—but he fell asleep immediately. The fatigue was deep, almost like death. Sometimes even the smallest effort would trigger it. First, the feeling drained from his hands and feet, and then something seemed to pull him by the back into the depths of the couch, into some relieving darkness where even dreams couldn’t follow. But unconsciousness didn’t last long anymore. Even now, his eyelids were already fluttering, and sleep was fragmenting. He would lie there awake, unmoving.
*
He had only visited the boys’ graves once. That happened after the funeral—he hadn’t been able to attend that, partly because of his injuries. They had driven to the cemetery almost a year later, in two cars, even the grandparents joining for some reason. It was a clear, crisp day.
“Let’s leave the car up close,” his father fussed.
“What?” his mother said, clearly thinking of something else.
He secretly opened the pill bottle in his pocket. One Tramal tablet, quickly into his mouth. It would blur his mind a little too, he hoped, because he was afraid of how this would feel. Of course he had thought about the boys. In the hospital and afterward. Many times, he had almost called them, just to tell them what it felt like when they were gone.
Grandma and Grandpa waited at the lot already. They chatted about acquaintances buried there, scattered in different corners. He let himself fall behind on the cemetery path, deliberately. His parents pushed the gate open together, but walked along opposite edges of the path, apart from each other. Grandma and Grandpa followed behind. A magpie cackled on the edge of a trash bin, and as a wisp of cloud drifted out from behind the church tower, he suddenly remembered the summer apartment in Spain. The one his father never bought. Their family had never really just been “cheerful.”
He didn’t like how his father had given things up for his sake—and grown old. His father used to blast his favorite music from his youth, dance around the house, jog, play, and even plan—well—the summer apartment. And now he was . . . like that. Slightly hunched. Even jogging had become gray repetition, and conversation that repulsive, forced cheerfulness again.
He thought of what it had been like before, when he was a teenager, staying out late. His father would stay up, waiting, pretending to watch TV or read. When he came home, his father surely smelled the cheap wine or cigarettes but never said anything. Then they’d cook fried potatoes together in the kitchen, with mouth-burning chili sauces or some dishes so weird they made them laugh.
And his mother hadn’t changed for the better either. She had always been a little high-strung, but now she practically crackled. Was it even safe to talk to her anymore? What could you say? She was obsessed with everything related to rehabilitation. That obsession seeped through the tight surface of her skin like gas, bursting out in sharp instructions, scolding, and sometimes even apologies.
And then there was his sister. She never got less than an A-minus on a test anymore, and cried if she didn’t get a perfect score. A real little rehabilitator too—watching his steps, correcting his posture when necessary. These were the thoughts that occupied his mind at the graves more than the friends who had died.
*
He had searched the internet for discussion threads using the keyword “disability.”
“Should disabled people be allowed to reproduce?” someone dumb had asked seriously on Finland24’s relationships forum.
“What do they cost society?” another genius pondered.
“They should all be gassed like good old Adolf did,” wrote someone under the username Third Reich.
He laughed at it all, drank coffee and laughed, but kept googling more, and it was as if the material had suddenly taken over—some kind of invasion—because how else could you explain throwing up all over the keyboard?
*
Once, he had followed his sister and her friends. It was spring, the time when nature awakens, and his sister chirped on the phone like a bird. Maybe he had listened to her for too long and gotten irritated, because after she left, he had gotten dressed too, hobbled down the stairs, hurried across the yard, and cut through the woods toward the gravel pit. That’s where they were hanging out—just like he used to, back when he was younger. So—why not? Why shouldn’t he be allowed to do the same now?
Suddenly, he felt ridiculously giddy, and the company of the younger kids seemed like exactly the right choice. He hesitated in hiding for a moment, then made up his mind. For at least a minute or two, he rejoiced in stepping out from his hiding place, taking a step forward.
It only took the dry crack of a branch echoing through the forest to trigger the collapse. Like searchlights, their eyes found him at the edge of the gravel pit. That’s when he got soaked—with shame.
*
And then there was the one. The one he still actively tried not to think about, even now. That one had only visited once, and it was a visit he especially avoided recalling whenever he could.
It was a rainy spring day, and he had heard voices downstairs. He hadn’t even realized the front door had opened—because of the rain, of course.
“He’s in his room,” someone said, but the rest of the sentence was lost in the patter against the roof.
“Can I go in? Or maybe you could ask him to come out? I’ve tried calling, like a dozen times, but he never picks up . . . ”
“Ask him yourself. He doesn’t listen to me.”
Then he heard footsteps, a knock on the door, and a question:
“Emil? Emil, are you there? Emil, it’s me . . . ”
The rain just kept falling, even after the footsteps retreated.
*
Didn’t they realize what he looked like now?
But how much did he really care anymore—about any of it? How much did it matter, in the end, whether there was anyone left or not? Whether he was accepted or not? How much did it matter if he recovered or not? How much did it even matter whether his father or mother were happy and cheerful? How much did he care about being alive at all?
*
A blue container had appeared at the edge of the field, just beyond the lawn—a storage unit for electronic scrap from his father’s workplace. Let’s state the most important thing right away: the color. Blue. Its dented corrugated metal surface caught the light in a way that, to him, was irresistibly blue. And the container would be here during the renovation at his father’s workplace. After that, the container and its junk would travel to Africa—to burden nature and people there.
“Well, I guess someone will still get some use out of it,” his father had said. “At least it gives those poor devils some hope. They’ll strip the copper out of it, the components, then the plastics . . . ”
He had imagined the container dumped on a beach in Africa. There were palm trees there and . . .
“Then they’ll sell the parts at the markets,” his father had continued, “and . . . ”
“Can I use them?” he had said suddenly. So suddenly he surprised even himself—who had spoken? His father had mumbled a confused objection, but really, he didn’t seem to be against it at all.
*
Lately, things had undeniably started to change. He realized it now, as he moved once again from the couch to the container, crossing the yard. He had genuinely begun to worry his parents—in a new kind of way. He no longer bothered to eat. He wasn’t seen lounging on the living room couch flipping through channels, nor lying in bed for long, at least not until eleven. He had asked his father to borrow an extension cord and run power from the garage outlet to the container. He closed the door behind him if anyone came snooping. When asked what he was doing, he responded with irritation or not at all. He was defiant, focused, even irritable. Wisps of smoke drifted up to the blue sky from the container’s open vents.
His sister, who had been spying on him from the container’s side wall since the very first evening, had heard a radio playing—or a television. She ran off to report to their parents, who, to her disappointment, didn’t quite know how to react. The father, flustered, had lent him an angle grinder, with which he enthusiastically began slicing up pipes; the machine’s piercing whine cut sharply through the air. The mother started ranting. The father shouldn’t have lent him that thing—or the soldering iron—and certainly not, for heaven’s sake, the MIG welder!
“Soon he’ll have his fingers and head blown off! We should be focusing on rehabilitation, not these . . . pointless distractions!”
“Miisa . . . ” he heard his father trying.
“And you just go jogging! Jogging and loafing while your child needs to be rehabilitated!”
He slammed the container door shut. Blue dusk.
But what exactly was he doing in there? What had so passionately gripped someone who supposedly couldn’t do anything anymore? Was there no rational explanation?
First of all, he had begun to remember. Because all that doing—somehow—set something in motion inside his dented head.
*
He surfaced from the coolness of the swimming pond. A hand had pushed his head underwater, and that made him remember her—Kiki, that wild, dark-haired girl who had nearly drowned him back then, and whom he had fallen for with all the force a person can fall in love.
His thoughts leapt from one memory to another, and suddenly the cloudless sky burst into view behind all those images—you know that moment, when the surface of the water acts like a fisheye lens—360 degrees—and you can see the trees along the shore, everything!
That’s how he remembered, or more accurately, how he dreamed inside his memories.
*
Then he tinkered—with computers, printers, radios. Bundles of cables, monitors, unidentifiable devices. He bustled around, clearing a semicircle in the middle that somehow resembled a cockpit. He worked feverishly. And he hoped—though he didn’t really know what exactly he hoped for.
*
Sometimes, lying in bed, he remembered things too clearly. He remembered the hospital: the hiss of the ventilator and the steady beeping that made it hard to sleep. And he remembered how his hands had been tied to the bedrails so he wouldn’t rip out the wires or try to get to the bathroom, even though he couldn’t yet sit up. He also remembered the flattened atmosphere of the ward, the depressing lack of events, where hope stopped even trying to raise its head. He remembered the nurses’ awkward small talk and, for some strange reason, the pile of grated carrots on the edge of his hospital plate. But when he shut the container door behind him, all of that seemed to dissolve—and something else began to rise in its place.
*
And so the days went on, had already been going on for a while, until one day he found himself again standing uncertain in front of the piles of junk. He sat down and chose an old black stereo system. Completely busted, he thought, and unscrewed the top.
And suddenly time began to move faster again, and it was as if the container itself had changed. There was a strange vibration in the air around him. Then again, maybe that was only natural—even his father had looked a bit dizzy after visiting the container. At least he had seemed that way.
It was as if the blue of the container had started to glow more vividly against the deep green of the grass. And the space inside the container expanded. It kept growing. From the door, it no longer looked like a cramped storage unit, but like a room—spacious enough for the whole family to live in.
That day, he first remembered all kinds of little things. Like that one time he snuck out during their early dating days—he wasn’t allowed to go out because of exams. He had slipped through his bedroom window and the others had waited just beyond the yard light. Then they had gone to some deserted summer cottage pier to drink beer and kiss, with the city lights glowing across the bay. Later, they had biked fast in the dark, through patches of mist on chilly spring nights, the first insects of the season stinging their cheeks. That was when it had started, years ago.
*
The most painful memory took its time. Not that he’d ever really forgotten it—it just hadn’t hurt until now. They had all been drunk after the nightclub. Kiki had kissed another guy, their tongues probably tied in knots. They had probably already slept together too? Crazy-Markku thought so. Said he’d seen them together before.
“I’m gonna beat the crap out of him!”
“Hey, calm down!”
“Get them apart!”
A brief scuffle. Then engagement rings clinking on the pavement.
“So that’s that, then.” Kiki got spat on.
“Stupid whore!”
“Come on, man, let’s just hit the road. Get in the car and go!”
*
Dinner was kidney stew. Long-cooked, thick, and salty. Pretty disgusting, actually. His mother sighed and snapped at his father, probably not even realizing it. His father mumbled, his sister chirped—nervously, like she somehow sensed something.
He stood up from the table. He figured soon they’d all be looking at him.
“Mom, he’s not going to do something self-destructive, is he?”
“I don’t think so . . . but this can’t be good either!”
“Mom, should we get him a doctor? A . . . psychotherapist?”
“Let’s just monitor things calmly,” his father probably said.
Or something like that they were surely saying after he left the table, heading once again to his container—which today felt especially inviting.
*
He stayed there even into the night. Soldering furiously while stars already twinkled above. Connecting yellow wires to blue, or blue to green—didn’t matter what to what. He was that fired up.
The solder melted into glistening droplets on the tip of the iron and dripped onto the intersecting copper wires. The radios started to crackle again, playing fragments of programs at their own will. He had grown bored with the busted black stereo and connected its wires to other devices. He didn’t really even know what they all were.
Now the channels changed manically, the broadcasts merged into each other. The electricity sparked and smoked—probably dangerously so.
Until suddenly, a clear melody rang out. One he recognized, though he couldn’t remember its name. Its familiarity licked at him. Then the sound turned into static, like the steady hum of a transformer.
From beyond the edge of the forest came barking. Foxes, maybe? Or was that a badger?
He moved to the door to look. Moonlight shone on the damp lawn. The sounds felt sharpened. The forest and clouds seemed to push toward him, as if demanding something.
He walked back and forth under the dim moon, uneasy.
At last, he dug the phone out of his pocket—it had been there for a long time. The number was still there too, right under K.
But he wouldn’t call.
Hell yes, he would.
But they wouldn’t answer. Not at this hour.
But they did.
*
His father was the first to wake up again. The coffee maker started to gurgle. His mother yawned loudly, his sister picked out jeans in her room.
You could almost believe it was just another normal day.
But his father kept glancing toward the stairs, expectantly.
An irrational thought crept into his father’s mind.
Had he truly gone—
with his blue container?
