The Book of Hope 30: Honeymoon

Man, where has this summer gone? It's been like a month since my last post, I can't believe it. Anyways, I forgot to show you my pictures of Christina's baby. Her name is My, named after "Little My" in Moomintroll. Isn't she totally amazing??? So now it's gonna be another month till my next post, because I'm off for three weeks on my so-called honeymoon. Which involves driving cross-country and then back again, believe it or not. To pick up some furniture. So I'll be seeing you all again in September hopefully, just as school starts. Blecch!

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The Book of Hope 29: Only the Shadow Knows

When we got back to Pauanne, Riita went off by herself somewhere to cell Erkki and I guess tell him the good news that he was all forgiven, so I took the opportunity to respond to all the messages in my voice-mail. But no one really had time for me. Christina was all weird and busy, Jo answered her phone by snarling "what?!?" (she's gonna make a really great pediatrician someday), and Kerry had picked up a new phrase that she used three times in our short convo: "It made me want to throw up in my mouth a little." I made a mental note to myself to try really really hard not to ever use it. Because I'm so verbally suggestible, it's pathetic. I mean, I could easily find myself saying it over and over even to strangers like I did with "crunk" or "toodles" or "he's just not that into you" or whatever, and I didn't want to go around implying to everyone that I was throwing up in my mouth all the time whenever they said anything. Already I was feeling the temptation, though. Because, you know, that was actually happening a lot, especially lately.

Anyways, because I didn't have anything better to do, I wandered across the parking lot to see if Dr P was around. He was--and for once he was in a really great mood. In fact, it was like the happiest I'd ever seen him, since he was usually cowering under a shawl or something and blubbering or moaning. But today he was beaming and smiling with all his chins and practically prancing around waving his arms, once Gailis and Matsson helped lower him down the steps of his RV. He was all dressed up again, and was even wearing his little cape.

"Success, Miss Hope, success!" he crowed, and began sort of dancing an oddly girlish wobbling little jig. "Thanks to you and Miss Riita. If I were a drinking man I would indeed break out the champagne this fine morn."

I was like, "Yeah, congrats! I just read in the paper that Likkanen is really alive after all."

"Even better than that--well, can't you see it for yourself?"

"See what?" I said stupidly.

"My shadow, dear Miss Hope, my shadow. He has returned! Behold!" and he pointed at the ground. Sure enough, his shadow was there, prancing and jiggling along with him. Only--well maybe it was my imagination, but it really did sorta look different somehow, like it didn't quite belong to him. For one thing, his shadow was definitely thinner than he was (that had to be an optical illusion though--I mean, anything looked thinner than Dr P!), and from some angles it looked a little like it was wearing a hat or a cap or something. Maybe a beret. But it was really impossible to tell for sure, since he was moving around so much. Still, he'd obviously got his mojo back or whatever, and that was a good thing. At least I assumed it was. Maybe a monster was about to be unleashed on the world.

And maybe subconsciously I was sort of dreading that, because totally without thinking I opened my big fat mouth and said something kind of bitchy. In fact, it was exactly the same mean kind of thing the Mothership always says to sort of 'cut you down to size', as she would put it, like saying "Aren't you afraid your skin will break out again like it did last time if you eat that ice cream?" or "Do you really think you should be driving again so soon after your little accident?" In fact, I gotta say it was the first moment in my life I ever felt like I was totally channeling her--I guess because Dr P had seemed way more manageable and even kind of sweeter and more helpless and dependent before when he was being all scared and miserable. I guess I'd felt in control or something.

What I actually said was, "So now are you gonna look in the mirror again?" And I could of kicked myself the moment the words were out of my mouth, because in like two seconds all his jollyness (is that a word? "Jollity" sounds stupid) was gone, and he sort of seemed all deflated and saggy like a big pink party balloon. A party balloon with plastic Bob's Big Boy Restaurant orange hair. With a guilty sinking feeling I realized I was gonna make a really lousy mother myself someday. Before I'd said anything about mirrors poor Dr P had been laughing his 'hearty' theatrical ho-ho-ho laugh in a deep voice as he danced around--now he wound down like a clockwork toy and started to tremble.

"I haven't seen any sign of Alex today," I said, desperately trying to change the subject. "What's up with him?"

"Mr Alex is in disgrace," he muttered. "I'm quite cross with him, Miss Hope. Last night he was instructed to lead you onstage, not to injure you. Blood must be given voluntarily in order for such ceremonies to be properly effective."

So I was all like, "Well look on the bright side--it did work! I mean, if if I can be all positive about it with this eggplant glued to my forehead and my nose covered in bandages and the rest of me all covered with mosquito bites, then I guess everyone else can, too."

"Yes, yes of course." But suddenly he didn't sound so convinced any more. Maybe he'd seen the newspaper that morning too and realized that Likkanen had actually been alive all along, making all the stuff we'd done the night before pretty pointless really, except as an excuse for a really weird party. Or maybe he was coming down off a blood-sugar high and just pouting. I mean, it obviously took a major zoo-feeding every few hours to keep his enormous bulk going.

"Hey, you got your shadow back. That's a good thing anyway, right?"

He burst into tears. "You think I'm a fool," he said. He took out a monogrammed handkerchief and loudly and wetly blew his nose into it. I had always thought of Scandinavians as you know, sort of dignified, emotionally reserved people, but between him and Riita I was beginning to feel like I was trapped in a Spanish fotonovela.

Meanwhile I was being like, "No, of course i don't think you're a fool, Dr P. In fact, I think you're one of the smartest and most interesting people I've ever known. I mean, you actually know really awesome things none of my professors have even dreamed of. Because you've like lived through them and stuff for real. You're an amazing person."

"You've read my website, haven't you, Miss Hope?"

"Every word," I lied. Well, be fair, most of it is pretty boring.

"In that case, you must be familiar with the term I have used to describe the world we see reflected in the mirror, the 'Anti-Pleroma'. This of course is a misnomer, but will do as well as any other. Possibly you know that the term 'Pleroma' is Greek, literally meaning 'fullness'--Paul of Tarsus and other early Christian writers adopted the concept from the Qabbala, and even Jung employed it in modern times as the origin of all divine goodness. According to them the opposite of the Pleroma is the 'Creatura', or the world that God created. But this is nonsense--the opposite of God is not the physical universe, not even the astral plane or the Satanic Hell. It is the absence of, or more specifically, the death and decay of God Himself, like a form of anti-matter. The Anti-Pleroma." He took my arm and we began to hobble together out of the parking lot and along the empty driveway while he droned on and on. "The early gospel writers had the most childlike notions of sin and virtue and how they were opposed, and despite the death of religion, this simple-mindedness persists even to the present day. All such logic is subjective in our society and therefore subject to endless interpretation. Scientists even tell us now that there is no such thing as time itself, that events unfold like a froth of bubbling alternative branches and that the human mind invents a rational sequence of interpretion in order to create its own sanity. So it is, I believe also with the 'Mirrorland'--it has no logical form or laws that we can understand, and so our minds assign it a familiar structure based on the 'reality' we have memorized. Tell me, Miss Hope, have you ever seen anything...unusual or disturbing in the mirror?"

We stopped, and I looked through the fence across the meadow where I'd glimpse the floating black garbage bags. Of course now it just looked like a Monet or Corot painting to me--anything could be floating around there now.

"Sort of," I said.

"Ah, then you have at least a primitive notion of what I mean. And why I should be terrified of mirrors. Quite aside, ho ho ho, from the more normal reasons of human vanity." I tried to think of something nice to say about his appearance but couldn't think of anything. So for once I just shut up. Big mistake. Because he didn't.

"The first time I was attacked," he went on, "Was when my dear friend and mentor Frederik Wilander lay on his deathbed. In Sweden we have national health care for the dying--not like your system in America where the elderly are all abandoned--but unfortunately the helpers that the social services sent to look after him were very incompetent. There was one Serb who wasn't so very bad, but the Somali women were useless--worse, they allowed their husbands inside to steal things, though of course, there was very little left in poor Wilander's flat that he hadn't already pawned or sold off already. This magnificent man, perhaps the greatest man of our century, you will recall, was the grandfather of your friend Mr Likkanen, who did absolutely nothing at all to alleviate his suffering. In fact, I gave the social services his address in New York, and he never responded to their letters at all. But perhaps he was busy at the time. In any case, because I was myself homeless and possessed considerable medical training after I found one of them hitting him, I dismissed the Somalis and looked after Wilander myself--he was by then both senile and incontinent, so this was no small thing. The saddest aspect of it was that he rarely recognized me, but instead would revile me as an enemy, often screaming the most terrible abuse aloud at me, which hurt me very deeply. But of course, this is often normal with dementia, so naturally I forgave it. And naturally I was still alert to any wisdom he might still pass onto me, since I was a mere novice at the magical arts compared to the great Frederik Wilander, despite his sorry condition. In particular, I was hopeful that he might offer some clue to the password of his bank's safety deposit account. He had some months earlier, when he was still somewhat compos mentis, told me of its contents--the final testament of Adolf Hitler--and of the provisions he had made for its inheritance.

So it was no mystery to me when Wilander first removed all the mirrors from his flat and had painted all the window-panes a flat gray color. I knew that he had taken Hitler's words very seriously indeed and perhaps had even conducted some experiments of his own with mirrors, but I must confess to you I was not inclined to lend any credence to it, not even to the slightest degree. It struck me at the that the whole story might be nothing more than a senile fantasy of poor Wilander's. Magic is every bit as rigorous a science as physics or chemistry, you know--thus, I was already comfortable in the realms of both the living and the dead. I could not imagine that a third and far more terrifying plane of existence might lurk inside the mirror. After all, reflections are present everywhere on many surfaces--they are an ancient and normal part of daily human life. It did not occur to me that they might simply be an optical illusion masking a reality far more sinister.

Because it is only we humans who are deceived by reflections. Animals, you know, are not. An animal will either ignore its own reflection in a mirror or thesurface of a pool, try to attack it, or else, like a kitten, attempt to sneak behind the mirror's frame in order to solve its mystery. A dog will bark--we assume at the 'strange dog' it sees reflected there--but its instincts may well be keener than our own. Perhaps a dog is growling and barking at the terrible threat it senses emanating from the Anti-Pleroma. After all, such a loyal beast will warn its masters of many another more mundane threat--and defend them against it. But of course, I had none of these thoughts at the time. Tell me, Miss Hope, when you saw whatever it was you did see in the mirror, did you also sense a deep humming vibration?"

I was like, "Huh, what do you mean?" I guess I was sort of surprised to be suddenly included in the conversation again. Normally when Dr P got going his lectures weren't exactly Socratic.

"A feeling of vibration in your bones or teeth?"

I tried to think. "I dunno really. I guess I was just too freaked to notice--it only lasted a few seconds, anyway."

He nodded wisely like an owl, another of the fake-o 'jolly fat man' mannerisms he had developed like the hollow laugh. "Yes, usually the influence of the Mirrorland is very weak indeed, particularly in daylight. And you are not a dabbler in the magical arts, which I believe acts as a magnet to attract it. That is why Wilander's deathbed was such an extraordinary nexus of power. Have you ever attended a dying person, by chance?"

"Yes, actually I have."

"Ah, then you know well the sensation of keeping watch for hours and days, anticipating every breath as they grow weaker and more labored. Very quickly the worst part becomes the boredom--it is impossible to read or watch television, of course, and one is too upset and distracted to work. Yet, all too soon, one begins to wish for the torture simply to be over, so that life may go on again. And of course, such thoughts are instantly accompanied by tremendous guilt. Such were my emotions attending Wilander's deathbed at any rate, mingled with many more: desolation at my loss, shame that I had not done more to provide comfort for his declining years, fear of my own future without his wise counsel and guidance, and of course regret over so many missed opportunities. Even at that very moment. Because, you see, a scene of death is ripe with possibilities for the true magician or sorcerer to exploit. Many of the most arcane and potent spells or ceremonies can or even must be conducted at such an event, or a body part or essential fluid extracted for future use. Naturally, as the Grand Master of the Craft, Wilander would have enthusiastically wished me to utilize his death to the full in this regard--but of course, I dared not. The old man had invoked and offended so many Invisibles and even great Powers in the course of his physical life that I could literally feel the weight of them gathering about the dark, airless little room. Had I attempted any sort of ritual, even one designed to ease his passage into the next world, I might easily have caused such a terrible etheric disaster that the entire umbra of all Stockholm would been disrupted or even destroyed, like an invisible nuclear explosion. And so, propped up on my own little pallet on the floor beside him, all I could do was patiently await his end. When it came at last, as is sadly so often the case, I was napping from sheer exhaustion and missed it.

I had no stethescope, of course, but after I had fruitlessly checked for a pulse with my fingers, I took out a small pocket mirror and held it to his mouth in order to detect any misting of breath. There was none. Yet suddenly I could not move. As I have said the flat was very dark, due to the fact that Wilander had painted all the window-panes a battle-ship grey, because there were no lamps left in the place, I could only see by the light that oozed through the painted glass. However, during the weeks I had spent there, my vision had adjusted to the gloom, and moreover his death took place in broad daylight. And so when I caught sight of something stirring deep inside his throat and nostrils, I was assured that it was not my imagination."

"What did you see?" By now we had wandered out into the garbage-bag meadow and stopped to look back at Pauanne. Above it the sky was already darkening--not the sudden violent pop-up squalls we had had along the coast the day before, but a big serious front moving in. The paper had said we were in for several days of heavy clouds and steady rain to usher in August and the national return to work.

"A universe," said Dr P dramatically.

"You saw the universe inside the old man's nose?" O-K...

"No, no--I saw a universe, Miss Hope. Perhaps 'saw' is too strong a word. I became aware of tiny creatures inside him. I can scarcely describe them to you--for one, none of them looked the same. You are familiar with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, of course? It is my belief that he was describing the world he saw inside the mirror, because that is very much what I was reminded of. But I did not 'see' this, precisely. Rather, I felt it. This feeling began in the bones of my right hand, the hand that was holding the pocket mirror, first as a tingling, then as a painful deadening vibration that slowly spread up my arm and thence to the rest of my body. I realized to my horror that my finger-bones were actually fusing to the mirror itself, so in a sense I was 'seeing' the mirror world directly through my finger-tips. It was utterly dark, filled with a bluish illumination rather like an X-ray--the landscape seemed alien and barren, yet violated and half-destroyed, as if some terrible war had taken place on the moon. Yet in every direction. tall spindly towers that slightly resembled radio towers reared up, darker than the blackness around them, and I felt it was these towers that were giving off the powerful vibrations that were about to shake me apart. In addition, I should add that there was a 'fuzzy' organic quality to everything I sensed there, like microscopic photographs I had seen of the surfaces of insects or mold spores. And so, after the event was over and my rational mind rebelled at the experience, I wondered if I had not somehow hallucinated an optical magnification of Wilander's pores and nasal hairs, perhaps brought on by stress and over-exhaustion.

In any case, it seemed to me at that instant that I could perceive thousands of creatures moving between the dark mold-spore radio-towers. Some seemed almost human in appearance--their naked flesh glowed a shade paler than their surroundings--others appeared to be their overseers, and these had strange bird or insect-like heads and were wearing dark uniforms with gleaming jack-boots. All of these beings seemed to be going about their tasks with a terrifying air of everyday practicality, and none, I noticed, possessed eyes or ears. All at once I became aware of an intense electrical force inside each of the towers, as if each were an identity broadcasting itself into an infinite void, where only such pulse-like signals could be perceived. In that instant, I became aware that I, too, was merely another of these organic towers, and that I was receiving the last message of my dear old friend, Frederik Wilander. But it was not a message in the form of human words, rather it was one of emotions, each of which I experienced inside my innermost self as intense bursts of low-frequency sound, rather as those teenaged youths must who convert their cars into mobile stereo speakers. First came a trembling wave of intense love and relief at my presence, closely followed closely by sheer terror--and then at the end a warning to save myself. With an almost superhuman effort, I forced myself back into my own consciousness--and found myself physically standing over my dead friend's body with the mirror shattered in my hand. I was bleeding profusely where its shards had pierced me.

This was my first visit to the Anti-Pleroma, but alas, it was not to be my last. The second occasion was some months later. By then, I had stumbled on the greatest of my mentor's secrets, the reddish powder that Alchemists call 'Phoenix'--the Philosopher's Stone. You see, most people believe that the Adept struggles to discover this secret in order to attain limitless wealth through the transmutation of baser metals into gold. In fact, that is only a 'by-product' of the Great Work. The Alchemist's true ambition is to achieve immortality. When ingested, the powder can prolong human life--even make one eternal!"

"Um," I said. "Your friend Wilander obviously knew that. So how come he died if he was taking this powder?" Maybe he took a powder, I thought to myself, har har.

"Yes, that mystified me, as well, for a time. At least, until I was almost captured again by the Anti-Pleroma--and then I understood at last. It happened one winter's day on a crowded sidewalk in front of the NK department store on Hamngatan. Several of its facings are mirrored, and as I walked past, jostled by crowds of shoppers and pedestrians, I suddenly fancied that I glimpsed Frederik Wilander waving from them to attract my attention. I stopped and looked wildly around, then approached the wall of the building. There was no sign of Wilander, but catching sight of my own reflection I began to experience the same faint sense of urgent vibration that I had felt at his death. It began in the fillings of my teeth, then spread to the teeth themselves, then to the bones of my skull. It was as if my eyeballs were exploding with it and would soon run down my face like the yolks of poached eggs. The pain of these vibrations, centered on my teeth, became overpoweringly intense--in order to palliate them, I moved closer to the NK wall and, opening my mouth as wide as possible, placed my teeth against its surface. I felt as though they were flowing like liquid mercury into the mirror itself. At the same time I heard a screaming high-ptched sound in my ears, and my lungs seemed to fill up with molten lead. It was an actual relief to fall into the Anti-Pleroma.This time it was not dark inside it--I suppose because it was reflecting a busy city street in daylight--but there were still the qualities of the X-ray and the organic in my sensation of it. At the same time my vision remained rooted behind in the real world. Directly behind the reflection of my face in the glass, I was also uncomfortably aware of my physical human form, grossly distorted and melting. I have no doubt that had it not been for the prompt intervention of a security guard, I would have been sucked forever into Mirrorland.

Because in those few moments that I stood there, I suddenly realized the fate that my poor departed friend Wilander had suffered. You see, it was now obvious to me that his own shadow had been stolen from him somehow, just as mine was some several days ago--as you can bear witness to, my dear. Initially, I had assumed that the sole reason he was living in darkness was that he was afraid of reflections. But that was only part of it--otherwise he would have employed oil lamps inside his home. But he did not, because it is possible to delay the inevitable death and decay of the shadowless soul by existing in darkness. For the magician, an ordinary death holds terror, of course--but it is not the terror of the unknown, as it is for so many. No, no, it is the terror, I would say, of the known. Like me, Wilander had crossed into the underworld, had cheated death, had exchanged one shadow for another, had employed sorcery to gain his own ends and in doing so had made many etheric enemies--with only the distant hope of a Christian salvation at the end of it after aeons of atonement. Like me you are a Christian, Miss Hope, so you understand that even for such a sinner as myself there does still exist that faint, distant hope for eventual redemption. However, that does not exist in the Anti-Pleroma. The Anti-Pleroma is the opposite of God's Grace, which can penetrate even the nethermost reaches of what we think of as Hell. The Anti-Pleroma is a place where God never existed and is therefore dead and decayed and so cannot reach into. And by ingesting the Philosopher's Stone, which must itself contain some essence of it, he condemned himself to the Anti-Pleroma forever. And so, Miss Hope, have I.

Like Wilander, I have been eating the powder for some years. And this is why I became so childishly and irrationally terrified, you see, at the prospect of my own 'death'. My only hope for the future now is never under any circumstances to allow myself to die."

"Wow!" I said. I mean, what else can you say to something like that? Good luck? A light drizzle began to fall. We turned and began to walk back toward the parking lot.

"And it may well be that Adolf Hitler's book will provide me with that key. That's why it is necessary for us to speak with Mr Likkanen as soon as possible. We must break camp at once--our time here is over."

"Well, I hope you won't fire Alex on my account anyway," I said uncomfortably.

"Why would I do that?"

"Well, it sounded like he was in your dog-house or whatever." This made Dr P start ho-ho-hoing again.

"Worse than that, he is in Tampere." Seeing my baffled look, he went on, "Tampere is Finland's industrial capital. It is also the headquarters of Nokia."

"OK, but I mean why did you send Alex there?"

"Because that is where Mr Likkanen is at this moment, in hospital. He was medically evacuated there by helicopter after his collapse--Tampere has the most advanced trauma care unit in Finland, it seems. My shadow has returned to me with this--and much other--information. So we are all driving there now. Mr Alex has merely gone ahead to make the arrangements." A spattering of heavier drops came down around us, and I could see a tall dark blob under a pie-shaped one coming toward us across the field. It was Gailis carrying an umbrella. Something about the scene reminded me of the Three Witches of Eastwick--which I was even more reminded of when I saw Siirka-Liisa and Gunilla waiting for me with Riita beside her yellow car. Apparently they were catching a ride with us to Tampere. Dr Praetorius would have to lose about 200 pounds to look more like Jack Nicholson, though--and get a personality transplant.

Before I went inside our RV to pack, he coughed and cleared his throat a few times. "My very dear Miss Hope," he said. "About the little matter we discussed yesterday. When I asked you to marry me, naturally I assumed I was to die very soon and would therefore be no great burden to you. In fact I welcomed the idea of leaving behind someone who truly understood me, someone who knew of my fate in the Anti-Pleroma and would be a proper caretaker of my vast library. After all, at the end of the day all any of us ever really desire is simply to be remembered by someone. However, I do understand that, being a healthy, vital young woman, very naturally you might now be appalled at the thought of marrying such a grotesque old figure, one who, moreover, may very well enjoy eternal life. So you must be entirely selfish in your answer."

Whenever the Mothership would get a bit tipsy and was mad at my dad she would always either talk about 'going on the game' if anything ever happened to him or else she would tell the story of how her high school sweetheart, the only boyfriend she ever had before Dad, had proposed to her the summer they graduated. And, word for word, her little rejection speech. And now, to my total shock and horror, I actually found myself recycling it! I was totally turning into my mother in the course of a single conversation.

"Wow, Dr P, I'll always treasure that you asked me to marry you. It's the first time anyone's ever asked me--and with my luck, it'll probably be the last. But I just can't help feeling that even though you're a really terrific catch and any woman would be honored to accept your proposal [OK, that was a total stretch], it's just that I don't think we'd be very happy together." Notice I didn't use the word "flattered" even once. Or "ewww" or "gross" either. Anyway, when I finished, I found him giving me like a sad little smile.

"But that's not the real reason of course. You are in love with someone else."

So I was like, "Shut up! I am???"

"Yes, my shadow told me that as well," he said.

"Did he say who with?" I mean, it sure was news to me. But Dr P just shook his head.


To be continued...

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The Book of Hope 28: One Of Our Zombies Is Missing

I had the world's worst hangover when I woke up. Ever. And it was so not fair, because I hadn't actually done anything to deserve it! I hadn't even had a single beer. My nose and forehead were all swollen up like a balloon, and obviously I'd bled some more in the night because the pillowcase was all stained with nasty black gooey stuff--I almost fainted when I saw it. In the bathroom mirror I saw that the spot where my face had crashed into the rock, right where my nose meets my brow, was turning all purple and had an ugly cut on it. I was covered in mosquito bites, my streaked make-up made me look like a photo of a Jane Doe corpse in a morgue, and my hair was a total mess. I felt like a casualty on CSI. Not just an actress playing a casualty--a real one. The kind that could walk and talk, maybe--but only to those 'medium' detectives who see dead people. I could see a future job market for psychic cosmeticians.

Just to put all this in even clearer perspective for me, Riita showed up at that point looking all golden and glowing like a nature goddess. Don't get me wrong, nothing could make the girl look beautiful--she was too solidly built and plain for that. But she was all brown from the sun, her hair was streaked with gold, and she was even humming! Which was totally disgusting. She'd spent the whole night stoned and doing God knows what with who, and she was practically purring like a cat--meanwhile I, who'd done absolutely nothing at all, was a total wreck. To add insult to injury, the moment she walked in and took a look at me, she started trying to clean me up in full clucking I-told-you-so mother-hen mode, with no sign at all of the crazed Maenad who'd had public sex as part of a Black Magic mass orgy just a few hours earlier.

"Oh my poor, poor Hoop," she kept saying while she dabbed ointment on me and stuck washcloths in my eyes and tried to comb my hair out by its roots, until I was just about ready to punch her out.

"Where's Kimmo?" I finally asked her instead. She shrugged and made a face like she wasn't sure who I was talking about. I decided to twist the knife in a little more. "He seemed like he was really into you last night" (hee hee.) But she just shrugged indifferently again.

She was like, "Oh, there is an American word for that, I think. He was just my 'f--k-buddy' for our holiday. But now the holiday is over. Besides, I think he is already going back to Gumbostrand now."

"Where's that?" It sounded like someplace on stilts on a bayou in Louisiana.

"A little seaside town near Helsinki. He lives at Ior Bock's house--you know, the crazy old hippie man. All the band lives there." Oh yeah, I vaguely remembered that convo from the night before. What else was I forgetting?

"So, are you gonna see him again when you get back?"

She gave a little snort of disdain. "No, no--he is too pretty for me," she said. "And I don't think he is really such a nice person. Perfect companion for vacation, though!" Damn, sometimes I really wish I was Finnish. They're just so amazingly...well, practical. Nothing ever gets wasted in that place. Especially not tears.

Since there was no food in the RV, and neither of us was in the mood to share another disgusting meal with Dr P, we decided to drive into Kaustinen and get some breakfast, then look for an optician's shop and a drug store. "But first you must see a doctor, Hoop," Riita kept saying over and over very firmly. "I am sure your nose is broken, and this could be dangerous for you. It could become terribly infected. Besides you have such a pretty nose, we don't want it to become ugly and crooked, do we?" Since Riita was always wrong at the top of her voice, her opinion made me feel a bunch better. However, I couldn't totally count on it, since she was so unreliably unreliable, so finally I caved.

As it turned out Kaustinen was too small to have either its own hospital or eye doctor. I would have to order new glasses or contact lenses, the pharmacist told me, and the earliest I could get them was in like about two weeks. So until I reached civilization, I was obviously gonna be stuck using Riita as my seeing-eye Finn. Gradually, it seemed to me, she was starting to take over all my support functions one by one--soon I wouldn't even be able to go to the bathroom without her help. For the first time I was starting to realize how my dad must have felt near the end. In the meantime, though, there was something to be said for being half-blind--in the bright sunshine, the little town had a sweet sunny glow full of fuzzy spongy green shapes for trees and blurry soft-toys for car traffic. The cartoon medical station, which was just across the street from the main stage not far from the folk museum, didn't open until noon, according to a hand-written sign on the door (which I could read by standing like six inches away from it), so we had time for some 'Finnish hot dogs' and surprisingly greasy coffee before going back there. One thing could be said for hanging with Dr P--I was already getting spoiled about food. If I was ever crazy enough to accept his marriage proposal I'd probably end up weighing almost as much as he did. Even a quarter would be bad enough.

The doctor on duty was the same very tanned goth-punk lady who'd been sitting behind me at the orgy last night. And her middle-aged husband was her male nurse! She told me that they only time they kept the Kaustinen clinic open was in the summer during the festival season--the rest of the year they worked in Ibiza, where '"there is much more money and not so much taxes." Her husband, she told me, had been a rock-music promoter and drug dealer who'd become interested in practical nursing during a prison rehab program and gone to nursing school after his release. She shyly showed me their matching eyebrow and ear rings. I declined to examine the genitalia versions.

"Your nose is not breaking," she told me after mauling it a bit, but she gave me some pain-killers and a big dorky bandage. The visit cost me $5, even though I didn't have a Finnish health insurance card. It wasn't until after I left that it occurred to me that they could of given me first aid on the spot. You know, when it actually had happened the night before. But I guess maybe they were too busy. Whatever, when I went back to the waiting-room, I found a big brown blob which I assumed to be Riita hiding behind a big white blob, which I discovered to be a copy of the Finnish national daily newspaper, the Helsingen Sanomat.

"I have made an important decision, Hoop," she was like when she saw me. "And it is all because of you. I have decided to forgive Erkki." Huh? Because of me???

"What are you forgiving him for?" I asked her instead, because I was still worried that maybe she'd found out about what he'd been doing in Moominworld after all, and that was why she'd been such a girl gone wild at Pauanne. But then I thought, doh, what I was doing protecting Erkki anyway? I mean it wasn't like I really cared. In a few short weeks I'd be gone, and I'd never see any of these people again. It was none of my business. But as soon as I had all these thoughts, I noticed Riita staring at me in horror. Was I bleeding again?

"For being such a bad partner to me, of course. We have discussed this many times between us, Hoop. You know how cold and hurtful he has become. That is why I have taken this little holiday away from him now. But I can see that you are disappointed with me."

I was like, "No, I'm not disappointed in you, Riita."

"Oh yes, I can see it in your eyes," she said. "You Americans are so simple about sex, you know. You think everyone should be married, just like you think everyone on this planet should be a Christian and eat at a MacDonalds. But life is not always so simple as that, is it?" Frankly, I was surprised she could see anything in my eyes at that point--it certainly wasn't two-way. To prove her point she started translating the front page of the newspaper for me (later I went online and dug it up again just to give you an idea of Finnish attitudes on the subject. And newspaper reporting):

'Young Finnish Women Want Safe Yet Thrilling Sex [no, I'm not kidding--that was the front page headline]

Young Finnish women appreciate sexual affairs which are safe and yet exciting. Nearly half of them think that a woman should be sexually experienced; however this fact should not be public knowledge. Senior researcher Osmo Kontula from the Family Federation commented yesterday on the questionnaire on young women's sexuality published by the pharmaceuticals company Organon. According to Kontula, the potential of female sexuality has increased among women of all age groups.

"Is sex becoming a matter of competence for women?" Kontula asked. However, he pointed out that female sexuality varies: some women prefer intimacy over sex, whereas others feel they can't cope without sex. Three-quarters of the women polled were ready to make an effort in order to keep the spark in their sexual relationships. However, over 40 percent didn't consider passion as an essential element of their lives.

"Selfishness is considered bad in a sexual affair, yet it is vital as far as pleasure is concerned. Being selfish doesn't necessarily mean one doesn't care for one's partner", Kontula said.'

"You see?" said Riita when she'd finished reading all this to me on our way back to the festival parking lot. "I am not such a terrible person, after all. I am very normal for Finland."

And I was like, "I don't think you're a bad person, whatever." But I realized that if I was honest I actually did sort of disapprove of how Riita and Erkki were acting a bit. And isn't just because I'm such a prude or moralist or whatever. It's because of 911.

Ask anyone, and I bet you they can tell you exactly what they were doing on 911, mostly in like really boring detail ("I was getting coffee when my coworkers called me into the kitchen, where the TV was on. I can still remember I was holding a bag of creme-filled doughnuts." Or "My mother-in-law called and said 'Turn on the TV.' I just stood there running the blender over and over thinking it was the end of the world.' etc). It's like some kind of collective Rohrshach (sp?) memory test, almost everybody can remember every detail of those first few hours, but everybody sort of sees them differently. So, OK, here's my 911 story.

And I swear to God I would remember that day pretty clearly anyway, because it was the day before my 22nd birthday, it was my first term at UChi, and Kerry and I had just met and finished moving into the apartment we were sharing the night before. Neither of us had early classes, so we'd both agreed to sleep in late the next morning. So there I was, sound asleep, when suddenly I saw what looked like this ghost standing at the foot of my bed with a deathly tragic look on its face. Naturally I woke up, anyway enough to notice that the ghost was my new roommate in my bedroom wearing only her PJ top with tears streaming down her face. Uh oh, I thought to myself, what kind of psycho lesbian head-case have I hooked myself up with this time? I looked at the clock, and it said 8:51.

"I think you better come see this," she said. So I got up thinking it was probably just another cockroach in the bathtub (she'd totally freaked the night before--I guess she'd never seen a bug before in her life) and went into the living room, where Kerry had propped up her little TV-DVD player on an aluminum travel-trunk. It was showing the people, you know jumping from the WTC building. So we just stood there watching and hugging each other for like forever until, like everyone else all over America, our cell phones started ringing.

OK, now you gotta remember this was just a short time after my dad died, so our family was like especially closely in touch. Plus two of my bros are commercial airline pilots, though as it turned out, neither of them was actually in the air at that particular moment. But that fact wasn't established until the Mothership had made like a bajillion brief but hysterical phone calls ("Hello, Hope? I'm putting you on hold") to all of us. The problem was that there was an additional casualty of all her cell phoning that day, and it wasn't a casualty mentioned in any newspapers or TV shows. The casualty was my middle brother Jerry's marriage.

I've mentioned my sister-in-law Carmen to you before, but in spite of the fact that the Mothership and I (after a rocky start) grew to love her to pieces, we never really got to know her as well as we'd have liked, because she and my older bro never lived anywhere nearby--mostly they were based in Texas and the West Coast, and we only saw them on family visits, pretty much. You know, weddings and funerals and the occasional Xmas. But Anna was a different story, because right after she and Jerry got married (very suddenly), they came to live near us while she went to law school here in DC. Of course, Jerry wasn't always around, being a pilot and all, so that meant she and I got to spend some time together--a lot of time actually during the year Dad was dying, and she was really really great about all that. In fact, I'm not sure we could have gotten through it all without her, because she was absolutely great about taking care of all the details and she was a fearless and patient nurse. That was one side of her personality--super-meticulous and energetic and kind. OK, that's a few sides.

For me, it was doubly cool, because I'd never had a sister. Now suddenly it was like I had one--someone who'd spend time with me and talk things through with me when I was having guy trouble (like during the worst of my time with Gene) and give me great hair and fashion advice. I mean unlike the Mothership, advice in an actual good way. She even took me to my very first spa (she always had sort of expensive tastes). To be honest it was the first time an older girl had ever like taken an interest in me before. Plus, since Jerry was away a lot at night, it gave me a sort of second home to spend the night at whenever things got too intense at school or at home. And right before she graduated, Anna got pregnant and had my nephew, Donald, who they named after my dad. Of course that didn't stop her from immediately moving the three of them to Ft Lauderdale to take a job at a law firm (she specialized in immigration law and is now one of the top legal experts on it in the country).

She was (and still is, I'm sure) a real dynamo, a big, fleshy oversized strawberry blond with an incredible history. She was actually Dutch and was an orphan or something who had grown up in state institutions and foster homes--then when she was like 14 she'd come to America to be an au pair, then went first to high school and next to college, which her adopted American family paid for. By the time she married into our family, she didn't even have a trace of an accent--you totally could not tell she hadn't always been American. I guess she was really good at fitting in, wherever she was. Of course, physically, she stood out. She looked like, well, the best example I can give you is Marie Antoinette--not the MTV Sophia Coppola singing movie version, but the real one, you know like you see on book jackets. She looked really European, like a big healthy farmer's daughter. She had curly blonde hair, sort of a perfect pinkish white complexion, huge blue eyes, a teeny little pink mouth, big boobs, strong arms, big powerful legs, and, if I'm honest, a really huge butt. But if you loved her, you thought she was pretty. I guess not, otherwise. Anyway, her personality was like that, too, once you got to know her: larger than life, you could say. Loud, earthy, salty-tongued, argumentative, petulant, pouty one minute, giggling with you the next. Truthfully, I still sort of miss her. A lot, actually.

Of course I was super-naive and gullible. I mean, you know that about me by now, right? So no surprise there. The only two warning signs I really noticed in those two years were things I just accepted as being part of her personality, like her always having to be the center of attention, always having to be right, always having to decide what was best for everyone, being really cold and stone-faced when she didn't get her way. And one other sort of weird thing--and all this is after the fact, stuff you only think about much later--was that she liked to entertain in bed. I mean socially. She would often just lie with her big legs spread talking to friends or eat her meals or study for hours there, and if you wanted to visit her you had to just go hang out with her in her bedroom. I mean, at the time she made this seem a very natural thing, sort of cool and hippyish or something, so I never gave it much thought.

Anyway that morning (of 911) Jer was scheduled to captain a Lauderdale-Newark flight (he was working for American Airlines then), but of course everyone was in a total panic, and all the airports were closed, and rumors were flying everywhere instead of planes, so he was grounded on standby. And of course, nobody remembers this, but things were especially tense in Lauderdale in particular, because a bunch of the terrorists (yes, Rosie, the ones who really did it, not Karl Rove or the CIA) had been living there just like a mile away from Jerry and Anna and Donnie, and the cops were blocking roads and turning over their entire apartment block. And just the month before there had been the anthrax attack just a few blocks north of that at the National Star offices--in fact, I'd actually been down there visiting them when that happened. So I guess when he was stuck at the airport watching CNN in a passengers' lounge, Jerry sorta freaked. Especially when the Mothership kept phoning him every five seconds with updates like, "Now they've located the mystery plane, but no one knows where it's headed." And "I've tried calling Anna a dozen times, but her cell-phone's not answering, and her switchboard at work's been turned off. Is she at home?" No, because Jerry had been trying her a dozen times, too, and their nanny who looked after Donnie in the daytime said Anna wasn't there and that she hadn't heard anything from her. So even though he wasn't supposed to, Jerry went AWOL and drove to her office looking for her.

That morning all across the country--not just in New York and DC--I've heard that offices were closing early and people were going home to be with their families. Because nobody knew just exactly what was going on. Was this just the first of many attacks? Were we at war? Everybody was scared and upset and worried about their loved ones, so there were like huge traffic jams and long lines of cars stretching in every direction in Fort Lauderdale, anyway, though parts of it, like the beach-front and the commercial downtown district, were pretty much deserted, Jerry told me. By the time he got to Anna's office, he found the building empty and locked down--the only reason he got in was because the security guard at the front desk knew him. Exactly what happened next I dunno, because he never really talked about that part of it much, because obviously it was pretty painful to think about afterwards, but to cut a long story short he went to her firm's darkened suite of offices and found her having sex with her boss. Sometimes he said it was in her office, sometimes he seemed to imply it was in his, I mean the boss's. But later Jer told the Mothership a long rambling drunken story over the phone about how he found no one in her offices at all, but on his way back down in the elevator, by accident he pushed the button for the second floor, which was being remodeled, instead of the lobby. And that when the elevator doors suddenly opened on the big empty stripped concrete space, lit by strings of utility bulbs strung across the ceiling he saw them humping on a stack of drywall panels covered by a big plastic tarp. So I'm guessing that's the true story. Because that's like an image you wouldn't find so easy to get out of your mind. At least I don't think I would, but I hope I never find out.

Anyway, when Anna got home she swore to him that this had been the only time and that it would never happen again. Then she begged him to go to couples' counseling with her so that they could 'learn to forgive each other."

"What the hell has she got to forgive me for?" Jerry asked me at the time. Well, it was a rhetorical question--he was probably having the exact same convo with everybody, even strangers he met in bars. Instead of agreeing to therapy, he moved into their basement so that he could still spend equal time with Donnie. In south Florida lots of houses have 'tearaway' first storeys that aren't connected to the house above by inside stairs--each of them had their own separate entrance so they didn't have to see each other. But he could still hear her walking around above him whenever she was home, since like a lot of large women she had a really heavy tread, and I guess that must have sucked for him a lot. He'd been suspended from his job for walking out that day, so he quit and went to work for Delta for less money. He got really dark and twisted and bitter during that period, too--whenever we talked on the phone he seemed really angry and depressed and mumbled a lot of nasty threats and stuff. Stuff he didn't mean. I guess that mood was why he hired a private detective to investigate Anna's story (later he told me that he wanted to believe her but that something the nanny had told him--he never would say what--made things not quite add up.) He even paid this guy to go up to Georgetown University in DC, where she got her law degree, and even UPenn and Beaver Falls, PA, where she went to high school, to check out her past. That's how crazy he got on the subject. And he got even crazier when the detective reported back to him.

According to this guy, Anna had always cheated. In fact, one of the other women in her law school class told him that Anna had done nine different guys her final year there--and this was while they were married, even while she was pregnant! Apparently everybody there knew about it. Just not Jerry. Or me. But it sort of explained why she never got out of bed much when she was at home. In Beaver Falls he was told that she'd seduced several of her teachers--and even the father of the family she'd lived with, which was why he'd paid her tuition all through college. So now Jerry was totally in shock--it was like everything about her was a lie. When he moved away from Lauderdale, he said he couldn't even be sure now he was really Donnie's father without a DNA test, which she would never agree to. Anna moved to Houston to join a prestigious law firm there and is really rich now, I heard, so her behavior obviously hasn't hurt her career. Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying she was an evil person or anything. She just should have never married someone and promised to only be with him when she already knew she couldn't right from the get-go. It wasn't even just that she'd hurt Jerry--the thing tore my whole family apart at a really bad time, just a few months after my dad's death. It was like she'd been a chameleon, lying to all of us, pretending to be one thing but really being something totally different, sort of like the blond Cylon babe on Battlestar Galactica. It was petty of me, compared to poor Jerry's miseries, but I guess I felt pretty personally betrayed, too. And that's why I was feeling no patience with Riita at the mo. I mean, what's the point of being together at all if you're gonna act like that? Maybe her relationship with Erkki wasn't perfect, but it looked pretty good to me from where I was standing (at least with no glasses on). I mean, I had no one to love at all. Realistically, my life was emotionally empty. I meant nothing special to anyone. If I'd fallen a bit harder and cracked my skull and died the night before maybe a few people would miss me--my close friends and family for sure--but let's face it, even they would all get over it and get on with their lives pretty fast. Like in about five minutes. Riita and Erkki had someone to love, they had a real thing going for them, and instead of valuing that, they were both behaving like stupid sluts. If they weren't careful, they were gonna really screw things up for good. OK, dumb American maybe, but at least I could tell a car wreck when it was about to happen.

But I didn't say any of this to Rita. What would be the point? Instead I was all like, "So is there like any actual news in that paper?" Bear in mind this was right after the Qana bombing, a shooting rampage in a Seattle synagogue, and Mel Gibson's drunk driving arrest. But I was living on another planet, apparently.

"Oh yes, it is a very busy time now," Riita said, stopping to read the rest of the headlines. "Festival attendance has set many new records in Finland this summer, that's a very good thing. But it says the big loser was the folk festival here at Kaustinen, not so many people want to hear folk music any more. Well I suppose it is a kind of music that is very boring for youths, of course. Here is another story of interest: 'End of summer holidays brings rush to, hmmm, what is the English word, detoxic clinics. It is because of the alcoholism here, you see. Oh look, look, Hoop! Here is a story about your friend!" She practically started jumping up and down on the pavement.

"My friend?"

"You know, your friend, that Likkanen! Listen to this:

'Two Suspects Arrested Over Attempted Waterpark Murder

Police in Espoo have arrested two men suspected of the attempted murder of an American tourist of Finnish extraction committed in the city on Monday. Night workers at Waterpark Serena were surprised to see the victim crawling inside the recreational complex from the outdoor artificial lake in the early hours of Monday morning. It is believed he was shot three times at another lake nearby and somehow waded to shore and then crossed a marsh before entering the water park, which is the largest in Europe.

"In the light of information we have now it is likely that we will ask that the two be remanded", said the head of the investigation, Detective Inspector Sakari Juurikkala of the Espoo police, speaking on Tuesday. However, he also emphasised that so far the pair are not the only suspects and that the investigation has indicated the presence of a third assailant.
     
Police have seized a cellphone and laptop computer that they believe the men stole during the crime, which they were attempting to sell on huuto.net [the Finnish eBay]. In addition, they are examining at least two "biker vests" which they believe were worn by the perpetrators. Juurikkala says that the suspects are an Espoo native born in 1952 and another man from nearby Helsinki, who was born in 1951. Both have a long record of criminal activities - mainly petty theft and drugs dealing - and at one time were members of the 'Banditos' motorcycle club.

On Tuesday the police asked the public for information on a stolen white Ford Sierra taxi cab which might have been linked with the crime. Police are still interested in knowing more about the cab's movements, especially on Sunday night and Monday morning. Juurikkala says that the police do not know why the victim was shot. The crime is being investigated as attempted murder and aggravated robbery. In what is seen as a related development, the victim's hotel room in Helsinki was robbed and the remainder of his personal belongings stolen. At present, the location of the victim, Donho Likkanen of New York, USA, and the details of his injuries will not be released to the public for fear of further attacks on his life. After collapsing beneath a water-slide, Likkanen was given first aid by an emergency rescue team and pronounced dead at the scene. However, some minutes later he was apparently revived and flown by helicopter to an undisclosed trauma speciality hospital.

Police are also looking into the possibility of a connection between the incident and a similar crime that took place in Kankaanpää a week ago. In that crime, two masked men broke into an apartment and beat up a man living there. "The acts have certain similarities. We are looking into the possibility that they might be connected", Juurikkala says.'

"Wow, that's really amazing!" I said. "So we actually did it--we brought him back to life again! Or Dr P did, I should say."

"Don't be silly, Hoop," Riita said with a sniff. "All of this happened days ago. He was at a hospital the whole time."

"Yeah, but we didn't know that for. Maybe, I dunno, the ceremony adjusted time and space into a new continuum or whatever where he was brought back to life by what we all did. Maybe he was really dead in the old one--it says in the paper that he was pronounced medically dead at one point." I had a mental picture of poor old Safe-T-Man in an ICU somewhere guarded by police like in a movie. Poor guy--maybe I should try to send him flowers or a card or something. Of course, we hadn't exactly parted on the best of terms.

"I'm sure the doctor knew all of this before the ceremony," Riita pointed out with that peasant shrewdness that always took me by surprise. "After all, he was the person who stole Likkanen's clothes from the hotel room. Perhaps he is the third bad man the police are searching for. You just want to believe in magic, Hoop, that's why you are always have such silly ideas." And nothing I could explain to her about alternate realities and pocket universe theory all the way back in the car made any difference. Some people are just born un-silly, I guess.

Still, yesterday he'd been dead, at least as far as I knew, but today he wasn't. That's a kind of magic, isn't it? Beats the reverse anyway.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 27: Raising the Dead, Part Deux

My first thought was that somehow Alex or Dr P had phoned the Mothership and somehow convinced her to overnight-Fedex the dummy from my closet to Pauanne. Then, doh, I realized that Safe-T-Man was still for sale as a product, even in Europe, and that all the copies of him looked exactly alike. So it was just an eerie coincidence. Or something. And of course, I'd just seen Dr Praetorius making a book 'walk' with threads at the National Library in Helsinki--obviously he was doing exactly the same thing right now, just on a much bigger scale. Even though I could barely see at all and was getting a really splitting headache (and my nose was throbbing big-time by now--I was just praying it wasn't broken), I could appreciate the artistry involved in his performance. I mean, it really looked amazingly real, even from, where I was standing.

So I just stood there staring with my mouth hanging open, which was really starting to happen to me a lot in Finland it seemed, when I felt Alex tugging at the back of my skirt. Which I guessed was my cue to climb down from the stage. So I let him lead me back to our rock--the only problem now, aside from being all swollen and in pain, was that I couldn't actually see much of what happened next. Everything looked like one of those blurry 'bursts of color' screen-savers. First I'd lost my contacts, and now my glasses were like totally busted. Obviously I needed to see an optometrist or an optician (I can never remember which is which) first thing tomorrow--I mean what was the point of sight-seeing in a foreign country if you couldn't even see??

Anyway what I think I saw next was Dr P invisibly raising Safe-T-Man up in his 'grave' so that he appeared to be standing upright, just sort of swaying and trembling like a marionette. At some point I remember Dr P leaned over and started licking the foamy stuff off the dummy's face--at another point he asked him two or three questions in Swinish, to which Safe-T-Man gave grumbly answers in a sort of echoey far-away voice, which I assumed was ventriloquism. I understood one of the answers, which was "54". Then Dr P killed the poor swan, who didn't seem to object much or make much of a fuss, by cutting its throat with a dagger. Meanwhile the crowd got into it again, banging on drums and chanting and stuff, and when this reached a crescendo, Dr P set Safe-T-Man on fire. He practically exploded into flame, blazing up like a nylon nightdress or something and sending off clouds of dark, rubbery-smelling smoke. People were screaming and howling all around me, dancing around like kids in one of those day-care exercises where you all pretend to be animals out of a Richard Scarry book or something. My main feeling was pretty much embarrassment. And of course I was totally pissed about my glasses and my broken nose, which I now could not breathe out of. And I was like way exhausted, because it had been a long day. More like two or three.

One of my very favorite and most loyal readers of this blog is named Mikhail from Russia, who's just emailed me in response to the last chapter saying:

"First you say you hate stories where no details are given about magical rituals, and you say it is cheating. But then it seems to me you are doing the same thing here! ;))"

OK, busted. If anyone really, really wants to memorize the details of the ceremony, which I later pieced together from Dr P's notes and my own research, here they are. Don't try this at home, though (oh, WTF, go ahead. In fact, I dare you. Email me if it works for you):

To raise the dead properly, the ceremony should take place on a Night of Power and be tailored specifically to that night; in this case, Lunasa (or Lughnasa), the night of the first full moon of Leo and festival of the harvest. The ceremony should also accommodate local deities, legends, and even flora as much as possible and will require three willing volunteers, in addition to the necromancer. The necromancer should be wearing robes made from flayed human skin or at least clothes taken from a corpse, and to help the process go smoothly must adorn himself and the ground around the ceremonial circle with tokens of death (such as bones, skulls, pieces of dried human flesh, etc.), as well as the head of an owl. The flesh of a dog can sometimes be used instead and even consumed as a substitute during parts of the ritual. If the subject has been dead for a long time the necromancer can call the spirit to an earthen grave outside anywhere--the actual gravesite isn't necessarily important. If the necromancer merely wants to interrogate the spirit of the departed, he can ask the questions required and then either burn the corpse or bury it in quicklime so that it could never be disturbed again and the spirit can return unhindered to the netherworld. If a substitute for the corpse is created in order to resurrect the dead in another physical locus these 'mock-remains' must always be burned so that they do not become a soulless zombie. The necromancer can alternately finish the ceremony by feasting on the flesh of the corpse, although this does not always destroy its animation. Burning that which remains afterwards is always wisest.

Altar supplies: yellow or orange candles (preferably of tallow or rendered human fat mixed with pitch and sulphur; animal fat if this cannot be obtained), burner, herbs, chalice for body liquids, salt, pentacle, chalice of wine, dagger or sword, wand or staff, plate of bread or wafer, ambergris, and a honeycomb. Because Lemminkainen is a fertility god (Adonis, Baldur, the Zodiacal Leo), and not just an ordinary everyday mortal, his own colors and plants must be included: chalices and dagger should be made of real gold whenever possible, and the drapery should be white, not black. Because Lemminkainen was killed by the Swan of Tuonela, a swan should thus be sacrificed as part of this ceremony. His plants are ash, chamomile, celandine, marigold, mistletoe, and St John's Wort, his runes are sowilhu, fehu, and raidho. Also Fall flowers, ivy and leaves for decoration.

Light twelve candles at nightfall and cast them three at a time, to the dwarves of the four prime directions (Nordhri, Sudhri, Austri and Vestri). Place ambergris, human bone, hair or fingernails in the first gold chalice and ignite them. Place the bowl in the center of the twelve candles, thereby completing a pentagram of occultated space above an earthen grave. Lay a solid line of moist earth in a complete circle around the candles. Outside the first circle, lay a second circle of common salt. The reason for this that when the proper time and place is fixed on, a magic circle is to be formed, within which, the master and his assistant, for in these ceremonies there must be at least two participants, three if the master is not pepared to use his own ejaculate, four if he does not wish to use his own blood) are to carefully respected. The dimensions of the circle is as follows: a piece of ground is usually chosen nine feet square, at the full extent of which parallel lines are drawn one within another, having crosses and triangles described between them close to which is formed the first or outer circle; then, about half a foot within the same, a second circle is described; and within that another square correspondent to the first, the centre of which is the seat or spot where the necromancer and his acolytes are to be placed. The vacancies formed by the various lines and angles of the figure, are to be marked with the names of gods and spirits written on runestnes or scraps of vellum or skin. Then cast a third circle over them with the sword or dagger, saying,

"I consecrate this circle to the ancient gods of this land [you may wish to invoke them by name], asking that they appear to us inside here and restore their beloved son to life."

Then go back to the altar, facing north, and raise your hand or wand in greeting above the belly of the girl or woman lying upon it. Her sex should be exposed and her legs parted to receive the offering of a male acolyte. If you do not choose to perform this office yourself, at this point summon him. After he has ejaculated inside her retrieve the mixture from between her thighs, saying:

"I stand now at the Gate between Two Worlds." Add to the first chalice of burnt offerings a mixture of semen and vaginal fluids, and place it inside the pentacle, then hold the dagger above it, saying,

"Great Mother-Goddess of us all, bless this offering of human seed to your service." Then plunge the dagger into the flames of the incense-burner and hold it in the flames until it begins to smoke, then raise it over the salt, saying,

"Great God-Father of us all, bless this offering of salt, and through fire transmute it to your desire." Then sprinkle the salt into the chalice inside the pentacle and hold the hot dagger in the mixture. Carry the cauldron counter-clockwise around the outside of the circle beginning with the east, then return it to the altar, saying,

"Many fragments were wanting to make up the body of Lemminkainen--half of his head, a hand, many little fragments. Life was wanting in the body. But still his mother would not cast it back into the river. Once again she raked Tuonela's deep river, first along it and then across it; his hand she found, half of his head she found, fragments of his backbone she found, and pieces of his ribs.

She pieced all together; the bones fitted, the joints went together. She chanted a Magic Song, praying that Suonetar would weave the veins together, and stitch with her finest needle and her most silken thread the flesh and the sinews that were broken. She sang a Magic Song, praying that Jumala would fix together the bones. Then the veins were knit together, the bones were fastened together, but still the man remained lifeless and speechless. He needed blood. Now I call upon the Flower of Saari, the Bride of Lemminkainen to come forth with her gift of blood."

The Bride approaches the altar and is given first the wafer, then the wine. Then blood is taken from her, and along with the honeycomb is added to the burning liquid inside the cauldron, with the words,

"Great Father and Mother, I take this blood, freely given, and offer it for your blessing so that your son may live once more. All the Fires of Creation, All Powers of the Air, I bind in your name inside this blessed circle. Cauldron of the Great Mother, cauldron of birth and renewal--hear my call. Return to the earth your son Lemminkainen at cock-crow, healed of all illnesses; rebuild his body, his mind, and his spirit."

On the offering plate should be the mountain ash leaves, cloudberries, feverfew, vervain, and wormwood, as well as the precious oils belonging especially to Lemminkainen, frankincense and cinnamon. The totem animal of the local deity, in this case a swan, should now be offered. It is wise to drug the animal first, both to spare it suffering and to render it docile. Lead it into the circle and employing your dagger, slit its jugular with a single firm swift motion. [you may wish to practice this on farm animals before performing it publicly, as a botched sacrifice can wreck the ceremony.] After the gravesite has been sprayed with its blood, cut it to pieces and extract its liver and sex. Sprinkle these, along with the herbs above, over the smoldering mixture, then tap the chalice three times with the dagger.

"And now as once did Lemminkainen's mother, I sing the Magic Song [now begin the incantation below and speak loudly and clearly]:

HIC EN SPIRITUM

SED NON INCORPORE

EVOCARE LEMURES DE MORTUIS"

Then, little by little the grave begins to stir, and various strange sights appear to the sorcerer while the dead man is being very gradually raised; but it goes very slowly, as the dead are most unwilling to move, and say "Let me lie quiet!" But the necromancer must not give in to their pleading, nor yet let himself be dismayed by the sights, but must mutter his incantations faster than ever and roll his stick until the dead man is halfway out of the ground. At the same time he must be very careful that no earth falls outside the grave when it begins to heave, for such earth can never be put in again.

"For she bade the bee go forth and find the honey-salve that would give final healing. The bee flew across the moon in the heavens; he flew past the borders of Orion; he flew across the Great Bear's shoulders, and into the dwelling of Jumala the Creator. In pots of silver, in golden kettles was the salve that would give final healing. The bee gathered it and brought it back to Lemminkainen's mother.

DECRETUM ESPUGNARE

DE ANGELUS JUMALA

EN INFERNO TUONELA

With the salve she rubbed him. She called upon her son to rise out of his slumbers, to awaken from his dreams of death."

[Now say very loud and fast five times]:

WATANA SYAM

Up he rose; out of his dreams he wakened, and speech came back to him. Even then he would have slain the Swan so that he might win a bride in Pohjola. But his mother persuaded him, and his mother drew him back with her to his home. There the bride awaited him whom he had won in another place and on another day, Kyllikki, the Flower of Saari. Now join with me in chanting five times [in this particular instance]:

Live, Lemminkainen! Live, bright one, shining God, light for all to see! Return to us and walk the earth once again!"

When the dead man has risen half way out, the magician must ask him two questions:

"What was your name in life?"

["Donho Frederik Likkanen."]

"How old were you in death?"

["Fifty-four."]

Never ask a third question, or the corpse will be released back to the realm of the dead.

When the dead man has said who he is and is half-way out of the grave, the sorcerer can either drive him down again if he chooses, or can continue the spells till he is completely emerged. When the dead first emerge from their graves, their mouths and nostrils are often bubbling over with a frothy mixture of mucus and mud known as 'corpse froth'; this the magician may lick off with his own tongue for its magical properties. Then he must draw the salve from the chalice, and moisten the dead man's body all over with it. When this is done and the corpse is standing fully upright in his grave, then comes the final ritual: he is set on fire. If the ceremony is successful, this will be a blinding blaze and all-consuming--trapped inside the circle of power, he will silent and unmoving, be turned to ashes in just a few short moments.

Now everything connected with the ceremony must also be burned, and all the ashes collected and buried together in a ploughed furrow in a field before cock-crow.


After everything onstage, including the remains of the poor swan, had been tossed into the grave and burned up too (and damn, it really stank), the still-smoking ashes were gathered up into the chalice and a bunch of us followed Dr P and Anssi outside. It was quite a slow procession, since Dr P was gasping for breath from all the unaccustomed exercise, and I was just barely able to hobble along behind him. We walked past the little artificial lake on the top of the hill next to the Great Hall (more of a mosquito-ridden pond, really) to a spot of meadow-land beside the tree-line, where someone had dug a sort of shallow ditch. We buried the ashes in it along with a Barbie doll wearing a wedding dress, then stood there chanting for a few more minutes until we could see the first faint light of dawn.

"Once upon a time, we'd have buried you instead of the doll, " Alex whispered to me as Dr P tossed the first clods of earth onto the doll. He sounded a teeny bit regretful.

A moment later a teeny little pink prick of light peeked through the trees, and somewhere a rooster crowed. In fact, once it started it wouldn't shut up.

"I bought that along with the swan--too bad we couldn't have killed it instead," said Alex, putting his arm around me to help me walk back. "But apparently no magical ceremony is considered over until dawn or 'cock-crow'. And Dr Praetorius is a literalist. Which is good news for me--this is all going to make a fantastic chapter in my book." Great--after all my hard work I was gonna be a chapter in somebody else's book.

I was like, "So it's over?"

"All over," said Anssi, grabbing my other arm. I felt like a drunk being helped home in an old screwball comedy or something. "How do you think it went?"

"I thought it was totally stupid and disgusting," I said.

"That's not quite what I meant to ask." He looked at Alex, whose lenses reflected back at us blankly. "Do you think it worked?"

Alex burst into laughter. "Do I, bollocks!" he said. Together, the two of them somehow got me back down the hill and into the woods where it was still pretty dark. Every now and then I could hear a rustling or a crashing noise, and a couple or a group would burst into view whispering to each other or whooping or making animal noises. Then they'd disappear again together looking for more private places to party, I guess. All I could see was pale splashes of naked skin in the forest gloom with dark shapes like pointed ears or antlers above them. And then suddenly I realized that maybe it wasn't so dumb or embarrassing after all, what they were doing. For years I'd studied Mythology and magic without really thinking about the reality of it much. Well, this WAS the reality of it. I mean, they were just doing what our ancestors had done naturally and even like religiously for thousands of years. I guess it was sort of still wired into us humans or something, because after being just plain disgusted by everything that had happened so far that night, suddenly the sight of all those naked people flitting through the trees in the darkness or whatever was actually making me horny! I totally couldn't believe it!

I guess maybe it's the same sort of thing that sometimes happen to me when I'm commuting to work on the Washington subway, which is called the 'Metro' after the one in Paris. Whatever, in the Metro the light is always so soft and dim that it's like you're in Dante's Inferno or some sort of club or underworld down there--sometimes you feel totally anonymous, like nothing you did would actually count, if that makes any sense. And because of the lighting guys' faces often look way cuter than they really are, unless they're like old old or super-ugly, in which case they look hideous and evil. I know this for a fact because a few times I've flirted with guys on the platform and then once we were at street level discovered that they were actually not hot. Which is always embarrassing.

Luckily--or maybe unluckily--neither Alex or Anssi seemed to notice my mood change. They left both right after they got me back to the Pace-Arrow, and I fell into a deep, drugged-feeling sleep on the bed as the world started to turn a pale peach color. There was no sign of Riita.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 26: Raising the Dead, Part One

"Then his mother went in quest of him; she questioned the trees, she questioned the pathway, she questioned the golden moon in the sky. But the trees, the pathway, the golden moon in the sky, all had their own troubles, and they would take no trouble for any woman's son. She questioned the sun in the heavens, and the sun told her that her son was in Tuonela's River."

--The Kalevala


When I was about 11 I got my very first crush on a boy in my class named Thomas di Angelo. He was half-Lebanese, half-Italian, and his dad was in the Army Corps of Engineers--he had the biggest, softest brown eyes you've ever seen and very sweetly helped me with my math homework (the only subject I ever needed help with) on and off. There were only two downsides to this great romance of mine: the first was that I was like nearly a foot taller than him, and the second was that he was officially the boyfriend of my then-best friend, Courtney Payne. So I totally couldn't do anything about it, even if I'd actually known what to do. But you know how it is when you have a secret crush--you feel like you'll burst if you don't tell somebody. I guess I coulda told my mom, but I mean somebody real. Besides, if you tell your mom a secret odds are pretty good she'll rat you out sooner or later anyway, and usually at the most embarrassing moment possible. I'm not accusing the Mothership of actually doing that on purpose constantly. I'm just saying. Anyway, I needed somebody who was like totally 100% discreet, somebody who'd never ever tell anyone else, ever, in the future history of the whole world. So I told a tree.

Yeah, yeah, I know how crazy that sounds--but gimme a break! I was only 11! Besides, this wasn't just any tree. There was a little park next to the base that I used to go walking in most days after I got home from school on my way over to Courtney's or whatever. And in the park just at a corner where three sidewalks met, there was a little glen with an old hollowed-out oak tree covered in ivy and moss that had a sort of natural door in its base that looked like an open mouth. One day I'd seen a pair of chipmunks come tumbling out of it and down into the grassy glade wrestling with each other--another time when it suddenly started raining, I saw a family of rabbits huddled up inside. Higher up, there were a few of holes in it where limbs had fallen off that looked like eyes and ears, and sometimes you'd see squirrels peeking their heads out of them watching you walk by. Bees were always circling around it and flying in and out. So privately to myself I thought of it as 'Treebeard', from the name of the chief Ent in The Lord of the Rings, which I'd just read for the first time that year. Finally, when I absolutely, totally couldn't stand to keep my secret crush secret one minute longer, I decided to confide it to Treebeard. So one hot summer day, after carefully making sure that no one else was around, I went up to it and stood on tip-toe and whispered my guilty secret into an 'ear- hole' in its trunk. And, stupidly, I actually felt way better! I can still remember how I fell asleep extra early that night.

But then I had a bunch of really bad dreams. Apparently I'd been overheard whispering my secret by a bee--so he told a squirrel, who told a crow, and somehow it got all over the neighborhood and finally to Courtney's dog, Sean Cassidy (yes, that was his name). That's when I finally woke up. But everything that day still felt like I was trapped inside a nightmare. I'm sure you know what I mean. First of all, when I got to school, I had the feeling that everybody was staring at me. You know, like we all stared at the poor geeky girl who peed herself in class in 5th grade and had to transfer to another school. That kind of feeling. But nobody said anything, just looked and acted funny. Then at recess after lunch, I was standing under the covered connecting walkway talking to another girl, Lourdes, because Courtney had been kind of ignoring me all morning, when suddenly I saw Courtney leading like half our entire class toward me, sort of like religious acolytes going on a pilgrimage or something, all excited and whispering to each other and giving me sneaky smirky glances. "Uh oh," Lourdes said, and split. I didn't blame her, because we'd both seen Courtney pull this kind of public shaming before.

See, Courtney was the class 'Queen Bee'. She was a blowsy honey-brown blonde girl, even taller than me, and way bigger. She had boobs before anybody else in our class, and her bra-straps were always slipping over her shoulders, plus she was constantly motor-mouthing and gossiping about everybody behind their back. Or even to their face. I'd been immune from that treatment up to this point because we were best friends--but today it was my turn. She led her delegation up to me, and suddenly I was surrounded. Thomas was standing at Courtney's shoulder (well sort of below her shoulder, actually), with a nasty look I'd never seen on his face before. Everyone was staring and grinning at me. Already I could feel my face flaming. "Look," Courtney said, pointing at me, "She wears guys' underpants!" Then she reached down and lifted my skirt so that everyone could see my panties. Which were girls'. In fact they were even pink (which didn't keep me from trashing them that night anyway, so they wouldn't keep reminding me of what had happened.) Everyone just kept staring at them for a minute--then I grabbed my skirt and I guess started channeling the Sound of Music or whatever, screaming, "F-ck you! F-ck you! And you and you and you!" (I had picked up a lot of really nasty language that year from my bros--I guess that's why I'm such a prude nowadays), and burst into tears. Then I marched off and locked myself into a restroom stall for the rest of recess. Then I came out and washed my face pretended nothing had happened. But after that I didn't want anyone of them for friends any more, which was maybe a little harsh of me.

Not that it mattered, because just a few months later I was living in a whole other country and starting over at a whole new school anyway. Which is typical in the life of an army brat (and I use the term 'army' generically, because everybody knows the Corps despises the regular army).

To give her credit Courtney even apologized to me the next week. Someone in the class (no doubt tipped off by the gossipy squirrels) had told her that I liked Thomas and that he and I were "doing it" when he was tutoring me in math, so she had retaliated in the only way she knew how--by publicly humiliating me. The weekend before I had gone over to her house wearing a pair of my bro's jockey shorts, and I guess she had caught sight of them when we were trying on stuff. See, what had happened was that my parents had been away all week, and when she got home, my mom hadn't quite caught up on laundry. So suddenly I had no clean underwear. "You can wear a pair of mine," she suggested, "Or you can wear these till I run a wash"--these being an old pair of my middle brother's white jockey shorts that were still in a drawer. In point of fact, except for the crotch, they actually could have been girls' panties pretty much, they were so shrunk and cut so brief, and of course in just a few more years in middle school everybody was into grunge and punk and Goth and wearing their boyfriend's clothes or pretending to be bi, so no one would have cared anyway. But you know what 6th grade was like. And I certainly didn't want to wear my mother's panties---ewww! Anyway, when Courtney had spotted them I'd been too embarrassed to do anything but just laugh, so I guess maybe she thought I was still wearing them. Or always wore them. Or whatever.

Anyway I accepted her apology, but we were never really good again. She wasn't a bad person, and I'm sure that somewhere she's now ruling a suburban cul-de-sac just like she ruled our class--probably she still leads delegations of housewife minions around inspecting her neighbors' house-siding and mocking their lawn furniture. And she taught me an important lesson: the moment you have a secret, even if you don't tell it to anybody but a tree, it's not a secret any more. The trick is never to act secretive about it. "Hide in plain sight, Scout," Dad always told me. So that's what I pretty much did for the rest of 6th grade. And that turned out to be pretty good practice for the rest of my life. If I ever get the urge to wear guys' underwear again I'll wear them on the outside.

Come to think of it, characters in the Kalevala are always talking to the rocks and trees. In fact, there's even one scene where Vainomen plays his kantele and makes the trees dance. Animals and birds are always talking, too, just like in my dream. Maybe that's why when Lemminkainen's mother goes wandering through the woods asking the trees and stones where her son is, it kind of makes me think of myself and Treebeard. I can easily imagine that if I ever suddenly lost someone I loved, like a husband or a child, I might wander around like that, too, so crazed with grief that I wanted to touch, even to talk to, all the things that had been a part of his life: the bed, the walls, the furniture, the trees outside...In fact, I sort of did that right after my dad died. I mean, I didn't say anything out loud, but I did touch lots of stuff of his after the mortuary ambulance came and they took his body away. And the whole time I wanted to ask each of them, "Where is he? Where's Dad gone to?"

Like his pillow or his glasses would know.

Although on second thought, according to Father Mac, objects do retain a sort of "memory" of their owners, sort of like how an old-fashioned photography chemicals respond to light--it was the saturation of the walls and floors and ceilings of the house in Bronzeville with his skin-scale dust, he told me, that had allowed the spirit of Billy Draper to remain behind as a ghost. But I would never have wished that fate for Dad and neither would he. So why on earth was I participating in a ceremony that would supposedly do something sort of similar to poor Likkanen or Lemminkainen or whoever you believed he was? I mean, A. it wasn't totally clear from the news reports that he was actually dead in the first place, just that he was "reported" to be dead, and B. even if it was possible to bring him back from the dead (which by now I totally didn't believe could happen, or to be even more specific, didn't believe that this cast of clowns could do it even if it was actually possible), what sort of form would he take? Would be come back transformed or whatever like 'Gandalf the White' instead of 'Likkanen the Gray'? Or would he be sort of all sad and ghostly inside, like Frankenstein's monster? Would he be a zombie? Would he be a normal human being, except with no heartbeat or breath or whatever? Could he even die again? I was totally unclear on all these details--but it suddenly seemed to me to be way kinder and, well, smarter, just to let him stay dead. Let sleeping gods lie, right?

Only Dr Praetorius had other ideas. Of course, it was all BS, right? I mean, I'm gullible as hell, but even I don't really believe it's possible to raise the dead (even after we actually did it). But here's the other problem--I don't really know how it happened or much of anything else about that night. It's all just kind of hazy. Because, well for a variety of reasons: I wasn't paying close attention at first, I was sort of out of it, I don't speak Swedish or Finnish, etc, etc, plus I got injured in the middle of the whole thing. I know, I know--I'm a complete loser. And this is even a perfect example of what I hate most about horror stories and fairy-tales and even slasher flicks--they endlessly refer to magical songs and spells and formulas, but never go into any specific detail. Except for 'Hail Satan' and 'Fee Fie Fo Fum' and stuff like that, but that doesn't really count, does it? I mean just try saying "Rumpelstiltskin-is-my-name' three times and click your heels and see just what happens. Even when I was a little girl I thought this was really unfair, because if a magic spell works in a story, then it should work in real life too. Otherwise it's just cheating. Supposedly, the original sources of the Kalevala were full of specific spells and chants, but Lennrot edited them out because of Christian prudery. But I'm not sure I believe that--I suspect the old story-tellers cheated, just like they always do, and fudged the details.

According to everything I've been able to dig up on the subject, there are three main ways to raise the dead, or to be more specific, three completely different and separate concepts that people mean when they talk about it, that roughly correspond to the three main magical techniques. The first is seeking answers from the dead in order to find riches or treasure, or to gain knowledge from those who have passed onto the next world, especially predictions of the future, like with the Witch of Endor in the Bible. This can mean anything from using a Quija board at a party to digging up a grave and forcing the skeleton to talk. The second is to prolong life (or briefly bring a loved one back from the dead) by stealing the life-force from others, most specifically through the medium of their blood, or using spells and incantations. Vampirism or cannibalism is the typical example of this technique. The third is to raise the dead, either individually or in legions, by magic to serve as slaves or soldiers. Jason sowing the dragon's teeth or the zombies of Haiti are examples of this one--and so are traditional fairy-lore resurrections, like in Jonathan Norrell and Mr Strange (or is it the other way round? I can never remember.) All three are called 'Necromancy"--that's what a necromancer does, is raise the dead in one way or another. Now, I'd like to pretend to you that I already knew all this at the start of Dr Praetorius' little ceremony, but actually I didn't--I've tried to understand what went on that night in hindsight by researching the subject, talking it over with Alex (who was sitting beside me whispering at me most of the time) and, of course, Dr P himself, who later gave me typed instructions for the ceremony (actually, I had to retype them--most of it was just scribbles). Because at the time I was pretty much totally clueless.

For one thing, it was dark. The rest of the 'crowd' on their individual rocks were now just dark indistinct shapes, some of them punctuated by the tiny glowing points of cigarettes or spliffs. Except for a few murmured conversations everything had turned dead quiet. I guess it must have been about 1 AM or so, and I started to doze off. Onstage a match flared, and I saw Anssi's face briefly as he lit a candle--and then very slowly one by one about a dozen more in a wide circle. This more or less dimly illuminated the rock-stage, and by their flickering glow I could make out that Anssi was now wearing a hooded white robe with gold stitching. So I figured Alex was right--we were in for a bit of theater. I caught a whiff of the candles and started choking.

"Ew, gross!' I gagged at Alex. "What's that smell?"

"Sulphur," he whispered back. What was he whispering for? Behind us, there was a restless sort of rustling noise, and Dr Praetorius appeared suddenly on the stage, apparently dressed for a luau, stuffed into a bright Hawaiian shirt and surfer shorts underneath a hooded robe that looked like it had been sewn together from carpet-scraps. As my eyes adjusted I noticed that the edge of his hood was fringed with human teeth on little threads, and he was carrying a sort of staff that looked like a human thighbone with a stuffed owl's head stuck to it. I started choking again just trying not to laugh. Huffing and puffing, he wheezed his great bulk around the stage pointing at stuff with his 'wand'--I noticed a big mound of earth in the middle of it, and behind that 'Tapio's Table', the giant slab of wood, had been converted into an altar by having a heavy white sheet draped over it. A gold chalice sat on a sort of fondue burner at one end, and at the other someone seemed to be lying on top of it. The person's clothes looked familiar--and suddenly I realized it was Riita! She was lying like in a trance or something, unmoving but with her eyes open and staring, up there in her 'bridal gown'. And she wasn't the only one wearing one, it occurred to me.

So I was all like, "You mean Riita's part of the ceremony? What about--?" but Alex shushed me. I stared at him in shock, because now he was wearing an owl mask too. It looked like something he'd found at a costume shop, and I could see his glasses glinting though the eye-holes. I looked around, and noticed that most of the people behind us were putting on animal masks and tails, and some were even taking off their clothes. This looked like it could get really ugly, since the average age there must of been like 40 or whatever. Anssi walked down the stage and past us swinging a sort of incense bowl like a censor in church that was billowing out a dark, putrid-smelling smoke. Pretty soon the whole hall was hazy with it, and I wasn't the only one coughing any more. At least it helped keep the mosquitos away.

"Don't inhale too much of that," Alex muttered in my ear. "You'll pass out. It's a mix of vervain, wormwood, rue, henbane, dried nightshade, mushrooms, belladonna, and poppy." A home-made hallucinogen, in other words.

A successful necromancer has to sort of become 'at one with the dead' if he's to be successful in raising one of them. This means he has to go through a phase of living like a graveyard ghoul, surrounded by dead things, making his utensils from bones and his clothes from their skins or whatever, and even eating their flesh raw, like Hannibal Lector. He has to bathe in dust and sleep in a coffin, ideally inside a charnel-house, so that at some point the world of the dead becomes as real to him as this one, and he can actually start seeing and you know, talking to them or whatever. That's the idea, anyway, though it's too disgusting to actually think about seriously. I mean, wouldn't you get e. coli poisoning or something? But it's like a rite of passage for a magician--Dr P seems to have gone through a stage like that when he was homeless and dumpster-surfing for meals and panhandling tourists and stuff before he got rich. At least according to his website. I guess the experience was a little like getting an advanced degree from a state university. As far as the food is concerned, anyway.

Now Dr P was standing with his back to us and his arms dramatically outstretched over Riita, started speaking in what I took to be his own personal version of Finnish mixed with Swedish (privately I think of this pidgin as 'Swinish'). I couldn't understand a single word, except a few of them in Latin. All of a sudden, I realized where I'd seen the clothes he was wearing before--on Likkanen on the airplane, remember? I guess maybe Dr P had stolen his suitcase or something in order to bring him back to life. Now I was hearing a new noise, kind of a jangling, vibrating sound like instruments being tuned up before a concert. What had happened was that a bunch of the musicians from the bands that had been performing all day were bringing out acoustic instruments like guitars, fiddles, tambourines, drums, etc. and were kind of picking at them, not really playing a tune, but just making a kind of droning musical vibration. Most of the women there, still wearing their animal masks, took off the rest of their clothes and started slowly dancing. Onstage, Dr P struck one of the gold chalices three times with his staff and raised his arms again, and a naked man wearing a deer-mask with antlers on his head walked slowly into the firelight. it was Kimmo, sweating and red all over, still wearing his running shoes but nothing else. He had a really painful looking woody, if you'll pardon my French (I say 'painful' cuz it was even redder than the rest of him, maybe with embarrassment.) The crowd started chanting and clapping in time with the music, and he went up to Riita, who was still lying there all out of it, and just stuck it in her.

All around me, people started falling down on the little mossy patches between the rocks and on picnic blankets and whatever and doing it. I wish I could say it was a big turn-on or even like mildly interesting in a Margaret Mead-social anthropology sort of way, but I can't. It was significantly less exciting than a bad porn movie and, with all the dirt and moaning and groaning under animal masks and meaty smacking of bellies and cellulite, more than a little spooky. I caught sight of somebody I was pretty sure was Jenn, but the guy on top of her wasn't Harvey. Or her husband. And I didn't even wanna imagine what Drundrero and Mrs Dundrero were getting up to. Or Siirkka-Liisa or Gunilla. I'm sorry, but I'm allergic to stuff like that. I'll just never be a totally swinging modern, I guess.

Suddenly Riita gave a loud scream.

"OK, that's your cue," said Alex, pulling me to my feet. Dr P was looking down at me from the stage, his arms raised.

I was like, "My cue for what?? No f-cking way am I having sex with anyone here, dude!"

"No, no--your role tonight is just to give a little blood. It's OK, just symbolic."

"Blood?" Not again, I almost said. "Forget about it!" But somehow Alex managed to wrestle me toward the rock-stage--I guess he was way stronger than he looked. He'd have to be, really. Anyway, I was so surprised and tired and wasted from the smoky haze that I kind of passively let myself get pushed along, which isn't really like me at all. Then, just as we got to the first of the little rock steps up to the stage, I felt something suddenly smack into my sprained ankle. I swear to God it was Alex's foot--he had deliberately tripped me! I pitched forward, the dark rocks came rushing up at me, and with a horrible smack my forehead hit the top step. My glasses shattered and fell in pieces everywhere, and I just sort of half-lay there stunned, my vision blacked out and pierced by bright flashes, and my ears filled with a loud roaring noise. For a minute I thought I'd gone blind.

Then I felt Alex pulling me up and I could see the candles flickering and Dr P in front of me, but all just sort of soft yellow and pink blobs, like an impressionist painting in motion. My face seemed to be covered with water--Dr P's pink blobby fingers reached toward me and started mopping my mouth with a handkerchief that instantly turned bright red, and I realized I had like the world's worst nosebleed. Figures. The roaring in my ears got louder. It was the crowd chanting. Riita and Kimmo, I vaguely noticed, had disappeared. Dr P took the blood-soaked handkerchief and dumped it in the gold chalice cookpot, then chanted some more. After he did that for awhile he started sprinkling stuff from the mixture onto the mound of earth in front of me. Everybody in the hall chanted along with him, the same nonsense phrase over and over again. He raised his staff over the mound and made stage-magic passes with his hands. Suddenly the earth began to stir. Loose bits of dirt started to fall away, and a hand poked its way out. Then the entire topsoil began to tremble and shake, and something pale and shiny could be seen beneath it--with my lousy vision it looked like tiny squirming black worms on top of a balloon. The rackety music clashed and screeched and reached a sort of loud crescendo with the howls of the audience. Suddenly the balloon-thing sat straight up in his grave and stared right at me. It was Safe-T-Man.

No, not Likkanen, the dead guy from my hotel in Helsinki--Safe-T-Man, the life-sized plastic dummy from my closet back home. He had some disgusting foamy stuff all over his face, and he seemed to be trying to tell me something...

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 25: Why a Swan?

The whole time I was in Finland I must of heard like dozens of bands and saw maybe 20 movies. I even thought of doing little thumbnail reviews or whatever of them here on the blog, but the problem was (aside from being way too busy), I just can't be positive enough about them. I mean it's not like Finns are unmusical, because they have actually produced a really amazing number of famous musicians for a country of only 5 million people. But, not to be mean or anything, Ireland has a million less people, so what's that about? Because everybody loves Irish music, even English people.

But let's face it, Finnish music only appeals to a narrow range of taste. Basically just Finns, pretty much, and Slavic metal-heads. I guess the deal with the arts in Finland is sort of the deal with everything else there: the Finnish language itself. It just isn't an easy language to sing in, and when Finns try to sing in English, instead of using their own heritage and, you know, distinctive vocal sound as a cultural advantage (like the Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria did, for instance), they all just try to sound like American or English pop stars, so the results can be pretty pathetic. If you don't believe me, try listening to Kingston Wall or Lordi or Nightwish or Sons of Bodom online and check it out for yourself. As for Finnish movies, they can be really interesting and sharp-looking and professionally shot and all--the Finns are the best tecchies in Europe--but basically they're like HBO specials filmed in a former Soviet republic. Finnish is a big problem in them, too, even in the famous ones like Man Without a Past--strangely enough, the more supporting the role, the better the acting. Less dialogue, I guess. The best actor in Finland (that I saw anyway) weighs like 400 pounds--he's the guy who plays the police chief in Raid. And I'm not even gonna try to type his name. But really, they should consider hiring the BBC to dub everything into English for them.

Whatever, the big exception (this is just my opinion, so please don't hate me) to mediocre Finnish music is their folk music, which I really like. And the most interesting band I heard the whole time I was there, though I would describe their sound as more electro-rock-folk, was a group called Tenhi (http://www.tenhi.com/). That's who was playing in the Paunanne main hall/rock garden at the top of the hill when we climbed up out of the gulch. One of the things I really love about the TV show Deadwood, by the way, is the way the mining town is sort of built during the course of the series, so that you watch it gradually spring to life. Paunanne reminded me of Deadwood in the way that everything was all rough-hewn and slapped together, with lots of little buildings and odd corners and twisting paths, though of course there weren't any gold mines. The only gold mines in Finland are cellphones and tourism, I guess. I never did find out who actually owned Pauanne, but I'm guessing it's some aging hippies like Ior Bock and his friends who were restoring and renting it out for a hobby--while prospecting for tourists in Kaustinen. Tonight they'd struck pay dirt.

Well silver, maybe, not gold, judging from their hair. Actually, the smallish mostly middle-aged crowd, who were mostly wearing jeans and T-shirts with slogans printed on them, kinda reminded me a little of the folks at very first "rock concert" I ever went to, which was in a park in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, when I was ten. And you will absolutely, totally never guess who was performing there. David Hasselhoff. You know, the American actor. He was like the most popular pop singer in Germany when I was a kid. That was a pretty far cry from Tenhi, who were playing a sort of dirge-like evocation of the winter forest accompanied by a dark chant when I first arrived. In other words, not danceable. Which was really just as well, in my case. Riita and Kimmo disappeared off somewhere together, so I was left to find a comfortable rock with Alex, who had thoughtfully brought along a blanket and some warmish Cokes and candy bars. "You'll never get through this circus tonight without some sort of sugar rush," he told me with a dramatic sigh. "I know I won't. I still have so many calls to make--the fat old sod lumbers me with all the details he can't be arsed with."

It was weird, but I still could get no sense of like who Alex really was. I mean, he was charming and even fun company to be around--especially compared to most of the other people there--but in terms of personal vibes, he seemed about as blank as the lenses of his designer glasses. I wasn't even sure whether he was gay or straight. Maybe neither. I got the feeling that deep down he was a sort of, you know, sad person--and usually that's a total turnoff for me. Well, makes sense, I guess after what I went through with Gene. But something about him, maybe his clever mind and curly hair and sharp-witted manner, made me want to find out more about him. So I just decided to save time and be like, "OK, so what's your story?"

But after he told me, I really didn't didn't feel any the wiser. Only child, father in the wine importing business, wanted to be a house music DJ and a journalist but instead got a degree in "accountancy" at Glasgow University, moved to London to work for an MP, then to Brussels when the "MP became an MEP", and now to Stockholm to work for Praetorius. There was absolutely no mention of a significant other or any personal life at all, and he recited it all impatiently, almost crossly, as if maybe he was ashamed of who he was or what he did or whatever. I thought to myself, damn girl, I do not want to ever sound like that about myself. Sort of accepting about being alone and bored with life and all emotionally blank, I mean, if that makes any sense. Maybe 'detached' is a better word? Whatever, I wanted to be happy, and I wanted it to show when I recited my resume to strangers. But realistically how can you ever guarantee that? Just by making your life as enjoyable as possible, I guess. I suddenly realized that what I really wanted was to be fed a diet of constant happiness, like chocolate. And that would take another person. And not just any person--only the right one. The candy man. In Sugartown.

I'm still not exactly clear where Sugartown is, but I know it exists somewhere. Because when I was a little girl, whenever I was really upset about something and couldn't sleep because I was sick or scared because we were moving or something, my mom would sing "Sugartown" to me as a lullaby. 'Cuz I'm in shh-shh-shh, shh-shh-shh, shh-shh-shh-shh-Sugartown..." It's a great way to say 'Shhhh' a lot to a whiney kid, I guess.

I'm guessing Alex's mom never sang him any lullabies at all. He only perked up when he was being malicious about his employer: "Magician, indeed. This 'raising the dead' ceremony we're to witness tonight is just his latest load of wank."

"You don't believe in any of it, then?"

He snorted. "Magic? It's all just pants. I should know, since I've made the arrangements for it--including the blood sacrifice. It's all done with mirrors, like the guerilla theater tricks he used to perform when he was a street busker for tourists in Stockholm's Old Town. How he ever got rich doing that for a living is a bleeding mystery to me."

I was like, "Sacrifice???"

And he was like, "Chill, not a human sacrifice. A swan, which was actually even harder to come by. They're legally protected here--I had to bribe a vet to diagnose it with bird flu. Probably really has it--I'm not going anywhere near its cage."

"So Dr P is killing a swan onstage tonight in front of everyone as part of this stupid ceremony thingie???"

He smirked at me.

"He's killed plenty of doves in his busking act--they don't just miraculously disappear, you know, dearie--they get crushed in little spring traps. Real or fake, either way magic requires a lot of blood. I thought you knew that from your long intimate talks with the great man." Now he sounded like he was jealous! It was weird--deep down I believed the same things he did about Dr P, you know, that he was a phoney or whatever, but for some reason I felt defensive about him at the same time. I mean, he'd always treated me with respect and courtesy, and it seemed sort of gross for Alex to be dissing him constantly behind his back. From what I could see he was a pretty generous boss, too, even if he was totally tweaked. And I guess I also still felt sort of flattered--in a freaked-out kind of way--that he'd proposed to me. Of course, he couldn't possibly have really thought I'd take a proposal like that seriously, right? Or did he? Suddenly I had a sudden picture in my head of Dr P as a sly, manipulative puppet-master type just pulling people's strings. Maybe he proposed like that to every chick he met, just to sort of guilt them out or fascinate them or make them feel some kind of loyalty to him, like I was. Now I felt really confused. And why a swan?

"I totally don't understand you. You don't believe in magic. You act like you hate him and hate the job--you must be doing it for some reason, aside from just the money, I mean!" He looked cross again. "Unless you're planning to write a book about it or something," I added. Then I caught sight of the look on his face. "That's it, isn't it?"

He laughed. "OK, busted. That's actually why I took the job in the first place. Well, that and all the lovely money he pays me. I've been working on a book about the Neo-Heathen movement for two years, so when I saw Praetorius' job advertised online I couldn't believe my luck. Look, promise you won't tell anyone, right? The old wanker would probably feel flattered to have someone to be his Boswell, but the rest of this mob would likely lynch me or sacrifice me to Loki or something. Promise?"

"OK."

Alex stared at me intensely. In the dim light his expression looked like that one you always see on statues of the Buddha. Smiling and blank. "And if you learn anything really deliciously interesting, you'll tell me first, right--I promise I won't quote you. It's not as if he doesn't deserve it," he went on, noticing my doubtful expression. "You've seen his website--almost everything on it from his so-called history is plagiarized word for word from the work of famous academics like Susannah Akermann and Anders Sandberg. Who I've met in person at an AI convention and, incidentally, thinks Praetorius is a charlatan and a hoaxster."

I was like, "You've read it in the original Swedish?" Yes, he said, he had--he'd learned Swedish in just a few weeks before he'd even taken the job. He spoke eight languages, David told me. The Finnish I'd heard him speaking on his cell phone just now he'd only picked up just in the last few days just to use on this trip. I totally couldn't believe it--his mad language skillz made me feel like a total dufus. I mean, I'd tried to learn Finnish for months, and I still had trouble just understanding what people said back when I said "Hello"! However, I was at least smart enough to recognize a good time to change the subject.

"How on earth do you manage to learn languages so fast?" I asked him with my best look of doggy-like admiration. "Is there like some kind of secret or whatever to it?"

"Sex."

"What do you mean?"

"The fastest way to learn a new language is in bed," he said and got back on his cell.

OK, so again I was no wiser. I still couldn't even figure out if he meant that in a figurative or in a gay way. Though as it turned out, he was totally right--and I'm finally picking up a lot of Finnish that way myself, now that it doesn't matter any more. And, let's face it--some bad habits, too. In bed I mean.

I like all of Tenhi's music, pretty much, although their latest CD, Airut: Aamujen is too much of a piano-y pity-party even for me. They were just about to record it in the studio, I guess, so they were playing a lot of cuts from it that night, with only a few from Vare, which is my favorite. Why do I like them so much? They don't literally play traditonal folk music in the way that some Finnish bands try to recreate the sound of the kantele from the era of the Kalevala (there is a lavish 2003 version of the Kalevala--a "Progressive Rock Epic"--available BTW, but it's not folk, and it's half in English), but somehow they manage to capture the feeling of how primitive Finnish music must have felt, if that makes any sense. They were playing the song 'Tenhi", which means "the voice of the shaman", when Jenn showed up to say hi--you remember, the heathen housewife from Columbia, Maryland? She had braided her dishwater blond hair and was wearing a tanktop and shorts. "Just went back and checked on the kids. He sounds like the guy from Coil," she said, or rather yelled, referring to Tyko Saarikko, the lead singer, who was growling into the mike up on the Flintstones rock-stage a few yards in front of us. High overhead, through the huge open wooden skylight, the sky was turning to a dark gold, as the sun blazed red through the round windows, burning through the swirling motes of dust to halo Dundrero's frizzy mane, to my left, like a giant Hairmax laser-comb.

One of the absolute worst things about me as a person is that I'm always noticing critical things about people--and one of the main things I always notice (which nobody else ever seems to) is how they walk. I think it goes back to my childhood, when I became really self-conscious about my gait, thanks to my mom. I guess I must have been in like third or fourth grade, maybe--we had just started having modern dance in PE, so one day when she was sitting on the patio having a gin and tonic or something I started dancing around the little back yard we had at that house. You know, to show off what I'd learned to her. But I guess she must have been having one of her "monthly migraines" or something, because suddenly she snapped at me, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, Hope, stop that galloping around!"

I was totally shocked, like she'd slapped me or something. I can still remember really clearly just standing there with my mouth open. I mean, I'd thought i was being so graceful! But instead Mom had made me feel like a great big clumsy horse or something. Anyway, after that I tried really hard to be conscious of how I moved and walk gracefully instead of galloping. In old-fashioned books young ladies are always taught 'deportment', which usually means stuff like manners and playing the piano or whatever, but also includes just learning how to walk properly. Especially because it must have been really hard navigating around in those huge stiff skirts they wore. Anyway, Jenn could have used some deportment classes, I thought. She had a sort of funny cartoon sailor's walk from side to side that made her hair flop back and forth like a spaniel's ears.

Although, come to think of it, the whole point of learning deportment was to attract a man, and Jenn already had one, being married and all. Plus she was a telephone-sex operator from home, which I guess meant she had a pretty different point of view on the whole subject of manners and stuff from Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott, for instance. Deportment pretty much didn't matter in her line of work.

"He's the head of the OTO in England," she said, still talking about the lead singer from Coil. "That's how Robb and I met--on an OTO message board."

I was like, "Nice. Romantic." WTF do you say to something like that, anyway? Oh, the Devil introduced you at an orgy? Bitchin'. "You know your friends from Seattle, Arwen or whatever? They sort of came onto me tonight. As a couple."

Now it was her turn to fake being effusive. "Cool! He's a really excellent lover. And she's lots of fun too. She's a great cook. You are so lucky."

"I told them no!" We were both shouting over the music now.

"Oh," she said. She made a big pouty face. "Bummer you aren't into them, they have a great leather collection. See, I have to be really dominated because I'm such a sub. And I just never seem to come with Robb--that's why he sent me to Harvey for training. Harvey's really great--he's into tantric techniques and all. And that charisma of his...he makes you wet just looking at you. I didn't even mind reciting my Oath to him every morning."

"'Oath'?"

"Yeah, that's the only part of submission I really hate. I have to wake up my Master every morning with, you know, this long speech full of promises about how good a slave I'll be all day and do everything he says and all. It's really unfair when you both have to work day jobs, you're just not in the mood half the time."

By now I should have been way past it, but I was still sort of shocked a little. "And you do all this like right in front of your kids???"

"Oh, the girls are too young to understand yet. They'll be free to make their own choices when they grow up--just so long as it isn't X'ian or anything super evil like that. Anyway, it wasn't just Harvey I served--Arwen's pretty dom, too. She was actually like the first woman I was ever with. To be honest, it was pretty boring down there, so I just played 'Alphabet Soup'. You know, I made vowels with my tongue, like 'A', 'E', 'I', 'O', 'U'..."

"Shut up, Jen, this is way too much information!" The band stopped playing just that sec, so suddenly everybody in the whole place could hear me screaming. A bunch of people turned to stare, including the middle-aged Finnish couple just behind us who were dressed like Goths but were severely tanned and groomed like aging fashion models, and I caught sight of Harvey and Arwen looking at me accusingly from between their stacks of coolers near the back of the hall.

"Oh--sorry," said Jenn. Then she brightened. "Maybe I'll see if they want to hook up with us tonight--if you're OK with that, I mean."

"Sure, it's none of my business," I told her. "I don't want to hook up with anybody tonight, thanks." But I was lying, cuz actually I really kinda did want to hook up with somebody quite a lot. They just hadn't shown up at Pauanne or introduced themselves to me yet, I guess. But there was definitely a feeling of orgy in the air, and it was starting to creep me out a little--maybe because I was starting to vibe it, too, and it made me feel all itchy and restless and, well, vulnerable. I wanted to wander out into the woods and go to sleep there and then fall in love with the first guy I saw when I woke up, like in a "Midsummer Night's Dream". But with my luck, I'd just get a sore bottom. I remember in my bros' old Playboy magazines there used to be a cartoon character called "Li'l Annie Fanny" or something who was always running around half-naked being chased by horny old dudes--and sometimes even horny old dudesses like Gunilla or Arwen. That's kind of how I felt right now with everyone hitting on me. I mean, it's not like I'm some kind of prude who's taken "The Purity Pledge" or whatever. If the right guy had shown up I'd have happily dropped my panties for him. I was on vacation, FFS! But let's face it--this was turning out to be a major freak convention. Riita had scored the only major hottie there, and even he was looking sorta gross at the moment. The two of them turned up all red-faced and covered in what looked like baby oil, with Kimmo stripped down to just his blue briefs and running shoes. Riita gave me a big kiss. She had woven a sort of garland of leaves and berries into her hair.

"Anssi is helping us to rehearse now," she said. "For the ceremony. Isn't it fun? We are having the most exciting holiday, even better than Ibiza."

"We were just in the sauna," said Anssi, squatting down beside me. I introduced him to Jenn. "Have you tried it? It is an authentic smoke sauna just as in our ancient Finnish traditions." Now that he mentioned it, I noticed he looked boiled-red all over too--and smelled like a side of ham.

"Is that the little brick building with the twisty chimney?" Jenn asked him. The band started playing again, and she and Anssi got into some long involved convo that I only half paid attention to--at least until he started talking about the ceremony, which was supposedly about to start any minute. Dr P's biggest worry, he told her, was that it would be somehow perverted or invaded by Tuuslar, the evil demon who secretly ruled Finland. Jenn said wow a few times, she was down with that, and nodded sympathetically while she gazed deep into his eyes through her thick glasses--maybe she was suddenly into him because she thought I was, I dunno. Or maybe she detected something Harveyishly dominant about Anssi that I'd stupidly overlooked. Whatever, after he'd been going on about Tuuslar for a few minutes, I interrupted her play.

"So you think Tuuslar is actually, you know, a real person--not just a symbol or whatever?"

And Anssi was like, "Oh no, he's a real person. He is the avatar of Vainomenen, who has come back to Finland, as he promised he would when he sailed to the Western Lands. He always takes the form of an old man with long grey hair and a beard, just like Odin," he added politely.

"Hail Odin," Jenn replied. She was starting to remind me of the chick on Tenacious D who clogged for Satan.

"But I thought Vainomenen was a good god," I said. "Why would he come back like all evil?"

"That is just Praetorius' opinion. Gods are neither good or evil--their ways cannot be understood by us. Vainomenen is not acting evil so much as...crazy. No Finn could believe he is evil. But he is perhaps insane now. You see, when Vainomenen began to be needed and believed in again, after independence when the Kalevala was taughtt in our schools, he came back to us. But his true native country was not just Finland--it was Karelia, too. And that part of our country is gone, stolen by the Russians and its Finnish people all driven out. For Vainomenen it felt like half his soul or his identity was missing. So he became like a schizophrenic. That is why he says crazy things and does crazy acts, but everything he does is for Finland. He is Finland, but the ancient and untamed part--that is why he is so dangerous."

I was like, um...ok...

Anssi wasn't done with the subject, though. "And even though he is perhaps the greatest magician in the world, Praetorius is making a stupid mistake to do this thing tonight, I think. He is very afraid of Vainomenen, but so far the god has not harmed him. But tonight Praetorius will invoke Ukko instead, Vainomenen's father. Ukko is like the Christian god, a creator, but he has vanished from this country, his powers are waning now, like Tapio the forest-god. But even if he does restore Lemminkainen back to life--and it will take someone of the blood of Lemminkainen's mother to actually do this, to make the magic salve from the honey of bees--then Vainomenen will be furious. He may be jealous of Lemminkainen and happy to have him stay in the land of the dead. Or he may be angry that he has been ignored and insulted in this way. It is my thought that he will take his revenge on all of us here tonight somehow."

"Well, duh! Why are you helping him do it then?" I said. "Aren't you afraid?"

He shook his head. "I have never seen any of the gods, even though I have studied them all my life. You have already met two of them just in the few days that you have been in Finland. You have even slept with one of them! I can only imagine to be in the presence of such power, of such a magical history. This is a thing I envy you very much--even if Vainomenen should find me, should kill me and steal my soul, then at least I will have been touched by a god. I will believe with not just my mind--but also with my inner spirit. You see, because Vainomenen is with us now, someday we Finnish people will have our Karelia back and become whole again. Already the Russians there are slowly becoming Finns. They read the Kalevala now there, too, you know--they even have Kalevala festivals and many publications about it. It is like a seed that is spreading there again, like a forest renewing after a great fire." Russians turning into Finns? Huh, how was that gonna work, by osmosis? You can see why I preferred hanging with Alex--he was the only other grownup there.

"I didn't sleep with him!" I said. "Well, technically I did, but we didn't--" Anssi was pursing his lips and shaking his head at me, while Jenn smirked.

He was like, "His mark is on you--you are like a celebrity for us tonight. Don't make it spoiled for everyone here by denying it."

Great. I mean, what could I possibly say to that? So I shut up. I didn't want to wreck anyone's little fantasies--I just hoped nobody was expecting me to have Likkanen's baby now. Tenhi came to the end of their set and after some applause, they were joined by their friends and girlfriends, who helped them move their equipment offstage. By now, the sun was starting to set behind the trees, and it was actually getting dark, something I hadn't seen before in Finland. "I must go to help Praetorius," Anssi said, getting up. "It's almost time for the ritual to begin."

I looked around, but Kimmo and Riita had disappeared again.

"OK, but why a swan?"

"The Swan of Tuonela," Anssi said. "It is the sacred Finnish symbol of death. After Lemminkainen killed it, his punishment was to be murdered himself and sent to the underworld."

"And tonight we're killing another one? How's that gonna work out?"

But he was gone. Something else he'd said stuck in my head, though. What was it--that I'd already met two of the gods of Finland? OK, assuming that Likkanen really had been Lemminkainen or whatever, then who was the second? The crazy bum in the park who'd taken a dump in the street in Helsinki? That was Vainomenen-Tuuslar? He hadn't seemed so scary to me. Smelly and disgusting maybe, but not exactly terrifying. I decided Anssi was just as looney as the rest of them, after all, if that was his idea of a god. Or Safe-T-Man, for that matter--I can personally guarantee you there was absolutely nothing divine about him.

But I'm sure L. Ron Hubbard got that a lot, too. Before he died, I mean.


Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 24: All Done With Mirrors

"As we pile now the things we used to feel before we
Get close to his presence who tells where to go.
It's that first sound you get before you think about it at all.
After that comes the one that's reduced and it's gone..."

-Petri Walli of Kingston Wall, "Welcome to the Mirrorland".

Well, be fair. Could you write song lyrics in another language? I couldn't, not even in German. When I got back to our motorhome, Riita and Kimmo were lounging around in a sort of post-coital stupor, smoking spliffs and, except for matching Tri-Logic T-shirts, pretty much totally commando. I jonesed once or twice with them just to be sociable--and it actually made my ankle feel way better (and the lyrics more, you know, comprehensible)--while Kimmo explained about the music we were listening to, which you can hear some of here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyLo19rnPXw . He was playing Kingston Wall's third CD, Tri-Logy, which he had told us had inspired the name of his own band. Well, band of the moment, anyway. Finnish bands change their names--and personnel--a lot, apparently.

But where had they gotten the idea of "Mirrorland" from in the first place, I wondered. I mean, it's not likely they'd heard about it from reading Adolf Hitler--or Dr Praetorius, for that matter. "Alice in Underland?" answered Kimmo, shrugging. "I dunno, a lots of bands are tuned onto that word, especially Russian ones. But the big idea for all the mystic concepts, all of of them came from Petri Walli. He was born from a famous Finnish musicals family, his older brother is a jazz guitarist, so Petri was very competed with him always. One day when he was just 18 he went in a bar club where was drinking beers Jukka Jylli, who was a bass player, and he spoke to him enthusiasted and demanded them to start a band. Then later they telephoned to America where Finland's greatest drummer, Sami Kuoppamaki, there was studied, and he agree to come back to Finland to join with them. So that is how 'Kingston' Wall became started. Soon, Walli reveal himself to be the next Finnish Jimi Hendrix."

I'm no expert, but actually his guitar playing did sound pretty amazing to me. "Shame about his voice, though."

"Many people say that, that is why he is never got a foreign gig. That is why also I have in my own music learned his lesson and teach voice training and so forth perfect English. It is not enough to be genius in America or the UK if you wish to sell yourself music--you gotta sound totally authenticated."

Too true, dude. Kimmo's English was not the greatest when he was straight, but when he was stoned he seemed to sincerely think it was. Listening to him, after awhile I started to feel pretty wasted myself just trying to keep track of all of his odd twisted phrases. I doubt I've done them justice here. Unfortunately for Petri Walli, however, there are a lot of websites that reprint all the lyrics to his songs, which provides a casual detective with a pretty good place to start when it comes to his relationship with Ior Bock. For example on Tri-Logy, there's a long song called "Alt-Land-Is", which retells the Bock Saga in mini-me form, though for some reason the 'Aesir' are referred to as the 'Arsers'. So, was Petri Walli mocking gays like Bock, who he spent all those winters in Goa with? Or was he gay himself? Kimmo greeted this question with fury. Terms like "gay" and "straight", he told me, were just Western inventions from our Judeo-Christian prejudice. Our human ancestors, the types Bock was talking about I guess, had no such prejudices and shared their love (for this I read "semen") equally with both men and women, and even themselves. In Vedic medicine it was considered healthy to drink one's own urine and semen. And his hero, Petri Walli, was not gay, he said. Walli, who had killed himself in 1995 at exactly the same age as me (then)--26--had checked out early partly because his relationship with a woman named "Tanja" had ended, and supposedly, the song we had just listened to, "For All Mankind", was his suicide note. This idea, by the way, seemed to be based on the two lines:

"Look out world it's time to die
No more crying with my mind".

"Look out" was right--he had killed himself by jumping from a church roof or tower a few blocks from where Likkanen had grown up. But that was pretty much it for suicidal lyrics, and the last few lines seemed to be about Bock again:

"Balanced heart needs no disguise
But shamen seeds for all mankind"

"Shaman seeds", of course is what Bock calls his own sperm. Unexpectedly, Kimmo agreed. He thought it likely that Walli had dedicated his death to his friend Bock, in the same manner as Hephaiston sacrificed himself for Alexander the Great, or the slave Antinous for the Emperor Hadrian, in the final Mithraic Rite of conferred immortality--though of course Kimmo didn't know about all that (oddly, however, it is mentioned on Dr Praetorius' website). Whatever, Bock was crippled in 1999, so if the poor old guy really is immortal, it's not likely gonna be much fun for him.

OK, I've just reread everything I just wrote, and it sounds totally dazed and confused. So I'm gonna delete it and start over.

Nope, the second version doesn't really read any better--I guess when you write about something that happened when you were high, you always type like you're on crack. That and my inferior writing skills. You should see Jo or Kerry's writing sometime--they are so effortlessly natural and talented. For me every single sentence feels like it's being squeezed out of a toothpaste tube--and I never seem to know what flavor it's actually gonna be until it's all out there. Anyway, Kimmo really had only one other insight to offer, that seemed excellent at the time, but now I'm kinda wishing we'd ignored it: he said that Walli was obsessed with mirrors, to the point that he would carry a small square one around with him and constantly look over his shoulder with it, sometimes even at his audience during concerts. This idea excited Riita, who produced her makeup compact and started peering out the window behind her. Our view, across the top of the chain-link fence, crossed a few dusty meadows and bogs and dirt roads in the direction of Kaustinen in the distance, visible only as a jumble of building-blocks and short trees, like a small child's toy-set.

"Oh look, Hoop," she said. "The town looks so different this way. I see balloons." Balloons??? "Oh no, not balloons." Suddenly she screamed. "No no, they are flying monsters!" She threw the compact onto the carpeted floor, then ran into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.

"What is she on, for Chrissake?" I asked Kimmo as I retrieved her little plastic compact case and wiped it clean with the hem of my skirt.

He looked apologetic. "We did a little acid together." Oh great. He went over to the bathroom door to remonstrate with her, and without really thinking, I plopped down on the couch and tried looking over my shoulder with the mirror in the same spot where Ritta had just been sitting.

Now before I get into this, let me just mention that I've done this thing with the mirror--"mirror-gazing", my husband calls it--dozens of times since then, and there really is a noticeable and consistent distortion effect, especially with objects that are super-far away. If you don't believe me, I suggest you try it yourself, and you'll see I'm right. I've turned on lots of friends and colleagues to this at parties, and they've made two points about the phenomenon which I think are totally valid. The first is that all mirrors, especially small cheap ones, are ground very badly and suffer from scratches and dead spots and surface tension curvature, so that over distances, they produce some really bizarre visual effects. The second is that we don't really see anything anyway--the human brain just interprets signals from the optic nerve in a way that we're comfortable with. So when things are totally reversed, like in the mirror, no matter how quickly we turn around to verify what we've just seen (or thought we've seen), it takes the brain a few milliseconds to reverse the data and return to "normal" itself. Do this enough times in a row, and your brain gets really confused, especially about left versus right. OK, OK, mine gets pretty confused anyway. Like Adolf Hitler's.

However a friend of mine here in the computer department at GW got so into the whole subject that he actually set up a series of quick and dirty experiments to see if the phenomenon was real or just psychogenetic. What he did was, he set up two identical cameras--first a pair of high quality digital still cameras, then video camcorders--side by side, facing out an upper floor window, one normally, the other into a mirror reflecting exactly the same view over the Foggy Bottom campus. In both cases, the cameras were time-coded identically, and the images displayed together on a computer screen. In the first experiment with the still cameras, except for scratches and blemishes on the mirror surface, there were no measurable differences between the two scenes, except in terms of picture quality. But in the second case, the moving images showed several anamolies--slightly different rates of speed for cars crossing the same path, lights on or off in matching apartments, and in several cases what appeared to be distant pedestrians appearing in the mirror that were invisible in the 'real' camera's view. So I'm just mentioning it to let you know I'm not just being all hippie and "woo-woo, scary" about it. Seriously, try it yourself. But take my advice and don't do it alone.

Anyway, when I looked for Riita's "balloon monsters", what I thoughe I saw was a couple of large dark plastic trash bags slowly floating and tumbling across a distant field. But when I turned around and looked through the window without the mirror I couldn't see them any more.

"She wants you," Kimmo said, returning to the living area, In honor of the seriousness of the situation, he had put his sporty red Euro-briefs back on, I couldn't help but notice. "I gotta go play some excellent music for the people now." I was getting more used to him by now, and he didn't look so much like Sting to me any more. His jaw seemed weaker, and there was something sort of foxy and shifty about his eyes, I thought. After he left, I went in the bathroom and held Riita's head on the toilet (she wasn't Ctrl-Z'ing or even crying, just sort of whimpering with her eyes wildly dilated like a cat's) for about half an hour while I patiently explained over and over again that the monsters she'd seen in the mirror were just trash-bags. Finally it seemed to get through to her, and she cheered up again.

"I love you," she said. The E talking again. Poor Riita, I thought, she'd really been on a strange trip these last few days.

"Um, me too," I said. Whatever.

"We do not say these words in Finland like you Americans do. I would sacrifice myself to give you life forever, Hoop," she said earnestly.

What can you say to that? I was like, "Uh, thanks." But no thanks. Chill.

"You will stay with me tonight? You will protect me from the mirrors? We will be wearing the white gowns together for the ceremony, you know."

I didn't. "What white gowns?"

And she was like, "The ones that Anssi brought for us while you were away. They are on the bed, we must not fold them or make them dirty. We are going to be brides, he said."

"Brides"??? Brides of what? Frankenstein? The Devil? I felt like I was stuck in a high school production of "Rosemary's Baby; the Musical" while were trying them on in the bedroom later. Oh well, I guess if I had any aspirations to be a serious Mythologist, I needed to suck it up like Margaret Mead or somebody and just go along with all this New Agey Wiccan cr-p and quit my belly-aching for awhile. Because soon enough, I'd be back in Washington DC teaching morons from Long Island that Brad Pitt's version of the Illiad was the incorrect one and Achilles didn't 'get away' at the end, in the country's worst private university in its most boring city with its dreariest climate, and Pauanne would seem like Heaven to look back on. Or something. At least I might actually get a dissertation out of it.

Because from a distance, this incredible hodgepodge of Finnish hocus-pocus was gonna look really impressive, at least to Stateside academics. The Kalevala had become a cottage industry here in Finland: in addition to the obvious branding, like folk-art mugs and blankets, theme parks, music festivals and the Society for Creative Anachronism-style re-enactments for TV, it had also spawned a permanent self-generating culture of new translations, album lyrics, comparative literature and sociological studies, and in recent years, its own magical belief systems--even Kalevala Tarot interpretation! Of course, it was all pretty much just hype--except for a few serious types like Anssi and con-men like Bock. Most Finnish Satanists, for instance, were teenaged boys in death-metal groups and most Wiccans and heathens were young working women inspired by the TV series Charmed, which was a huge hit here. But nobody in my department needed to know that. At this rate, I'd be the only "occult Kalevala studies" expert in America--and this without even speaking a word of Finnish. I know, I know, what a pathetic ambition, right? But I had to do something to make a living, and nowadays it was no longer enough just to be a conscientious college professor and scholar or whatever. If it ever had been, I mean. After all, I had just turned town down many many millions of dollars in marriage in favor of a working life. Though obviously, if I intended to get serious about all this stuff professionally as a future career path, I would need to bite the bullet and just go ahead and learn the stinking language. And how better to do that than in bed? Obviously, I needed a Finnish husband. Speaking of which, I noticed that both our long rather simple Karelian-style bridal gowns were split all the way up nearly to the crotch--so remembering the mosquitoes, I went ahead and put a faded pink long-sleeved Old Navy jersey, which was as close as I could get to flesh-tone, and my jeans back on underneath it. Which somewhat marred the fashion effect. But Margaret Mead obviously had taken along way better insect spray than me to Samoa.

Riita, on the other hand, looked pretty good (for her). I spent half an hour putting makeup on her , because she refused to look in the bathroom mirror, and we found her a pair of silver lame slippers in her suitcase to wear. I felt like the ugly step-sister in Cinderella. But actually it was just as well that I was way over-dressed, because when we got outside about 10 pm or so, I noticed that it was starting to cool off outside in spite of the bright sunshine. In fact it still looked and felt like a lazy autumn afternoon in Tuscany, but you could definitely feel a bite in the air. By now my ankle was killing me again, so it took us forever to retrace our steps back across the parking lot to the Music Gulch. Halfway down, Riita suddenly said, "Hoop, what if we are really trapped in the Mirrorland now? What if we have gone through the mirror without realizing it? Perhaps we will suddenly see monsters everywhere now, and nothing will ever be same for us ever again in our lives."

I was like, "Damn, girl, you are so never allowed to take drugs again!" But she was right about one thing: nothing would ever be quite the same again after that night, for me at least. Of course, that's true for every night of our lives anyway, pretty much--we just don't notice it very often.

Down in the gulch, more oil-drum fires had been lit and loud music was blasting and echoing through the trees. All evening more and more cars had trickled into the parking lot, and now a crowd of maybe 40 or 50 people was camped out down there. As we got closer we saw it was "Tri-Logic" playing on the little improvised stage under the bridge--and surprise, surprise, they actually weren't bad. At least as long as they kept playing instrumentals. According to their CD cover, they played "happy music, with a blend of Nordic Rock and Eastern Hindu traditions." The Hindu part, was apparently the guy named Pol (who had lived in the Bock commune in Gumbostrand and had even taken part in the "Temple of Lemminkainen" excavations, Kimmo had told us), who played tablas and other Indian-looking stuff. But by Finnish standards, it did sound happy pretty much, I guess. On the other hand, by Finnish standards Petri Walli's suicide song was actually pretty upbeat. It was a country E had been invented for, if you ask me. Alex and Anssi spotted us and found us a big rock of our own to sit on, between a pair of lesbians with "Huggy Heathen" T-shirts and a deeply tanned married Boomer couple, the guy of which had the strangest hair I've ever seen. It was sort of balding from the front, but enclosed his head like a giant frizzy gray ear-muff on the sides and back--that erupted underneath in a sort of huge horse-tail of long straight very coarse black hair that he must have spent like two decades growing out. The lesbians turned out to be a married pair of Lutheran priests--the younger one, Gunilla,who had a dark 'stache, was Swedish and the older fatter one, Siirkka-Liisa, was a Finn--and both had been suspended by the church, they told us during a break in the music, after they'd been arrested by the police for performing a naked woodland heathen rite in a national forest.

The Swedish one, Gunilla, was like, "The Church is responsible for all the evil in the world today." In addition to a mustache, she had short corn-rowed plaited dreadlocks with little plastic toy cars and animals woven into them.

"Um, what about the good things it did, like literacy?" I said. "And the law?" There was a general murmur of disagreement around me.

"The ancient Finns and Vikings had their own Runic alphabet. And they had many good laws," Anssi told me. "If a man killed another, for example, then he would compensate the family."

"You mean like O.J.?" I said, but then the next set started up. This time Kimmo sang. He didn't have a bad voice exactly--and at least he didn't try sing in English. Instead he sang in a language that I like totally couldn't recognize--it sounded sort of made up, like rhymes you sing when you're playing jump-rope. When I asked Riita what language it was, she just shook her head. Her eyes were still wildly dilated, I noticed, and she seemed twitchy and restless.

"He's singing in the Bockian 'Finnish alphabet' language or 'ROT'-system, as it is also known," said my neighbor on the other side, the tanned aging Boomer guy with the weird hair. He was obviously another American--it's a good thing I hadn't come to Finland to escape my fellow-countrymen, because us tourists seemed to be outnumbering the Finns, here in Pauanne at least. "I helped Ior develop and translate this root human language from the ancient Runic sources." His voice had the weird sing-song sound of Beavis and Butthead's hippie teacher on MTV. His name was Dundrero Adonizedek and his wife was named Charlotte. The reason I know this (and can even spell it) is because he handed me his business card, which had a little sunburst native American logo on it above both their names and said "The Adonizedek Foundation--Lectures on Shamanism and Kabbalism".

"We'll be conducting workshops here all day tomorrow," he said. "I hope you'll attend, OK? Our meme will be the amazing synergy between the Kalevala and the Kabbala." See? My thesis was writing itself. All I had to do was just relax and get fed info. His wife Charlotte, who seemed to be both younger than him and another nationality (French Canadian--and a former psychiatric hospital administrator, I later found out), didn't seem nearly as friendly--she just glowered at me. "No pre-registration necessary," he added quickly. Meanwhile, Riita suddenly took off to dance frenziedly in front of the band with the dark skinny Swedish lesbian, Gunilla. They looked exactly like something out of The Golden Bough, after the priestesses chew laurel leaves or whatever and start foaming at the mouth. I was just hoping everybody kept their clothes on.

"Would you like perhaps a tarot reading from the Kalevala?" her Finnish friend Siirkka-Liisa, asked me shyly. Her big bovine face bore a strange resemblance to Wheezy's, but she was way too old to be her reincarnation (Dundrero would have said she was her 'Preincarnation'). Alex was back on his cell, Anssi was sulking again, and I wasn't going anywhere on my ankle, so I was like, OK, why not? First of all, she explained to me in her heavily accented English (I'd noticed that older Finns tended to speak better grammatical English but with much thicker accents, while the opposite was true of the younger ones), I needed to understand that the Kalevala tarot deck was not an exact match, that many of the heroes and heroines and gods in the deck were only partially equivalent to the traditional Major Arcana. Anssi, with many interruptions and arguments, helped her translate this.

The first "stave" she laid down, "Fehu", advised me not to take anything in life for granted. Wow, brilliant. The card she placed there was that of Death or Tuonela, where Lemminkainen was depicted lying in pieces. But I was not to be afraid of death literally, she said--this conjunction merely meant a great change or transformation in my life was coming. The second stave was "Uraz", which she said symbolized a strong protective strength. The effect of this was apparently doubled by the card she drew for it, which was Kylikki, the wife of Lemminkainen. "But in this place she wishes you well, so don't be afraid of her either," said Siirkka-Liisa. "She will join her strength and sexuality to yours." For some reason this made me think of the naked porn actress I'd seen having sex with Erkki and Eetu at Moominworld that morning, and suddenly I felt a teeny bit sick. I looked over at Riita, her mouth open and her bridal dress falling off, dancing with Gunilla right in front of the grinning Kimmo and remembered how anxious I'd been to make sure she didn't see anything. God, what a dope I was, trying to protect her! Maybe she wouldn't of even cared. Maybe it would of just gotten her hot or whatever--what did I know?

Had that actually happened just that morning? It felt more like a year ago. It was like time just stood still during these super-long Finnish summer days. Maybe if you divided your year between Pauanne and Patagonia you'd never get old. They have summer during our winter down under, right?

On the seventh stave, "Gebu", Siirkka-Liisa placed the Lovers card and on the eighth, "Wuhoz", The Hanged Man. "This key is about willing self-sacrifice, and often it can be compared to Odin hanging himself on the tree to gain the knowledge of the Sacred Runes. This is what must happen tonight to bring your friend back from Tuonela." She and Anssi bickered in Finnish after that, them she laid down beside "Jera", which she said was the passing of the seasons or time, the Wheel of Fortune card. This caused more argument, because it said "Taro" on it it, which Anssi insisted wasn't even a proper Finnish concept.

"Our word for fate is 'kohtalo'," he said, "Not this stupid card with a circle of animals painted on it. This isn't even Sami."

"It is just a symbolize," she said placatingly. She really did have a sweet temper, which is pretty much what it took to live with her friend Gunilla, I guess. I only remember two more staves after that: "Mannaz" and "Inguz". The first of these represented the Adamic "first man" or male principle, she said--beside it she placed the Fool, in this case the card depicting Lemminkainen. The second symbolized the female principle, and it drew the Star card, or Marjatta. You remember Marjatta, right? The chick that gets pregnant from a whortleberry tree? So then, now that all the staves were filled, Siirkka-Liisa next interpreted their meaning, using the rest of the deck. This went on like forever, and I pretty much tuned most of it out. "The suits for this deck match in this way: Swords/Swords, Wands/Stakes, Cups/Dishes, and Pentacles/Loaves. I am going to work key by key through this layout instead than stay with the normal sequence. This is because I want each card to be a 'key' to the position I place it...this works for me. And, please believe, this is very important--this must work for the Inner Self! Now that is explained, we are starting off with the first card being for the God, Himself..."

She laid it face down in the center of her layout, then turned it over. The card was Judgement, or Ukko. "Oh, this is very powerful," she said. She then launched into a long, rambling explanation full of vague stuff that had Anssi shaking his head, you know, the usual fortune-teller stuff about change and daring to take chances, etc etc. But at the end of this, she added, "I don't understand this layout too well, really. The cards seem to say that Lemminkainen will come back to life again if the right offering is made to the God. So that is correct for the ceremony and is a very good thing. But it must be his bride who brings him back, Kylikki, by sacrificing her own life for him--instead it is the Star card, Marjatta who is sitting in her throne here instead. It makes no sense."

So I was like, "So what is the symbolic meaning of this Star card?" She and Ansssi conferred briefly over the right English word.

"Hope," she said finally.

Maybe it was because of all the smoke or because we were in the forest, but it seemed to get darker a lot sooner that night than on any other other since I'd been in Finland. By the time Tri-Logic played their final number just before 11 or so to a round of polite applause, it actually felt sort of like a real honest-to-goodness dusk outside. Riita came back looking all flushed and sweaty, but elated again. I was really hoping Gunilla wasn't giving her more E. While we stood around slapping at mosquitoes and waiting for Kimmo to finish packing up his equipment and join us, I heard Dundrero getting into a loud argument behind me with Harvey, the "vitki" from Seattle, on the subject of runes.

"The Runes are not Jewish or Christian," Harvey was insisting in a loud, over-bearing tone. "They are part of our pure Nordic heritage, not part of the Judeo-Christian Conspiracy. So all this Kabbala equivalency bullsh-t is nidh!"

"Many leading eriloz now accept that the Sephiroth is symbolic of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, OK?" squeaked Dundrero back in his passive-aggressive sing-song.

"There's nothing Zionist about the sacred Aesir symbols, blood-sucker! You're nothing but a spiritual leech!"

"Oh yeah? Well, Heil Hitler, man!" It was obvious that Dundrero was both furious but totally physically scared of the other guy at the same time. Still, something was causing him to stand up to him. I fully expected both men to make a sudden rush at each other like a pair of enraged gorillas and really get into it or whatever--in which case Harvey could have snapped the other man, who was taller but way older and thinner than him, like a twig. But instead of staging a smackdown, both of them started making odd passes at each other with their arms and striking weird poses, while screeching weird cawing noises.

"Oh, don't pay them any mind, darlin'," said Arwen, who had popped up beside me. "They're just showing off for the young wenches. It's typical male behavior."

Maybe it was typical in Seattle, but I'd never seen anything like it before. So I was all like, "WTF are they doing???"

"Ha ha, it's called staghagalder--they're miming runic postures and chanting galders at each other, old Norse spells. They'll get bored with it in a minute as soon as everybody stops paying them attention. Men start acting like big babies the minute they reach middle age. It's a harmless way of letting off a little steam. Cheaper than a red sports car, anyway." She took my arm and propelled me off a little way from the others. "Harvey--I mean Eldred--really likes you," she said, looking at me all expectantly. Uh oh.

"Huh?"

"He's really into you. We both are. Why don't you hook up with us, sweetie? We can take you back to our B & B with us after the ceremony." I stared at her for a few secs, just to make double-sure she meant what I thought she meant. Yep. She was pimping for her husband!

"No offense--but that is just so gross. Ewwwww!" I said, twisting out of her grasp. Well, I told you before there was worse to come, didn't I? I actually didn't even enjoy typing about it--now I'm gonna have to go watch some TV or something to get that picture out of my head again. I guess you had to see them to understand what I'm all about here. Maybe I can find a photo of them at their website, so you can. Meanwhile 'Ugly Betty' is on, yay! Which is my fave show now. 'House' used to be, as you know if you've been reading this, because of my super-sized crush on the totally awesome Hugh Laurie, but if I'm honest, it got pretty dark and grim right about the time I got married. Or maybe getting married had something to do with it, I dunno. Whatever. Oh, and I also love 'Dirt', 'the Unit', 'Friday Night Lights', 'Deadwood', and 'Desperate Housewives' (so now you know). Everything else on TV pretty much sux, though. Especially the news.

And 'Wife-Swap'.


Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 23: The Second Chamber

When I was a little girl, even before I learned to talk properly, I began to notice that my dad came home at about the same time every day, so I would wait for him at about 5 o'clock outside on the front stoop. At first my mom tried to make me stop, but I must have been a really stubborn kid, because she finally gave up and started giving me a little snack to take out with me instead, which consisted of animal cookies and a Dixie cup of chocolate milk. I guess my dad must have been desk-bound for the first time at that point in his career--I can't even remember which house it was or which base we were stationed at--but it became a kind of tradition for me even after I was in school. I can remember I even did it when he was due back from the Gulf after Desert Storm, when I was about 10 or 11.

By then of course I would take along a good book to read. The thing was I never quite knew how he'd arrive home, sometimes it would be in his car, sometimes in a military vehicle, sometimes he'd bum a ride from one of his fellow-officers, sometimes in Germany or England we even lived close enough to base for him to actually walk home. So it was like a game every time a car turned onto our street, trying to guess whether he was in it or not. I think he liked it, too--I can still remember Daddy saying at the dinner table, "No sir, I won't accept just any old posting from the Corps unless it includes a good front stoop--that's my A number-one requirement for housing. I don't care if a billet has no kitchen or bathroom, not even a roof, just as long as she has a good old-fashioned solid front stoop for the Scout to sit on." Well, that was how he talked. Until I was six or seven nothing would budge me from it in the late afternoons, except a bad thunderstorm (I was afraid of lightning and thunder when I was a kid), especially when he was due home after a long overseas posting. A few times, I remember, the Mothership would even come out and sit reading and waiting beside me. I guess those must have been times when she was secretly worried about him. More than usual, I mean.

I was reminded of this feeling sitting under the awning on the stoop of the motorhome, even to the sensation of imaginary chocolate and animal cookies in my mouth. I briefly thought of going back inside to find a book to read, then remembered I'd only brought along The Game, which didn't really seem to suit the occasion much. On second thoughts, maybe it did--a little too well. Then I suddenly wondered, who exactly was I waiting for? Dad? Or Safe-T-Man maybe? Well, why not? Sitting on a stoop was kind of appropriate, I guess, since the whole point of this gathering, aside from the music, I mean, was to bring him back to life, to create the "Return of Lemminkainen", just as in the Sibelius suite. And I probably knew him about as well as anyone did--judging from Likkanen's blog, spending one night with a woman seemed to be pretty much his average. And we'd spent two together, if you counted the airline flight. Dr P and Riita had only spent about an hour each with him, and nobody else here had even met him at all. The only other person I could think of better qualified to wait for him on a door-stoop was Riita's mom, really. And I couldn't exactly see her showing up to resurrect him, though she might have done a better job than me, actually. Obviously Riita got her girl-gone-wild streak from somewhere. Thinking about this made me sort of sad, actually, because I decided that in a way Matti really had just spent the rest of her life waiting around for Likkanen, or maybe just some guy like him. Finally she gave up and settled for just any old Pekka (so to speak)--but if she and Likkanen had actually worked out and somehow stayed together, then he would be Riita's father, which was kind of a spooky thought. But then Riita would be a totally different person, wouldn't she--probably a lot smarter and more attractive and ironic than the version I was stuck with. It surprised me a whole lot to find myself thinking that, because up until that moment, I hadn't really seen Safe-T-Man as being any of those things at all. But maybe now he was safely dead, it was OK to romanticize him a little. Certainly no one else was going to--the poor old guy had managed to construct a perfectly empty, pointless life. In my opinion, anyway. I knew I didn't want to end up like that, with just a few boastful, lying entries on a blogsite and a brass erection to be remembered by. I think that was probably also the first moment in my life that I also suddenly realized that I wanted marriage and a family. You know, children or whatever.

Strangely enough, I am now totally cured of my fear of thunderstorms. That's because when I was in high school I was struck by lightning during soccer practice. Well, almost struck by lightning--technically it hit the tree we were all cowering under. But it knocked me unconscious and left me tingling and deafened for days. But here's the amazing thing: after that, I wasn't scared of it any more! I guess it was the 'never strikes twice in the same place' thing. Wouldn't it be great if all our fears could be cured that easily? You know, like not being afraid of the dentist any more after you've had your wisdom teeth pulled. Or not being scared of getting into relationships once you've had your heart broken. Instead of the reverse, which is usually what happens. I used to think about that when my dad was dying--you know, what if I could wheel him out onto a soccer field and arrange to get him struck by lightning. Would that have somehow magically cured his cancer? It occurred to me that that was sort of what Dr P was planning to try to do with Likkanen, really--run a sort of psychic electric charge through him like Frankenstein's monster in order to bring him back to life. And what if (OK, ha ha) it worked? Would that mean that Likkanen would then be immortal?

I was interrupted in this unusually silly (even for me) reverie by Alex Rizzio. "His Satanic Majesty requests your company at supper," he said. "Christ! What the bluidy f-ck have you done to your foot?" I had put on a pair of thick yellow socks and a Nike on one foot, but because my ankle was so swollen had borrowed one of Riita's Birkenstocks for the other. Just to, you know, complete my total dork look. So actually it was a good thing that there were no seriously hot unattached guys there, or I would have probably just had to lock myself in the bathroom. And in fact Alex was being tactful--he hadn't even mentioned the Retardex all over my face, even though I could tell he really wanted to.

I was like, "I sprained my ankle. And Riita won't be joining us, I don't think. She's kind of busy." Behind me the back of the RV was visibly bouncing up and down.

"So I see," he said, arching a single slightly plucked eyebrow at the sight. "Who knew your little side-kick was such a slapper?"

"A what?"

"You know, a slut. A skanky ho. Though if I'm honest, I'd be a bit tempted myself. I have noticed," he went on as we crossed the lot to Dr P's motorhome, "That for whatever the reason, everyone who spends any time around you at all gets the urge to drop their knickers and start shagging. Or haven't you noticed?" I was literally struck speechless. Was this his way of cruising me? I'd been pretty sure he was gay, but he'd just said he was "a bit tempted". Did he mean he was into Riita or Kimmo--or me? Or was he just being sarcastic? "You're a Virgo, right?" he asked.

OK, I was. I mean, I am a Virgo. And it was kind of actually kinda a little bit true, now that I thought about it. Everybody around me was always shagging or whatever. Everybody but me.

A mobile kitchen catering van was parked in front of Dr P's motorhome. Its top side panels were opened to vent the heat I could feel coming out of it from 20 yards away, and inside it a pair of middle-aged blonde Finnish women dressed in painters' overalls were banging pans and screaming hysterically at each other. The van had the word "Harkonen" painted on its front doors, just like in Dune, and I suddenly realized that was exactly who Dr Praetorius reminded me of: the evil baron in the movie. Physically, I mean, hopefully not in any other way, though I was still pretty upset about the jail thing. Had Alex intended that as a warning--or was he just being bitchy? I started to ask, but he just opened the door for me, then waved dismissively and took off. I climbed in. The inside of Dr P's RV looked sort of like a darkened diner--every spare inch of space was either covered in food or stacked with coolers. To my left huge platters of fish and ham, jellies and pies, were spread across the countertops, and there was a mountain of hotplates on the dining table. All the curtains had been drawn, and there were no lights turned on. Through the gloom, I could see Dr P sitting on the couch dressed in a huge bone-colored kaftan stitched in silver and maroon embroidery and juggling five or six oranges in time to the classical music that was blaring from the stereo speakers. One by one he dropped the oranges back into a fruit basket at his feet, then sent the last one sailing across the narrow space to me. It hit me in the forehead with a thud and then fell on the floor.

"Khatchaturian," he said. "I find it relaxes me. Please come in and join me in a light meal. I won't try to get up. Where is Miss Riita?"

"Um, she's sort of otherwise engaged at the mo." I sat in the recliner across from him--a large meal had already been laid out on a little folding table beside it.

He was like, "Of course, of course, I do understand. To be young and on holiday is its own magic. How deeply and passionately I envy the young. Still, I have seen many remarkable sights they will never see in their own lives--I suppose that will have to be my final consolation soon enough. You see, my dear Miss Hope, I believe I may be dying."

So I was all like, "Wow, what's wrong? Are you sick?" He seemed healthy enough to me except for all the weeping and wailing--unless he was planning to eat himself to death. But he ignored my questions.

Instead he said, "Tell me, do you believe in the existence of the soul?"

"Sure," I said. That was an easy one.

"How many?"

Huh? "How many what?"

"How many souls do you think we humans have?" he began (I could tell from his tone of voice he was only just beginning). "The answer can vary greatly from culture to culture--some scholars assert, for example, that the ancient Egyptians thought that we each possess seven. Oddly enough, this spiritual complexity is shared by the belief-system of the early Finns. They believed that all humans had multiple souls or aspects. One of these was loyli, which can be translated as the spirit, ghost, soul, or life-force that animated the body of a human being, manifesting itself in breathing and the vital essences of the living body. This corresponds roughly to the fylgja in Old Norse, the soul's 'karma'. These days, of course, loyli merely means the steam inside a sauna, which I find richly symbolic of the modern disease of secularism. Itse, on the other had, was thought to be the actual identity or seat of self-awareness of the human being, corresponding to the Norse hugr and was seen as his shadow. If one lost one's shadow, this catastrophe rendered the person itseton or nithing. Such a person became sickly, pale, depressed and so unlucky that he soon died. That, Miss Hope, is what has happened to me. Please pass me that plate of lobster. Have you ever tasted Cornish Hen?" His kaftan made him look like he was wearing a giant sea-food bib.

I was like, "So what can you do about it?"

"Candidly, I don't yet know. Much will depend on tonight's ceremony. You see, there is also a third soul to consider--what we would nowadays call a 'guardian angel'. In Finnish this was called one's luonto, or as the Vikings would say, one's hamingja, or 'luck'. It attached itself to the person sometime between his naming and his first tooth. A luontowas a kind of ghost, specifically emanating from the individual's clan spirits residing in Tuonela, the Land of the Dead. Sometimes it was thought to be the mythic first ancestor of one's family line. I have myself invoked such a spirit from my own maternal ancestry, the banker Knut Agathon Wallenberg.

Upon occasion, this guardian spirit might travel ahead of a person and give others the false sensation that he had already arrived at his destination. This was called etiainen. It was assumed that people with powerful characters or great charisma attracted such spirits, so it was often considered a good thing. On the other hand, it could also happen in reverse. When a person's luonto continues to lurk about after he is gone, that is an extremely bad thing. It usually means that the person is about to die and some elements of his soul are unwilling to follow him. That too has started to happen to me--I have received several cell-phone messages today from people who claim to have seen me in Helsinki this afternoon. Do you have any idea what happens to you when you die?"

"No." And I wasn't sure I wanted to, either. At least not while I was trying to eat. But that didn't stop Dr P.

"And I thought you were a Christian like me, Miss Hope! The answer, of course, is that we go to Purgatory and thence to Heaven or to Hell."

"You're a Christian? I thought you were into Norse magic."

But he was like, "I am a devout 'occult Christian'--just like our good friend Pekka Ervast--as well as a Swedenborgian. We who believe in this fashion are informed by Gnosticism, so that while we accept Christ as our personal savior (and it is true, I have sinned most terribly), we see him merely as a human manifestation, a spiritual shell, of Jehovah Himself. But Jehovah may take many other forms as well, as He does here in Finland under the guise of Ukka Ilyjumala, the Creator. Further, as as a good Swedenborgian, I believe that we all of us carry our own private Heaven and Hell within ourselves, the appearance of which we project onto our spiritual surroundings, whatever they may truly be. In other words, a Muslim suicide bomber, to employ an obvious contemporary cliche, might immediately after death fetch up in his own perfect vision of Paradise, complete with forty houris to cater to his every whim. This vision, of course, is maintained purely by the strength of his own will. Gradually over time, cracks would begin to appear in this picture of perfection--his food might begin to rot, for example, or his women become disobedient and eventually revealed as djinn. In such a personal Heaven, the tiniest flaw renders it a Hell instead. In the Buddhist bardo, this purgatorial journey, where we are attacked by demons and devoured by every animal we have ever eaten [he belched loudly and without irony at this point] is said to take 40 days and nights. Uncannily enough, that is precisely the same amount of time the ancient Finns also claimed it takes the itse-soul to find its way to Tuonela. In the meantime, it might linger behind to appear to its loved ones as an animal or spirit--or even, as with your Billy Draper in Chicago, become a ghost. This is the position in which your poor dead Mr Likkanen now finds himself, unless we can convince all three of his spirits to re-animate his remains again. Miss Hope, I have another question to ask you."

I was like, "Yeah?"

"it's rather delicate, and I don't quite know where to begin. I've never asked this before of anyone."

"Well, spit it out, dude!" I said, doing the same with a piece of herring-bone in my napkin.

"Miss Hope, I would like you to consider marrying me," he said in a sort of nervous rush. His voice became suddenly high-pitched. "Naturally, there would be nothing sexual about such a union between us--I have in any case long ago given up a sex life for occult reasons, and of course I am now too corpulent to perform, in any case. But I am extremely wealthy, you know, and in addition to that, I own one of the largest collections of arcana in the world. I know your interests embrace such things, and there would be a great deal I could teach you in the few short weeks or months of life I have left to me. I could act as your mentor, your spiritual guide. Please don't give me an answer now--I can see that I have embarrassed us both--but I beg you to consider it seriously. You would be able to live exactly as you liked for the rest of your life. You would never have to work again. You could devote your life to study, to writing, to travel. You could live like an angel or a goddess, taking good care of your dear friends and family. Please think it over, Miss Hope, I beg you humbly."

I just sat there there staring at him. I think my mouth was actually hanging open, and a little bit of fish was dribbling out of it. After a few minutes, I just said the first thing that popped into my head. "Shut up, why me?"

He started to squirm, then turned pink and just looked at the floor. "I suppose I must be a bit in love with you," he said reluctantly. And that's when I choked--you know, one of those fish-bone-stuck-in-your-throat things where you wheeze and can't breathe and think you're dying, and your eyes are flooded with tears, and your face turns purple, and you stagger around pounding your chest and holding your hands over your head until it finally clears up-type things. And that pretty much closed the subject for the moment. But I definitely had the feeling that I wasn't gonna get out of it so easy the next time it came up.

Naturally, conversation became a little stilted after that. But at least I'd avoided the "I'm really flattered, but--" speech. When my coughing and wheezing had subsided enough so I could swallow again, I tried a few random other topics, but now he was sulking. Then, over dessert--by now I was developing a serious addiction to Karelian pastries, and I could tell I was like in for a total heart attack the next time I was anywhere near a non-metric bathroom scale--I asked him if he'd ever heard of Ior Bock.

"Who told you that name?" he demanded furiously. "Has someone invited him here tonight?"

"Um no. I just wondered if he was, you know, the Tuuslar guy you mentioned earlier." At the sound of this word, Dr P visibly cowered and quietened down.

"Shhh!" he hissed. "No, no, Bock is merely a charlatan, an old confidence trickster. But the most dangerous of fools, one with innate, yet utterly undeveloped, occult powers. In fact, we in the Stockholm Chantry were forced to threaten him to desist from his activities in 1990 or so. I realize now in hindsight that Wilander was concerned that Bock's excavations in Sibbo might inadvertently open up a gateway to the Mirrorworld. Bock spent his winters in Goa during that era taking drugs and fornicating with Indian rent-boys. We projected a psychic emissary to him on one such occasion, and the experience terrified him so thoroughly that he immediately returned to Helsinki and ordered his followers to cease their digging operations. Unfortunately, they had already broken through to a second chamber--what he later claimed to the be the 'Tomb of Lemminkainen', I believe--thus opening up our own plane of existence to great danger. After that, the Finnish government took the so-called 'mountain' (it is merely a large rock out-cropping) from him, for reasons of their own. They are, as I have told you, under the control of the person you have been so unwise as to just name, and it may well be that he has continued Bock's work, but with advanced equipment. Certainly Bock himself was physically attacked and all but destroyed by this same malevolent Power."

I was like, "So you think it was like Tuu--I mean, the person I was so unwise as to name--who caused that? You know, turned him into a paraplegic?"

"Ja, I do indeed," said Dr P. "And I don't want to share the same fate. Neither," he added almost in a whisper, "do you..."

And I actually shivered when he said that. Of course, I was already feeling a bit accident-prone that day.

I made an excuse to leave a few minutes later, when the 'Finnish shaman' Anssi showed up at the door, looking all apologetic and, you know, interested in me again. Dr P didn't try to stop me--I guess the two of them wanted to get together and plan their resurrection ceremony. Anssi stared wistfully after me, but it was too late--I guess I'd already gone off him. I didn't like his temper. Plus, I'd just noticed that in a country full of the straightest backs I'd ever seen, he had that sort of question-mark posture that a lot of geeky guys get from two many hours spent in front of the 'puter. And I already knew the answer to his question. Too bad, too, cuz he was kind of cute. But I barely noticed him in spite of that, because I was in a state of something like shock. Because, well this is super-embarrassing, really. OK, I'll say it. Because weird and crazy and disgusting though it was, it was my very first marriage proposal. And I was almost 27!

I mean, it wasn't like I was some kind of Victorian spinster sewing doilies for my hope chest or something. I was perfectly happy on my own. And I'd survive just fine if I never got married. But you can't help but keep a kind of mental body-count of everyone who seriously asks you to marry them, it's just human nature, right? And I gotta admit that as I hobbled back across the parking lot back to my own motorhome, I actually considered it for a minute or two. I mean, the thought of being financially independent for the rest of my life was amazingly tempting. Like he'd said, I'd be able to do whatever I wanted, travel the world, live anywhere I liked, and I'd never have to work or worry about money again, plus I could look after my family and anyone else I loved if they got old or sick or in some deep financial crisis. And it was true too, that I was seriously tempted by him as a sort of "teacher"--crazy though he and his theories obviously were, he still knew more about mythology and magical systems and comparative relion than anyone I'd ever met, including my professors. And it wasn't like I'd actually said "no" exactly. I'd just...choked.

But see, there was a major flaw in the idea that even I could spot: love. I totally, completely, utterly did not love him. And what if I like fell in love with someone else tomorrow? I remember the first time I ever called the Mothership and told her I had a broken heart, she said crossly, "Listen to me, Hope--your heart has two chambers." At the time, I didn't exactly get what she meant, but now I thought maybe I did. If I ever settled for anything less than totally being in love, then I'd barely be feeling anything in my heart at all--and when I got married I wanted to be using the the whole thing. Both chambers, like a double-barrelled shotgun. I guess that's where the word "whole-heartedly" comes from. I just had to have faith that someday there would be a second.

Proposal, I mean, Of course, no way would it ever be from someone that rich again. OK, OK, I know--I was crazy to blow it off. But you'd never watched the guy eat.

Besides, isn't there some Shakespeare play where a really young chick is sent for to marry the King of France, who's dying of old age? And then suddenly when she's in bed with him the dying old geezer perks right up and starts getting frisky? The thought of Dr P doing that was just too pukey to even think about. So I wasn't gonna. Go there, I mean. OK, enough, I told myself, whatever.

Still, he'd said he loved me. Not that he actually knew me, of course. But that was really like sort of sad when you stopped and thought about it, because it always sucks when feelings aren't two-way.

So I was stupidly feeling a little guilty for not liking him that way (not really liking him any way, to be honest--he was really pretty creepy!), and this made me want to take the sad old guy more seriously intellectually or whatever. You know, to kind of like make up for my dislike. He'd said something about being a Swedenborgian, so I made a mental note to learn more about that when I got home. I mean I'd come across the name of Emmanuel Swedenborg in Borges, and I knew there was some kind of old-fashioned religious cult in Pennsylvania like Quakers or Mennonites based on his writings, but that was about it. He had claimed to visit Heaven in visions and had written long descriptions of it, hadn't he? But it had sounded like Dr Praetorius believed that we all sort of visually program our own, like the Holo-Deck in Star Trek: The Next Generation or something. This thought made me wonder what my own private Heaven would look like. Probably a really great big house near a beach, maybe like in Naples or Sanibel Island, Florida. But near a beautiful old city like London or Paris filled with theaters and libraries. And maybe near some mountains where it snowed in winter. And, OK, Disneyworld. Who would be there? My parents, obviously, and my grans and aunts and uncles--everybody I had ever known and loved. But they would all be young again, wouldn't they? Or maybe they'd kind of be like every age they'd ever been, according to the moment, you know, old and wise on some occasions, young and beautiful on others, according to what was inside. This was a sweet thought, imagining Dad like that.

So what about family pets? Would Wheezy be waiting for me there, for instance? But animals don't have souls, right--that was why it's OK to eat them. So then I decided that anybody who's ever had a pet probably knows the feeling of watching them strain to understand you, almost like they were trying to 'grow' a human soul or something. I mean, that's one of the few New Agey concepts that really makes sense to me, the idea of spiritual evolution taking place at the same time as physical evolution. And to be honest, Wheezy wasn't a heck of lot dumber than some Marine Corps wives I'd grown up knowing, so it wasn't too much of a stretch imagining her being reincarnated as one of them someday. Somehow, I had the feeling that we don't get 'designer heavens' all to ourselves, though--I mean, if we did, there wouldn't actually be any difference between Dr P's hypothetical suicide bomber and St Augustine, for example--both would be pretty much projecting their own vision of the City of God onto everybody else (of course I realize that in the eyes of God there's no difference anyway, since we are all equally sinful and must be redeemed). Seen that way, Dr P's marriage proposal would have given me the chance to actually try to build my own Heaven on earth while I was actually still alive, you know, the beach house, the skiing, etc etc...but something deep down told me there would always be flaws in my vision, no matter how hard I tried to create it. I mean, would my beach house be gated? Would people dump cigarette butts and condoms on the beach--or scrawl graffiti and torch cars on the city streets nearby? These are pretty harmless things--I happen to think they're ugly and stupid, but other people might think they were cool. So do our separate Heavens leak and bleed into each other just like they do in life, or is Hell really just other people, like someone famous (I couldn't remember who) once said? What kind of afterlife did I really believe in, anyway--you know, with my instincts and not my intellect. Maybe just some grey ghostly underworld of mists and shadows. If that was the case, was poor Likkanen wandering around there now, lost and alone? The odds didn't strike me as too good of bringing him back.

Our Pace Arrow had stopped rocking up and down by the time I got back, and now loud rock music was throbbing and thumping inside it. I opened the door and stepped up and in--it smelled just like a giant bong. "Welcome to the Mirrorland", boomed out from the speakers.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 22: Cold Comfort Farm

Kaustinen is a tiny town of about a hundred buildings on a little hill that rises up from the flat, dreary plain nestled inside a bend in an even tinier river. Riita had told me that the festival stage architecture had been inspired by the Greek Parthenon, but in point of fact it looked exactly like the Wolf Trap pavilion outside Washington DC--or basically any other modern open-air theater--built out of huge triangles of reddish wood, in this case covered by a giant yellow-and-white striped umbrella and a ring of rocks. There were several dozen people sprawled on the short yellowish grass in front of the main stage watching a bunch of musicians set up, while a few couples clog-danced on a bandstand behind them, dressed in what I took to be Karelian folk garb. We passed the oddly Santa Fe adobe-looking "Folk Art Centre" and rattled down a tree-lined gravel road to Pauanne, stirring up clouds of dust.

Pauanne turned out to be a collection of stone farmhouses on top of a second steeper, craggier hill--we couldn't climb up to it in the cars, so we parked nearby in an asphalted parking lot inside a chain-link fence. There were three or four large motorhomes, the kind you see on film sets, waiting there for us there, in the middle of a flock of old vans and SUVs. At some point, about the time he stopped talking, I noticed, Dr P had become overcome by the heat and dust and had to be wrapped up in a sort of tarp made of parachute silk and half-dragged and half-carried into his RV by Gailis and a second thuggish-looking goon who was already there guarding the site. When I tried to help, Dr P waved me off. "Later, dear Miss Hope, later," he whimpered tearfully from under his wraps, "We shall talk tonight." So Riita and I just stood there like "WTF" until Alex showed up in Riita's car and helped us unload our stuff.

"You'll be in this 38-footer," he said to us cheerfully. "I'm lumbered sleeping with the driver in the porta-loo over there. Oh, it's not that bad, I'm just taking the piss. I'm really jealous because you two get to share one of the Pace Arrows. You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to locate them in Helsinki--at one point I thought we'd have to airlift a fleet of Honeywagons in from Berlin. That's the great thing about this job," he said unlocking the side door of a gleaming motorhome beneath the triangular awning that jutted out from its roof. "I get to play God with someone else's money. Just about the only good thing, actually." I noticed that it said "Ansel Adams Edition" in red chrome letters across the door, and had white silk curtains drawn closed across every window, including the huge front windshield. We climbed a single steep step up into it and switched on the lights. It was panelled in cherry-colored wood and had brushed stainless-steel appliances and mock-marble countertops. "Look, it even has a satellite dish for the tellies," Alex said.

"If you don't like your job, why do you keep working for him?" I asked him.

He was like, "The money. That transmuting of lead into gold he tells everyone about is an absolute load of wank, of course, but he is rich. Very rich. And he pays very very well. Hence all the slavish arse-licking from the Latties." I totally loved his Scottish burr: 'verrrry verrrry'. I also loved his constant stream of casual obscenities. I wish I could talk like that! And, you know, get away with it, I mean. If I say anything rude people act all shocked.

"So he's not a real magician?" I said innocently, and he laughed.

"Is he, bollocks. [I think that's how you spell it anyway.] Know what he did in life before he decided he was really Gandalf? He was a stage magician for children's parties--he used to make animals out of balloons and pull bunnies out of hats. Ask him sometime what he went to jail for." After Alex showed us how to use the chemical potty, he left us alone to unpack and wash our faces and brush our teeth and whatever. He also left behind alarm bells ringing in my head. Went to jail? Uh oh.

The side door we had entered was sort of like the front door of a house. To the right were a couch and a swiveling recliner chair directly behind the driver and passenger seats, to the left a recessed kitchenette and directly across from it a round four-chair dining table beside the couch. Maybe I'll try to download some promotional material for it, so you can see the layout. OK, done:

As you can see, there was a little hall leading back to the bedroom, and even a small tub/shower-stall in the bathroom. And Dr P had rented at least two of these, plus a pair of smaller ones, just because there were no luxury hotels available in the area for a night or two--you don't get that rich from working children's parties, I thought. While Riita was busy in the bathroom I took out my rent-a-cell and called the Mothership to let her know where I was, then tried Christina.

"What do you know about this Dr Praetorius?" I asked her after we'd chatted about her pregnancy for a few. "I just heard he'd been to jail."

"So? That is typical--great men are always persecuted," she said.

"You really think he's a 'great man'?"

"Yes, I think he is the most remarkable man I've ever met in my life. We were his guests at a weekend party at one of his country houses near Lund, didn't I tell you? This was before I even knew myself that I was pregnant, and he just looked at me and told me so. And a few weeks later, I discovered he was right! He predicted that we will have a very important child, a daughter who will be the future savior of all Sweden. He said that she was the reincarnation of a woman he had loved very much, and that we were to name her 'Freyja', so that is what we will do. Oh Hope, isn't it exciting?" She actually sounded serious.

I was like, "But what if it's a boy?"

"Oh no, it will be a girl. He is never wrong with his predictions, you will see. You should have seen the things he knew about others who were there--some were so shocked to hear their secrets spoken aloud that they began to cry. It was amazing, because we Swedes are not usually so emotional like that. Well, you know how I am, for example. But now I am emotional all the time." Yeah, I was beginning to notice. All this was super-worrying. Because Christina wasn't like this normally. I mean, I was the gullible one--she was supposed to be the rational one!

Next I tried Kerry. who answered on the first ring. "Hey, hope I didn't wake you--I have like totally no idea what time it is in Savannah."

But she was like, "Me either, cuz I'm not in Savannah--I just got off a plane at Newark Airport. I have the procedure scheduled for tomorrow."

"Wow!" I was like. "That is so organized of you, girl. I am majorly impressed. Only..."

"Only what?" It was kinda hard to hear her with all the airport racket going on.

"Only, I don't know...are you absolutely, totally, completely sure you want to go through with it?"

"Well, duh," she said. "Of course I'm sure. Can you seriously see me with a baby? Being a single mother like in some stupid after-school special? Whose number did you think you were dialling, anyway?" Yeah, well, duh. I mean I'm not some crazed Right-to-Lifer or anything, it was just that after hearing Christina being all happy and stuff, I was suddenly sort of reluctant to hear about any final decision in the other direction. Without some thought to it, I mean. Also, and I know this was kind of tweaked of me, I was sort of having visions of a little baby version of Christina--and it seemed like a little baby version of Kerry would be equally lovable and, you know, precious or whatever. But Kerry was right, of course--this was her I was talking to, for crying out loud, the only person I knew who'd impulse-bought her college education. Somebody was tapping on the door--I opened it and Alex was standing just outside. He had changed his shirt, and the new one had purple folk art all over it. Over it he was wearing a camera and had somehow managed to cram three ear-pods into his two ears. Unless he had a third and I'd missed one. Anyway, there were three wires going up to them.

"Time to meet the heathens," he said.

"Where are you, anyway?" Kerry yelled in my ear.

"In Finland, in a place called Pauanne. I think you'd like it here--every third word ends in 'Ma'. But I gotta go now. Best of luck, hon!"

"No more 'Ma' jokes for me after tomorrow, bitch! I'll call you when it's over." How I missed Kerry. Actually, I missed being a bitch, too, I was thinking as Riita and I crossed the parking lot with Alex. Instead of some goggle-eyed grinning tourist, I mean. I was wearing my glasses, my flip-flops (a giant mistake), my only clean(ish) jeans, and a short pink and olive-drab polka-dot print dress and was feeling like a total dork in them. It was time I got back in touch with my inner bitch again, I decided. Only--it wasn't me who was just about to do that. Surprise, surprise, it was Riita.

I guess I should have seen the signs. She'd been really unhappy with Erkki pretty much from the get-go--I mean it was obviously not a healthy relationship for either of them, to be fair. They both had like really different life-goals or whatever--she wanted to play house, he wanted to have sex with porn stars. Plus she was a total control freak and had been forced to sort of give it all up first to Dr P and then to "Mr Alex" in the planning and decision-making departments that day, so I guess it was natural that the girl would go wild once she felt she was sort of on vacation. And, as I was about to find out, when Finnish girls go wild, they don't hit the Esc key.

There was an old white Isuzu Trooper parked between a rust-red VW bus and a Toyota Hi-Ace, and a bunch of guys about my age were unloading musical equipment out of the back of it. One of them spotted us and came over to say hi. "I'm Kimmo," he told us in pretty good English. He had short blonde hair, a really nice tan, and was wearing a bright yellow T-Shirt that had an elaborate 'Edrian Sun Cycle' logo on it. He looked a little like Sting, except younger and a lot more serious. "Those are the other guys in my band, Tri-Logic. We are naming ourselves after the Kingston Wall album, you know it? Over there is Kaari, Timo, and Pol, the Hindu guy." We waved. Kimmo walked with us carrying his keyboard-case and flirting seriously with Riita--who flirted seriously back. Alex, as usual, was on his cell, which left me pretty much alone to listen to the two of them chatter away in Finnish--every now and then one of them would stop and translate. Every time either of them did this, I swear to God, Riita giggled, a noise I had only heard come out of her before at the Madonna Concert (I almost typed 'Cricket' just now--what is happening to me?) Oh well, I was just being like all bitchy because she suddenly had a guy, and I didn't.

"You have never heard Kingston Wall?" Kimmo was saying. "It was the band of Petri Walli, the Finnish Jimi Hendrix, who is dead now. You must hear him, I will give you the CD tonight. He was the greatest guitar-player ever for Finland or even for all of Europe."

And Riita was all like, "Oh, that would be very nice," and giving me liitle pouty wide-eyed looks that I can only describe as 'kittenish'. Ugh. I could tell I was in for a long evening.

The trees in Kaustinen had been pretty much scrub, but Pauanne was in a deep dark wood. There was a trail leading up to the compound that crossed a rickety bridge across a dried-out creek, but Kimmo insisted we go down into the ravine with him first, where "all the cool people" were. Apparently his band and a few others called "Rihmasto", "Ihokas", "Nemesis", and a bunch more whose names I can't remember were stuck playing down here under the bridge, because the main hall in the Pauanne compound (you certainly couldn't call it a 'complex') was being used both for the ceremony and by a more popular band called "Tenhi". Electric lines snaked down from the bridge, and a huge stack of amps and speakers had been set up on a row of folding tables beneath it. "It is good," Kimmo was saying, "Because more people can listen here." But it was bad, at least if you were in flip-flops, because the ground was so rocky and uneven. And because there were mosquitoes everywhere, even in broad daylight, but especially among the trees. Riita had some kind of repellent, but it seemed to only work on Finns. I guess overseas we Yanks just aren't quite repellent enough.

Alex got off his cellphone long enough to help me cross the creek-bed. "Tell me," he said. "This Tuuslar guy--what did he look like?"

"Like a bum," I said crossly. "You know, old. Gray beard, long gray hair. Crazy expression on his face."

So then he was like, "Was he in a wheelchair?"

And I was like, huh? "Uh...no." What was that about? Just then we were approached by a youngish and not at all bad-looking dark-haired dude carrying a big Canon G2 pro video camera.

"I am Anssi," he said, introducing himself to Alex. "I am making a film of the ceremony." His English was the best I'd heard yet from a Finn.

"Oh right," said Alex. "You're the pagan shaman. This is Hope from America." His cell rang again--a Queen ringtone--and he answered it. Cool. Now I had a guy, too. Well, actually, that sort of depended. On what a "pagan shaman" was, exactly.

"No, I won't be conducting the ritual tonight," Anssi said when I asked him. "That will be done by your Swedish magician friend. But I have translated the words into Finnish for him. I am not really a practicing shaman so much as a recorder. For me, learning about this lore and making films are the interesting part. I am not even sure that magic will work--it is more the traditional heritage for the Finnish people that is important to me. Forgive my English."

"Your English is great. Almost perfect, really." This seemed to cheer him up, and he walked up the hill with the rest of us to Pauanne, telling me more about it. And I gotta say it really is like one of the strangest places I've ever been in my life. For one thing, it wasn't hard to see where the mosquitoes were coming from--there were ponds and pools of standing water everywhere between the rocks as we left the tree-line and crossed the crest of the hill. In the middle of the hilltop was a collection of buildings of loose stone, formerly medieval farmhouses and cottages, some of which had been restored in the last century with Swedish wood-frame and jigsaw shingles. Some were straight, some were rounded, some had been restored traditionally, others whimsically, like there had been a super-clumsy and cheap attempt to create a LOTR theme park. There were round windows with 'elven' wooden frames in the shape of runes, round doors with metal 'serpent hinges', even a replica of a neolithic sauna with a twisting brick chimney. The interior of the great hall looked exactly like a zoo terrarium--the wooden beams were pitched over a miniature landscape of mossy rocks and pools, and a huge worn slab of of stone acted as a stage at one end. I kept expecting to see iguanas. I guess the idea was that Pauanne was supposed to like be growing organically from the rocks and soil around it, like mushrooms or something It was still daytime, and the light streamed in through the huge paneless windows and an enormous vaguely rectangular hole in the roof. So did the mosquitoes.
"Aren't they terrible?" said a loud American voice near me. It belonged to a fat, cheerful-looking black-haired lady in her late forties, who had set up a little camp of folding chairs and drink coolers on the biggest and flattest rock in front of the stage and was slapping at her own shoulders energetically. With her was another woman about ten or fifteen years younger, who had dirty blonde hair and glasses more or less exactly like mine (which was cringingly embarrassing, for some reason--it wouldn't have been so bad if they'd been a different style), and their two "men-folk", who were big, burly, darkly bearded and dressed in medieval Viking garb. Arwen's (the older woman's) husband, who called himself "Eldred Thorsson", but whose real name, she later told me, was "Harvey", was even wearing hand-made chain-mail in spite of the heat. Which, to be fair, was considerably less here in the woods and was actually about to plunge quite a bit during the evening ahead. We introduced ourselves--the younger couple, who turned out to be from quite near me in Columbia, Maryland, were named Jenn and Robb. So now the cast of characters was rapidly expanding like in a Shakespeare play. I'll do my best to keep them straight for you--I even have a few photos, in some cases. We were also joined by Kimmo (remember him? The Finnish rock singer who looked like Sting} who had deserted his bandmates to follow a very pink and smiling Riita up the hill, the dark, intense-looking Finnish Anssi, taking test pictures of us all with his video-cam and complaining about the lighting, and another Swede, a soul-patched, slightly balding journalist named Bo with a long back pig-tail, who was wearing a sort of white pirate-shirt with magical symbols on it and wooden clogs. He and Anssi seemed to be old friends (or maybe enemies, it was hard to tell) and sporadically kept us informed of what was going on.

"That will be our altar," Anssi said, for example, pointing his camera at a rounded, polished plank of wood on the stone stage. "It is called 'Tapio's table'--it is made from flattened pine. We call such surfaces 'elk-eaten'." Meanwhile Arwen pulled cold Lapin Kulta beers out of one of her coolers and handed them around to everyone. Before the four Americans drank theirs they raised the cans and said a prayer together that went, "Hail Aegir! Husband of Ran, ale-brewer. gatherer of sea-gold, father of the nine waves, feast-friend of the Aesir and the drowned, and keeper of the great kettle!", something they did every time they drank another, I kid you not. Being a pagan looked like a lot of hard work to me, kind of like being a nun.

"Harvey--Eldred, I mean--wanted to come here for our summer vacation," Arwen (and I'm guessing that wasn't her given name, either) started telling me, with that instant intimacy fellow-tourists overseas seem to assume with each other. "It's always someplace crazy with him. And of course we have Aasatru meetings all over the Northwest year-round. We live in Seattle. I have a terrible time taking time off from my work. I'm a lawyer--family law and mediation. Where are your kids, Jenn?" Jenn, it turned out, was an online sex chat-room hostess. The pay sucked, she said, but it allowed her to work at home and keep an eye on her kids. We agreed it was much better for them than day-care.

"Oh, we left them in Kaustinen for the night," she told Arwen, "Well, if you can ever call it night here--with Laurel. You met her yesterday, she's here with a few other Deadheads. Mickey Hart was at the big festival there last week. We just wanted to get away and, you know, party."

"Is she one of your Kindred?"

"Oh no, but we've done a 'bloat' together. She's Thelema. Actually, that's how Robb and I met years ago--on an OTO forum."

"Aw, that's such a sweet story. We used to be Thelema, too." Arwen turned to me. "How about you, Hope? Are you a practicing heathen?"

I was like, "No, I'm just here researching my PhD."

Behind me, Anssi and Bo were having a quiet argument in Finnish and Swedish, occasionally using an English word or phrase that I could understand, like "sh-t" or "soul retrieval healing", that kept getting louder and louder until the rest of us just shut up and stared at them. Harvey caught my eye and shrugged ruefully--he was, his wife had told me, a 'vitki' and a 'runester', which meant that he carried around a little pouch full of runes carved into what looked like mah-jong tiles, which he would cast predictively like dice before making any decision, no matter how trivial. Unlike the younger guy, Robb, who just seemed sort of innocently hebephrenic, I thought Harvey's black beard and perpetual scowl gave him a sort of sinister, villainous look. "What are they arguing about?" I finally asked Riita.

Kimmo answered instead. "They are fighting whether the ritual shall be done in the ancient Finnish or else the Bockian tradition." I expected Riita to pipe up with her usual pro-Finnish opinion, but instead she just kept her mouth shut and stared adoringly at Kimmo. Harvey interrupted, offering to settle the dispute with a rune-casting, but Anssi angrily told him that runes were not part of Finnish tradition. Bo erupted with another flurry of Swedish, then stamped off and got on his cell. Alex, still on his, came up to Anssi and tugged him out the main door.

"What does Bockian mean?" I asked, scratching furiously at my arm. I was getting eaten alive.

"I will tell you his history," Kimmo said, "But you must both come back down the hill with me to the music place. I am needed to do a sound-check, I think."

As we left, Arwen called out after me, "Put some toothpaste on those bites, sweetie. Nothing else works." Once outside, we were joined again by Anssi, who fumed all the way back to the ravine, breaking his silence only to disagree loudly with whatever Kimmo was saying. I started to pretty much give up on him at that point--he was reminding me more and more of a really bad date. You know, the intense, seething intellectual type who attacks an ex at a dance when he spots her dancing with another guy (that actually happened to me once. Plus he would ask for other girls' numbers in front of me). Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, here's a quick capsule summary of the life of Ior Bock,who, Kimmo said, was the greatest man in Finland, from the things the two of them said, plus what I learned later from websites. Like, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ior_Bock which, however, I think Anssi may have actually helped edit. This guy Bock was a Finlander-Swede who had first trained as an actor and then like a lot of failed would-be actors in Hollywood, ended up being a tour guide. In his case, at a Helsinki fortress and tourist attraction for 12 years, which sort of gave him a chance to refine his rap, I guess, which became a family 'oral history' that was later made into a book called "Bock's Saga". In it, he claimed to be the descendant of an ancient family whose lineage reached back to the time of the Norse Adam and Eve, who he called 'Frej' (the 'first Bock') and 'Freja (the 'first Svan'). He claimed they were born in a kind of Ice Age tropical paradise in southeast Finland created by warm winds of the Gulf Stream and that they and their descendants lived to be hundreds of years old by drinking their own sperm and vaginal fluids through straws (ewwww! I swear I am so not making this up). Anyway, Bock started a sperm-drinking and yoga commune in his ancestral home of Sibbo (or Sippoo or "Gumbostrand"--they all three got into a long argument about this), and convinced his followers to excavate a "family mountain" nearby for buried treasure. There they found a sort of holy chamber inside with a series of tunnels, which he named the "Tomb [or "Temple"] of Lemminkainen" but Bock ran out money before he could excavate further, and the Finnish government (Kimmo claimed) then took the mountain away from him before he could make any more discoveries that would upset the official Finnish view of history. This was in 1991. Then in 1999, Bock was mysteriously attacked in the street and his spine was severed by the knife-thrusts of a "professional assassin", and now he's a paraplegic in a wheelchair.

Duh, I thought. So that's why Alex was asking me about the wheelchair--he obviously thought this Bock guy might be "Tuuslar". I admit the description kind of fit, but the old bum in the park was definitely not a paraplegic. Plus he seemed at least 10 years younger than Bock, who was born in 1942. Of course, in his "Saga", Bock claims all kinds of miracle cures from sperm-drinking, particularly his own (again, totally gross!), which he apparently calls sauna-solmu in Finnish. Anyway, the point of Bo's tirade, according to Kimmo, was that he felt that the ceremony of raising Safe-T-Man from the dead should have been held in Sippoo at Leminkainen's Tomb--Anssi, on the other hand, thought the whole Bock thing was just typically crazy Swedish crap and that the Norse gods had no place in the ritual at all. Which didn't seem very smart politics to me, considering this was supposed to be an Asatru "folkmoot" to begin with. But what did I know?

Not enough to walk and chew gum at the same time, anyway, as things turned out. Down in the dark wooded ravine--or "Music Gulch", as I had now begun to think of it--a smallish crowd had gathered to listen to "Ihokas", which turned out to consist of just a single musician, a guy so shy that he hid behind his synths and speakers while he played what Kimmo informed us was 'drone music'. This was endless loops of what sounded like a shortwave radio being badly tuned in, and was painfully, almost excruciatingly boring. Which was the point, I guess. A number of fires had been lit inside oil-drums--the Finns are sensibly paranoid about forest fires and enforce campfire regulations very thoroughly--but these only seemed to be attracting even more mosquitoes. Most of the crowd appeared to be made up of other musicians and their girlfriends, along with a sprinkling of younger pagans and few kids. There was also the typical old Finnish drunk--at least one always seems to show up at every social event there--in this case wearing only army combat boots and a pair of graphically soiled boxer shorts. Anssi gloweringly wandered off to film all this, while Riita and Kimmo downed two tabs of E and then got to work on a joint, both of which I peevishly declined. By now I was getting really sick of waving and slapping at myself, plus I was getting a headache from all the droning, both musical and mosquitoid, so I decided to walk back to the parking lot. Big mistake. I misjudged a step from one wet rock to another in my flip-flops, slipped, and badly turned my ankle. In fact, at first I thought I'd broken it.
Very sweetly, two of Kimmo's band-mates, Timo and Pol, more or less carried me back to the parking lot, followed by Kimmo himself and the by now extremely giggly Riita, who shoved my butt up the steep step into the Pace Arrow. When I had a look in the bathroom mirror, I almost fainted. I was so badly bitten that I really did look like Safe-T-Man's insulting name for me on his blog: "Strawberry". I looked seriously, embarrassingly blotchy and awful--no wonder Anssi hadn't been more interested. I felt so miserable and desperate, I actually took Arwen's advice and dabbed a little toothpaste on a few of them. And amazingly, it worked! The itching stopped almost straight away. So basically, I went around for the next week covered in Retardex. Which was really pretty appropriate, all things considered.

When I hobbled out of the bathroom and into the little back bedroom to look for some Nikes and socks to put on, I found the two of them already in it with most of their clothes off. They were writhing around on the bed and moaning and groaning just like in a porno flick. Kimmo paused long enough to make a sort of "come join us" motion (that made what, like the third of the day? I just felt so wanted), and Riita panted, "We love life. Oh Hoop, I want to share everything with you." Seriously, she really said , "We love life"--you just can't make that kind of stuff up. I smiled and waved at them and went outside. Incredibly enough, this was not the last proposition like that I was gonna get before the night was over--though, with my luck, it was the most attractive. The waaay most attractive, as it turned out.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 21: Mirrorland

OK, I admit it: my wedding was the teeniest bit of disappointment in some ways. I mean, when you're growing up, it's natural that you fantasize about it, what your dress will look like, what kind of service you'll have, how you'll rewrite your vows, who'll be there, what kind of band will play at the reception, where you'll go on your honeymoon, what flowers you'll have, which caterers, etc, etc. All girls do that, don't they? I sure did, anyway. So from that standpoint, it was pretty much a total dud--we didn't even have a honeymoon! "We'll just have to make the rest of the marriage be our honeymoon." I told him, and come on, give me credit, I was like 90% sincere when I said it. Seriously, the marriage was what I was all about, not just a stupid social event. But still...well, you know. You open your mouth and hear yourself say those kinds of things, and then afterwards you're all like, "Whoa, did I really say that? No way, what was I thinking??"

For starters, we couldn't have it in church, because my husband (getting more used to that word now) isn't a Catholic--as if anyone really is these days, at least in America anyway--so we had to say our vows at the license office in front of a justice of the peace. In this case, he was also a notary and realtor with his office across the street, and that's where we all ended up. Not exactly the most romantic spot in the world. The Mothership was there, of course, dressed to the nines and looking all glowing and happy--incredibly and weirdly enough, she has a super-sized crush on him, after I'd spent ages dreading that she was so gonna hate him. And would try to talk me out of marrying him. Instead she acted all grateful, like he was rescuing me from a life of spinsterhood or whatever! My older bro flew in to give me away, and my other bro filled in as best man, since none of my husband's friends could make it on such short notice. And neither could any of mine, either, (including Father Mac who I'd originally wanted to read us the vows) except Kerry, who sweetly drove down from New York just to be Matron of Honor, and looked far better than the poor old frazzled bride in her second-best formal dress, but of course, no bridal gown. In fact, I was terrified Kerry and my man would run off together, but he gallantly assured me afterwards that he adored her already because she was my best friend but that she really wasn't his type.

So I was like, "Oh yeah, right, too beautiful for you, huh?"

"No," he said. "Not quite Hopeful enough." OK, he had to say it, but it still made me swoon a little. So things didn't suck totally. In fact, my biggest regret is that my dad couldn't have been there to see it.

It's really hard for me to write about my dad. About his death, I mean. Because it was like, so unfair. And all the way to Kaustinen I kept think that if Dr Praetorius really had the power to help me bring the dead back to life again, then why couldn't it be my dad instead? Why Likkanen, who I didn't actually care about at all? Of course, he didn't really have that power, it was all just crap. But I kept thinking, you know, what if...?

At first when my dad was diagnosed, he and the Mothership tried to keep it a big dark secret from the rest of us. I dunno how they thought that was gonna work out, since he had to have an immediate first surgery, which left him shaved on one side of his head with a livid scar. And then, of course, then he had to have chemo, because the tumor couldn't be completely removed, and that took care of the rest of his hair. And he lost a lot of weight. He had what was called a 'wafer' implanted in his brain before I'd even come home from school and saw him for the first time, which was a total shock, probably the worst moment of my life. At first he had fantasies of actually going back to work while he underwent treatment, but pretty soon it became obvious that wasn't gonna happen. Especially after he had a couple of seizures and had to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the day a few times. His military insurance wasn't bad, but it didn't cover a lot of stuff, so they ended up taking out a second mortgage on the house (which is now, thank God, still worth way more in spite of the recent buying slump). When it became pretty obvious that the treatments weren't working out, I wanted to take the rest of the year off from school so that I could help out with the nursing and hang with him as much as possible, but they wouldn't allow it. The Mothership converted the dining room into a hospital room, because it was on the first floor and rented an adjustable medical bed, and professional equipment like trays and bedside potties, IV stands, oxygen, etc etc, because Dad was starting to have opportunistic infections like pneumonia. I took his car down to St Mary's and commuted back home every weekend--and each time he looked noticeably worse. It was so hard to imagine that such a tiny growth could destroy such a strong, vital man. A man who was the center and the bedrock of a whole family. But it was in just the wrong place. At the wrong time. Of course, it's never the right time, unless you're like 110 or whatever and die right away the first time you have a seizure--then I guess it could be a mercy.

But there was absolutely nothing merciful about those last few months. When actors die on TV, no matter how realistically it's portrayed, they always look pretty good. I mean, they're actors and actresses, for Chrissake, so naturally they look good, no matter what. Their agents aren't gonna let them jump the shark. But nothing prepares you for the reality of just how terrible-looking and shrunken and withdrawn someone you love gets when they're dying. Or how gross all the little details become, you know, like when you have to check bedpans for stuff before you empty them. Or when you're bathing them after they start getting bedsores. Or when they start getting really bitter and irrational (because most of them do at some point after the chemo) and lash out at you. Or in lots of pain when nothing helps. Well, maybe you already know all this because you've been through it yourself, so I'll shut up.

Bad as it is, though, it gets even worse when they finally pass. By that point you're like, "Oh it will be such a relief to have the suffering over with." But somehow it isn't. I can't even explain why. Maybe, in spite of everything, you still, you know, have hope even at the very end. During the funeral, the Mothership acted really weird. She didn't cry, she just looked cross and impatient and was barely even polite at times while she was doing the social meet-and-greet thing with all the Marine Corps brass who showed up for it. Inside the chapel, she said to me, "This may be the last time I ever set foot in a place like this."

So I was all like. "What are you talking about?" They were playing Sibelius' Valse Triste in the background, I now realize.

"I'm not so sure I believe in a god any more," she said. "What's the use of our Faith anyway? It doesn't get you anywhere--none of our prayers were answered. I don't believe in all that submission BS any more." "BS" being as close to an actual cuss word as I'd ever heard her use, I was pretty shocked. But when I thought about it later, I could see her reaction was pretty natural. I mean it's all well and good for the priests to tell you that Christ loves those who suffer, that it's a test from God, etc etc, but that doesn't actually the address the question of 'why'? What is pain for, exactly? What use is it and what good does it do? And what kind of god creates it, much less allows it? Or, in this case, actively inflicts it on us? Is that a god worth worshipping? Or just some sadistic monster who takes pleasure in our misery? A few nights later, the Mothership was still acting totally unlike herself, chain-smoking like a teenager, stubbing them out again half-smoked or just forgetting about them and letting them burn unattended in ashtrays, wandering around in her bathrobe, pouring herself out belts of scotch on the rocks which she would clink around while she talked. It was like suddenly having a slutty older sister instead of a mother. I didn't get that she and dad had started dating when she still WAS a teenager--and now, with him surgically removed from her life, she was reverting back to being the girl she was in the weeks and months before she'd met him. A sad and miserable and lonely girl this time who was numb with shock and fear about the future.

We talked about religion again. "I've been thinking about what you said in the chapel," I told her, "And I think here's what I believe. I think we both need God right now more than ever, so it's dumb to be mad at him. Maybe our needing him makes him love us more, too, if that makes any sense. I mean, to me, God is sort of like your parents--they give you the gift of life, they love you, sometimes to pieces, but they can't live your life for you. They can't protect you from everything or you know, try to baby-proof your whole world because that wouldn't be fair, right? Freedom is like the biggest part of their gift. Freedom to live your life the way you want it or even die young trying. But that doesn't mean they don't love you."

"But why give us such frail bodies?" She burst into tears. "Why make them age and get old and sick so fast? Where's the love in that?"

"Well, maybe bodies are kind of like cars. I mean, when Dad loaned me the Cutlass to drive back and forth from school with, he got new tires for it first and had it tuned up and lubed and everything. He didn't want his little girl dying in a car crash, right? But even with all the best will in the world, that car has broken down constantly--it's spent almost as much time in the shop as on the highway for the last nine months. Maybe our bodies are like that, too."

"I tried to get him to buy an Accord," she said, blowing her nose.

So basically it's like that old joke. The good news is there is a god. The bad news is that he's definitely a man. And probably an American, judging from all the design flaws. Definitely not Finnish anyway.

At Kokkola, we turned south-southeast and drove across a flat, boring landscape down a highway that was absolutely straight, like a military road. The Return of Lemminkainen was playing over the car stereo now--it made me feel like we were galloping across the plain on fast horses. "Are we anywhere near Lappland?" I asked Riita.

"Oh no! Lappland is much more interesting than this. But you will like Kaustinen, I think. It is called the 'Finnish Woodstock'. In our cartoons, the little bird from Peanuts is named 'Kaustinen'. We have a saying that even the rocks sing there."

"The geological harmonics are excellent in that area," Dr Praetorius informed us. "It is also at an epicenter of ley lines. That is why it was chosen for the ceremony."

Riita glanced at him shrewdly. "Why do you want to bring this Likkanen back to life, anyway? You must have a secret reason for it." In that moment, my opinion about her changed once again. I guess I had started thinking of her as being a bit pitiful, even a little helpless because of her unhappiness and the business with Erkki, but now I suddenly saw that Riita had something I didn't have and would never have, a kind of stubborn resilient farm-girl toughness that allowed her to focus only on the things she wanted to see. She'd somehow even managed to avoid discovering her boyfriend having (well trying to have, anyway) public sex with another woman--instead, she was already finding reasons to be bored and dissatisfied with him, so that when it came time to make the break, she would do the dumping, not him. And now suddenly, I could see the crazy fat old Swede was no match for her at all. He even squirmed at her question.

"It is true," he said at last, "That I have no love for Mr Likkanen. To be very honest, I was extremely bitter when his grandfather, my dear friend and mentor, Frederik Wilander chose to bequeath certain articles to him instead of me. One of these I particularly wished to buy from him, and obviously I cannot do so now that he is dead."

"You could just buy it from his estate," I pointed out. "Wouldn't that be easier than raising him from the dead?"

But he was like, "I'm afraid that is impossible. The article in question is in a safe-deposit box in Stockholm that Mr Likkanen never bothered to visit--only he knew its numeric code. We were negotiating a price for it at the time of his death."

"What is this 'article'?" Riita wanted to know.

"It is a book."

"A book of magic?"

"Ja, ja, in a manner of speaking," Dr Praetorius said irritably and with great reluctance. "It is a book written or dictated by Adolf Hitler describing his discovery of another plane or dimension of existence."

Oh great, I thought. Just priceless. Here I was stuck in the middle of nowhere in a stretch-limo with this total nut-job on his way to attend some kind of Neo-Nazi New Age cult ceremony designed to bring a dead plumbing fixtures designer back to life so that he could buy 'Hitler's Diaries' from him. I think that's a fair summary, anyway. Oh well, as my mom used to tell me before a blind date, at least I'd get fed. Though, speaking of getting fed, I made a mental note never to be stranded with Dr P in a lifeboat, as I watched him gobble down yet another 'light snack'. Oh, and have I said that all his eating utensils were made of gold, too? Heavy, brushed, non-reflective gold.

This was the very first time I ever heard of this manuscript, by the way, the book I now sort of think of as the 'Occult Mein Kampf'. Yes, it really existed, bizarrely enough. And, incredibly, it was gonna play a really huge role in my life to come, though I didn't have a clue about this at the time, and I really don't know exactly how I feel about it in retrospect. Exhausted, mostly. In some ways, I wish I'd never even heard of it. But again, in lots of other ways, it's actually brought me plenty of happiness. It's a bit like the Treasure of the Sierra Madre or whatever--I'm pretty much the only one who's gotten anything out of it at all. Including, amazingly enough, my marriage. Yep, I admit it--I owe my wedding to Adolf Hitler! Which I guess is why I'm writing this, cuz "winners write the history books", right? Survivors, anyway. And it's just too weird a story to, you know, keep to yourself. Even if I could, I mean.

Dr P (it was a typo above, but I liked it so much I think I'll keep on using it, because it majorly saves me having to type out his whole last name over and over), probably sensing that we were totally not buying into any of this Hitler stuff, started talking about Sibelius again. "It is a sad fact that my country of Sweden has never produced so great a musical genius as Jean Sibelius--or of the Norwegian Grieg, for that matter. I am myself descended from the 16th-Century father of Swedish church music, Michael Praetorius, but since his day I am very sorry to say Sweden has produced few serious composers other than Hugo Alfven, and he is, at best, an amiable mediocrity, do you not agree, Miss Riita?" He shifted position slightly, his enormous pajama-clad belly rolling around under the shawl. "For me, music dwells apart from anything else in this life, and is much more my real home than the mundane world. And Finland oozes Sibelius. I have noticed that driving through the country. Different parts of it often evoke different moments from his works. For example, a rocky pass might be shaped exactly like the savage theme in En Saga. Or the curve of a distant hillside might resemble the opening theme from the fourth movement of the Sixth Symphony. That stretch of river with the sun on it puts in me in mind of the sparkling 'Musette' from the King Christian Suite that is so often played on the radio. In fact, I would say there is no passage from Sibelius that will not unavoidably drift into the mind from time to time--and that I think is the mark of musical greatness."

Have I mentioned anything about how his voice sounded? It wasn't like it was, you know, deep or rumbly like George Clooney's for example--in fact, when he was upset, Dr P sort of squealed. But when he spoke normally, like now, it had a surprisingly pleasant sound, sort of cultured and theatrical, like he'd been trained for the stage or something. You could imagine that he'd be great at reading books aloud, because he was definitely pretty hypnotic to listen to. Of course, he could also sound very fake and histrionic, especially when he laughed, which involved a great deal of preliminary chuckling and chin-wobbling, kind of like a sad, humorless thin guy imitating a jolly fat one. If that makes any sense. Anyway, it was just as well that his was an OK voice to listen to, because the rest of the way to Kaustinen he never shut up:

"Finland is still a living country, full of magic. Unlike my poor Sweden, which is slowly dying. Our gods have abandoned us. Instead of making babies, our young people spend all their time on their computers, dreaming of becoming rock music stars or computer game programmers. Their parents retire at 50 and watch TV all day. We are committing mass suicide--soon there will be no Swedes left at all, and our country will be inherited by Finns and Slavs and Muslims. Instead of churches we will have mosques. But you Finns, by contrast, are vigorous and self-respecting with a healthy birth-rate. You still have a hearty appetite for sex."

Riita nodded approvingly. Obviously this was her kind of talk--and after what I'd seen that morning at Moominworld, I sure wasn't gonna argue.

"And this sad decline began nearly a century ago. After your independence many of Sweden's most dynamic and powerful personalities, like my dear friend and mentor Frederik Wilander, were not native Swedes but were Finlander-Swedes fleeing war and persecution in this country."

Riita was shocked. "That is not true!" she said in an outraged tone. "We Finns respect our Swedish heritage very much. No one in my country is allowed to be persecuted."

"But you hate Swedes," I pointed out. I felt like we were having a group therapy session. "You're always complaining about them."

Then she was like, "No, I don't! Of course I don't hate anyone, that is a very bad emotion! It's true I don't like Swedes very much, but that is just my personal opinion."

"And perhaps there is some validity in that," said Dr P in a soothing tone. "Sweden has treated the Finns very badly at times, it's true. And usually historical conflict of that sort leaves a legacy of bitterness, particularly among refugees, but that was not so for my dear friend Wilander. Despite his political convictions, he was a very quiet and gentle man, and in his own way, quite fearless--while as you see, I am a timid coward who merely stews in his own fears. If he were here now, he would not be afraid of Tuuslar--and he would never have lost his own shadow, which, incidentally, possessed a tail and was quite disturbing to look at. Believe me, there can be no doubt that Frederik Wilander was the most remarkable man of this past century. You are surprised? Amused at me again? What if I were to tell you that he discovered the secret of the Philosopher's Stone? That he was able to transmute lead into gold? It's true--all my vast wealth, everything you see in this automobile, I owe to his alchemical genius."

"Shut up!" I was like. "No way!"

"Nonetheless, it is true. And I can prove it."

"But if he could transmute lead into gold or whatever, and he was Likkanen's grandfather like you say, then why didn't Likkanen inherit all that?" I pointed out. "I don't get it."

Dr P sighed. "Your friend Mr Likkanen did inherit it all, in fact. He just never bothered to come back to Stockholm to collect it. He was a very careless and foolish man--in purely Darwinian terms, one might say he was simply too stupid to live."

"I didn't think he was stupid at all!" I protested loyally. "He was just sort of sad and didn't really care about himself at all, except for like his appearance. And he drank too much. I think his priorities in life were pretty much all wrong."

"It amounts to the same thing in the end," he said. "In any case, for whatever his reasons, Wilander bequeathed to him rather than to me the Hitler document. Mr Likkanen had no use for it--he was never interested in saving the world, nor indeed in saving even himself. But it is my destiny to do so."

"To save the world???"

"Yes, yes, I know it must sound mad to you. Let me explain, please, before you close your mind to this, Miss Hope. And you too, Miss Riita. Because I need your help, it is only fair that you should both understand the reason why." He gulped down another half-bottle of some bright pink soft drink. "To begin with, you must try to accept that the times were very different then. Wilander was a Nazi, it is true, but a Swedish nationalist, not a German one. I do not condone it, of course, and it is no longer an acceptable political philosophy in the modern world, but it is irrelevant to the larger issues at stake here. You see, during the war, he belonged to a secret Swedish occult order called the 'Knights of the Hooked Cross'--many prominent Swedes were members of this, including the Von Rosens, who created your Finnish air force. Some of the Swedish volunteers who fought at your side during the two Russian wars were also members. It was Wilander's duty to act as a courier between Stockholm and Berlin, where he was often the guest of Hermann Goering, whom he knew well. On one occasion he even met Hitler himself, which is how all this came about, for during their conversation together, Hitler promised Wilander a signed personal copy of his book, Mein Kampf.

Some time passed after this occasion, and Wilander forgot all about the proposed gift. In 1945, on his last visit to Germany, he found himself trapped between the Russian and the American armies, but was able to attach himself to Count Fulke Bernadotte's famous 'White Bus' convoy of repatriated prisoners and so leave the war-torn country under the neutral Red Cross flag. The night before he was to depart, two SS officers came to his hotel room and gave him a manuscript copy of Mein Kampf wrapped in brown paper. Upon his return to Stockholm, he had the leisure to examine the document more closely, and discovered that it was an altered and updated version of Hitler's work, typed out by his secretaries and with many notes and changes hand-written in pencil by Hitler himself. In addition to being somewhat pornographic, it also detailed Hitler's discovery of a world or dimension parallel to our own. This world Hitler called 'Glassland', or as you would say in English, 'Mirrorland'. He believed that it could be glimpsed in mirrors.

Hitler had first glimpsed this world late one night during one of his constant car trips between Munich and Berlin during the late 1920s. The driver had pulled his car over to the shoulder of the road for a brief stop and, left alone momentarily inside the darkened automobile, Hitler had happened to glance up into the rear-view mirror. He saw in the distance an old country house blazing with lights. Inside the windows he could see a number of figures in silhouette coming and going and conversing, rather like in a puppet theater-- these figures resembled grotesque caricatures of people and animals with large, misshapen heads or limbs, with great beaks or rows of sharp teeth. At first he assumed this to merely be a costume party, but much later he came to realize that these creatures must surely have been what we would term 'demons' or 'monsters'. He turned to look at the hill through the rear window panel but could see no house--nor could his driver or bodyguard when he sent them up the hill. The house existed only in the mirror. Or, he later decided, in his imagination, agitated by great stress and overwork.

However, some months later his car happened to pass the same way again, and he ordered that it be stopped in the same place. Once more he was able to clearly see the house in the mirror, though now it appeared dark and abandoned. But on this occasion several of his party were also able to see it, too. After this incident, discovering the truth about the Mirrorland became an obsession for Hitler. He diverted funds for its research, assigned many top scientists to the program, and even built secret factories in Northern Italy to develop experimental machinery and vehicles in order to penetrate it. During the war, concentration-camp inmates were successfully sent into it, but when they returned they were often turned inside-out or suffered other horrifying molecular changes. As the war progressed, and it became increasingly obvious to Hitler that Germany must lose it, he became even more frantic to find a way into Mirrorland, seeing it as his only escape route. He also decided that its inhabitants were able to spy on him from mirrors and glass reflections, which is why they were banned from his bunker--this was a fear that he shared with Wilander, and it is also why I am careful never to allow reflective surfaces anywhere near me. Of course, now that I have lost my own shadow such precautions are all but pointless, even comical.

But you see, unless I am able to secure this document and destroy it, it will fall into the hands of Tuuslar or some other evil warlock like him. They will discover the secret of entering Mirrorland from Hitler's writings and in so doing will open up a gateway between the two worlds..."

OK, I guess you really had to be there.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 20: The Man Who Lost His Shadow

Back. It sort of feels like me and Riita have been stuck on that stupid footbridge forever with our legs frozen in mid-stride, like in a nightmare. Hopefully, it's over.

So where was I (again!)? Oh yeah, after we crossed back to the harbor parking lot, we found a black 6-door Mercedes stretch limo idling in front of us, blocking our path. The back door swung open and a pink fat hand waved at me from inside it. This was the second time in the last few minutes someone had beckoned me with the exact same motion, and I was seriously starting to freak. What's more, there was something even more familiar about this hand--and I realized why when the owner stuck his face out at me from the gloom of the limo's interior. "Miss Hope? I must speak with you urgently. I am acquainted with your good friend, Miss Christina Fischer--she has sent me to you. My name is Dr Ivar Praetorius," It was the fat, orange-haired munchkin from the National Library. The Swedish magician who had made the book walk. What was he doing here? "Quickly, quickly, I'm afraid I must insist!" he hissed. "A terrible evil is near." He pointed wildly in the direction of Moominland, and sure enough, looking back I saw the trees whipping around and dancing in a whirling wind, while the sky above them boiled with clouds the color of a rotting egg yolk. Even from the other side of the channel I could hear a chorus of kids shrieking. Suddenly there was a blinding bolt of lightning, with a deafening crack of thunder at the same time, which meant it had hit really close, and then it suddenly started to pour. OK, good enough for me--I leaned over and ducked inside the car.

Riita was totally horrified. She was like, "Hoop! Do you think this is such a good idea? This person is a stranger!"

"You're getting soaked!" I yelled at her. "Get in, girl!"

"Please don't worry, Miss Riita," the fat man said, "Be so good as to join us--I'll explain everything."

"But he is...Swedish!" Riita said furiously, coming up with her final objection. Actually, he didn't sound very Swedish--he sounded almost like an Englishman, except for the occasional awkward sentence construction. Whatever, I'd had enough of the argument--and I was desperate to get Riita away from there before Erkki showed up. So I dragged her into the car after me. One of the three guys in the car with the magician--two were wearing dark suits, got out and closed the door after her. Then he got back in the front passenger seat, and we drove off.

"So...what is this 'terrible' evil' exactly?" I said. We were sitting in a pair of revolving white leather chairs turned to face the rear of the cab--the fat man was sprawled over most of the back seat with a very thin young guy in an expensive blue shirt and designer glasses squeezed into the corner next to him, sipping at what looked like a ginger ale while he listened to his iPod and stared at the screen of a laptop. Behind us I was conscious of a chauffeur and the huge hulking guy who had slammed the door closed behind us, who I assumed was some kind of bodyguard. So it seemed pretty obvious to figure that that the munchkin was both really rich and really paranoid. The rich part was easy to spot, but the paranoid part was even easier--even if I hadn't heard him mentioning the 'terrible evil--because he was half-covered, even over his head, with a sort of grey blanket or shawl covered in dark runes. Underneath it, he was sweating and seemed to be trembling with fear. He was literally wringing his hands.

"Tuuslar!" he breathed. "The greatest demon-god in Finland, perhaps in the world. You met him in the park just now. I think it is he who has stolen my shadow." He peered fearfully around, like a blind mole. His face was even more cartoonish today up close, pale and almost perfectly round, his tiny, piggy eyes and almost girlish mouth dwarfed by the droopy orange Van Dyke beard and mustache (he'd forgotten to wax the ends today, I guess) and his fleshy little bulb of a nose.

"Your shadow?" I echoed stupidly.

"Yes, my shadow--when I woke up this morning, it was missing. That's why I don't dare leave this car in broad daylight. Everyone would stare, you see." I didn't dare look at Riita, cuz I was afraid I'd burst into a laughing fit. I stole a glance at the guy with the glasses beside him though, and he just nodded solemnly, like he was used to talk like this.

"Forgive me, I'm extremely upset," said the fat man. "This is my administrative assistant, Mr Alex Rizzio."

"Hi," he said.

"You're American?"

"Scottish, actually. I'm from Glasgow--but primarily I'm based in Brussels. Would either of you ladies like a drink?" Admittedly, my gay-dar isn't the best in the world (for a whole month I wanted to marry Nathan Lane), but it was definitely pinging in his case.

Meanwhile his employer was continuing with the introductions: "Behind you is Matsson, my driver and Gailis, my security chief. And yes, Miss Riita, I am indeed Swedish."

"How do you know my name?" she asked.

"I know everything," Dr Praetorius said, waving his hand dismissively. "I am a magician. But I have been following you both, I admit. I need your help. In fact, Miss Hope, I am begging for your help." The limo had suddenly stopped, and I realized we were now parked behind Riita's yellow Ford.

"Your help with what?" I'd had a bad day, and so many bizarre things had happened in a row that I felt like I was losing it. So I figured just about any crazy thing he said next was totally not gonna surprise me. But, of course, I was wrong.

Because next he was like, "I'm very much afraid I have some bad news concerning your friend, Mr Likkanen."

"He is not Hoop's friend," said Riita. The rain was rattling on the roof of the Mercedes now like millions of tiny pebbles--I looked out the window and saw hailstones bouncing on the pavement.

"Ah, it is even better if he were your lover," he said. "The signs were very unclear to the Invisibles. I'm sorry to have to tell you this bad news in that case--Mr Likkanen is dead."

"Dead?" I said. Now I sounded like a parakeet.

"I'm afraid he was murdered last night. I attempted to warn him, but he paid no attention to me. He found me a figure of fun, I think." I was like totally in shock. I mean, the Safe-T-Man and I hadn't exactly parted on the best of terms--in fact I barely knew the guy, really--but still, it's horrible to find out that anyone you know is dead. Especially dead as in murdered. It's funny, at the time I didn't even think to question the truth of Dr Praetorius' statement about him dying, I guess because Riita seemed to believe it so instantly.

"You see, Hoop, I told you--those men we saw him with were criminals. Oh, I am so glad you did not go with them, or you might be murdered now, too."

"Yeah, thanks for that thought. Who murdered him? And where did this happen?"

"It is my belief that a notorious gangster has killed him and left his body in a lake, I cannot say where, but all the signs point to water. This man's nickname in Estonia translates as 'Shiny Hat'. I'm very much afraid that by sheer coincidence I am personally acquainted with him. His sister is a business partner of mine, in fact, and Markko has always been a great trial to his family. Why he and Mr Likkanen quarreled, I have no idea--no doubt over a woman." That didn't sound like Safe-T-Man at all--I couldn't imagine him actually fighting over a woman. Only with them.

In fact, the whole story sounded pretty tweaked to me. "It was my belief"? "I cannot say where"?? And neither of the "gangsters" I'd seen Safe-T-Man with after the concert had been wearing hats, much less shiny ones. So I was like, "OK, but what I don't get is what I can possibly do to help."

Dr Praetorius stared at me very seriously for a few long seconds and then said, "I need you to help me bring him back to life."

"Back to life??? Shut up, you mean like for a stage act? That's kind of, well, you know, tasteless, isn't it?" Unexpectedly, he made a noise like a seal barking. Since he was shuddering with terror at the same time, it took me a few minutes to figure out that he was trying to laugh.

"I'm not merely a stage magician, Miss Hope. I'm a real one. Please believe me, I have done things, witnessed things, you cannot imagine. I have stopped time and reversed it, I have traveled to the land of the dead and back again, I have transmuted lead into gold. I have had several deeply intimate conversations with your good friend Miss Christina, and so I know that you are a serious and open-minded young woman with a knowledge of miracles and spirits as the result of your own personal experiences. I can assure you there is much more for you to learn. With your help, I think it's perhaps possible that we can raise Mr Likkanen from the dead. And we won't be alone in this attempt--dozens of true believers from around the world will be gathering tonight to perform a mass ceremony based on the Kalevala. We shall meet them on a hill near a place called Kaustinen."

"You mean at the folk music festival?" Riita asked. "They are all done with that now. There will be no one there."

"Yes, that's why the Odinists and several other heathen groups have reserved it for the next three days, specifically a lodge nearby called 'Pauanne'. I should like both of you to come there with me now. Naturally you will travel as my guests, and I shall pay all your expenses. Do either of you have any particular dietary requirements or allergies?" We both shook our heads. I felt dizzy with confusion, everything was happening so fast. "Call the caterers in any case and make sure of the menus," he said to his secretary, "My appetite is slowly returning after my great shock this morning. And insist again that the bars are well-stocked inside the trailers. Miss Riita, you are free to follow along behind us in your own car--or if you would be so good as to ride with us, you may give your car keys to Mr Alex, and he will do so. He is an excellent driver." I nodded at her. I'd wanted Kalevala research, hadn't I? Besides, it was an adventure. Dr Praetorius was crazy as a coot, no argument there, and I totally didn't believe he was gonna 'raise Safe-T-Man from the dead' or whatever, but he'd struck me right from the start as sort of gentle and harmless. I mean, it was hard to get too nervous about someone who was literally scared of his own shadow. Plus, I was curious about what he could tell me about Chris.

So very very reluctantly, Riita handed over her car-keys, "Mr Alex" clambered out into the rain, now just a steady soaking cloudburst, with them and splashed over to Riita's Ford, and so we set off as a kind of trucker convoy out of Naantali. And not a moment too soon--I totally wanted to get as far away from there as fast as possible. In fact, I really didn't want to have to see Erkki ever again at all--things were gonna be way awkward enough the next time Riita talked to him by phone, if he ever turned his back on again, I mean, but I didn't have a clue how I could look him the eye now after looking him in the, well, you know. Or not warn Riita about him somehow. Then I was suddenly struck by another, creepier, thought: what if he'd been working all along for that old bum, the one that Dr Praetorious seemed so scared of? But when I asked him who this "Tuuslar" guy was and what made him so scary, he just hushed me. He said that even mentioning his name was bad luck, and that the demon could overhear our conversations if he chose.

"Even the Invisibles are afraid of him--he is a Power, an awakened reincarnation." Then he shut up and sulked. We took the highway back to Turku. The storm had put a sudden and violent end to "Sleepyhead Day". Tree branches had been blown down into the streets, and there was bright debris, mostly plastic bags and candy bar wrappers, drifting around everywhere (remind me to scan and upload some of my Finnish candy bar wrapper collection soon--some of them are super-funny, some just make you cringe. Here's a good example of the latter:

"Lakritsi" means "licorice".) A few bedraggled kids in soggy costumes were wailing at their parents as they splashed back to their cars. We turned north at Turku and took Valtatie 8, which Riita explained was part of the old "West Coast Road" leading first to Pori and Vaasa, then to Kokkola, which was the nearest large town to Kaustinen. "We will pass through many interesting places filled with pretty handicrafts," she said, and I think, due to our weak bladders, that we probably stopped at most of them. Dr Praetorius, on the other hand, was still too frightened to leave the car to empty his--when I came out of one Shell station rest room, I spotted Gailis emptying a green plastic bucket in the grass, then putting it back in the trunk of the car.

It was "Lace Week" in Rauma, so the town was packed, and we didn't try to eat lunch there, much to our host's increasingly loud gastric distress. After we by-passed it, I amused myself by trying to figure out whether Dr Praetorius' shadow was really visible or not. The light from outside was pretty dim through the tinted limo windows, and he had all the ceiling lights on. I could see a sort of patch of darkness on his seat under his enormous pudgy thighs, but that could have been from the shawl, there was just no knowing for sure. I tried to imagine what it would be like going through life without a shadow. Would I even miss mine? I looked around, but right at that moment I couldn't see it either. Or Riita's. Really, what was the big deal? Once we'd left Naantali, the sun had suddenly blazed out again--the storm had been like a purely local event, I guess. But there were still no solid shadows inside the car.

I caught the glitter of his eyes watching me from under the shawl, so I wasn't too freaked (or thought he was reading my mind) when he started talking about his missing shadow again. Apparently, he viewed it more like the desertion of a close personal friend. He told us it had been the soul of a baby who had died of neglect because his father didn't love him enough to look after him. Then in the shadow world it had grown into a kid of about 12, but without learning how to talk or knowing anything about the living world, because it had no one to teach him. So then, Dr Praetorious had undertaken the 'soul-quest', he said, going through a rite that made him sort of die (he wasn't too specific about the details) and go down into the underworld in order to gain the wisdom of Odin from sacred runestones or something. In order to enter it, he had to bribe the guardian with his own shadow--you can't take it with you, I guess--and then on the way out again, this new shadow, that of the 12 year old boy I mean, attached itself to him, actually was literally stitched to him with a sewing-needle, "because he wanted to visit the world of the living in order to learn to speak." The whole time he was going on about this, Riita was rolling her eyes and making huffing noises, so I thought I'd better interrupt to try to change the subject, even though I found it really interesting. He might be crazy or a chronic liar--or both--but just hanging with Dr Praetorius was a lot like taking a college mythology course. And for free.

"Why would 'Odinists' perform a ceremony from the Kalevala, anyway?" I asked him.

He just glared at me from under his shawl and was all like, "I confess I'm disappointed in you, Miss Hope--I thought you of all people would have recognized Mr Likkanen as an avatar of Baldur or the Finnish Lemminkainen. He was specifically bred for the role. And like all fertility gods, he has died and so must be reborn. This is not, I admit, precisely the right time of year for it, but tonight is Lunasa, and that is at least a window of great power. But dealing with the Asatru is never pleasant. They are currently the principal group in the neo-pagan Norse religious revival movement."

"So these 'Asatru' people actually believe Mr Likkanen was 'bred' to be a god?"

Uh oh, big mistake, because for most of the next hour we got lectured on Safe-T-Man's divine family history, which apparently was half-Swedish. I'm not gonna try to quote much of it--if you're really interested, you can go read all the details at: http://hem.passagen.se/dendoldahistorien/ . Be warned though. This site contains a bunch of excerpts from Dr Praetorius' huge Secret History of Magic in Sweden" (Den Hemliga Historien om Magi i Sverige) translated into English by some cult follower of his and alternates between being way boring and just plain insane. But basically, the deal was this: when Dr Praetorious was in college he fell under the spell of the foremost magician in Sweden, an old geezer named Frederik Wilander. In 1930 Wilander had married the daughter of a pair of total nutcases named Oscar and Signe Krook, who had tried to breed a race of gods by the use of ritual ceremony and whatever, who they planned to raise on a farm they called "Asgard". Apparently, they were only successful in producing one goddess, who was named "Fairgun" after the Scandinavian earth mother (think "Gaia")--anyway it was her Wilander married. So next they had a daughter, Frikka (Frey or Frigg), who came to Finland and married Likkanen's father (also a local divinity), and together they parented Likkanen himself, who was, according to Dr Praetorious, an 'unawakened avatar'. Meaning he had divine powers but didn't know it. Which, to be honest, made the whole thing sound pretty pointless to me. I mean, you could pretty much make the same claim for half of Hollywood. Which I guess is what publicists do for a living, really.

So then, just for a joke, I started to like wonder or whatever which stars might be the 'reincarnated avatars' of which gods, if Dr Praetorius' crazy theories turned out to be right. For instance, would you include dead ones in your imaginary pantheon? Had Clark Gable been Zeus? Had Marilyn Monroe been Aphrodite--or was Angelina Jolie? Maybe she and Brad Pitt were more like children or proteges of the gods, sort of like Helen of Troy and Paris. Or Muses. Maybe Britney Spears was Terpsichore. Or was I being way too Greco-centric about all this? Maybe Paris Hilton was really Ishtar and George Clooney was Osiris. I decided they must have all been driven out of their native countries to be reborn in America and had just drifted naturally to Hollywood to assume their divine status, because it was like a modern Mt Olympus. And not just Hollywood. either. I remember one time when I was in high school in Chevy Chase, we went down to the White House as part of a class field trip. It was long before 911, so there weren't any Jersey barriers and actually not much security at all, really, but the main thing I noticed was that hundreds of people in wheelchairs were flooding the sidewalks and taking the White House tour--it was like Lourdes or something. They had flocked there from all over America, I guess because maybe they all had this subconscious belief that President Clinton's touch could heal them, like a medieval king with lepers. OK, you can laugh, but don't charismatic politicians and Hollywood stars perform the same functions as the old gods, really, when you think about it? Don't they publicly feud and cheat and mate with nymphs and cause big storms? Doesn't Clooney donate millions to make crops grow in Africa? Doesn't Paris Hilton make movies of herself having sex just to inspire millions of mere mortals to be fertile? Maybe when Christianity and Islam and Communism destroyed the old pantheons, they had to make their acts secular and adapt to new technologies. I'm just saying.

New technologies like this stretch-limo we were in, for instance. Which struck me as totally a sort of chariot for the new Hollywood gods, kind of like Alexander the Great's gold horse-drawn crypt, only with padded seats and a bar. Actually, it was a lot less comfy than an RV, because you couldn't walk around inside it. Or get up and use the bathroom. But a stretch-limo was faster and more anonymous and godlike, I guess. This one had a little fold-down table for Dr Praetorius to eat on, which we got to watch in action. We had stopped briefly in the small city of Pori, famous for its Jazz Festival (where Sting was appearing as we drove by), in front of the town hall, inside which was a fancy restaurant.. Alex had phoned ahead with our order, and it was waiting for us--Gailis and two waiters trundled a trolley cart across the cobbled sidewalk and unloaded steaks, lobsters, several types of fish, along with assorted veggies, sauces, and desserts in plastic containers. Dr Praetorius then proceeded to eat most of this while we drove. There was also a refrigerated bar just behind me and Riita stuffed with fruit juice and soft drinks and grossly sweet Euro-combos of both--Dr Praetorius was a teetotaler for 'mystical reasons', he told us--and he swilled these down indiscriminately between dishes. I had a feeling it would be bucket-time again pretty soon. To be honest, it was pretty gross watching him eat, because he, well, you know--slobbered. In fact, it was so nasty that it was actually a pretty cool dieting aid for both me and Riita in terms of losing our own appetites. Instead I drank a Coke, and we played with a pair of built-in DVD players whose little screens popped down out of the ceiling right in front of us, complete with iPod-type earphones. But there were other, definitely weirder custom touches inside the Merc. For one thing, there were solid gold stars bolted into the upholstery everywhere, one inside each door and a few sprinkled across the ceiling and floor. For another, there were no mirrors in the car at all--Matsson the chauffeur, a sweet clown-faced man in his forties, had three LCD screens in front of him, one mounted where the rear-view mirror should have been, all connected to external cameras and GPS. Avoiding all mirrors and reflections was another of Dr Praetorius' fetishes (I had noticed during the storm when things had gotten dark out that the tinted glass windows were all non-reflective), but I couldn't figure out whether this was connected to his paranoia about his shadow or not. Or whether it was just a whole other one. Whatever, he was turning out to be one seriously whacked-out dude. But hey, at least it wasn't a date.

And a good thing, too, cuz it would have been the longest one of my life. The whole way, Dr Praetorius played classical music over the car stereo, which normally I hate--it always reminds me of doctors' offices and makes me feel kind of woozy and constipated--but I actually started to enjoy parts of this, which sounded familiar to me.

"Sibelius?" I asked, finally.

"Ja," he said. "Specifically, the Legends from the Kalevala. This is the Lemminkainen Suite." I had heard it when I was first researching the Kalevala, which the only reason I'd have ever recognized it, I guess. I can recognize Beethoven, though.

"It is the Swedish version," said Riita sourly. "It is better to hear it performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic." The distance between Turku and Kokkola is about the same as between DC and New York, so it took about 6 hours for us to get to Kaustinen. The bulk of this was between Pori and Vaasa, which is called the 'capital of the Swedish Coast'. "This region is called 'Ostrobothnia' by the Swedes," said Riita. "I think it is very ugly here." She had a point. It was very flat and prairie-like with a lot of dried grass. Occasionally the highway strayed near the Baltic, and once or twice we even glimpsed the sea. As we traveled farther and farther north, the forest-line receded farther and farther away from the road, like a Boomer's hairline, and the trees looked more and more stunted. By the time we got to Vaasa, home to "Wasalandia", Finland's version of Disneyland (http://www.wasalandia.fi/template_wl1.asp?lang=3&sua=4&s=303 ), Dr Praetorius was starving again--and so were we. Again, he'd had Alex Rizzio phone ahead, but this time the three of us rebelled and insisted on actually eating inside the restaurant, while he fumed outside in the car, where he was fed by teams of waiters, sort of like the Great White Whale at Seaworld. More and more this whole gig was giving me the feeling of being stuck on a camping trip with Jabba the Hut. And a 'droid from the Finnish Chamber of Commerce.

The restaurant was called the Gustav Wasa, and maybe it was just because I was so hungry, but I thought it had the best food of anyplace I ate at the whole time I was in Finland. I had the "Ostrobot Menu", which was whitefish with potato salad and lime dressing, a local Brie, and for dessert a honey parfait with orange and mint salad. Riita had reindeer, which I tried and didn't much like, really.

I also loved the decor, which was straight out of Rivendell--I kept expecting Elf-lords to stroll in with their hunting-horns full of mead, but the room was mostly full of middle-aged German and Swedish tourists in sandals with socks and way too short pants. Both Alex and Riita stayed on their cell-phones for like the whole meal. Riita called her mother to tell her where we were going and to ask if Safe-T-Man's death had made the news. "She says it is on the TV news that a man was shot at a lake in Espoo, but there are no details yet. It is thought he might be a tourist." So the evidence was mounting up. Poor Likkanen. I found myself really missing him.

Alex looked up from his laptop and started quizzing me in a sly, ingratiating way. "Did he say anything more about this 'Tuuslar' then?" he wanted to know. It was such a shame he was (I assumed) gay, because I could have listened to that accent of his all day. Glaswegians--"Weegies"--talk in a sort of cross between Ulster and Sean Connery.

"Um, no. He seemed too scared to."

So he was like, "But you know who the guy really is, right? You met him, didn't you?"

"No. Honest, I have no idea who he is," I said. But I could tell he didn't believe me. In the middle of her phone call to her mom, Riita got a call from Erkki at last, so she rang off and talked to him during dessert. Even though they spoke in Finnish, which meant I couldn't understand a word of it, her tone sound non-committal, even kind of bored to me, so when she got off I asked if everything was OK between them.

"Sure," she said and shrugged. "But now you have made my eyes wide open, and that is the problem, I think. It is because of you I have finally realized Erkki is a bad boyfriend for me. You see, with you I have many fun and frightening adventures, and life is exciting. It isn't just that Erkki has been cold and hurtful to me all this year--now I am seeing that he is not even interesting enough for me any longer."

"Well," I said dubiously, "Honestly, I think he may be a bit more interesting than you give him credit for, actually."

But it was obvious she didn't believe me either. It was the Cassandra Complex at work again--I've told you about that, haven't I? Oh right, you didn't believe me.

Nobody does.


Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 19: Grrrrrrrrrrr

OK, you are never in a bazillion years gonna believe this, but I'm running late again--this time it's cuz my 'puter died! Unbelievable! At first I thought everything was lost forever, including everything I've written here, so I was totally freaking, but it looks like all the data is fine after all, it was just the system that got corrupted. My husband (how weird is it to type that word!? All week long I've been going around trying it out casually in sentences, you know, like to total strangers, and I really doubt I'll ever get used to it) reinstalled the system on a new hard drive, and now he's in "reinstall hell". So all I get at night is the back of his head and the occasional tantrum. Which feels really weird now coming from a 'husband' instead of a boyfriend, because instead of marching out the door I have to just well, you know, deal with it. So far (and it's been, what--like a week? OK, OK, 12 days exactly, but who's counting?) my favorite parts about being married are all the corny cliche stuff you'd expect, like having someone safe and warm to sleep next to who'll get up in the night and check things out if you hear a noise. Or fix your computer for you. Whether you're kidding yourself or not, being married feels like you're getting lifetime tech support.

So when he says everything's fixed and gives me the all-clear, I guess I'll start writing the story again. See you then. Sigh. Some Valentine's Day present...

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 18: The Sleepyhead Festival

Hey, sorry I haven't posted anything for the last two weeks, but I've been like really super-busy and mostly away. Actually--I kinda sorta got married. But it really wasn't any big deal, honest. I'll tell you about it later. OK, so where was I? Oh yeah--the bordello hotel room in Turku. I woke up to the sound of Riita doing her Pilates. "Wake up, sleepyhead!" she trilled when she saw my eyes open. She found this so funny she said it two more times.

So I was like, "Huh, what time is it?"

"5:30," she said. "Hurry, you must get up and pack everything. We don't want to be late for the 'Sleepyhead Festival' in Naantali."

"The what??"

"The Sleepyhead Festival--it is a famous celebration they have every year in Nantaali when they throw some famous person in the ocean for sleeping too late. We must hurry, though! Because It starts at 7." Groan. Only in Finland.

Then I was like, "What about breakfast?" Because that was included in the hotel bill.

"We will eat breakfast at Moominworld, " she said firmly. How is it that people always know what buttons to push pretty much as soon as they get to know me? Whatever. So, feeling a little hungover, I got up, grabbed a five-minute shower, packed my stuff, and then checked out in such a hurry that I somehow left my contact lenses behind. So I basically spent the rest of my trip to Finland wearing my glasses, which are super-thick and magnify my eyes, sort of making me look all bug-eyed and owlish. According to those who love me, anyway. Which also means I couldn't wear my (non-prescription) sunglasses. And we were in for a sunny morning--the sun was already high up and blazing away when we left the hotel.

Naantali is a pretty little town--it's built around a medieval convent--that reminded me a little of Cape May, New Jersey, or Fernandina, Florida (home to 'Pippi Longstocking'!), except without a real beach, but with dozens of tree-covered islands surrounding it instead. But it had the same gingerbread-jigsaw-cut wooden ornaments on the restored old houses, all painted in bright colors. And the same sort of hand-made advertising signs every few yards. We parked in a huge lot near the main harbor-front marina, in front of an old Victorian resort hotel decked with pennants that lay at the end of a beach-style boardwalk featuring a huge wooden pavilion. The place was packed with tourists, so it wasn't so easy finding a space--Riita just drove into one that someone else was backing into, then refused to look at them until they gave up honking at her and drove away. I congratulated her. "You drive just like an American," I told her. Hee hee, she hated that!

We bought coffee and stood in the crowd staring out at the water. A yacht putt-putted into the harbor and stopped, and then a lady with high hair the color of Ronald McDonald's waved from it. There was a teeny round of scattered of applause. "That is our president, Madam Halonen," Riita informed me. "Perhaps someday America will have a woman for a president, as well, just like Finland. See the tower on that island? That is the summer home for all of our presidents--she has come from there to observe all the festivity." As she spoke, a group of middle-aged men dressed like characters from Gilbert & Sullivan's The Gondoliers in red-striped shirts and funny hats marched down to the end of the pier carrying a tarpaulin which had a gray-haired head sticking out of one end. "That is Bjorn Walroos--he is a very important man, the president of Sampo," said Riita. "Also, he is one of the richest men in our country. That is why he agreed to be this year's 'Sleepyhead', because it is very good for public relationships."

The gondoliers tipped up the tarpaulin, and the 'Sleepyhead of the Year", wearing beige long johns, suddenly plummeted down into the sea water. It looked cold even for July. After a moment, he surfaced, shook the water out of his hair like a dog, then paddled back to the pier, where he was lifted out like the Baby Jesus in a Nativity play and then wrapped up in a blanket while a succession of men in business suits solemnly shook his hand. I was like, "That's it? That's what you hauled me out of bed for?"

"No, no, there is much more fun to come, don't worry. Now there will be a parade. Let's go find a good place to see it."

The 'parade' consisted of the official Sleepyhead himself, with his hair slicked down and looking bored out his skull, holding a sign that said "UNIKEKO" (Sleepyhead) driving around the town in a tiny trolley car in front of a ragtag marching band, followed by a gang of young children in Halloween costumes with their mothers, gossiping and waving at friends, close behind. That was it. Oh yeah, there was a yellow dog with a blue scarf around his neck. Then we went to Moominworld.

Which meant we had to first retrace our footsteps back through Naantali Old Town (passing the "Moomintroll House of Surprises" and the "Moomintroll Strange House") to the harbor parking lot, and then crossing a very, very long white wooden footbridge over to Kailo Island. Riita pointedly explained to me all the way across how the family of Tove Jansson had refused to deal with Disney at all when they decided to license Moominworld, but had signed with a Finnish company instead. And I really, really hate to say this but...it kind of showed. I mean, I'd hate for the park to have been just like Disneyworld or whatever, but it sure could have used some Epcott Center touches, you know to make you feel like you were really inside Moomin Valley, instead of stuck on a dinky little island with a few badly constructed houses full of actors in really clunky and obvious cloth suits. Oh yeah, and with the single "Mama's Kitchen" restaurant next to the "Sniff" gift shop (our breakfast was better than the food you get at Disneyworld, admittedly). Still if I'd been a kid, I think I'd of felt way gypped. Of course, it just have been me--since I was like 20 years older than most of the other kids there.
Not to make too big a deal of it, but come to think of it, Finland could actually really use a Disneyland. The whole country reminded me of a giant US military base in some ways--full of weird rules and low, clapboard buildings, where everybody knows everybody else's business. A little more crass commercialism would probably be a good thing. When I sort of hinted at this to Riita over our pancakes and honey from the "Snork Pancake Factory", she shook her head violently at me.

"Oh no, Hoop," she said. "We like our Finland just as it is. We have many big companies here already and many malls and nice things to buy. And we have the Internet. If we became like America then we would have to allow many immigrants to come here to work at the new jobs."

"Right. And that would be like a bad thing?"

Riita looked embarrassed. "Of course we have a tradition of welcome to those who are wanting political asylum, especially from Palestine and such places, but most Finns are unfortunately not so modern as they should be in their thinking. Some Finns don't like immigrants so well. That is why we have a law that to live here, you must learn to speak Finnish. Otherwise, no one would, you see." I could see that. "Hoop, I must thank you."

I was like, "Huh? For what?"

"For being my friend. And for always talking with me so honestly. Around you I have become such a happy person on this trip. You see, I have been going through a long time of not being so happy lately. I think maybe I have even been clinically depressed. It is very common here because of our culture and the long winter night. Also many Finnish people are naturally bipolar, I have read. Perhaps I am one of those. I was thinking of going to see a doctor to discuss this and why I have so few friends who like me any longer and why Erkki is now so cold to me. And then you came, and suddenly I realized that I no longer have to be in control of everything after all. It is such a relief! Now I have confidence again that Erkki truly loves me and that everything will be very good between us again. And that is all because of you." She stared at me expectantly.

"Thank you, Riita. That's a very nice thing to say," was all I could think of to tell her back.

"You are a wonderful person. So open, so full of life. You make everyone around you laugh and feel happy."

So I was like, "Are you on crack?"

She didn't get it. "Never mind," I said. "It was a joke."

"You see?" she said, beaming.

After breakfast, we took a tour of the rest of the island. By 'tour' I mean we went for a long walk--there are no trams or trains or anything. Our first stop was the Post Office, where we were encouraged to mail letters all over the world stamped with Moominworld's own special postmark, for instance. You get the picture--and if you want to see more pictures, check them out at: http://www.muumimaailma.fi/englanti/puisto.html . OK, not all of it was dumb. The sunlight was dazzling, and it was cool to see kids running around spilling ice cream from cones and screaming. Moominpapa's ship--in dry-dock at the far end of the island--was cute, and so was the Hemulen's house, which had painted wooden butterfliy shutters on all its windows. According to Riita, the region around Naantali is world-famous for its hand-crafted wood ornamentation on walls and doorways and gates. There was a very tiny beach with like ten yards of sand and its very own sauna. Most like the book illustrations, however, was the Moominhouse, a three or four story round house painted blue with a conical red-tiled roof.

Because we had woken up so early that morning, the sound of the kids' voices and the bright sun had a kind of lulling effect on me after we'd walked back from the Moomin swimming pier, and I started feeling pretty sleepy. We stopped and bought lemon drinks called "Zingos" (they're sort of like Oranginas) at a kiosk, and afterwards, of course, Riita immediately needed to pee. But there were long lines of kids outside the beach rest-rooms.

"OK, I will go back to the Sniff shop and also buy some postcards there," she said after I declined to go back with her. "And then I will try to call Erkki again. I think he will want to hear how happy I am today in my voice. It will cheer him up, too, to hear it. I know I am not so fun to be around lately. You will be good by yourself? It will not be too boring?"

"I'll be fine. Maybe I'll find a bench and take a nap."

"Don't get too much sun. Oh no, it is beginning to be clouds." She was right--a dark haze was creeping up over the western horizon. I wandered off toward the Moominhouse, which was by far the tallest landmark on the island, then found myself in a patch of empty parkland surrounded by scrub that was miraculously kid-free. There were a few benches scattered around with dozing grandmothers lounging on them, faces worshipfully propped toward the sun--that, I thought, is what I'm about. There was a drowsy hum of hornets around a trash receptacle, and an overpowering smell of Finnish hot dogs, which are sausages fried in batter. Come to think of it, I needed to make some phone calls, too. I hadn't spoken to Kerry or Chris in days--and the only email I'd had was from Jo, containing a link to an article about the rising costs of Australian med schools. I realized I even owed the Mothership a call. I turned a corner around a copse of trees and saw two or three people gathered around some kind of strange big costumed animal on another bench that looked kind of like the "Pushmi-Pullyu" from Doctor Doolittle. I walked closer, kind of half-trying to recognize it, then suddenly I realized it wasn't a Moominworld prop at all. I stopped and just stared stupidly. I think my mouth was probably literally hanging open, like "Doh".

You know how sometimes when a flash-camera goes off in your face, the light just burns into your retina, and you sort of see it frozen in your eyes for hours afterwards? Well, as soon as I realized what it was I was seeing, this scene had exactly the same effect on me. To begin with, it wasn't a single person in an animal costume at all, it was three of them, though the woman in the middle of the three wasn't exactly wearing a costume. In fact. except for the "Snork Maiden" pink flowers in her hair and a yellow anklet, she was like totally, completely stark naked. I kid you not. She was a very unusual-looking woman, too (and probably would have been even with her clothes on): she was blonde, luridly tanned, middle-aged, in pretty good shape actually (but way too overly buff and collagened-looking), but everything about her was somehow larger than life, like the statue of Havis Amanda in the Helsinki harbor--her eyes, her mouth, her lips, her boobs, all were almost cartoon-huge. She was kneeling on the park bench with her butt in the air, while behind her a guy dressed as "Sniff" was humping away at her--he had taken the costume head off (I guess it was hot work in there) and was holding it in one arm. With a shock I saw it was Eetu, my "date" from the Madonna concert. Now I suddenly realized what he'd meant by "sexy acting" or whatever. But now I was in for another, even bigger shock. The second "actor", who was standing in front of the woman's face and was obviously pretty bashful because he was, um, having trouble performing publicly (in spite of her enthusiastic attempts to help him out there), was dressed as "Snufkin" in a green hat and scarf and artist's smock--but underneath it all I could clearly see that it was Erkki.

You know, Erkki. Her boyfriend? The guy Riita lived with and was trying to phone from the Gift Shop at that very moment? After I spotted him, I really did not know where to look. My gaze wandered, and I saw there were other two guys filming all this heavy action, one with a huge camcorder suspended from some sort of elaborate belt-chest mount, and next to him a guy holding a boom mike and staring into a laptop. Then I made the mistake of looking back at the bench for half a sec. The blonde lady spotted me and stopped what she was doing. She widened her eyes and gave me a humongous smile, which totally creeped me out because--and I know how weird this sounds, but I'm just saying what flashed through my mind at the time--well, because it was like she recognized me somehow. Something about her, her expression maybe, sort of reminded me of my mother, which was way beyond gross and spooky. And then, this woman waved at me and beckoned me over, like "hey, come on and join in!" Ewwww! By now I was actually backing away like I'd disturbed a nest of snakes or something, almost tip-toeing backwards--and suddenly I bumped heavily into somebody. I jumped like a foot and turned around, really, really hoping it wasn't Riita. Because i know I sometimes say cruel things about her here, but I so did not want her to be seeing this. In fact, I didn't want to be seeing it either.

But it wasn't Riita. It was the bum from Helsinki, the one who had crapped on the sidewalk in front of me a few days earlier. "Wake up, sleepyhead!" he shouted at me in his terrible growly English, then laughed at the expression on my face. Which to be honest, must have looked pretty funny really. How did I know it was the same guy? I just knew, that's all. The scary eyes, the face, the voice, were all still exactly the same. Actually, the rest of him looked a lot different today--cleaned up, sort of, with his long grey hair in a pony-tail. He was wearing almost-new Nikes and a soiled black T-shirt that said "Bonk Industries" on it and was holding a big round fabric light reflector. He pointed at Eetu, and said, "That's the second-biggest frog I've ever seen." I'd had enough. I turned and ran. I mean, I felt like a fool, but at the time it really seemed the only appropriate adult response to the situation. Because I was suddenly desperate to stop poor Riita from seeing it. I mean, I know Scandinavians supposedly aren't possessive or jealous like we unhealthy Americans are, but something about the scene struck me as a deal-breaker anyway.

As I ran, drawing stares from old ladies and kids as soon as I rounded the corner, I suddenly got mad. I mean, there were kids all over the place there, for Christ's sake! What if small children happened to see what was going on? What was the point of filming something like that at Moominworld? Obviously it was against the rules (if not the law, I didn't know), which I guess is what made it "guerilla film-making", but I still couldn't think of any political--or especially even erotic--statement they were making there.

And, if I'm totally, brutally honest with myself, I was pissed off for another reason, too, I mean aside from being angry on Riita's behalf. And that was because I'd had the teeniest little a crush on Erkki. Not even "one-quarter of an eighth of an inch in love", as Kerry would say, but a crush-lite. It was something about his eyes and how sweet and patient he always looked when he was around Riita. Now I was seeing all of that in a slightly different light. Which (speaking of light) began to change as I was passing "Snufkin's Cabin", first brightening, then getting that dramatic dark glare you see sometimes before a storm.

I bumped into Riita in the middle of a flock of baby strollers.

"Come on, hon" I said to her, all out of breath. "We gotta get the hell out of here!"

"But Hoop--why?" she said. Actually that was a pretty reasonable question. Problem was, I hadn't really thought of an answer to it. So I just said the first thing that came into my head.

"I'm having a really bad allergy! So we better get out of here fast, or else you'll have to take me to the hospital." I grabbed her arm and started marching her toward the front gate.

She was like, "Hoop, stop this, what's wrong with you? What is it are you allergic to?" Another good question--what was I allergic to? Finland? Public sex or whatever? Surely not Moomintrolls. Though I have to be honest here--it was gonna be some time before I could look at them again in quite the same way. Especially Snufkin. Because I've never really cared for Sniff all that much anyway, if I'm honest. Him I could live without--but not Snufkin. What is it with guys anyway? I guess I had sort of been starting to think it was me, not them, but it wasn't, was it? They were all perverts, let's just admit it. I mean, you pretty much expected that kind of lifestyle choice from guys like Eetu--but from Erkki?? He really had seemed so sweet. But I couldn't get the picture of that gross woman messing with the front of his smock with her big collagen mouth out of my head.

"Didn't you see?" I snapped at Riita. "There were whortleberry bushes growing all over the place. I could have had a seizure--I'm totally allergic to the whortleberry."

"Just like in the Kalevala," she said, allowing herself to be dragged out onto the footbridge.

"Yes, exactly like the Kalevala."

Riita dragged her feet and sulked the whole way across back to Naantali. "I thought you liked Muumit," she was muttering, half in Finnish. "I didn't see any such trees." A sudden wind sprang up, and overhead a flight of ravens flapped by us, screeching. I had a tingling feeling all over, like a volcano was about to erupt on the island. Now I had another thought stuck in my mind: how had the bum known that Riita had said, "Wake up, sleepyhead!" to me first thing that morning? Was he psychic? Had he bugged our hotel room? Or was it just a coincidence? And if it was a coincidence, then why was a majority of the people I'd actually spoken to in Finland all on the same tiny island at the same moment? I mean, I know Finland's a small country, but there's no place on earth that small.

I had no way of knowing it was about to get even smaller.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 17: The Land of Summer

Maybe because I've been mostly single all my adult life (not that there's actually been much of it so far) I tend to be overly romantic and hopeful about other people's marriages. Or relationships or whatever. This began when I was a kid and used to pray to the Holy Mother that my parents would stay together every time they had a big fight--which was pretty much every time my dad was home for more than a week. Or when my brother and Carmen got divorced. Or later on in college when my roommate Miranda, who was the school beauty--she looked a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow, with long silky blonde hair--got married to her high school sweetheart, and I was one of her bridesmaids. Her boyfriend, well, husband I should say, was one of those big beefy 'earthy' type guys, which was what she liked about him, but in my experience, 'earthy' just pretty much means 'gross'. For example, he had gotten really drunk with his buddies that morning, so right after the wedding ceremony when we were all exiting the chapel, he let out this really loud fart. "That's my opinion of these proceedings," he said. And that sort of set the tone for their marriage, which she spent being mostly miserable. Luckily, it didn't last too long.

Actually, it was at the reception that I met the major boyfriend of my life so far, Gene, who was a buddy of the groom, though there was very little that was earthy about him. He was, if I'm honest, both a neat- and a control-freak. But I couldn't blame him, because he had the ultimate miserable wedding story. He had been engaged a few years before to another girl at St Mary's (I'm talking about the college in Maryland, not the sister-school to Notre Dame, which I keep getting Googled about every time I mention it here) who was a few years older than me. They had decided to have a quickie wedding when they were both juniors, not because she was pregnant, but because their families were both sort of devout, and they were madly in love and wanted to live together openly instead of sneaking around (which we did, so there's a clue for you). So the whole ceremony was all set up with all their friends and family at the University of Maryland chapel, but she had stayed behind at school to take a late final at St Mary's and was scheduled to fly over from Leonardtown at the last minute in a small chartered private plane. But she never made it--the plane crashed on the way. By the time he and I started seeing each other, I guess he was still rebounding from that horrible shock, and that's pretty much why we never worked out, though we kept trying for two years. I should have known better--no way anybody can follow an act like that. I kept hoping he'd get over it, but a part of him just stayed stuck waiting at the College Park airport in his wedding tux. Probably still is, poor guy.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it didn't take a genius to see a few signs of trouble between Riita and Erkki. Although, to be totally fair, we were all three feeling pretty down from the E wearing off the morning after the concert. Which began, as usual, about 4 am, with the sun rising through the eastern haze like a red star of death. Even so, personally I didn't feel like getting out of bed till 9 or 10 (I had insisted on switching to the couch futon, so it was pretty bright all night) and felt all whiney and depressed the way you do after you crash from the high, but Riita refused to get up at all. When I went into the bedroom with Erkki to check on her after we had our breakfast, she just pulled the sheet over her head and refused to speak. So I was like, OK...

"What is your reading?" Erkki asked me after I pulled out my Xeroxes from the library and decided to make a start on them.

"Ervast's Key to the Kalevala."

"I don't know it."

So I was like, "Well, it's a definitive commentary. Problem is, it's making me a lot more confused, not less. For example, according to this, there are actually two versions of the Kalevala, The 'Old Kalevala' and the 'New Kalevala', which Lonnrot apparently rewrote by adding a lot of his own poetry. In the new version, there are two separate creation scenes, for example--in the old one Vainomonen just suddenly appears as a smith. There's lots of stuff about smiths here, I guess they were kind of like the software engineers of ancient Finland."

He shook his head. "I don't remember anything about Kalevala. It was very boring to learn in school. I like 'Halo 2' and 'Half-life' instead." So much for that topic. I tried another.

"I want to get a nice 'thank-you' present for Riita before I go, because she's been so sweet to care of me. Can you think of anything she might like?" Now this was a teeny bit mean of me, because it's totally a trick question--asking any guy this is like sticking a dipstick into the oil sump of a relationship just to see just how hot it's running. Or how much of it is just getting burned off...

He shrugged. "You can get her a Sudoku book," he said finally. So I was like, uh oh. But there was worse to come.

He sidled closer to me on the couch. "Tell me, what would you say Riita is mood?"

It took me a moment to decipher this, but when I got it, I was like, "Not good. Not this morning, anyway."

"That is what I am thinking," he said. "I wish to tell her something honest, but I don't think today is a good day for that. You see, Eetu is asking me to come with him on location for a film shooting tomorrow, but Riita will not like this. So I will say to her I am having a company training time instead." OK, I know, I shouldn't have agreed with him--I should have lectured him about honesty in relationships or even ratted him out to her. But when he said he wanted to 'tell her something honest', I totally thought he was gonna say he wanted to dump her, and I was so relieved that I just butted out of the subject.

Instead, I was like, "What kind of film is this?"

"It is guerrilla cinema. You know, sexy statements, very extreme political actions in a public places with famous Finnish actress, Kylikki Kiissiu. It is edgy. In your face."

"You mean like 'Dogme' films?" I asked.

"No," Erkki said, "They are black and white, I think. This will be film in color."

At noon, Riita emerged from the bathroom fully dressed and with her game-face on. "Let us begin the day now," she said brightly. "Hoop, do you like Pilates?" Erkki muttered his goodbyes and left, carrying a big travel-bag. I had thought--well sort of hoped, really--that Riita might still be sulking at me for the night before, but no such luck. All was forgiven. It was Erkki she was really pissed at. "He will be gone on his company retreat for a few days," she said. "But I was thinking, there are so many exciting things in Finland for you to see, why should we just stay home and wait about for him? Why can't we make some fun for our own? We could go to the Savonlinna Opera Festival, where they are having a Kalevala opera with dogs singing all the songs. There is the Kalevala Centre in Kuhmo, and the Folk Music Festival in Kaustinen. Or we can go see Kalevala paintings at the Gallen-Kallela Museum at Tarvaspaa--that is so very near to us we could walk there."

"That all sounds wonderful, Riita," I said. "Only, I really should spend at least the first week doing research. Then I can sight-see. By the way, I don't suppose you have a blank computer CD I can borrow? Cuz I need to back up all my notes today. I've had laptop hard drives crash on me twice, so I like have to to be really careful."

"Oh, that is something that Erkki should have perhaps." She tried his cell--no answer. So she led me into the bedroom and showed me the few cubic feet that Erkki was allowed to call his own in the top of a storage closet, then left me to excavate it. There were stacks of plastic CD and DVD cakeboxes wedged between a tool-chest crammed with computer parts and an old Dell desktop tower--some had been labelled, but some looked blank. While I was rummaging through these, the Dell somehow tipped over and fell partly on my head. Luckily for me, it was hollow, just a plastic case with the motherboard still attached but with everything else stripped out of it. Instead it was crammed inside with porno books and DVDs that spilled out all over the place: I had inadvertently discovered Erkki's 'man-hole'. Well, I told you every guy had one, didn't I? Even Erkki.

As I was stuffing all his swag back into it, I noticed that most of the DVDs seemed to be Finnish porn, I couldn't tell how hard-core--several featured the name of the actress Erkki had mentioned, KIssi-somebody. So that's obviously why he was so hot to visit her film set. Then I heard Riita's footsteps coming back into the room. I propped the computer case back up again, then noticed there was still one book left lying on the floor. The Game by Neil Strauss, as it turned out. So I quickly picked it up, tucked it under my arm, and pretended it was one of mine (the damn thing actually looks like a Bible, with fake black leather covers and a little gold ribbon marker)--which is how I came to be stuck with it for the next couple of weeks. Because when we left, the only way I could figure to smuggle it back eventually was to take it along in my back-pack. How I got stuck reading it is a total other story.

"Are you OK, Hoop? I thought I heard a noise."

"I slipped and fell. Doh."

"Don't worry, I have a brilliant idea. We'll go to Turku today. That way you will see the original Kalevala manuscripts in the Lonrott Collection at the university--and then we can spend tomorrow at Moominworld! You would like that, wouldn't you, Hoop?" OK, we all have our Achilles' heel--mine is Moomintrolls. After about thirty seconds of arguing, I totally caved, and that's how we ended up spending the next three hours in Riita's family Ford on Highway (Valtatie) 1, which runs between Helsinki and the old Swedish town of Turku (Abo), which was apparently Finland's first capital. We had typical highway weather: it started dark and overcast and drizzly in Espoo, then we'd get periods of brightening mixed with occasional showers. All the towns we passed through had been historically restored, so it was like a drive through coastal Maine or Delaware, and the further west we drove, the more brightly-painted and 'Swedish' the wooden houses and barns and boating sheds on all the little finger-lakes looked. Most of the signs seemed to point at some beach town called 'Hanko'--apparently this area is called the 'Finnish Riviera' because it gets more sun and warmth than the rest of Finland. Which is not saying much, to be honest.

"Hoop, why are you so crazy for the Kalevala?" Riita wanted to know after we left Espoo.

"I'm not sure, actually," I said after I'd thought about it for awhile. "I guess because it's sort of like one of those frozen mummies they found in the Alps--it's really old and strange, yet in some ways it feels so modern that it might almost still be alive, if that makes any sense."

"No..."

Sigh. "Well, I think it provides all sorts of useful parallels with other mythological belief systems, like those of Scandinavia and ancient Greece--even India and Persia. And the heroes in the Kalevala are really pretty cool dudes, when you think about it. Except for Kullervo, who's sort of of a late addition, they aren't interested in building kingdoms or murdering each other, like in the Iliad or the Bible, and there's not a whole lot of betrayal or cannibalism or incest or anything--all they want to do is chase women, and get drunk, and sing. There's something sort of, you know, nice about a culture like that. I mean, it really like says a lot about Finland."

"We have all those things in Finland," Riita said darkly.

So I was like, "Yeah, well, at least you don't brag about them." Well, except for Kullervo. And every Finnish heavy-metal band in existence. OK, so much for that theory. The truth was, I didn't know why I liked the Kalevala. I wasn't even sure I did any more.

We stopped in a tiny little town called Kirkonummi for lunch at a sort of tea-room. Up till then the traffic had been sort of leisurely, but after we passed Salo suddenly it was just like American beach traffic, bumper-to-bumper trucks and vans and cars with little trailers or camping equipment on their roofs. We could smell the ocean--not the dark, muddy gulf like in Helsinki, but the real salty Baltic sea--carried on a stiff westerly wind. Just before we got to Turku, the sun briefly came out, nearly blinding us. It was an omen.

Turku is a little like a mini-me version of Brussels. It's not a big city like Helsinki, and most of the newer buildings seem kind of bland and dinky, especially the university complex, but the old town is pretty in a sort of 18th-Century Dutch-looking way, kind of like what I imagined when I dreamed of going to Finland in the first place. It's on the water, specifically on a river that becomes an inlet into a bay of an archipelago in the Baltic, so that by the time the ocean water manages to creep in it's pretty much tamed and industrial-smelling. There's a little port next to the castle, which is the best-preserved fortress in Finland, Riita told me, (but looks sort of like a big Lutheran church actually), and at the far end of the embankment along the river, a pretty little cathedral. In between there are lots of historic buildings and museums, a town square and theater, and a surprising amount of greenery and night-life for such a small city (165,000), I guess because of the university students. Because I was feeling so indebted to Riita, I insisted on paying for expensive hotel rooms at the Radisson Scandic Marina Palace with some of the cash I'd unexpectedly gotten back from Eetu. Riita, who had wanted to cheap out and stay in a hostel, argued with me about splitting the cost of it, so in the end in order to save money we decided to share just one room overlooking the river. And, as it turned out, we were also sharing a bed, because unlike in most American hotel rooms, there was only the one. Which felt sort of awkward for several reasons. First of all, Riita was the kind of person who stacked and folded and numbered everything (I forgot to mention that she was so anal that everything she stored in her apartment was color-coded, I kid you not! Even socks and tupperware!) Secondly, I had inadvertently noticed that she liked to sleep in the nude or whatever--and I'm strictly a PJs person. And worst of all, well, this is embarrassing to confess (to confess that it made me uncomfortable, I mean) but--there was a huge gilt-framed mirror hung over the bed, so I felt like I was stuck in the set of one of Erkki's porn flicks. After reading Likkanen's blog, I kept thinking that this was the sort of place he had fantasized about taking us both that afternoon at the Torni. It even had sort of faux red velvet curtains and bed-covers, like in a Victorian brothel. Ewww!!!

But whatever. At least it had Wifi and the bathroom was nice. After we checked in, we visited the Lonnrot Collection at the university library and then some kind of 'pharmacy museum' inside the town's oldest building, which wasn't actually very old, only from 1700. But the castle and the cathedral were way older, and I discovered that if I squinted my eyes at them I could almost imagine Finland's Age of Heroes. Not that any of the figures from the Kalevala lived in places like this, since they were semi-nomadic warriors a little like the Riders of Rohan in the LOTR, but their descendants lived here. And so did some of the people who later made up the stories about them, in particular the author of the Kalevala himself, Elias Lonrott. But I felt I was somehow closer on my quest. Ethnologists and commentators on the Kalevala have always tried to shift its goal-posts away from Finland somehow--to places like Estonia or Karelia or wherever. There's even a school of thought that the legends refer to some ancestral Ural-Altaic homeland and have little to do with Finland at all, geographically, I mean. I don't know much about it, obviously, but that seems really tweaked to me. Even the shallowest reading of the legends tells you that its three primary heroes--Vainomoinen, Lemminkainen, and Ilmarinen--were living the good life in an endless land of summer. It was only greed and lust (and later the blasts of the icy winter brought on by Louhi, the evil witch of Pohjola or the Northland) that motivated them to get off their asses and go off babe-hunting and fighting. And when they did, they went off in ships, just like the Vikings, and headed north. Well, Finland may have a thousand lakes, but you couldn't sail very far north in them back then, because there were no canals. And you wouldn't get very far in the eastern Gulf, either, or on Lake Ladoga, according to the map. So the only realistic candidate for all that ancient action was the Baltic--only there can you sail all the way to Lapland. So this had to be the cradle of the Kalevala, where we were standing now staring out into the Aurajoki River. Where else--in Finnish eyes--could the Land of Summer lie, except in the 'Finnish Riviera?'

One of the other things about Turku is that a lot of Finland-Swedes still live there, so that between them and the tourists that flock there on the Viking Line ferries, you hear a lot of Swedish being spoken. During supper, I kept overhearing snippets of conversation and found I could actually recognize a word here and there, thanks to Christina! We ate at the Restaurant Teini near the Old Square next to the cathedral, which had dozens of rooms and dining halls (a chess-tournament/banquet was going on in one) and reminded me of an old-world restaurant complex we used to visit in Munich when I was a kid, a place for serious eating where you could order anything, including, when I was six, a birthday cake with candles and be pretty sure you'd get it. Apparently, the Teini was famous for its 'winter terrace' during the Christmas celebrations every year where they serve some sort of pukey-sounding hot spiced cherry wine--Turku, Riita told me, is known as the "Christmas City' and every year the Turku Mayor's 'Message of Peace' is broadcast to all of Finland on Christmas Eve. But we ate inside, because it was drizzling again and had turned almost chilly. We ordered smoked salmon and, at Riita's insistence, local 'raisin' sausage, and for dessert Lapp cloudberries in sweet cream and got out of there for less than like $80. Even so, I could seriously tell I was gonna max my Visa about halfway through the trip at the rate I was going, so I would either have to beg the Mothership for more money--or else, as she used to put it, 'go on the game'. As in: "If anything should happen to you before Hope graduates, I don't know what we'll do for money. At least I'm not too old to go on the game."

And of course, now I had the hotel room for it.

After supper we went to Puutorin Vessa, or as Riita translated it, the 'Public Toilet Pub.' This was a round building in the middle of a square in front of the old train station, which had originally served as its public restroom. Instead of bulldozing it, which in my opinion would have been the kindest thing to do, somebody had converted it into a bar--you actually sat on toilets while you were drinking and could even order your beer brought to you in chamber-pots! Riita kept trying Erkki's cell the whole evening--when she couldn't get through she ended up drinking too much and getting pretty buzzed. But she kept it under tight control, and when we got back to our room, touchingly, without even a word or a lecture on Freud being said, she even made the ultimate sacrifice. She wore her, you know, T-shirt and underpants to bed. No biggie, of course, but it was thoughtful, and really made me feel ashamed of how much I still resented her half the time. She was really really trying.

She had even found me an English translation of the 'Old Kalevala'--Magoun's--in the university book store that afternoon (my favorite translation, as it turns out, I don't really like the 'modern' one by Bosley. But you can read the gorgeously illustrated Friberg version online for free now! Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/9511101374/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-8131237-6881513#reader-link). I was thumbing through it at bedtime while she was in the bathroom--like me, she normally had to pee like once an hour, which was one of the reasons our drive here had taken so long--and after she came to bed and adjusted the sheets and pillows for fifteen minutes or so, she said, "Hoop, is everything you type for your notes?"

I was like, "No, why?"

"Well, you write so much I thought perhaps there was someone special in your life you were emailing or IMing."

"No, nobody special. I keep in touch with all my friends, I guess you could say they're special. [They were certainly acting 'special' lately, this means YOU if you're reading this, Kerry!] But to be honest, there is one other thing I'm working on, only it's kind of a secret. You promise not to tell anyone?"

"No, never!"

"OK, well, ever since college I've been writing a series of murder mysteries in my spare time about a little mouse detective. I've even sent the first book off to a literary agent."

Riita clapped her hands loudly with childish delight--I was hoping that wasn't gonna become a habit. "Oh, Hoop, that sounds so exciting! And also very cute. Do you make sweet little drawings for it?"

So I was like, "No, it's not a childrens' book--the murders are actually sort of gross and extreme."

Then she was like, "That doesn't sound so sensible to me. Why would adults want to read about a mouse detective?" And I totally couldn't think of an answer to that--but I guess it might explain why the agent still hadn't gotten back to me on it. So I changed the subject.

"I really appreciate all you're doing for me, Riita. I just hope you aren't taking time off from your classes or anything."

"Oh no, Hoop--classes do not begin again here for two or three more weeks. Besides, being with you is like a course of learning English for me. You are the first American friend I have ever known--and you must be sure to correct me all the time. I want my English to become more perfect."

"Well," I said, "I'm no expert, but I dunno if you can really, you know, learn to speak a language any more fluently than you already do without actually living in another country."

"Oh I could never move to another country! My life is here with my family! And with Erkki, too. But perhaps now we are true friends, someday you will invite me to come visit you in America?" And I'm proud to say that I actually sounded sincere when I agreed. I mean, anything could happen, right?

And the next day, it did.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 16: The Crossroads

A few semesters back when I was writing a term paper on voodoo, I read that voodoo priests, or houngans, are able to travel back in time and change the past. The more powerful the houngan, the further back in time he can travel. Like if you were a female 'mambo', for instance, you could avoid a traffic accident that happened a few seconds ago--but if you were a real bad-ass 'Papa Doc' you could probably go all the way back to high school and re-take that test you forgot about. Or remember your locker combination. But according to the book I read, some events in the past are called 'immutables' because they occur at a 'crossroads', or multiple convergence point of the currents of history or the will of the gods, whichever you wanna call it. The examples this book gave (and I totally cannot remember which book this was, sorry) were really big events like the discovery of America or the dropping of the atomic bomb or the JFK assassination, because these were all such tremendously powerful crossroad occurrences they could never be altered. It was like if you went back to the Book Repository in a time machine and prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from pulling the trigger or whatever, then there would always be a second gunman on the grassy knoll to finish the job. And apparently there are lots of otherwise trivial events in all our lives that have this immutable power. I was beginning to think that the stupid black magic ceremony the girls had staged at the beach the month before was one of them

Because all three had suddenly gotten pregnant, in spite of the patch, the pill, and the condom. Jo, of course, had already taken care of things with her usual ruthless efficiency, Kerry would dither and drama-queen around for a few weeks but ultimately do the same thing--after making sure that her family and everybody else who didn't need to be involved were--but Chris was planning to have hers. Even looking forward to it, in fact. Which left me sort of mulling over two big questions. The first was: exactly what kind of kid was this occult event gonna produce? A talkative baby messiah, like in the Kalevala? A Swedish Rosemary's Baby? And the second (even more important) question was: why wasn't I pregnant, too? I mean, aside from the obvious, like that I hadn't actually had sex with anybody in many many months. In magical 'whortle-berry' terms, that shouldn't have mattered, I could have conceived from, say touching a toilet seat. Like the one I was sitting on now, which was actually none too clean. So why not me?

I was interrupted by a tapping on the stall door. Riita, of course. "Hoop, I have to make an apology for Finland," she announced. "Not so many Finnish men is like Eetu. In Finland, men expect the woman to make the 'first moves'--some are so respecting of women they would never even speak aloud to them, like Erkki. Both sexes are very equal here, that is why this Eetu is a bad person."

Sigh. I unbolted the stall door and went out and washed my hands a few times. "Honestly, Riita, it's OK." I was like, "I'm grateful for everything you've done, especially the concert tonight. Don't worry, just chill, OK?" Nobody who's ever been to an Air Force Academy party needs to worry about an Eetu, I was thinking.

"But still we must both be nice to him tonight anyway, so he will pay for the fourth ticket. I am sorry for this."

Terrific. This was shaping up as a really rockin' evening. Just how 'nice' was I expected to be? "OK, Riita." Then, to my amazement, she sort started to cry--or at least I think that's what she was doing.

"Finnish women have a very relaxed opinion about allowing many things," she wailed, burying her face in a paper towel and blowing her nose. What I could see of her forehead had turned beet red. "We are different than Americans. So I do not say anything when he is out all the nights drinking with this Eetu. It is normal, especially if we marry later. But he never helps with the housework. And if I should leave out some dirt in the kitchen or even spill a beer, then he will yell at me and call me a 'stupid moron' and such names. Lately, his language is becoming much worse. But mostly he never talks at all."

I felt totally helpless, so I was like, "I'm sorry..."

"Do you think he would cheat with other girls, Hoop?"

Like, how would I know? I mean, why ask me? I didn't have a clue. As far as I could tell, all men cheat sooner or later. But I mumbled some stuff about how devoted Erkki seemed (he actually did seem like a very sweet, patient nice guy) and got her cleaned up a bit before we went back and joined the guys for some greasy sausages and more beer. But really, I was secretly thinking, I'd want to cheat on Riita, too. If I were a guy, I mean.

After we were allowed to escape from the MOCKBA, Eetu insisted that we all go visit someplace called 'Hesari'. It was still raining, so I shared an umbrella with Riita (one of the waitresses at the bar had taken pity on me and made me a poncho out of a garbage bag, so at least my backpack was now covered), and we walked behind the guys. Erkki, being the well-organized type, had another smaller umbrella, but Eetu viewed the downpour with lordly indifference. "Yo, dig, the rains was much more worse last summer," he announced. "These two was away on holiday, but here in Stadi was much flooding of the streets and even my car." Slicked down by the rain, he was now starting to really look like a toad. 'Stadi', Riita told me later, was local slang for 'Helsinki', just as 'Hesari' was for the 'Helsinki Club'. When we arrived, Eetu said, "You all be my guests here, OK, because in this club I am very well knowed. You must just say, 'We are with the famous "Mr Platinum"! Respect!''"

At the MOCKBA. Eetu had attempted first to read my palm--and guess what? I had a strong love line, which meant I was gonna have 'many sexy loafers'--and then, when I obviously failed to recognize the potential one clutching my hand and staring hypnotically at me from across the table, he tried Positive Visualization. "When I am very attract to a lady, I feel these as a happy bubble inside my chests. And next I feel this bubble rising up, up, to my throat..."

"Like a burp?" I asked innocently, illustrating the concept. Well, Koff is a gassy beer, be fair.

When these attempts at 'sarging' failed, he fell back on the last resort of most guys: boasting. Apparently, the Helsinki Club, which was sort of like a cross between an ultra-modern Tokyo disco and a polished wood Finnish sauna, was the site of many of his greatest sexual triumphs, and one by one, we got to hear about them all during the course of the evening. The longest and most complicated story, pretty much, had taken place on his last visit there some months before and involved a night spent drinking with two friends of his (who he discreetly referred to as 'Mr White' and 'Mr Black'), who were unsuccessfully competing for the attention of 'Miss Pink', a "sexy young Finnish chick, very blonde, very cool." One by one, he heaped scorn on their bumbling and amateurish attempts at 'sarging' her. "Their technics was very, very bad," he said, chuckling, "But it was very relaxed for me to just sit and watch this like a Sensei master. It was like I was out of my body, I felt like I was float in air, like no pressure, dude, no need for pleasure myself at all. And why not? Because at the last, when Mr White was tried to feel her tight sexy ass with his hand, I was able to be thinking with luxury, 'Haha, I have already enjoyed that very young, very tight sexy ass myself last Saturday night!' It was the most best feeling, better even than a 'cock-block'." You get the picture. On and on it went all evening, pretty much like Muzak. Oh, right, what's a 'cock-block'? It pretty much seems to be stealing a girl from one of your buddies when he's too drunk to object. And he used another term too: 'Kutzwrangler' or something, which he said was Dutch for 'c-nt-in-law', the relationship between two guys who have had sex with the same woman. Yuckkk!!! But Eetu was not just a boaster, oh no. He had a softer, more vulnerable side, too, as he carefully explained. Several months before, he had been dating two girls, 'Miss Blue' and 'Miss Yellow'. Miss Blue was boring and unresponsive in bed, so he decided to dump her--but only hours after he did, Miss Yellow dumped him. "So I had beginned that night with two sexy loafers--and now I had none! I tell you these story to prove you that I am a very sensitive mother-f-cker. Everyone is thinking that a film actor is the most biggest stud, he can never be without woman. But, yo, I can be hurt."

I was trying to imagine the most painful and prolonged way to do just that all the way up Mannerheim Street after we left the club. By now the rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the sky remained dark and overcast due to the Russian forest fires, so it looked pretty much like a scene from 'Dawn of the Dead'. Crowds of people were pouring out of doorways and drunkenly marching north along with us past the art-deco trains station and toward the concert at Hartwall Arena, which is north of the city center near the Olympic Stadium (beside a lake). The whole time, Eetu was conducting a loud monologue on whether Finnish or American girls 'was the most easiest'. So I began to wonder: had Safe-T-Man been like this at our age? You know, just another typical Eurotrash 'Borat'-style a--hole, pardon my French? Or had there been something more to him? I mean, obviously there wasn't now, but it seemed to me from reading the stuff at his blog all the night before (and was that Riita's mother he'd been having a three-way with? Yikes! Not a picture I wanted in my head, for sure!) that maybe he'd been a half-way decent, almost normal kind of guy when he was young. If so, what had turned him into an aging Eetu? I mean, when I did a term paper on Casanova for my Women's Studies class, all the books I read (well, skimmed anyway) on the subject said that the definitive experience in his life--and I guess in those of most compulsive womanizers or whatever--was the withholding of his mother's love. Poor Eetu, I decided, had probably never even known his mother and was most likely raised by wolves, but what was Likkanen's excuse? It was totally crazy, but even after all the nasty things he'd said about me, I was curious to see if he'd updated his blog yet. How dumb was that???

"I do not want you thinking I am calling the American lady 'easy' in a bad way," Eetu was bawling above the traffic noise. "Yo, dig, these is a thing I like about them. Respect! Respect for the easy American lady!" Speaking of which, it was still about an hour before the Hartwall was opening its doors for the Madonna concert, so we went inside another nearby club (I think it was called the 'Ooppera Club'?) for yet another round of beers and snacks. It looked and smelled like a barn in there, because it was so crowded--too crowded for us all to sit--so naturally, Eetu grabbed the one remaining chair and tried to force me into his lap. I declined with a sweet smile, but truthfully I was seriously thinking of ways to ditch him now. Suddenly the price of that fourth ticket was looking like chump change. But, doh, I'd forgotten my concert-going etiquette--because next he was like, 'You will like me more soon, I am thinking--see, I have bringed E for everyone tonight." And I couldn't just walk away now, because that would look like I was some kind of judgmental right-wing Fundie or something. So, praying I wasn't swallowing Rohypnol or some weird industrial-strength, cocaine-laced stuff I knew nothing about, I joined the glum and mopey Riita and the two guys in a tab (it had a little Lacoste alligator on it) with our beer. It seemed only polite. And who knew? It might even make the evening bearable. Though I'm not normally all about drugs. Well, you pretty much know that from reading this blog, right?

But I hope I haven't come across as a total dork, either. Whatever.

"Go on, have two--these is a roll of good whites from Norway. Dig, all MDMA, no caffeine or coughing medicine sh-t." So sure enough, being me, I spent the next half hour feeling nothing and obsessing about it. But by the time we were inside the hall with the big crowd and all, I was definitely grooving and trying to identify the vaguely familiar pre-show music on the PA system. Also, Eetu had given up trying to feel my ass, and had mercifully abandoned us to hang with a group of journalists and local celebrities partying in a sky-box. So I was free to relax and enjoy the show, which was pretty much the same one I'd seen in Chicago. But this time, I felt sort of detached, almost like I was outside my body. When Madonna was lowered to the stage in that giant glittery disco-ball orb thingie and the light show started, it was like I was floating up off the floor into the flashing light beams, and the bass and drums were vibing and flowing through me like electricity. Then when she stepped out wearing S&M bondage gear, the stuff she wore for W Magazine, and did 'Future Lover' with a big crowd of acrobatic back-up dancers I sort of came back to earth. There was a lot of dancing going on around me, and most of the crowd was singing along to every song (she did some cool oldies like 'Like a Virgin' and 'Live to Tell'), so I should have had like a really excellent time, right? Only...well, I wasn't. And I couldn't quite figure out why until about halfway through. And then I realized what was bugging me.

My dad had lots of sayings--come to think of it, he was as bad as Riita's father about that, so maybe he was part Finnish, too! Anyway, one of his favorites, which never made any sense to me as a kid, was: 'Never shake your hero by the hand." One time when he said it (I must of been about 12 or so), I finally asked him what it meant.

"Well, Scout, it's simple," he told me ('Scout' was his nickname for me), "If you shake the hand of someone you really look up to, you're always gonna discover they have a weak and clammy grip." And that's the thing--I had met Madonna on the airplane, I mean just for a few seconds and all, but still close up and in the flesh, and now she was kind of real to me. Mortal, I guess. It was like watching a family friend or a relative, maybe, somebody your mom's age, working really hard to put on a big show. And I was thinking that she had sort of a weak grip on it at times, especially when the sound system went down for a minute or two. Her 'mambo' powers were definitely fading.

I can still remember when I first became a big Madonna fan. If I'm honest, I pretty much got into her because the Mothership absolutely banned her from the house. So it was like my big teenage rebellion or something. I saved up my money for weeks in 1996 so I could go to one of her concerts, then at the last minute the Mothership didn't allow me to go. Right in front of my friends! And since it was my first year at a new high school, that was especially humiliating. "She's offensively anti-Catholic, and I refuse to have you exposed to messages like that," she said. "When you're older, you can make your own decisions about your faith." And of course I did. And was. By being there tonight, I mean. But that was the other weird thing--during the Crucifixion number and particularly during 'Sorry', when pictures of Pope Benedict were flashing on the Jumbotron next to Hitler and Pol Pot, I was almost like, well maybe the Mothership sort of had a point. It was all a bit like the movie, 1984, you know, subliminal propaganda or whatever. Luckily that mood didn't last, what a downer.

After the concert, in the line for the restroom, Riita was all like, "Oh, can anyone see I am so high now? Oh, Hoop, I am sure everyone here knows!" Then she threw her her arms around me. "I love you, you are my only friend. My other friends all say they like me, but they don't, I can tell. If I don't call them, I will never see them, because they never call me. Why does no one love me, Hoop? Why am I so hateful?" And this was when she was high! Even worse, you know what I couldn't stop thinking about the whole time she was going on like that? Safe-T-Man. Can you believe it? I was remembering all the lies he had written about both me and Madonna. But one of them really stuck in my mind, and that was the thought of her rushing around Manhattan with his laundry. The mental picture of this was so funny, I started laughing and couldn't stop. But at least this gave Riita an excuse to get over herself and join in, though she looked pretty baffled at first. Obviously the E really was for real.

So naturally, Safe-T-Man was almost the very first person I saw when we were all exiting the arena. My ears were ringing so loudly it was almost like I was deaf or something. It was almost twilight outside, and the streets were black and shiny with rain and had that whooshing traffic sound that Proust describes--and suddenly there was Likkanen himself, standing in the middle of the intersection with cars lurching around and honking at him with what appeared to be two buddies of his. They were both middle-aged bikers wearing jean-vests with biker insignia on them, and one had a big bushy beard and grey pig-tails. All three looked pretty wasted and were sort of supporting each other as they swayed around, so they looked like the statue of Lacoon and his two sons wrestling the serpent. But when Safe-T-Man recognized me (and I guess it was the E affecting my perception here), I had this total rush that he was really sorry for being such a jerk to me. I mean, why else would he appear outside the Hartwall after he'd made such a big deal about rejecting the ticket? Unless he was hoping to get back together with Madonna. Or wanted her to iron some of his shirts, hee, hee. The two of us sort of stared at each other through the traffic. It was like he was straining to open his mouth in order to apologize, which in Finnish culture is apparently a really difficult thing to do, but no words were coming out. I guess I must have taken a step toward him, but then I felt a pair of hands tugging me back onto the crowded sidewalk. Riita again.

She was like, "Oh no, Hoop, do not talk to him! He is a very bad man for you to know. You heard what what Pekka said about him."

"It's rude not to say hi."

"No, no, the men he is with are gangsters and criminals. They are his friends. See, they are from the 'Banditos' gang, it says on their jackets. They are murderers, some of them have guns, this was on our television. Besides, he is not your friend--I am."

Then Eetu grabbed my other arm, and the two of them dragged me away. By now I was ready to bitch-slap them both, because I really, really hate being manhandled, as you know. And I'd had enough. "We are going to a sexy party!' he said.

But Riita was like, "No, we are not! We are going home!" That's when I pushed them both in front of a bus. OK, to be fair, it wasn't really moving. And its brakes were working really well, as it turned out. Finns are good about stuff like that, you know, maintenance of public transportation. But I think they got the message, because after that, they shut up, pretty much, and he actually paid for his ticket.

I guess maybe he was scared of having it punched.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 15: The Whortleberry Tree

For Finns, the Kalevala is a little like the Iliad and the Odyssey all rolled into one. Heroes raise armies, march or sail off to battle, and perform magical quests--usually in 'triads', just like in the Mabinogeon or in German fairy tales--in order to win the hands of princesses in marriage. And Chris had been wrong: the Estonian version, the Kalevipoeg, is not more reliable than the Finnish. Both were compiled from songs ('runot' in Finnish) and oral traditions, but the Estonian (which is about a young giant resembling the tragic hero Kullervo) may be as much as two-thirds all made up. Of course, for all we know, that could be the case with the Finnish legends, too, because their compiler, the brilliant Elias Lonnrot, was a poet and mystic in his own right. So it's sort of a judgement call. In the 1920s another Finnish poet and mystic named Pekka Ervast reinterpreted Lonnrot's work in 'Christian occultist' terms. He pointed out that unlike the Greek Myths, for example, the Kalevala had both pagan and Christian influences. The final Rune 50 is clearly a parable of the Christ child--a young virgin named Marjatta gets pregnant from a whortleberry tree (or strawberry or lingonberry bush, according to which translation you believe. And don't ask me what she did with it in order to conceive!). Then when she gives birth, the old hero Vainomonen, who is sort of like a cross between Odin and Odysseus, is called in by the local wizard to decide what to do with the baby.

So he's all like, "Hey, kill the kid. He's a son of a bush, so he's most likely some kind of monster." Which is really pretty sensible if you respect his cultural POV. I mean, think about it--how many Hollywood monster film disasters could have been prevented by that kind of clear thinking? Or recent presidential elections, hee hee?

But nope, now it's too late. The newborn baby pipes up like the baby Jesus in a Nativity play, saying, "Shut up, dude, no way I'm a monster, I'm just a normal kid" or whatever, so he's crowned king of Karelia on the spot, and poor old Vainomonen slinks shamefacedly off into the sunset. Joining Bilbo in the Western Isles or Arizona or someplace I guess, wherever old legends go to die. After that, a golden age of Christian peace and harmony comes to the Finns. The saddest thing of all about the Kalevala is that most of the places mentioned in it, including Karelia, are no longer Finnish at all but now belong to Russia, with no hope of ever getting them back. So the myths have kind of a sad lost quality to them, like the Celtic legends of Ys. Or like most Finns, come to think of it.

But Ervast didn't stop with interpretation. He examined every line of the 50 runes for mystical significance and found they made up a pattern of magical incantations and symbols, sort of like a 'Bible code'. So now Wiccans and occultists and New Age mystics all over the world consult the Kalevala for prognostications just like the I Ching or the Tangram. I didn't know it yet, but they were gathering to hold a 'sunrise festival' in western Finland at that very moment.

Which also, though I didn't know this either yet, accounted for the absence of the little orange-haired Swedish magician when I went back to the National Library the next day--though I found myself constantly looking back over my shoulder in case he suddenly materialized again. Even without this distraction, I was having terrible trouble getting a handle on the whole subject of the Kalevala. I mean it was like back in America it had seemed so small and tidy and quaint, almost like a Moomintroll story--but up close, surrounded by the descendants of people who had maybe been in it or made up some of the stories in it, surrounded by people who had learned it as songs in kindergarten--suddenly it seemed really hard to, you know, comprehend or whatever. One minute, it felt huge and magnificent, part of the grand wheel of world mythology quoted in Hamlet's Mill, then the next minute, sort of boring and stupid and, well, trivial. I mean, it had suddenly occurred to me there was a whole foreign country waiting outside the library windows, and I only had a few short weeks to see it. And Madonna was playing tonight.

And to make matters even worse, I was now coming up, even slogging through dusty old academic texts, against what I have privately come to call 'kallakukko', or Finnish boneheadedness. I had discovered that if you ask any three Finns the same question, you will get three different answers. Like, for instance: "How do you say 'hello'?" A real tough one, right? (Riita: "Moi", Erkki" "Hei", Antti: "Terve"). This, I was rapidly finding out, was even more the case with academic interpretation and literary criticism. To be honest, I even think this national trait is deliberate--maybe it's why the Russians kept getting lost every time they invaded. Because they kept asking Finns for directions, doh. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to make this whole story sound like a prolonged 'Finnish joke', because actually I think Finns are totally amazing (I won't give the ending away by telling you why)--I'm just saying there's a reason why are three slightly different versions of every single event in the Kalevala. Finally, when my mind was totally whirling, I decided to go outside for a break and enjoy the sunshine.

So naturally it started raining.

I was standing on the massive front steps staring up into the dark, swirling sky and noticing a strange smell of soot when my rent-a-phone rang. It was Christina. I was like, "Thank God! Are you OK?" Directly in front of me on Senate Square there stood a collection of humongous cement cut-out statues of musical instruments that people were now trying to shelter under.

"Oh yes, I'm fine really. It was nothing."

"Where are you?"

"I'm still in the hospital. But truly I'm OK, I promise."

"Well, that's a relief," I said. "I was thinking of catching a plane tomorrow and coming to check on you."

Then she was like, "Oh, that won't be necessary. It's not a convenient time really. Besides, I am being very well looked after." She sounded really weird, like her English was staring to desert her. So naturally that put me in mind of something else weird.

"Chris, I know this is like a really strange question, but have you ever met a little Swedish guy with orange hair and an orange beard, about fifty I would say? Wears a cape sort of like a stage magician? And is really really fat?"

Silence. After a few moments, she said, kind of like from very far away, "Oh, yes, I should have told you about that. You see, he is a friend of Lennart's--I think they belong some club together in Stockholm--and that is why he came to speak to the children about the Norse gods. He is an expert in these things." It was hard for me to hear the next few sentences because the connection started breaking up. "--really quite a nice man--one of the richest men in Sweden, he has many big houses here. After the talk we were invited to a gathering at one of them, just outside Lund--his name is-- all telling ghost stories, so I suppose--"

"You told him about Billy Draper and the house in Bronzeville."

She was like, "Yes, Hope, please forgive me. It's just that I'm so happy..."

"Happy?" This convo was getting stranger and stranger.

"Yes, you see--wasn't going to tell anyone, but--I'm going to have a baby! That's why I was ill."

"Wow!" I said, after I caught my breath. Riita had arrived with a big blue umbrella and was making very 'patient' faces at me as she held it over us, which meant that she was really very cross. The rain began to drum heavily on top of it like lots of impatient fingers. "Well, what will you do?"

"Oh, I'm going to have it, of course! I'm so happy, Hope. I want to have it for him."

"Him?"

"Lennart--the headmaster at my school. Didn't I tell you? He left his--together ever since I came back from America."

Riita hissed at me, "Come Hoop, we must hurry! We are meeting Erkki and his friend at the MOCKBA."

"Well, congratulations, sweetie!" I said into the cell-phone. "I'll call you later and we'll talk more then. And I'll meet Lennart when I come visit you in a couple weeks, OK?"

"Everything's wonderful," said Chris, and we hung up. She sounded totally insane to me. But I guess truly happy people generally do.

Now it was pouring. All around us the outdoor cafes were shutting and waiters wearing garbage bags were dragging chairs and trays and little trolleys of food covered in napkins indoors. Inside the lights were cheery, and the muffled noise of music and people talking drifted onto the sidewalks along with the smells of cooking and damp old wood and stone. A bright red SparaKoff 'pub tram' crawled by us, crowded with seriously drinking tourists routed by the rain. The long languid love-affair with the sun was over, at least for the moment, and this made me realize that, like Hamburg or San Francisco or any seaport really, Helsinki was pretty much built for mists and drizzle. And therefore most comfortable with them. Finns weren't really being themselves when they were wandering around stoned in the sunshine, they were just imitating some California dream. Now they were all back to normal. But what was the dark smoke in the sky about? I asked Riita about this while we were huddling in a doorway during the worst of the cloudburst, and she was like, "That's George Bush's fault."

So I was like, "Huh?"

"It is because he will not sign the Kyoto Treaty," she said. "Now there is global warming, and this causes more forest fires all over Russian Karelia and Murmansk. And since they have no money for fire-fighters, these fires burn all summer now and spread to Finland, where they harm our wood industry. That is what we are seeing today, the smoke from them. It is quite usual in summer now." So, yeah, America's fault again. We shouldn't have cars. And we should pay Russians not to smoke.

We were pretty soaked by the time we got to the bar, which was about about a 10-block dash through puddles and flooded gutters. When I say 'we', I mean 'me', because Riita was wearing a raincoat and a pair of yellow rubber boots. "Erkki's friend is named Eetu," she hissed at me while we were being splashed by a large truck driving too close to the kerb. Why was she still whispering? "He is famous here--he is an actor and a journalist. But he is not a very nice person, I think. He is a 'bad influence' on Erkki," she added with heavy emphasis. "They are childhood friends, however, so I can do nothing to discourage them. But don't worry, Hoop--I will look after you and make sure he does nothing bad." So, as you can imagine, after hearing all that from her I was already inclined to like this Eetu guy a whole lot before we ever even got to the bar. That lasted about thirty seconds after meeting him.

The MOCKBA's thing--and every bar in Helsinki, I was discovering, has to have a 'thing'--is that it's a mock nostalgia cafe for old-school Finnish Communists and their anti-globalist wannabe Marxist hippie kids, decorated in dingy old curtains, heavy linoleum table-tops, and a samovar, with Soviet pop tunes playing on an old-fashioned record-player. If not for that, you could almost think you were in Fargo or Sioux Falls or someplace. Erkki and his friend were waiting for us on red-plush benches at a table in the corner, and he waved at us as we stumbled in. Eetu certainly wasn't what I expected--if he was typical of Finnish actors, then I can sorta see why they've never managed to export any to Hollywood. He was a very muscular little guy with a distinct facial resemblance to Toad of Toad Hall from the Wind in the Willows, with his hair and his stache and beard--in the style favored by IT geeks the world over--shaved to the same dark stubble. Maybe he had great stage presence, I dunno. If so, it was wasted on me. But it really wouldn't have mattered anyway--because it turned out I already knew all his lines by heart.

Maybe I've mentioned my interest in men's 'pick-up' books before. Long before I dug what sex actually was, I used to sneak into my big bros' rooms when they were off at football practice or camp and sort of sneak through their stuff peeking at things. If I'm honest, it was like a huge source of fascination to me as a kid to try and discover just what was going on inside guys' big thick skulls. And, you know, inside their testicles or whatever. Unlike most girls I know (or what they claim, anyway), I wasn't that much of a tom-boy--though I am pretty good at sports--it's just that ever since I was a kid, I've really, really wanted to understand men. Because I actually really like them, even if it's not hip to say so. Anyway, when we moved to Jacksonville from England, we lived in this strange house that had a sort of single connecting closet running along one side of it that opened out into all three of the kids' bedrooms (I'm thinking there had been plywood dividers between them that had fallen down or something). Whatever, it made it really easy to spy on each other through the louvred slats of the sliding doors, which I never got away with when they were home because my bros always seemed to hear me creeping around. So I would wait until they were gone for a few hours and get into their 'man-holes'--which is the secret place every guy hides his stuff. And trust me, every single guy on earth has one. Or two. Theirs were under some loose plywood floorboards in the long closet, so I created a little secret reading nook inside my part of it with a flashlight and a stack of fluffy pillows and slowly went through their literary collections.

Later, of course, when we moved to Chevy Chase, and they were both older and away at the Air Force Academy and then later in the service and then married, these collections of theirs shrunk down to a few piles of dog-eared books and magazines in the bottom of a box or two in the basement. But I was an excellent museum curator of these treasures--old Penthouse and Playboy magazines, old videotapes of Debby Doing Dallas and Misty playing Beethoven. I know you probably think I'm a total airhead from reading my blog, but actually I have a really orderly and methodical mind when it comes to information storage and retrieval. Believe me, it's the only reason I did so well in school, since I had to go to so many in so many different places and never had any kind of standardized K12 study program. I survived by taking equivalency tests. And notes. Lots and lots of notes.

But we're talking pick-up books here, and you don't need much education to read those. Or to write them, either I guess. In fact, you could probably say an advanced degree might even be a real handicap! The first big bestseller on the subject was written by a New York accountant named Eric Weber in 1970: How To Pick Up Girls. Yep, there's a copy still in the Mothership's basement. Then in the '80s along came hypnosis--the most famous guru of that technique was Ross Jeffries, who wrote a lot of books about using Neuro-Linguistic Programming to seduce women. My next oldest bro used to try to practice this on me, especially when I was home from school sick: "You are getting sleepy, your eyelids are so heavy, now you think you are a chicken..." And lately there's been a new cult of the 'PUA' (Pick-Up Artist) on the Internet, inspired by Neil Strauss' book, The Game, which is a huge bestseller and has been translated into like a dozen languages. Now, at this point in the story I hadn't yet read The Game, but I was about to, under circumstances that I could have never in a million years imagined in advance. In fact, for a period of a week or two, it was my only reading material, along with Ervast's Key to the Kalevala (which I had just hand-xeroxed in the National Library that morning and was in my back-pack turning into a totally sodden lump), which is sort of a form of hell in itself.

Obviously Eetu had read it though, because right off the bat, as soon as we ordered drinks, he started hitting on me: "You are not so attractive as I expect," he said. Well, yeah, it's true I was soaked to the skin, and my hair was a mess--I had to finally shoo Riita off from trying to dry it with paper placemats--but that's not why he said it. He was 'negging' me, which is what PUA's do to chicks to lower their self-esteem and make them vulnerable. In plain English this is called 'insulting' and from what I can tell is an ancient form of flirtation dating back to the dawn of kindergarten.

So I was like, "Well you certainly aren't what I expected either. What kind of acting do you do?"

"Sexy acting," he said, with a booming laugh. "You can know me in some popular films like Finska Gigant. But now I am also becoming producer and making these films of my own. Yo, dig, I am always trying to talk this boy here to become my partner with me."

"Eetu was the host for his own show on Aluetelevisio," said Erkki proudly. You could tell right away that he really looked up to his friend and thought he was cool, which is why I could see big problems down the road there for Riita. Maybe that was why she was such a crab. It was, as far as I could tell, still lunchtime, but the two guys were already 'pre-party drinking' for the Madonna concert at 7. And my internal clock was so screwed up by now that I really didn't know what time it was--basically I was hungry and sleepy 24/7. But too wired to actually sleep. So what the hell, I had a Koff beer, too. When in Rome or whatever, right? But when the drinks arrived with the MOCKBA's deliberate Soviet-style 'rude service', Eetu stared 'kinoing' me. In plain English, this is called 'pawing'. In Eric Weber's book, it's a no-no, but times change, I guess. Now in 2006, it actually seems to work, so guys in bars all over the world who use the 'Mystery Method' (named after Strauss' mentor) are all stroking the arms of the poor dumb women they've just met right above the elbow, as recommended. That's the saddest and scariest thing about these stupid little tricks--most of them actually work! Naturally, they work with guys even better--but why bother? I mean, let's face it, almost anything works with guys. They are just so easy. (Except for the one you really want, of course, who is pretty much impossible.)

And I'm pretty impossible too, I guess--at least where 'kinoing' is concerned. Because I have this thing: I totally hate to be touched by strangers. I'm not even that crazy about it with friends or family. Maybe it's because mine was pretty much non-touchy-feelie. We were affectionate, pretty much, but not in a physical way--for instance, if either of my brothers scored a touchdown or announced they were engaged or something, my father would just shake hands with them. And the Mothership will only touch any surface after she wipes it clean. Whatever, I have to actually establish social relationships with dental hygienists and manicurists, etc, etc, before I can stand for them to touch me at all. And with Eetu, that clearly was not gonna be happening. As soon as I could wrestle myself away, I excused myself to the bathroom (there was no 'Ladies'), hid inside a stall so Riita couldn't find me, and after I'd dried off a bit, called Jo in Australia. God alone knows what time it was there.

"Oh yeah," she said when I told her about Chris. "Turned out I was, too." She sounded faint and drowsy.

"You were what, too?"

"You know, preg. I just took care of it this morning. That's why I'm feeling like a dessicated aardvark turd right now."

I was like, "Oh my God."

So she was like, "Well, I just couldn't keep it, Hopey. I'm in second year, and the pressure's too intense. Besides, the father was some German back-backer who was playing the piano at a party, and that was never going to work. He had the loveliest fingers, though," she added, yawning. So after she drifted off, I called Kerry. Yep, pregnant, too.

"Oh God, Hope," she kept saying over and over, "What am I gonna do?"

"Don't ask me, girl," I said. "What do you wanna do? What's your gut telling you?"

And she was like, "You don't wanna know what it's telling me right this minute, trust me. But seriously, if I try to have it, my family's so gonna freak. I don't know what to do."

So I said, "Well, what does the guy have to say? Who is the father anyway?"

"Well, that's the other thing," Kerry said in an embarrassed voice. "I mean, I'm on the patch, so I'm not really sure."

But suddenly I was. The whortleberry tree...


Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 14: Sauna Culture

Riita's parents lived in North Tapiola, which is a sort of suburb both of Espoo and Helsinki. It's a planned community, she told me on the drive out there, designed to be a garden city, and architects come from all over Europe to study it. The photograph I snagged off the net is not actually their house--it's one of the same type that was built in a sort of cookie-cutter pattern in the 1950s and is a few streets away from them in a slightly more wooded area. It's also the reverse of theirs, which is also painted blue not red. But I didn't actually want to use any, you know, real photos I took of them or Riita, because a lot of embarrassing and upsetting things happened afterward, and I don't want them suing me. Or hating me or whatever.

All the way out there I was also A. worrying about Kerry and Jo, and B. totally freaked out about the spooky little orange-haired munchkin we'd met in the library. So I guess I didn't really pay much attention to the scenery that she kept pointing out to me. Frankly, it looked pretty much like a normal suburb. And Riita was all sort of 'look at me, look at me' about driving the car, which I guess is way more of a big deal in Finland. Plus as I said, the stuff that happened in the library sort of stuck in my mind. Like when we were living in El Toro, there was a colonel on the base who was sort of in charge of all the holidays, his wife was very involved in the social scene and he had two sons my brothers' ages who were real gung-ho, always breeding snakes and windsurfing and building robots and stuff. You know the type. Anyway when I was three or four, this family held an Easter-egg hunt on the big ranch they lived on, and me and a few dozen of the other kids were invited. It was a cool, very hazy morning, and one of the colonel's boys had dressed up like a big grey rabbit and was hopping and skipping around in the distance hiding brightly colored eggs. Well, naturally I thought he was really the Easter Bunny, I mean, I didn't know any better cuz I was just a kid. And he looked incredibly real--real fur, real whiskers, floppy ears. I can still close my eyes and clearly remember him disappearing into the mist doing cart-wheels and handsprings. So for years after that--like until I was almost in college!--I still believed in the Easter Bunny, even though one by one I stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Blessed Saints, the Tooth Fairy, etc etc, because I'd seen him with my own eyes. And that was kind of how I felt after seeing the fat little Swedish magician guy--my mind just kept playing the scene back to me over and over, with him disappearing down the library stairs just like the Easter Bunny, if that makes any sense. It was bogus--but somehow it still felt magic. So I guess I was still pretty distracted when we got to Riita's parents' house and maybe wasn't as into meeting them as I should have been.

There was a big black Volvo parked in front of the Koivisto's house (the second family car, the yellowish one Riita was driving, was some kind of Ford with a funny name like a condom, 'Dura' or something). Inside, her parents were waiting to greet us at the front door. Her father was a biggish guy named Pekka (are all Finnish men named that?) with thick 'distinguished'-looking greying hair, and her mom was a sort of pink pudding of a woman in a green bathrobe and slippers named Matleena or Matti for short. She had diabetes, I was told, and went to Denmark to stay in a sort of diabetic resort there for three months every year. In the meantime, she seemed to do nothing but eat desserts.There was also a son named Antti, who popped up in the sauna. A pre-supper sauna was apparently a strictly-observed ritual for all Finns, so that was where we all went first, after I heard lots of advice from Riita about the 'rules' of doing this. She was all like, "You must remember that for us a respectful silence is important in the sauna, it is almost like being in a church." Great. "It will be too hot in there even for a towel. Aren't you going to take all your clothes off?" Um, no, I was feeling weird enough already--I didn't really feel the need to go commando with a family of total strangers. So in the end, I kept my panties on. Which sounds silly, I know (plus they turned into a soggy mess in the humidity), but experience has pretty much taught me that's the smartest way to go though life anyway. Riita saw it differently. "You should really think of what Freud stage of development you want to be arrested in," she told me when we went in.

There turned out to be a lot of chatting in a sauna. The Koivisto's was pretty big, with wood-slatted floors and benches, a high ceiling with skylight windows and a stove called a 'kiaus'. "We have a saying in Finland," Mr Koivisto said, "A foreigner only becomes Finnish when he thinks +25 C is hot outside but +65 C is cold in a sauna." This saying might have been a scream, except I didn't have a clue how hot that was in Fahrenheit. But wait, there were lots more. "Our word for sauna means a hole in the ground where we went to cure sickness. We have a saying in Finland, 'First make a sauna, then build the house around it.'"

Apparently, Finns are really into old sayings. While we were mulling these over, we were joined by Riita's teenaged brother Antti, who was a tubby, pudgy-faced, clumsy-looking kid with long white-blonde bangs. He sort of lurched into the room and crashed down onto a bench right across from me, where he sat silently staring at my boobs or whatever. Which were now, like everything else about me, turning bright pink. I crossed my arms. A long silence fell.

"Hoop was staying at the Torni Hotel," Riita said to her 'rents. "I did not think it was a very nice place, so she will be staying with me tonight. There was a very dreadful man who was following her there." They both nodded sleepily.

So I was like, "Well, he wasn't exactly following me--"

"You should have notified the police," Mr Koivisto said. "Our Finnish police are very good, very honest. They do not permit such things."

"He wasn't actually following me at all. Mr Likkanen was actually pretty nice--we just had like a misunderstanding is all."

"Likkanen?" Riita's father looked thunderstruck. "You mean the EU minister?"

Then Riita was like, "No, Pekka, this was another one..." (She called her parents by their first names, which is something some of my friends did, too, when I was growing up, but which I just can never get used to. Or hanging with them naked either, for that matter.)

"Donho Likkanen," I said. Her father looked at me like I'd suddenly cursed or farted or something.

'That man is back in the country?" he said. He seemed to be trembling with anger, and his face turned a really scary shade of red. "He should be in jail. He was a gangster and a criminal when he was young--now he is some sort of pornographer in America."

"No, he was not!" Riita's mother said unexpectedly. She had been so quiet and mousy up till then I didn't even know she could speak English. "He was a very sweet boy and a national hero. He was a spy for his country--like James Bond."

"I suppose you would like to have him back again!" said her husband bitterly. The two of them began to scream at each other in Finnish, then Matti got up and rushed out, and her husband followed her, still yelling.

Riita looked really embarrassed and was like, "Oh, Hoop, I am so sorry and ashamed that you have seen this. Please forgive me. I must calm them now." Then she rushed off, too, leaving me all alone with Anttii. Who stared at me. And stared at me.

Finally after like ten minutes had gone by he opened his mouth and spoke. "There's a girl at school I really like," he said in amazingly good English. Unlike Riita and his parents, he had almost no accent, I guess from watching TV all the time. "Should I ask her to go somewhere with me sometime?"

So I was like, "Sure, why not?"

But he was like, "Because I have no confidence. She will just think of me as a friend, like all the others do."

"OK, you need to build up your confidence then. Focus on your good qualities, just like you were trying to make a big sale or something. What would you say is the most important thing about you?"

He thought about it really intensely for a minute and then said, "Well, I'm very indecisive."

"No, no, I mean the most cool thing, something positive!"

He shook his head. "I can't decide." It was at that moment that I realized that the god of Love had totally forsaken Finland.

We were joined at dinner by Riita's boyfriend Erkki, who was a taller, thinner, younger, darker-haired, and much sweeter-faced version of her father. While Riita bustled around serving us an enormous supper he shyly showed me how he'd connected his iPod to his cellphone, so he could talk on it and listen to music at the same time. "In Finland we have three types of national dishes," Riita informed me. "There is the Karelian, the West Finnish, and the Finlander-Swedish. All are good, so I have included dishes from all three traditions. You are lucky because Matleena and I are excellent cooks." There was no sign of either of her parents during the meal, though her mother joined us for dessert. Her father, it turned out, was off sulking in his 'studio', which was a separate little building like a large shed with big windows across the back yard.

"My husband is being very rude today," Matleena said. "He is in his studio now on the computer with his Estonian girlfriend." Whether she meant this was a real-life girlfriend or just someone he messaged on the Internet, I have no idea. Whatever, she ate a whole lot of cake. As far as Finnish cuisine is concerned, I gotta say the Swedish cakes and the Karelian pastries were the best, though the fish and fresh veggies were very good, too. The reindeer meat was interesting ('gamey' is how the Mothership would put it), and the boiled potatoes were...just like boiled potatoes. But the meatballs suck, and all the rye puddings and stuff pretty much tastes like wet cardboard. Weirdest of all, though, was 'Kalakukko', which is a sort of fish bread/pie filled with bones and even the head. The first time I bit into that I figured out where the name 'ERKKI!' came from. But Riita only frowned at at me when I gave a little scream and was like, "There are two proper ways to eat this dish, Hoop--the West Finn way and the Karelian way. You must not try it your American way." Apparently, the reason for Riita's culinary show-and-tell supper was this: a few years ago some Italian or French prime minister made some nasty remarks about Finnish cooking, and ever since, Finns feel it's like their patriotic duty to prove how great their diet is. I mean, in America, who cares what losers like that have to say about anything? To me it seems pretty strange to imagine basing your life on what other people think of you anyway, but the Finns actually do this with just about everything. They're sort of like a whole country full of my cousin April.

My cousin April is the Mothership's favorite family project, next to genealogy. She's a year younger than me and lived on her parents' farm in western Minnesota her whole life. She's a huge girl with big arms and legs like tree-trunks, big red apple-cheeks, and big bright brown eyes (my mother always has claimed that she's part Native American). If I'm honest, it's sort of disturbing to be physically related to someone who's that big. Whatever, if you went to visit her on the farm, she'd always be hardworking, self-confident, loud and rowdy at times. Even bossy. A little like Riita, come to think of it. But when she used to come to stay with us (usually for a week every summer), she'd always go totally quiet and meek and mousy. And weirdest of all, she'd spend half the day in the bathroom, just staring at herself in the mirror and trying on our clothes and make-up. To me, Finns are just like that. That's why I feel really guilty writing anything negative about Finland at all, because lots of Finns google this blog and come here, read it, leave no comments, and go away probably feeling really insulted and getting none of the jokes. Because, like April, they are both fascinated and struck dumb by what the world thinks of them. And all their European fashions and modern design and English-speaking are basically like make-up and mirror-gazing. Frankly, they should just stick to what they do best, which is working hard and building beautiful things and being apple-cheeked. And ignoring everyone else.

Though I guess even Aprils get lonely, too. Last year she met an older married guy on the Internet (her laptop was a gift from the Mothership, of course) and ran off to live with him in Wildwood, New Jersey, and now she's heavily tattooed. And heavily pregnant.

After our miserable meal, still in bright daylight, Riita and Erkki drove me with all my luggage to their apartment, which was in a modern high-rise halfway between Tapiola and downtown Helsinki. It was small but pretty, with a nice sunny kitchen and bathroom, and they both insisted on sleeping in the living-room on their futon-couch and giving me their bed. Which was totally sweet but awkward. One thing I gotta say about Finnish homes: they are spotless. I mean, really really clean. You could of eaten a meal off any surface in that little apartment--as opposed to mine, where you'd be more likely to stumble over one. Admittedly, I'm a slob, and so is Kerry, but I know plenty of Americans who aren't. But honestly they are still grunge-rats compared to Finns. The biggest cultural difference, strangely enough, was in the bathroom, which was filled with stuff I couldn't figure out--as well as a few things that, let's face it, would never be big in the States. like, for instance, 'Retardex' toothpaste (at least I think it was toothpaste!)

On the other hand, both Riita and Erkii had perfect teeth--so I made a mental note to buy a suitcase of the stuff before I flew back home.

Understandably, I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep again in a strange bed in sunlight. After everything was quiet in the living room, I sat up and switched on my laptop and after I'd checked my email for news of the sickies (all three seemed better), made the mistake of googling Safe-T-Man. His corporate home page was bad enough--and after seeing it I could totally see why Riita's dad called him a 'pornographer'--but it was his blog that really boiled my pee (likkanen.blogspot.com). After reading all the incredible lies he wrote about me (I am SO not nervous about flying--and my fingers are NOT chubby! And neither are my thighs, much), I got so pissed off and wired I could barely sleep at all. I was all like trembling with anger or whatever. And worst of all, I totally do not believe, not in a million years, that Likkanen ever had sex with Madonna! I was there, and believe me, she totally had no idea who he was. I mean, she never even glanced at him. I think if he was a former lover, like Dennis Rodman or somebody, she'd have at least remembered his face! As if!

But why would he lie about something like that? Obviously he was a lot sicker than I thought, as his 'dream' posts made pretty clear. What a perverted weirdo. Well, it was like nothing to me--I wasn't ever gonna see him or speak to him again. But of course that didn't stop me from morbidly reading his entire site.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 13: The Opposite of Christmas

If there's one thing on earth I love even more than Moomintrolls, it's Christmas. I admit it, I'm the kind of dork who shops for Christmas presents year-round, wears stupid hats all the week before Christmas Eve (and those brooches that have flashing reindeer noses and stuff), and even shops at 'Christmas Crossing' stores sometimes. Well, when no one's looking, anyway. That's how dumb I am. And Finland, from everything I've read, is sort of like a Santa Theme Park at midwinter, always dark and snowbound and filled with little lights and special Christmas dishes. And drinks. Lots and lots of Christmas drinks. So maybe, given my tastes, I really should have waited to make this trip over winter break (it's no longer referred to as 'Christmas break' on campus) instead of midsummer in the 'land of the midnight sun'. Because my trip was like turning out to be the opposite of Christmas in every way...

Turned out Safe-T-Man was writing his own blog (I'll link this site to the url of his blog later, so you can read for yourself all the outrageously mean and inaccurate stuff he wrote about me). I found this out that morning at breakfast, or maybe I should call them 'morning' and 'breakfast' in quotes, because the sun basically shone all night and I ate breakfast at about the same time as I'd normally eat supper. I decided to eat it downstairs in the hotel dining room because by now pretty much whatever Riita said not to do I was into doing, on the principle that she was always wrong. Problem was, she was only wrong half the time, as I later found out, but because it was always at the top of her voice and I could never figure out any pattern to it, that made her totally unreliably unreliable. Whatever, the food was OK. I didn't die from it anyway. So while I was eating, he sipped coffee and aspirin and tapped away beside me (one-handed, he seemed totally clumsy with his left) at his Powerbook, which he had dragged downstairs with him.

"So what's your blog about?" I asked him.

"It's my last will and testament," he said in his usual gloomy voice, sounding sort of like 'Lurch' on the Addams Family.
So I was like, "Cool! Be sure to put me in it." And Safe-T-Man pretty much did look like death warmed over that morning. Though I probably didn't look much better.

I'd woken up in his bed an hour or two earlier feeling totally disoriented. Bright sunlight was streaming in through the thick curtains, as if there had never been any night at all, which I guess there pretty much hadn't been, just like some Korean War torture. Especially since the TV was still on. Other than that, I was all alone, but at some point while I was asleep Safe-T-Man had half-covered me with a thin white blanket, which was surprisingly sweet and thoughtful of him, especially considering he'd never been married or had any kids (or so he'd told me on the plane.) But it was getting hot already, so I kicked it off and sat up. There was no sign of him in the room. But when I staggered into the bathroom to have a pee I found him lying on the floor in there still tapping at his keyboard, but in a kind of spastic reflex sort of way, like a dying dog. From the smell, it was obvious he'd spent like a major part of the last few hours in there being sick or whatever. And here's the funny part: my first impulse was to clean it up after him! I guess because it reminded me of the time my brother Marty (the older one) came home late after a stag party the night before his (first) wedding and barfed up in the upstairs bathroom he shared with me. And when I say barf, we're talking a sort of ring of puke at eye-level all over the wall tiles. At least Safe-T-Man was pretty clean and tidy, which was another mark in his favor. Anyway, I bravely rolled up my PJs and mopped the whole place out before the Mothership could see it, because she would have had a cow, since her nerves were on edge anyway (she hated Marty getting married, but of course the moment he wanted a divorce she became his-ex wife Carmen's biggest champion and still sends her presents and stuff). And I was only 12 at the time! So I actually stood there in the doorway trying to think where I could find a mop--and then it occurred to me: Doh! This is a hotel! To hell with this sh-t, let the maid do it. At that point I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and realized I was having my worst hair day ever. We're talking cat-lady here.

Outside, it was turning out to be another seriously sunny dazzler of a day--my only complaint was that there was so much of it. It just went on and on and on. After breakfast, Riita showed up, all beaming and smiling. Somehow, she had scored two extra tickets to the Madonna concert for me! Extra meaning that she and her boyfriend ('Erkii', she said his name was) already had their own. Serious money must have changed hands, I figured, so I finally forced her to let me pay her back for them--and believe me, was I ever sorry I did. It worked out to be almost $500! So there went half my spending money up in smoke, pretty much. But I was determined to make the best of it. Who knew, it might even be a lot of fun. So I went up to Safe-T-Man's room to tell him the good news and invite him along to the concert as my guest, because I basically had no one else to ask. Only, was I ever in for my second rude shock of the morning when I did--he totally freaked. I mean, bright red face, yelling, the works:

"Of course I don't want to go to your stupid Madonna concert! I can't think of a more boring way to waste an evening!"

So I was like, "Whoa, chill--I was just asking you because I thought we were friends." I felt so lame standing in the hallway outside his room having this convo in front of Riita and, for all I knew, half the hotel.

So then he was like, "Friends? Friends? There is no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman, you stupid girl. Go find some nice young man your own age to go out with--I am too old for you!"

So then I did something really, really like shamefully embarrassing. I blame the jet-lag and, you know, being in a foreign country and so disoriented and all. I started crying. I couldn't believe it! And then Safe-T-Man just slammed the door in my face! I mean, he was totally not supposed to act like that--he had been really pretty decent up to that point, if you didn't count the corn-ball pick-up lines on the airplane. Well, that and the puking half the night on the bathroom floor. But otherwise he'd pretty much behaved like a real gentleman, as the Mothership would say. So I was totally shocked at how he'd acted--as well as sort of like disappointed or something we weren't going to be friends any more. Meanwhile, Riita was putting her arms around me (something I totally hate) and making little comforting noises. "Don't worry, Hoop," she said. "It will be easy to sell the other ticket again, you'll see. Perhaps we will get so much for it that it will pay for yours as well." (We didn't, but it was nice to get nearly $300 back).

But I still couldn't believe all the stuff he'd said. Was he on crack? I guess alcoholics can develop serious mental problems when they start getting old. Because honestly, what had I done to deserve being treated like that?? I decided to forget all about it that very minute and get on with my trip. Which I did. Problem was, getting on with anything pretty much involved Riita. And now I was really stuck with her, since she'd been so nice and found me the Confessions tix and all. I mean, I wasn't just stuck with her company, I was obligated to play really nice and sweet right back at her. Ugh!

And, though I didn't know it yet, things were about to get way worse in that department. Because when we got back to my hotel room and I'd blown my nose and restored my face to something sort of human in the bathroom mirror, Riita was suddenly like, "I tried to telephone you here last night--where were you?"

So I was like, "Oh, I fell asleep watching TV with that jerk up in his room."

"In his bed? You didn't have sex with him, did you, Hoop?" she said.

Whoa! I mean, Chris could ask me a question like that. Or Jo. And there's no way on earth to stop Kerry from talking about stuff like that. But some strange woman I'd only just met the day before? Tell me that wasn't seriously whacked. So I just glared at her.

"If I had," I said, "I'd be needing a lot more make-up right now. And another shower."

She gave a huge sigh of relief. "Still, you must not stay here any more. You must pack up your bags, and we will check you out of this place after we come back from visiting the library."

"Oh, I don't think that's such a great idea."

"But you can't stay here after he has behaved like this. I think he is a crazy person. How will he act the next time you see him in the lift? You cannot trust him now. No, no--you must come with me. You can stay with us at Erkki's flat, he will not mind." Seeing the look on my face, she added, "It will be a smart thing for you to do, Hoop, you save your money and will not have to spend it all here. And besides, tonight you are coming to have dinner with my family in Espoo and meet my parents--and it is much closer to go to the flat after that. Then on Monday, after the concert Sunday night at Hartwall, we will be taking the train anyway to Turku. So you see, I have everything already planned for you!"

Yes indeed, she certainly did. See what I mean about her being bossy? But after I thought it over a bit, I really did see the logic in it--I mean, I wasn't exactly looking forward to running into Safe-T-Man again--ever! And she was right about the money. And when you travel, it really is kind of anal not to leave the tourist areas and meet the natives, so to speak, and enjoy their hospitality and learn about their culture or whatever. That's why I'd come to Finland in the first place pretty much, and she was being really generous to invite me to her parents' house and stuff. So I took the easy way out, I guess, and just went along with it, forgetting that Riita was always totally wrong half the time. For all I knew, her behavior was normal for Finns. Maybe the sex question wasn't really that strange, I decided, maybe she was just possessive or something. I mean, it was obvious she thought we were friends--maybe she just didn't have any. And so didn't know any better.

"You must pack quickly!" she said. "The library closes at your 4 o'clock on Saturdays. And it is not open tomorrow." 'My' four o'clock? What was that about? "Don't worry, Hoop, we will go back there again after we are home from Turku--you will need to, because the library is where all of the most important books in Finland are kept. And I will spend many hours helping you read through them, you will see. Then you will write a really wonderful book about Finland, and we will both be proud!"

Uh-huh. Like that was ever gonna happen.

The library she was referring to, by the way, was the University of Helsinki Library, now known as the 'National Library' (http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/english/), which is the Finnish library of record. Finland is a very literate country, Riita informed me all the way there--Finns are the world's biggest readers per capita and the 4th-largest publishers of books (because of cheap paper), mostly of best-sellers translated from English, you know, stuff like Stephen King and Dan Brown. "A person who is so fluent in English as me can always find work in the home as a translator," Riita told me as we walked to Senate Square, where the library faces the Finnish Senate Building (sort of like our Capitol. In fact, Finland's government is very closely modeled on ours). The day was hot and sunny, and the big green trams rumbled along their tracks almost as erratically as the sun-burned Finns stumbled across their streets. They were all as bloated and drowsy and unpredictable as bumble-bees. It was barely noon, and already everyone had started drinking! Safe-T-Man was probably totally blasted by now. And after yesterday's incident with the crapping bum, I now was uncomfortably aware of just how many of my fellow-pedestrians were peeing in public--I kept noticing puddles in doorways and on the sides of buildings near the sidewalk. And of course, on the sidewalk. This was a country that seriously needed some pooper-scooper laws--for people! But hey, when in Rome, huh? Though I could just imagine the looks I'd get at home when I came back if I suddenly started squatting down and doing my business in front of them, hee hee.

Speaking of home (and peeing), I was pretty upset by the emails I'd found in my box before we'd left the hotel. Kerry was bleeding again, and her mom had flown to New York to look after her--now I felt like a totally selfish jerk for abandoning her like that! And there was worse news to come. Jo wrote to say her tummy trouble had returned in the form of bloody diarrhea (being in med school, she was way over-graphic on the subject and devoted like two paragraphs to her symptoms, which was too much information), and there were a bunch of text messages from Christina that had been forwarded to my email account. She had been helicoptered off her little island and was in a hospital in Stockholm having tests for bleeding from her 'sinus'--I later discovered she meant 'urethra' and had looked the word up online in a hurry. So all three of my best friends were now bleeding from mystery diseases. It was like an Ebola plague or something. Would I be next? All day long I'd been compulsively checking myself in the bathroom, but so far, so good. Was it only hitting them because of that stupid magic ceremony they'd performed at the beach? But why? But why like this? Why now? It almost made you believe in the powers of the moon or something--maybe Kerry needed to make a serious sacrifice to the Mater Dea.

Of course, having her own Mater around her apartment all week was pretty much gonna be sacrifice enough, I guess. But my own was even greater: I had...Riita. But before I get started on that topic (again), I gotta tell you what happened at the library first. Because Finland just hadn't been weird enough yet, I guess.

OK, now I have to preface my next remarks by stating the following: I am an addict. Yes, I'm a book addict. And I totally love libraries. I'd actually like to die in in a library. Everywhere I go, the first thing I look for is the nearest public or local university library. I even take pix of them whenever possible--someday I'd like to publish a coffee-table book just about libraries. So now you're probably wondering what I'm gonna say to trash the Finnish National Library. Answer: nothing. It's gorgeous. I'll go even further--it's pretty close to perfection. It looks exactly how a library should look, it has that yummy old book smell that a library should have, and unlike the public library near the Mothership's house in Montgomery County, Maryland, it even has lots of the main commodity libraries are supposed to have. No, not play-areas. Not DVD's. Not 'open spaces' or skylights or computer terminals. Books. It has lots and lots of books. It's quite a sight. Frankly, the Finns have done this so right that it instantly forced me into a total reassessment of the whole country. I mean, if you revere books, what does that say about the rest of your culture? So I have to admit absolutely nothing about the library sucked--except for some of the weirdoes inside it. And remember, I was pretty distracted by all the worrying news I'd had just before I checked out of the hotel--so that made my perceptions of them a bit more suspect, to be fair.

The main hall is absolutely gorgeous, cool and marbley and echoey and ringed by stacks and stacks of well-preserved books that seem to go up to the roof. Everything is brightly lit and beautifully crafted, even the woods used in the shelving are old and solid and lustrously polished. And all the chairs and tables and lighting is ultramodern and well designed. OK, I'll shut up now. I just wished I could find a man who was like that library. Anyway, go to the library website and have a look. And while you're there, run a search for books with 'Kalevala' in their title--you'll find nearly 1,000 of them. After we found this out, Riita suggested that since we only had a couple hours we should start with just the English titles, which apparently kept on their own special shelf. So after a sharp exchange in Finnish with a woman at the collections desk (I thought they were gonna punch each other out at one point), we went up stairs and down halls and down stairs and up more stairs to the reading room. Everywhere we went there were students reading and dozing and enjoying the relatively cool temps. Some were enjoying it so much they were wearing raincoats like it was a winter day instead of the hottest day of the year so far. Others had brought along half their life's possessions with them and constructed sort of little homes inside reading cubicles. And I don't just mean geekospheres either, though I saw plenty of laptops. I mean obviously if we were in DC or NYC half the people there would have been homeless and the place would have looked like a men's prison just before bedtime--that wasn't the case here at all. Everyone was well-dressed, pretty young, and obviously not homeless. Yet, a lot of them were scruffy and bearded and building themselves little cells anyway, like medieval hermits or whatever. And weirdest of all were the number of women doing this, too. A few of them like barked at me as we walked by. Riita just ignored them. But what the hell were they planning to do at closing time, I wondered?? Did they all hide somewhere and come out again at night? Oh wait, there was no night. And I guess their stuff was actually pretty safe in there, locked away till Monday. See? Day-care nation.

When we found the English Kalevala section, there were big gaps in it where a bunch of books had been removed. There was also a sort of humming noise behind us. It was coming from a short, very fat, jolly-looking little man in a dark old-fashioned formal suit sitting at a big table with stacks of books in front of him. He had a round, egg-shaped face with bulging eyes, a little orange goatee, a waxed mustache, and thick lock of orange hair that made him look a whole lot like the Mayor of Munchkinland in the Wizard of Oz. One of the books lay open in front of him, and he was making elaborate passes over it with his hands like a stage magician--each time he did this, a page of the book would turn like magic. When he saw us staring at him he smiled and waved his hands around some more, and the book flipped over and started walking across the table toward me.

"This is the book you are looking for," he said in a thick, sort of prissy accent. (And it was actually, it's called 'Key to the Kalevala' by Pekka Ervast, and you can buy it here: http://edj.net/mc2012/thekey.htm.) Then he stood up, twirled a thick black cape around his shoulders like he was going to the opera or something, and gave us a little bow--I am totally not making this up, either. "Ladies," he said, and marched away, disappearing down the staircase. We just stood there staring after him.

"Swedish!" Riita said finally with a snort of disgust.

But I was still pretty much in shock. See, it wasn't the book-walking thing that had upset me, though I admit that was pretty strange. But I've read about it online since then, and it's apparently a pretty easy trick for a trained stage illusionist--they just use neutral grey or beige-colored thread wrapped around their fingers to make objects move or walk or even dance or whatever. It's almost exactly like being a puppeteer. No, what really freaked me out was that while he was doing it, the fat little man had given me a great big wink. Like he knew all about Billy Draper and what had happened inside the house in Bronzeville. And that thought was way spooky...

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 12: My First Finnish Penis

If I am totally, completely, utterly, brutally honest here the Moomin Shop was kind of a disappointment. I dunno what I expected, maybe some really great dolls or books I'd never heard of--and there were tons and tons of comics--but 90% of the stuff in there, T-shirts, 'babywear', coffee mugs, kids' tableware, rubber boots, candies, etc, etc, was Japanese junk. Apparently the Moomins are a big hit in Japan, there 's a kids' TV show there or something, and the Japanese artists and cartoonists have a way different idea of the Moomintrolls than I do, you know, how they look and stuff. Also the store was really small and cramped. And it didn't help to have Riita tapping her feet and blowing out her cheeks impatiently and telling me how cheaply and shoddily everything was made and how Finns could never manufacture such a lousy product. I decided she would make a really good addition to the cast of Harry Potter: 'Miss Ida Sapprove', the Hogwarts Pursar of Lips maybe. But I decided to sneak back again sometime soon on my own so I could look more thoroughly, if it was ever possible to ditch the bitch.

Safe-T-Man was waiting outside for us at a little outdoor bar, sipping on a second black drink and lighting yet another cigarette. It was definitely weird seeing rows of people standing and drinking at counters out in the bright sunlight--I guess it shows how seriously they take it or whatever. He must have seen the look of disappointment on my face though when we came out, because he said to me, very sweetly, "Never mind. There are many other Muumii cultural experiences for you to have here. For example, there is a Moomin theme park now, I think."

So then Riita was like, " Yes, that's right: Moomin World in Naantali. Polls have shown us that Naantali is the happiest place to live in Finland. Perhaps it would be nice for you to visit there when we are in Turku--I will arrange to get tickets for you if you like." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomin_World)

So here was a perfect example of Finnish behavior for you--rude and insensitive one minute, kind and thoughtful the next. The whole time I was there I thought of those people exactly like I did the little hot and cold water taps on my sink in the hotel room, which would never work at the same time, so the water was either burning or freezing, but never anything in between. Well, I guess 'off' was in between, which was pretty much the normal state for most Finns. But not for these two. In Finnish terms they were both total drama queens. First they got into a big argument about coffee. Or rather, why their country drinks so much of it (they're like the biggest consumers of coffee in the world or something). Then they started bickering about local history, and Safe-T-Man even grumbled at her about it in his mopey Finnish. The two of them were glaring at each other, and Riita's face was turning red. They appeared to hate each other's guts, but maybe that was just how Finns express sexual attraction, I couldn't tell. Everything here seemed like the opposite of America. Or maybe just of me.

"Oh, I wish you could get me tickets to the Madonna concert!" I said, you know, as a joke, but the words seemed to have a magical effect on Riita, who beamed at me radiantly. Like Katje from the airplane, she had really nice teeth.

"You like her too?"

And I was like, "Only totally! I saw her in Chicago just a few weeks ago, and check this out: she was on our plane! Yes, way--she even talked to me and whatever!" So then Riita started quizzing me about what Madonna had been wearing, which songs she had done in Chicago, etc, etc. Finally, we had something in common--so naturally, she had to work it to death all the way down the Esplanade. I mean, if I'd told her a really funny joke (that she could get), I'm sure Riita would have immediately repeated the punch-line four or five times to emphasize its humorous qualities. She was just like that. The girl couldn't help it.

The Harbor Market turned out to be a real market, with dozens of stalls selling mostly junk, but also lots of farm produce like beets and leeks and endives and stuff. There were also tons of boats along the stone wharf filled with herring and cod, etc, etc, the 'fruits of the sea,' as the French say, but there wasn't much I could realistically shop for there even if I had been in the mood for a big fry-up. However, I did buy a disposable cell-phone and a rechargeable calling-card from a Turk or Gypsy (in spite of Riita's dire warnings). I guess Safe-T-Man was feeling a bit left out or something, because at that point he said something really weird, I mean weird even for him: "I think we are being followed." Great, I thought. I mean, I was beginning to realize he was an alcoholic, now he was acting like a paranoiac, too, or whatever they're called.

I was like, "Why would anybody want to follow us?" and he just shrugged. He shrugged a lot, I'd noticed, it was like some kind of cool feature built into his inflatable dummy frame, like a poseable action figure. Or, as Carlos from work would say, maybe it wasn't a feature, maybe it was a bug.

"Perhaps some poor fellow has fallen madly in love with you."

"Shut up, no way! But that's pretty much what you wanna hear when you're on vacation," I told him. "Right, Riita?" But she just glared. Ouch! On an impulse I said, "When we get back to our hotel I'm gonna go online and see if I can find somebody scalping tickets for the concert. Would you mind to help me translate the Finnish sites?" I had more or less meant the question for Riita, but instead Safe-T-Man grunted a yes. Or something. Riita looked even more furious at this.

"I have some important business to attend to this afternoon," she snapped. "So I will have to leave you now, but I will be back again tomorrow, Hope." She pronounced my name 'Hoop'. Suits me, I thought--in fact, I'm afraid almost said it aloud. "Do not eat the food at that hotel, I do not trust their kitchens," she added darkly as she left. What was she, a health and safety inspector in her day job?

"That is one strange chick," I said to Safe-T-Man after she'd gone. "Are all Finnish women like that?" He did his patented action shrug. Up, down, up down, went his (admittedly very broad) shoulders.

"She is very typical, I think," he said. "But she is of no interest to Likkanen." I'm serious, he really said that. In the third person, no less, like he was Salvador Dali or somebody! "You know, my very first job was here in this place when I was 16. I sold ice cream at a stall. Right where we are standing now." I waited for him to go on, but that was all he said. Maybe he was lost in his memories. Or maybe he was getting Alzheimer's.

So after a really long Finnish silence (well, short for Finland, long for anyplace else on earth)--six minutes by my watch--I was like, "How long has it been since you've been back?"

"Thirty years," he said.

"Wow, that's longer than I've been alive."

OK, I know that throughout this blog or blook or whatever it is, I've said that lots of things were 'weird'. I guess I've sort of over-used the word, really--maybe I should of saved it for when I really needed it. Like now. Because on our way back to the hotel, something really--well, you know, weird--happened. I mean it was too strange to be just 'odd'--but not quite strange enough to be 'bizarro'. So, I guess I have to say it was just plain weird, that's the only right word. Though I better warn you now, it was just the first of many things like that that started happening there. If words were made of paper, 'weird' would wear right out in Finland. What happened was, we were going back to the hotel via a different route, because Safe-T-Man had this sudden allergy to the Esplanadi--I guess he still thought we were being followed, like in a spy movie. So he took me on a tour of a 'historic district' to the north, which was pretty interesting and looked a lot like Chicago near the lake, all the old buildings built of grey stone, though few were taller than 10 or 12 storeys. There was a terrific old art deco railway station, and north of it were elevated tracks just like the Loop. The whole time he kept looking back over his shoulder and chain-smoking, so finally I said to him, "I thought you weren't supposed to smoke when you're wearing patches."

And he was like, "These aren't nicotine patches--they are vitamin patches I order from India. That is Vitamin C and this one is B, and the smelly one here is a mineral supplement." Whatever, it seemed to be working--he looked pretty good for an old geezer, almost as cut as a military man, only a little soft around the gut. That was probably from all the drinking. Incidentally, I grew up in a family of smokers so it really doesn't bother me much. Both of my big bros are on the patch now, which is a good thing, and my mom only ever pretended to smoke--honest, for years she would just light cigarettes and hold them in order to be 'sociable'--but Kerry and Chris both do, even though Jo was always on their case to quit. So I'm used to it. Though, of course, I'm always happy when people give it up.

Anyway, that's not the weird part--this is: we turned a corner and there was an old homeless guy in a coat singing and sort of dancing around in front of a small group of college kids on the sidewalk. When we got closer, I saw that his pants were down around his ankles and his penis (or 'unit', as the Mothership used to call it) was hanging out and flopping around all over the place. Now, again, I am totally not an expert on any aspect of Finnish life or culture, but I can tell you for sure the whole country is pretty much into nudity, because of their saunas and stuff, I guess. Whatever, if you go to Finland you're gonna be exposed to a lot of penises, especially on TV. And I gotta tell you honestly, from what I've seen so far there is very little to write home about, so to speak. It's weird that the guys with the least to show off are usually the biggest exhibitionists, but that's pretty much the case with most things in life, I guess. Anyway, this old bum looked sort of like a toddler blown up to full size, but that didn't stop him from, you know, strutting his stuff or whatever to passersby. So then when he caught sight of us, he started yelling at Safe-T-Man in Finnish, like he knew him. And even stranger--he looked just like him! Except, you know, sort of older and filthy and unkempt. Of course, I was still at that disoriented stage after a long flight where all Finns were looking alike to me, you know, like Cabbage Patch kids or whatever. I mean, I'd even been seeing resemblances between Riita and Safe-T-Man earlier--you know, like how they moved their mouths and the texture of their skin and the expressions on their faces, etc, etc. So I was not a reliable witness at that point. Plus, jet-lag had hit, so the whole thing felt sort of like a bad dream.

Suddenly the old bum switched to English, though his was heavily accented and kind of unintelligible and guttural, and held out a chipped Moomintroll mug (I noticed because it had the Snork Maiden on it). "Come on lover-boy, don't be shy," he said. "Feed the Sampo. You have to pay to cross the river." So while Safe-T-Man was fumbling around in his OP's for some money, the guy looked at me and added, "Hey, you f-cking her? She's not bad. I'll have to tell my wife I've seen you two." And then he crouched down on the pavement and took an enormous dump! Right in front of everybody! I mean, not to be too gross or anything, but it just kept coming out like a long, dark oily coil of garden hose. Safe-T-man sort of grabbed my arm (I noticed he was pretty strong) and steered me off quickly. The whole time the bum was shouting stuff after us that I couldn't understand. But here's the craziest thing of all--I had this distinct feeling that he wasn't really a homeless guy at all, that he was just sort of playing a part. Though who on earth would want to do that? It was all part of the 'being spied on' feeling I guess, like the bum was some kind of secret agent and was passing along a message in code to Safe-T-Man. 'Hide in plain sight, Hope', was always Dad's favorite advice, along with, 'naked is the best disguise.' That old incontinent beggar guy was certainly well disguised, in that case. I guess what put that in my head, the idea of a disguise I mean, was the uncanny resemblance between them.

So when we got back to the hotel I was all like, "WTF was that all about? I mean, he acted like he knew you or something. And the two of you look enough alike to be brothers! Was he a friend of yours when you were young?"

So then Safe-T-Man gave me like the saddest smile on earth and shook his head (hey, I thought, another action movement!). "No," he said.

But I could totally tell he was lying. Which is always an attractive quality in a man, I think. I mean, that you can see right through him like that.

I spotted my second Finnish penis in Safe-T-Man's bed, and after that there was an avalanche of them in various shapes and sizes. Well, mostly shapes. What happened was after I got back to my hotel room, I tried out the disposable cell-phone I'd bought at the market and got it working after a ton of number entry. So first I called the Mothership back, to give her a chance to resume her cruelly interrupted nagging, then I tried Kerry and Chris (no answer). So I left them voice-mails, then hooked up my iBook to the hotel Wifi and sent around a mass e-mail, leaving out the part about the homeless guy who'd crapped in front of me in the street. Then I checked my e-mail. Nothing. Suddenly I felt so lonely and homesick I'd of been grateful for spam. But I didn't even have any of that. I'd been almost asleep on my feet when I'd called Mom, but now I felt all wired and nervy, so I packed up the laptop and went upstairs to Safe-T-Man's room.

Which was even smaller than mine. Which meant there was noplace to watch TV except for the bed. So after we wasted half an hour looking on Finnish websites and forums for Madonna tickets, we sort of started dozing off together watching nude Finnish TV shows like 'The Dudesons'. There was even some kind of upscale department store commercial featuring naked guys and chicks just jumping up and down flopping their, you know, boobs and penises and whatever up and down. Really in your face.

So I was like, "Oh, wow, none of them are circumcised." At which he frowned and looked sort of offended.

"It is against the law here now," he said. "It is considered infant mutilation, and one can go to jail for it. So you see, we clever Finns are socializing even the penis."

Basically, I was starting to get the vibe that the whole country was like a giant day-care center, only with heavy drinking. Speaking of which, Safe-T-Man had brought home a bottle or two of some unpronounceable Finnish liquor that appeared to be a combination of vodka and industrial sludge and was putting it away in record time. He offered me a taste in a gargle cup, but one whiff of the smell was enough for me. Actually, I gotta confess that it felt really nice slowly relaxing and falling asleep beside him like that. He was definitely a strange and untrustworthy kind of guy, totally into himself and dishonest and untruthful. And old. And alcoholic. But. He never smoked indoors (he told me that was 'unhealthful'). He was just the right temperature (which is very rare, in my humble experience), plus he smelled really comforting. None of that disgusting cologne that geezers like to wear. Or the 'floral male scents' that smell like Rescue Remedy or whatever and stick to you like Febreze. Just guy smell, really comforting and safe, like his name.

"Sometimes you say 'we'--and sometimes you say 'they'," I mumbled at him drowsily. "Which do you consider yourself to be?"

And he was like, "Well, when I am in America I often feel like a Finn. But at this moment, I am feeling very American." Fair enough, I thought as I fell asleep. So was I.

Continued here...

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The Book of Hope 11: All Are Bound For Moominland

It turned out that Safe-T-Man had a few issues of his own. After my tummy felt better, he fell deeply asleep for a couple of hours and then woke up screaming somewhere over Sweden the next morning. I mean, screaming like a girl! The stewardess came over to check it out, but by then he was awake, so I squeezed and patted his hand until he calmed down. I mean, he had behaved really sweetly to me when I was being sick, considering what a creepy lech he could seem to be at times, so I wasn't too worried he'd get the wrong idea. I dunno what he was dreaming about, but it was definitely a Freddie Krueger (another Finn!) moment. Because Safe-T-Man was Finnish, too, if I haven't already mentioned it. He told me his name was 'Donho Likkanen' and he was some kind of designer. Seems like most Finns are, or at least claim to be. So I'd met my first Finn, aside from the stewardess, whose name was Katje and who was really nice. I mean not just nice because it was her job to be, but genuinely good-hearted. You could tell. And except for that weird mixing up of 'hallucination' with 'malfunction', her English was pretty good, too--just wait until I tried out some of my phrase-book Finnish on people! And the flight so far definitely had a trippy quality about it. For example, all during breakfast, I kept hoping Madonna would come back to visit tourist class again, but she never did.

In front of us on the plane was sitting a Finnish family who had a 3 year old girl who kept peeking back at us. I began to try to practice my Finnish on her. It must of worked, since she started laughing. Her mother tried to get her to use some of the English she knew, to which she protested (in Finnish), "I don't want to speak Swedish." Katje translated this for me when she came back with a complimentary Finnair box of candy with a Moomin inside and Moomin scenes. Now, here I have to explain about me and Moomintrolls, which are sort of the main cultural icon of Finland. They are just about my favorite things in the whole world--and I have a really big collection of the books (in English) at home next to my bed. This dates back to the first time my family visited London on our way back Stateside, which I guess was in the late '80s or so. Dad took my brothers on a 'pub crawl' so Mom was like, "OK, Hope, we girls are going on a shopping crawl." So first we went to Harrods, then we had 'tea', and then we visited all the book stores around Charing Cross. Yes, the Mothership is a big reader, that's where I get it from, though it pains me to admit it. But here's the odd thing about her: she's always reading, it's almost like an addiction with her, but she never ever says a word about anything she's read! Fiction, biography, gardening, you name it--she has absolutely nothing to say about any of them, even if it's like some best-seller she's read the night before that everybody's talking about at a party. "Oh yes, it was interesting," is all she'll ever say, her eyes darting from one side to another, like you've caught her out sneaking a drink in the middle of the morning or something. And to complete the drug addiction metaphor, the moment she's done with the book, out it goes, either back to the library or into the church charity bag. Basically, the only books in the house are mine--because I'm a total pack-rat. And of all my books, my favorites are the Moomintroll books Mom bought for me that afternoon. I have all the ones in English: Finn Family Moomintroll, Comet in Moominland, Moominland Midwinter, Moominsummer Madness, etc, etc all with their 'Ernest Benn, Limited' imprimiturs. The jackets are all pretty tattered by now, but they've got to last me a lifetime, because when I'm scared or upset I always reread them. For example, when Dad would be overseas on a posting I would read The Exploits of Moominpapa. Or, my first year in Chicago when a freak ice-storm closed O'Hare and I couldn't get home for Christmas, I spent Christmas Eve in Borders drinking hot chocolate and reading a paperback copy of Moominland Midwinter.

I would say that of all of them I find that book the most comforting. There are two characters introduced in it that I love the most, too. The first is 'Little My', who always reminds me of Jo--or Madonna--because she's a fearless trouble-maker and can never feel sad, only mad. And the second is her big sister 'Mymble', (sorry, I have no idea of what their real names are in Finnish) who is very quiet and kind and patient and has lovely long legs. She is exactly what I long to be. Of course, she remains asleep throughout that book.

So when I found out Safe-T-Man was Finnish I tried to talk to him about the Kalevala, but he just blew me off, same as when I asked if he wanted to share a cab at the airport in order to cut down on expenses. So I pretty much had written him off as a rude old jerk, when suddenly he started hitting on Katje, the stewardess. And this was really interesting to me, I guess because it's always sort of exotic to see mating rituals at work in another culture, like watching animals doing it in a zoo, especially bizarre ones like rhinos (which is always sort of how I imagined my parents, hee hee.) But here's the amazing thing. After Safe-T-Man muttered a few mopey sentences in Finnish to her (which I couldn't understand), it was Katje who was all over him! She even turned all pink and glowing and kept making excuses to come back and talk to him before we landed. So I guess his act really played in Europe. Or maybe it was just the shirt. Whatever--eww! But I still kept wondering what he'd said to her. Because Kerry and Jo and I sort of collect pimpin' lines, you know, the kind they teach losers in those perverted pick-up manuals guys are into, like, "Want me to show you a magic trick?" or "You had lint on your dress" (after the guy paws you with the lint he's hidden in his palm.) In those kind of books (I know because my bro's used to collect them) this is called 'breaking the ice'. But in Finland, things were always pretty icy, as I was about to learn.

The airport looked like Mardi Gras or something when we landed, lots of local fans had showed up screaming and waving banners for Madonna's arrival in Finland. Naturally, her party got off first and were whisked away to a VIP lounge somewhere, so I smiled and waved and pretended the crowds were there for me. A few people dressed in B&D outfits even waved back. So now I was actually in Finland! Everything looked and smelled totally different. It was all flat and dinky, like a giant Fisher-Price village. But weirdest of all, the signs were all in Finnish! And everywhere you went, people were speaking it, too. Luckily for me everyone in Finland speaks English--or at least they all pretend to. All except my cab-driver, who was some kind of African and only knew how to say 'I take you now', 'Faster, faster!' and 'No, more, more!' which I'm guessing he learned from porno films. When we got to my hotel, he kept making me give him more and more money for the fare, and I suddenly realized that my cash was going to go like water, in spite of all my planned economies. It's always like that when you're traveling anyway, only it somehow seems worse in a foreign country. Well, as Kerry says, it's like being raped--all you can do is give it all up and hope you get some fun out of it. Not that Kerry speaks with the wisdom and sensitivity of somebody that's actually ever been raped: as Jo cruelly puts it, Kerry never gives a guy the chance to do it first. Obviously, I was missing them, because suddenly I felt really alone. I mean, that was sort of the whole point of this trip--to get away from everyone, especially the Mothership--and I was sure I'd start enjoying that feeling pretty soon. It just wasn't happening for me quite yet.

My hotel was called the 'Torni', and it was really great, kind of quaint and old-fashioned on the outside, but pretty modern and, well, Finnish on the inside. Everything was small, but very very clean and polished. My room had all glass blocks and blonde wood surfaces and a sort of Lapland-looking handmade quilt on the bed. I was in the land of Ikea, for sure. After I checked in (there was no tipping, which was cool) and unpacked, I tried calling the Mothership on my cell, which I'd been assured would work in Europe if I prepaid an extra roaming fee. Naturally, it didn't, which meant I had no text messages and couldn't access my voice-mail either, so I ended up having to call her collect on the hotel phone to tell her I'd landed safely.

When I did she was like, "Hope, you know I don't like accepting collect calls."

"I know, Mom, but my cell phone doesn't work here."

"You told me you'd fixed that," etc, etc. This is dialogue that pretty much writes itself, if you've ever had a mother. Luckily I was able to hang up quickly, because while we were talking the phone buzzed to tell me I had a visitor. Obviously, I wasn't gonna be allowed to wallow in my loneliness for long!

My visitor was named Riita Koivisto--she was the 'guide' assigned to me from the University and apparently she'd cut her vacation short by a day or two to come back to Helsinki and look after me, as she soon made plain. In great passive-aggressive detail. In Scandinavia, everybody basically takes the month of July off, which was why I hadn't tried to stop over and see Christina first on my way to Finland, since she was busy hanging with her extended family off on some tiny little island somewhere with no toilets, but Tuesday was the official 'back to work' day all over the Baltic (I think I arrived in Helsinki on a Friday or Saturday?). Describing Riita actually isn't easy for me to do, because she was one of those people who struck you as being one way when you first met her, then sort of totally the opposite as you gradually got to know her better (as I unfortunately had to)--and then one day, reveals herself as being really different than either of your two previous opinions, if that makes any sense. And, let's face it--I'm a total chump when it comes to people. I was always the kid in the class that teachers picked on to look after the 'new kid', you know, the shy unibrow retard with a pizza-face or glasses or uber-braces or whatever. So I was always stuck being lab-partners or 'study-buddies' with every freaking geek and lame-duck in the world--in other words, I'm a pushover and get along with just about anybody. But I didn't like Riita. I mean I didn't have a hate-on for her at first sight or anything, I just found her problematic. To be honest, she was a big bossy cow of a girl and what's worse, was several years younger than me, which made her self-importance and air of always being right about everything even more annoying. Especially when I got the Bush Derangement Syndrome lectures ("Why can't Americans just use 'people power' to bring him to justice?" "Why do you support the genocidal terrorist regime of Israel?") Like I would ever say stuff like that about Finnish politics. About which I could care less actually. Their political views are their business, just as mine are my own. Anyway, the point is that normally I would just blow someone like that off as nicely as I could--but in this case, we were totally stuck with each other for the next week or two.

Part of my problem with Finns is this--their accent makes them all sound totally miserable, like a whole country of Eyores. And they sound equally sulky whether they're speaking English or Finnish, so this automatically makes dealing with them difficult because you assume they are feeling certain emotions, especially hostile ones, even when they aren't. They think they're being incredibly shy and polite (they actually have almost no polite expressions in their language and don't employ English ones easily , so you just have to guess their intentions). The only time they lighten up and laugh is when they're drinking heavily, basically. Or wandering around half-naked (sometimes not just half!) and stoned in the middle of the summer night, which is pretty much broad daylight, as I was about to discover. So in total fairness to Riita, I now think she thought she was being kind and polite the whole time she was ordering me around and lecturing me about stuff. But what do I know?

I'll give you an example: from the very first moment she walked in the door she was sniffing and literally turning up her nose at everything in the room. "This hotel does not have such a good reputation," she told me (again in fairness, I admit her English was exceptionally good--'reputation' is a hard word for any foreigner to use). "I would not stay here." Great. Who asked you to? But then five minutes later she was all like, "You must see the bar at the top of the hotel tower. It is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Helsinki." And she sounded proud of that! Go figure.

A beer was pretty much the last thing on earth I was in the mood for at that moment--it was mid-afternoon their time there (I think), and my tummy was still sore and way grumbly after that long vomiting sleigh-ride across the Atlantic. But the bar was kind of cool and it perked me up just being there, like I'd wandered into a spy movie or something. You know, like you're a Bond Girl and the canned music is your own private soundtrack. And for Finns, even priggish chicks like Riita, a beer is like a Perrier water or something at any time of day. They don't even view it as part of their serious drinking, which they have all kinds of Finnish words for the various stages of, which starts later in the evening and involves all kinds of social events and the types of drinks that are appropriate to them. As far as I can make out, the typical Finnish drinking binge is basically a marathon athletic event punctuated by visits to the sauna--the trick is to spin your drinking out for as long as possible without socially disgracing yourself, which would involve puking and passing out prematurely or drinking vodka instead of aquavit at a funeral toast or punching (or kissing) the wrong person or gender or something, so that you are actually able to fall into your own or someone else's bed near dawn under your own power. And if you make a big business deal or hook up with someone or get pregnant while you're in this sort of twilight-bombed out of your mind state, so much the better. You don't remember it, and odds are nobody else will either, since they were all in the same state you were. So you all still have your dignity. And if all this keeps happening enough times with the same person, then you either start a new political party or high-tech company together or you get married or go gay, whichever is most appropriate. At least this is my explanation for Finnish culture, but I don't pretend to be an expert on the basis of a few short weeks.

I guess this sounds like I'm some kind of prude on the subject of alcohol, but I'm totally not. Actually, I like drinking a lot, and I'm in favor of legalizing drugs, too. I think most laws about what people do in their private lives are ridiculous and sometimes even evil (these were called 'sumptuary laws' historically). It's just that occasionally you find yourself in a place where people are culturally so extreme about something that it makes you look like a Puritan or whatever. If the Finns were as into sex as they are into drinking, for example, there would be little outdoor 'shagging booths' every ten yards or so, 'shagging bars' on every street corner (and even in gas-stations!), imported shagging techniques from all over the world, and affectionate Finnish words for every conceivable position and combination. And of course, they'd tax the hell out it.

So the beer definitely had a good effect on Riita, who lightened up to the point where we were even able to discuss Mythology, you know, the reason I was actually there in the first place. I guess I'd hoped she might be an expert on--or even have an interest in--the Kalevala, but no such luck. "We studied it in high school, but no one takes such stories seriously these days," she sniffed. "It is considered old and boring. I think there is a Kalle Anka Kalevala as a comic book for children now." 'Kalle Anka' is 'Donald Duck' in Finnish, believe it or not. So what was Riita into? You guessed it: Women's Studies. The Mater Dea. Ma ma. So while we were busy chatting I noticed a very familiar silhouette on a bar-stool in front of us. Someone had dragged Safe-T-Man, you know, the inflatable dummy from the plane, into the Torni Bar, strapped him to a stool, and stuck a glass full of some disgusting-looking liquid in front of him. And maybe it was my loneliness or maybe it was poor dumb Riita's boring convo, but I was actually pretty glad to see him. Or maybe it was the Hawaiian shirt!

So I was all like, 'Hi, Mr Likkanen! [I almost said 'Aloha'] Remember me from the plane? Would you like to join us? This is Riita Koivisto from the University--she's taking good care of me." And then she went all strange again, trashing the bar and saying how much it sucked. He just stared at the two of us with an absolutely inscrutable expression--I couldn't tell whether he was about to ask us to pose in the nude for his 'Camera Ca-rub' (as a Japanese tourist had done to me a few days before in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York) or whether he found us really irritating like a couple of children and wanted us, as Jo would say, to 'just sod off!' And I definitely caught the vibe that Riita couldn't stand him at all, for whatever weird personal reason of her own, maybe his age or something. So this had the perverse effect of making me be on his side instead. After all, he was Finnish, he had just come back to the land of his birth, and yet here he was all alone in a tourist hotel bar getting drunk. What was up with that? Obviously, he was pretty lonely, too.

"We're mostly here for the view," I said, loyally defending the hotel. Riita had brought me along a little 'Lonely Planet' guidebook as a present (or a loan, I couldn't tell which from the way she offered it--this, too, was typical of her), so I showed him the page that had a pic of it. "Apparently, you have to go to the Lady's Restroom and look out the window to get the best view." And I'm telling you the absolute truth. What you do is get in line and then shuffle in and cram yourselves into a toilet stall and peer through the open window in order to see what is sort of the 'Empire State Building' view of Helsinki--from all of 16 storeys high or something! I kid you not. Below you (more or less) is the whole city, looking a little like Rostock or Kiel or Duluth, except more Russian, all the green-copper spires and roof-tops and grey-stone squares and streets and steel tram-lines and muddy brown bays and inlets looking sort of stoned and sleepy under the blazing gold afternoon sun. It's no wonder the Finns like to stay drunk all the time--they're just echoing nature, really. So one of us, Riita or me, I can't remember who, suggested a visit to the old Harbor Market Square (also in the guidebook), and the other of us, most likely me, invited Safe-T-Man along. You know, just to be polite, like when you invite some grouchy old neighbor to your noisy party. But much to my surprise, he said yes. So off the three of us went.

When we got down to the street, we turned left onto the Esplanade, which is like the biggest and most famous street in Helsinki ('Esplanadi' in Finnish). In fact, it's so big, it's actually two streets, North Esplanadi and South Esplanadi with a sort of park in between filled with some seriously ugly statues. Though to be fair, I really don't like statues, period. They always remind me of decomposing corpses. I'm sure these were very nice and historical if only I were capable of appreciating them. And then right there in the middle of the Esplanade I found my own private Mecca, the Hope Muntz Highway to Heaven: the 'Moomin Shop'! My trip to Finland would now officially be worth it, whatever else happened.

Or so I thought at the time.

Continued here...

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