Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (35 page)

‘That’s sad,’ I say.

‘You don’t need to think of it like that,’ Håkan comments. ‘We cannot see x-creatures, but they can see us. They can take any object from us as easily as taking sweets from a child: a car, a book, a house – and to us it looks as if they disappear into thin air before our eyes.’

‘Oh dear,’ I say, and I begin to feel like yawning. ‘Whoever has seen anything like that?’

‘Oh, lots of people,’ says Håkan. ‘But they have no idea that x-creatures are behind it. X-creatures can see inside us. They can take our spleen, liver and brains.’

‘What is a spleen, anyway?’ I ask. ‘What does it do?’

‘That’s beside the point,’ Håkan says. ‘They can even take our heart, without leaving a scratch on the skin.’

‘It’s not true,’ I say. ‘I’ve certainly never heard of them taking anyone’s heart.’

‘You don’t read everything in the papers,’ Håkan says sharply. ‘Doctors have their professional discretion. They can change a right-hand glove into a left-hand glove. And vice versa. Knots that we make, even the tightest, can be undone in a moment in the hands of an x-object. They can take us away from ourselves, and x-creatures have taken many of the missing persons who are the subjects of notices in the papers.’

‘Why would they do such a thing?’ I ask.

‘Search me,’ Håkan says. ‘They need us for their own purposes. But what they might be, we would not understand, even if they wanted to explain it to us. And they do not even try, as little as we try to explain things to ants.’

‘I don’t think I like them very much,’ I say.

‘That’s not the point here,’ Håkan says, impatiently. ‘They have senses we have never even heard of. That’s why they also know a lot more than us.’

‘What kind of senses?’ I ask.

‘Good heavens,’ Håkan says. ‘If only you would listen! Didn’t I just say that no human being can understand them? How could I explain them to you? You don’t even know how you see and hear. They know more than us, and we cannot even ask them what. We don’t know what we can’t know.’

‘Have you ever met them?’ I want to know. I have often asked this question. I am still a little nervous. I am afraid that he will one day tell me that he has met them in person.

But once again, Håkan does not reply to the question. It is as if he had not heard it. But he wants me to understand his silence as an affirmative answer. I am happy with his silence; I did not expect more. But if I did not ask what I asked, Håkan would be disappointed.

‘What’s work to us is play to them,’ he says.

‘Can they play, too?’ I ask.

‘Why not?’ Håkan says. He lies with his hands behind his neck and looks at the street-lamp through the curtain. I know what he is going to say next.

‘What is impossible for us is simpler than simple for them. What is magic for us is everyday reality for them. What is supernatural for us is natural for them.’

‘I would like to meet one of them one day,’ I say suddenly, although in fact I am not at all sure about it. I shiver a little.

‘If he were to come up to you,’ Håkan says, ‘you would not recognise him. We are nothing in the eyes of the x-creatures. They pity us because we have so little of anything. A few dimensions and senses, a little understanding and a little knowledge.’

I begin once again to feel sorry for us humans. ‘It’s not fair that they know everything about us, but we hardly know anything about them,’ I say. ‘And I do not even believe that they know everything about us. No one can understand human beings unless they are human themselves.’

‘On the contrary,’ Håkan says. ‘We know more about fish than they do about themselves.’

‘But we do not know the most important thing, what it’s like to be a fish. And they shouldn’t feel sorry for human beings,’ I argue. ‘We know much more than they think.’

‘That’s what you think,’ Håkan says. ‘But we’re rather primitive creatures.’

‘We’re learning all the time,’ I say.

‘No one can learn new dimensions unless they are born to them,’ Håkan contests. ‘Human beings are what they are. They are born human and stay human. They watch us from afar, and we do not even know that they are watching us. Although sometimes we may have a strange feeling.’

‘Don’t you know, either?’ I ask.

‘I certainly do. I can sense their gaze. But soon they will go away and forget about us.’

Håkan falls silent, lies motionless, and we forget about them.

Individually Wrapped Cheese Slices

Håkan was reading a newspaper article that said: ‘What makes so many people so sure that aliens want to visit us? Why should species that are able to travel throughout the universe and make contact with much more intelligent species be interested in our company? For we cannot even leave our own solar system.’

Håkan decided to write a response. He had found many answers to these questions. But he had only just written: ‘Because we can offer . . . ’ when the doorbell rang. It was his brother.

‘What’s up with Operation Squirrel?’ his brother asked.

‘For the moment, nothing,’ Håkan said, a little irritably.

‘That’s what I thought,’ his brother said, and laughed.

Håkan was used to that kind of laughter. Håkan was a heretic. He had original opinions which his family and his friends did not understand, ideas which no one wanted to listen to in bars, points of view which were not acceptable at church or at the university. Operation Squirrel was one of his special hobbies, otherwise known as the Squirrel Revival Project.

The simplicity of life made Håkan feel dizzy. He looked at people and saw that they were vacuums inside a vacuum. Håkan believed that the world did not exist. It had not begun and would never end. Time did not exist, either. Like colours, tastes and sounds, time and space were also only apparent. They were not realities, they were only tricks of the mind which we used to try to explain and classify our experiences and perceptions.

Perceptions of what? Something about which we do not, and cannot, know a thing.

‘You never hear anything about it any more,’ his brother said.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ Håkan said.

Håkan believed that the concept of reality created by the mind was comparable to the quivering image of a television screen or, rather, the graphics generated by a computer. He was also convinced that basic physical concepts such as ‘mass’ and ‘acceleration’ were not real, but mathematical values created by the imagination, errors, as was gravity. In fact all the concepts of both classical and modern physics were based on error.

As a child he had had some unusual experiences. In the evenings, he had heard someone breathing as if asleep in his room, although he was there alone. It actually made him feel safe. Night after night Håkan fell asleep to that insensible and invisible peaceful breathing.

In the summer, Håkan spent a fortnight living with his father and brother. Sometimes his father took them on long cruises, sometimes he rented a cabin on the seashore. Once when, late on midsummer’s eve, they were rowing on the lake, he heard the beating of a large bird’s wings in the bright twilight.

Håkan was holding the tiller. He looked up to see the bird, but all he could see was blue, falling from the sky to the water’s surface. But now it was full of a sighing that proceeded from island to island, from the reeds to the open water and to the last glowing stripe of sunset. Håkan sought his own excitement in his father’s face, but his father was rowing with long, even strokes, lost in thought. Håkan realised that he was the only one to have heard the beating of the wings. That knowledge made him lonely.

And there was more, like the flash in the nocturnal shore-meadow, as if a searchlight had been switched on. He had been walking with his then girlfriend in the twilight of a summer’s evening, and beside the path was a tussock of grass.

‘Look!’ he said to the girl, touching the grass’s panicles.

Then they lit up, the entire meadow flared for a moment, bright as in the midday sun. Håkan looked behind him and saw a dazzling arc of light above the serrated edge of the forest which, as he watched, withdrew and disappeared once more into the night.

Once, in a weak moment, he told his brother of these experiences. His brother said that even healthy and balanced people can experience things that seem frightening and inexplicable, but they are simply the results of neural activity.

‘Just neural activity?’ Håkan said. ‘Hah!’

‘Not that I consider you to be healthy or balanced,’ his brother added. ‘Not after that squirrel business. Nothing you can say can surprise me any more after that. But you can be sure that there really is something that exists objectively, which is not at all dependent on ourselves. And something that exists only subjectively, and that is not true.’

‘Not true! Our entire universe is a result of neural activity,’ Håkan protested. ‘You think you live in the world. Wrong! You live in your mind, like everyone. The entire world is just a projection of our minds. You think everything can be explained! How idiotic!’

‘What do you mean by “our”?’

‘All you explain is things you have made up yourselves, not reality. The world
is
frightening, the world
is
inexplicable. We don’t even know whether it exists. And when it comes to the squirrel business . . . ’

‘Don’t ever mention it to me again,’ his brother said. ‘There has to be a limit.’

‘Forget the squirrel,’ Håkan said. ‘It was just an experiment.’

‘Absolutely,’ said his brother, with a half-smile.

The squirrel they were talking about had died in a car accident. Around it there had developed an extraordinary project, in which Håkan had, in fact, taken part only through the internet.

The aim of the project was to liberate the squirrel’s mind from the prison of its body, its small, graceful body, which had now been destroyed and cremated. The squirrel was to become a digital being.

The squirrel was found immediately after the accident. Its skull had been crushed, but its body temperature had hardly begun to fall. This offered good conditions for the group’s plans. The squirrel was immediately transferred to a cryogenic state: it was frozen. Later, an autopsy was carried out and the body was preserved in alcohol. Next, it was dried and mummified.

The mummified body was set on a conductive platform and given a 15,000-volt shock. This caused a convulsion and – so Håkan was told – brought the animus back into the body.

‘The animus?’ his brother asked.

‘You could call it the soul,’ Håkan said.

‘Why not,’ his brother said.

During the electric shock, the animal’s neural activity was monitored. The information gained was decoded and reorganised into an algorithm which was transferred into a memory space that had been reserved for it.

The mummified squirrel was ceremonially cremated in a wax-sealed sarcophagus. But the squirrel’s soul – so it was claimed – had already moved to the internet. The intention was to follow the process over the course of a year. Its current state was described on the Door homepage. To Håkan’s disappointment, no development was visible. The aim seemed to be slipping out of their hands.

‘When the Door is opened, the squirrel can go, if it wants to,’ Håkan said.

‘“If it wants”!’ his brother mocked.

‘Not long ago it was said that it was impossible to move faster than light. Now physicists and engineers are seriously talking about faster-than-light travel. Why should immortality be any different?’ Håkan asked.

‘It doesn’t fit the picture,’ his brother said.

‘Now, that I do understand,’ Håkan said. ‘Not your picture. You have cropped the picture to exclude reality.’

Like the other members of the group, Håkan believed that the body is an imperfect and miserable object. It is imprisoned in its time and place, and has become what it is for spatial and physiological reasons. It can never be updated, and it is very short-lived.

The mind, on the other hand, is a complex algorithm which can – if it is only given the opportunity – continue its existence outside the co-ordinates of time and space. All intelligence is of the same value and the same origin; there is no difference between artificial and natural intelligence.

And Håkan thought about the squirrel, any squirrel, the light daredevil of the forests whose leaps make a mockery of the force of gravity. He remembered the squirrel’s bright eyes, its lightning-fast reactions, its ballet in the sighing treetops. What a merry game its life seemed, and nevertheless it was a matter of constant toil and gambling, eking out a living at the mercy of winter and hunger. Was it free now?

Håkan wished the project’s squirrel immortality, digital or non-digital, wished from the bottom of his heart that it was still leaping somewhere, from branch to branch in the great forest of the world.

‘See you,’ his brother said.

And Håkan went on writing his response. ‘Because we can offer individually wrapped cheese slices,’ he wrote.

Think Again!

It had not been a good day. When Doctor Fakelove went to lunch, he noticed an advertisement that covered a whole wall, taped to the gable of the bank. It read, ‘THINK AGAIN!’

Fakelove stopped and stared at the notice, screwing up his eyes. It was a giant portrait, some kind of hologram; that was, he supposed, why it had captured his attention. The hologram was animated. Whose picture was it? It changed incessantly; first Fakelove seemed to recognise in it Comrade Stalin, then Hitler’s unnaturally large moustache. They were replaced by Pol Pot’s features, which melted and were then reconstituted as the face of Charles Manson, that demented American murderer.

Good heavens! Fakelove shivered. What on earth were they trying to advertise, he wondered, shaking his head. Cigarettes? Shoes? Computers? Chocolate bars? He couldn’t make sense of it.

When Fakelove returned, after some mediocre spaghetti, he was awaited by a new message from Håkan.

‘You would do well to take into account,’ Håkan wrote, ‘of the fact that we live on the threshold of great transformations. An enormous change will take place in the behaviour of oceans and oceanic currents in the near future. It is now unavoidable. The entire global climate will change radically. When the Gulf Stream no longer warms our latitudes, our region will become unfit for habitation. No human power or knowledge can halt this development, and to some extent, at least, we must blame ourselves for the disasters to come. On the other hand it must be admitted that sudden transformations such as these belong to the process of evolution. Bodies of land and water will change places. Europe and America will sink underwater, but perhaps Atlantis and Lemuria will rise again.’