Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (95 page)

It is a seriousness devoid of all moral judgment. No hatred, no fear, no pain. Concentration, that is the right word. Such complete concentration can only be seen in the eyes of very small children or, sometimes, at a moment of ecstasy, in someone listening to music. Something that is left as proof of what is and what may persist. As if something crucial had been revealed to them.

It is the look of knowledge. The mouth half open. And the eyes, most of all – they are open. The vitreous humor is of course less clear than that of a living person. The eyes never blink and the mouth will not tell what they have seen. Still they keep the knowledge that no longer seeks or needs to be expressed. It will stay to trouble the onlooker as an inextinguishable question.

I would like to know what she looked at. Not at her murderer any more. What happened to her no longer interested her. It had already happened, was over at last. The worst had happened. All had happened that could happen to her on Earth.

What were her eyes in fact fixed on at that final moment, when all her muscles slackened from their frantic convulsion? On a branch of a tree, at the edge of the pit, that kept swaying gently, incessantly even as the hands closed around her throat? The wind, forever roaming the Earth, brushed the tops of the bushes as well as both their foreheads. “Still, the moor-wind remains . . . ”

Where she was dumped and hidden, whence she was carried, the first snow now falls. The rusty tracks, the car tires, the oil containers will soon be covered under the humble forms of the snowdrifts. The armchair on the tracks will get a luminous cushion. How unresisting and at the same time irresistible is the ongoing snowfall. The meadow fescues, which yellowed and flattened under her ravaged corpse, are coated in snowflakes. When they rise again in the spring, no trace of the shape of her body will be visible.

Queen, where did you go?

Translated by Vivii Hyvönen

TO SLEEP, TO DIE

Extracts from the novel
Unelmakuolema

(
Dreamdeath
, Teos,
2004
)

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

In
Dreamdeath
(
Unelmakuolema
, 2004), Leena Krohn provides her own take on utopias and dystopias. In the future, the law has been changed so that people can choose their own perfect death. Some decide to make an artwork of their own death while others choose less ostentatious (and expensive) displays. The experience is meant to take any stigma and any discomfort out of the equation. But how does this effect what it means to be human? Characters from prior novels such as the doctor Umbra and Dr. Fakelove from Krohn’s novel
Pereat Mundus
reappear in
Dreamdeath
as well.

To Sleep, To Die

Who would not like to cheat the Grim Reaper? Ways are known, of course, both scientific and non-scientific, but all of them are uncertain and temporary. Except for the simplest: to get there first oneself.

The refinement of this idea was Dreamdeath’s business idea. ‘Dreamdeath – because you deserve it!’ went Dreamdeath’s slogan.

The Dreamdeath home offered those who wished it the means to the most pleasant, even luxurious realisation of an autonomic death in an atmosphere of moral approval, against a suitable fee. At Dreamdeath the client himself decided when and in what conditions he would leave his mortal clay.

Dreamdeath did not employ the term ‘suicide’; its place was taken by ‘event’ or ‘project’. It was a tamed, timed, extremely refined phenomenon, purged of everything unexpected.

The Omega Foundation had founded Dreamdeath in the teens, after a change in legislation. At that point suicide was recognised as an essential human right which must not be stripped from citizens. The foundation was the first in the country to trademark a self-chosen and autonomic death.

If a person can choose his toothpaste from among thirty-six different brands, it would surely be unreasonable if he could not choose his own moment of departure, its place and manner.

Dreamdeath considered one of its spiritual fathers to have been Dr Glas, who wrote more than a hundred years before: ‘The day is coming, and it must come, when the right to die will be recognised as a much more essential and inalienable human right than the right to place a voting slip in a ballot box.’

There were, however, those who were so determined that they wished to carry out their last act themselves and alone, those who would not for anything have sought out Dreamdeath or who could not afford it. But was Dreamdeath’s offices and website warned, considerable risks and possibilities of failure were associated with private attempts.

There were indispensable advantages associated with fitness for death. At Dreamdeath, there was no need to fear the intervention of compassionate nearest and dearest or the failure of the method. Here, the individual’s right of self-determination was honoured. Ease and freedom from disturbance were guaranteed.

A quality death, a gourmet death, had from the beginning been the institute’s aim. Dreamdeath did not pursue old or terminally ill people as clients, people whose time was already close to its end. No, ordinary terminal care was for them.

Dreamdeath’s product idea was aimed above all at healthy people who for one reason or another were tired of their lives. Some spoke of a rational, carefully chosen death. Others wanted to make their death a work of art, or were already bored of other extreme experiences. Those who did not control their lives wished to control their deaths.

Dreamdeath already had offices in many cities. For the capital’s Dreamdeath centre, ‘home’ was altogether too modest an appellation. The centre had, through the years, developed into a highly individual area of the city. In Dreamdeath’s little square, which locals, for one reason or another, called the Brain Square, one could sit in the sunshine or among the tall rhododendron bushes admiring a glass sculpture in which blood, not water, circulated. It took the form of an apeiron and its name was ‘The infinity of life’.

Before the ‘event’, one could also spend time in Dreamdeath’s well-equipped mediatheque, or, if one was still sufficiently hungry, glance at the admirably long menu of a Bykovian, Kungho, Tainaronian or even Lastrupian restaurant. General athletics competitions and championship sporting events were held on the Dreamdeath sports fields. It was, after all, the dream of many an armchair sportsman to expire in the grandstand, supporting his favourite team to his dying breath.

The cinema showed, according to the wishes of clients, films in whose company they made the shift to eternity,
Casablanca
or
Vertigo
or
Wild Strawberries.
Those who wished it were given a sufficiently strong dayma dose in a Coca-Cola mug. Thus, at the end of the showing, a few people always remained motionless in their seats, their heads toppling against their chests. When the rest of the audience had left, a sensitive group of Dreamdeath workers arrived.

The main street led to the main building, whose concrete architecture would not be, in the opinion of experts, a positive addition to any city. Locals called it the Bunker or, on account of its crooked tower, the Jib.

But not just anyone could wander there freely. Identity was checked at the gate using not just one but two bio-identifiers, and the services were paid for in advance. The area was fenced and designed for paying clients only, and for those who accompanied them and who received a special pass. This too awoke curiosity and spread Dreamdeath’s fame.

Here, the aim was to transform the fear of death into a thirst for death. Dreamdeath’s well-trained product guides liked to make reference to Freud’s old dogma of the death instinct. They had also learned suitable quotations from Marcus Aurelius, Hume and Schopenhauer.

Phrases from Pliny were also popular: ‘Bid death welcome, for Nature herself wishes it’, or: ‘Among those blessings that Nature itself offers, there is none greater than the opportunity to die.’

The range of services was wide and the prices correspondingly varied. There was the savings line, the express line and the so-called SloBea line, which meant Slow and Beautiful (and Expensive).

For those without resources, the social services could, in response to an application, grant death support for the cheapest possible Dreamdeath. This involved a small sleeping tube for two hours, a sauna, a double hamburger and, of course, dayma.

Special offers that changed every month were popular, and special requests were accommodated as far as possible. The options and alternatives were endless. Religious convictions were taken into account, whatever the church, sect or cult they represented. Moonies and de Sadeists, Unitarians and Universalists, pagans and voodooists all received equally attentive service.

Nobody stayed at Dreamdeath for long. Most people lingered for just a day, others for a couple of hours, and those who stayed for the longest departed after a week at the longest.

Dreamdeath promised its clients a great deal. The aim was to combine enjoyment and death with such sensitivity that the client did not need to notice where enjoyment ended and death began.

In the popular erotic bungalow, the moment of death and orgasm could, at the client’s requests, be synchronised. The client could also choose the S/M line and whatever toys he or she wished: whips, studded belts, stiletto heels, ropes, dildos, rubber virgins . . . A partner could be chosen from specialist workers if the client did not bring his own partner, spouse, lover or prostitute. The support staff were also trained in the popular strangling technique, but most clients nevertheless chose Lucia’s sweet evening drink, dayma. It was claimed that before it took its final effect it produced colourful dreams, that its drinkers could see strange landscapes and hear music that no one else had ever heard.

Fear of the Dark

Children are afraid of the dark, and children are right. They are persuaded that all night means is the temporary absence of colours and light. But in fact it is the other way round: what is momentary is the day. Sunshine, colours and sounds are special cases, they are part of an exceptional state of being.

Day has its hours, its timetable and its program, but night is without measure or quantity. Its moments are ruled by the unpredictable and the formless. Day is small, localised and limited, but night is timeless and infinite.

Such thoughts moved through Lucia’s mind at night as she lay awake. She thought them both when she was at work in the city hospital or at Dreamdeath, and when she was waiting in vain for sleep in her own bed.

Lucia did not speak about them to other people, her nocturnal thoughts. The night, too, was silent. Words and speech belong to the waking world. The gifts of night are dreams and visions.

Lucia, a slim and already grey woman, was an anaesthetist. Of the medical staff, it was she who with greatest certainty alleviated suffering and pain, stunned restlessness with languor, calmed suffering with the nectar of dreamless sleep. She if anyone knew that, despite fear, no one could for long resist the call of night and infinity.

Lucia’s working week was divided between three different institutions.

At the city hospital, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, she anaesthetised people who were waiting for surgical operations: the removal of a breast or womb, an appendix or a gallstone, the mending of a hernia or varicose veins, a Caesarian section or an abortion . . . Sometimes Lucia was asked to induce unconsciousness that would last for weeks in patients whose brains had been damaged in a car accident or who had been the victims of cruel violence.

Two days a week, on Mondays and Tuesdays, Lucia held consultations at Dreamdeath, an institution in which people who wished to die were helped over the last threshold.

Every Friday she hurried to the Freezer. That was the locals’ name for Posterus, the cryonics institute. There, newly dead were deep-frozen in order that, when conditions were favourable, they could be awoken to new life.

Lucia served Hypnos, the god of sleep, who could transform himself into a bird and who gave Endymion the gift of sleeping with his eyes open.

But Lucia, the bringer of sleep, could not herself sleep, even with her eyes shut. Perhaps it was as it should be: when others sleep, there must be one person, after all, who will stay awake and keep guard.

Lucia, the sleep-inducer, the Sandwoman, lulled her patients into night and infinity. From time to time, if Lucia had a moment to linger by the bedside and if no one else was present, she might hum her patient a line or two from a lullaby. Almost as if to herself, Lucia whispered: Golden slumbers or Now it’s time to say goodnight or Lulla lullay.

She sang to those who would wake in the morning, to those who would soon close their eyes for the last time and even to those who were already dead, whose blood had been drained away and who were awaiting another opportunity in liquid nitrogen, in their titanium coffins.

Fit and Unfit for Death

Bureaucracy was something those who sought a dreamdeath could not avoid. Every applicant had to fill out a form and the foundation’s board of directors had to approve it before admission. The applicant had to prove that the decision to die was the result of thorough consideration and not a mere whim, notion or revenge on a former lover. The application form was, in fact, simple: proof consisted mainly of ticking boxes. But before the eventual realisation of the project, the applicant also had to attend a personal interview. One of the interviewers was Lucia.

Every adult who met certain minimal requirements had, since the change in legislation, the right to a dreamdeath, whatever the state of his physical health.

Adulthood, at Dreamdeath, nevertheless meant twenty-five years of age. Younger people, it was believed by Dreamdeath’s board, might rush into death too lightly. They might make unconsidered decisions if a boyfriend or girlfriend cheated on them, if an entrance exam or a job interview went wrong, if someone called them gay, fat or a whore on the street . . .