Troll: A Love Story (8 page)

“I’d think your uncle is a bit late with his animal: it’s either got better by itself by now, or otherwise your uncle may have got some new but not particularly fine-quality wolverine mittens.”

Angel closes his eyes slowly, as if he were trying with all his might to control himself.

“If you were treating roundworms, what would you do?”

“I’d administer an anthelmintic.”

Angel’s lips move. He mouths the word silently: an . . . thel . . . MIN . . . tic . . . an . . . thel . . . MIN . . . tic. Memorizing it. I’ve no idea what he’s going to do with the knowledge. Is he going to rush off and save his uncle’s illegal wolverine? But anyway I add fuel to the fire.

“Mebendazole is the commercial form. It’s a wonderful medicament. In practice it works on all animals. You can employ it just as well with reindeer and cattle as with the large predators.”

Angel’s eyes blaze up with interest. I smile.

“Unfortunately, you can’t get it from a pharmacist.”

He swallows the bait and takes the hook, which will give me two different catches. And of those two, satisfying my curiosity is almost as pleasurable as satisfying my lust.

ANGEL

Another thing I’ve managed to extract from Spider is that this anthelmintic takes two or three weeks to take effect and that the extermination of the parasite’s no big deal: the animal doesn’t, thank God, throw up or excrete strings of worms wriggling in a pool of bile but little by little gets better. He also drops the hint in passing that it’s a common type of medicine he himself always keeps on hand.

Lightly brushing Dr. Spiderman’s thighs with my fingertips, I breathe inviting little sighs toward him and let my eyes dissolve in his. I say that I’ve been longing for him.

And, feverishly, I’m thinking how I can get him to make love at his office and not at his home? It’s not beyond possibility: we’ve done it before, on the gaudy sofa in his waiting room. Remembering that helps—and instantly it tells me which string to pull.

“Do you still remember our first time?”

Spiderman nods, with a strange look in his eyes.

“That creaky waiting-room sofa, with dog hairs everywhere. You said the cleaner wouldn’t be there till Sunday . . . And then you brought out that bizarre collar! A restraining collar!”

I laugh boisterously, far more than the unforgettably absurd event deserves.

“I was still picking those dog hairs off my underpants all the next week. And the memory’s stayed with me.”

Spider gives a brief dry smile, but I can see he remembers, too, and well.

“I’d give almost anything for that same feeling again. Just that very feeling,” I say and lick my lips lightly and then sink my eyes bashfully in my beer mug.

DR. SPIDERMAN

Angel has forced me with a little affectionate flirting to show him my office, as if it were something he’d not seen before, something incredible and wonderful. He’s sweetly inquisitive and boyish and wants to see everything, wants to know everything, wants me to open all the doors, and bends to kiss me at exactly the moment when I should be locking the medicine cabinet.

ANGEL

I feel like Buster Keaton as I sneak through the dark in my boxer shorts. They’re the ones I bought in London, literally “boxers,” covered with pictures of those wrinkle-faced, flop-eared, soft-eyed dogs that resemble a certain canine-faced figure currently lying prone in a deep sleep on the shabby sofa. Before I set off for the Café Bongo I remembered they were Spider’s favorite under-pants—when I first took my jeans off for him at this very spot, they sparked off that nervous strangled but in its own way sexy giggle that is his trademark. I’m cursing that I don’t have Pessi’s eyes. I can’t even find the door from the waiting room to the examination room without bumping my toes on the doorsill, making my eyes flash red amoeba-like flecks for a moment. The medicine cabinet is dimly outlined at the other end of the room, looking like a big white whale mounted on the wall.

I open the door and the hinges creak, making me nearly wet my pants. My heart tries to jump out of my skin. I freeze. I’m an antique statue, so just carry on with your dream, my dear Spider. I know where the anthelmintic is, because, brimming over with breathless enthusiasm, I asked him about everything possible, including whether the medicines were arranged from A to Z or according to their use.

The package is already in my hand when I hear a voice behind me.

“The bathroom isn’t that way.”

If my pulse was fast, it now bursts into a gallop, nearly suffocating me. I try to keep my back to him and stuff the package in my boxers. It mustn’t slip down through the legholes, so I’m forced to squeeze the square cardboard box into the fork of my groin, with my balls wedging it in. I turn and try to behave naturally.

“Oh yes, it was that other door.”

“Henrik Tikkanen’s writer-friend, Benedict Zilliacus, as I remember, once peed into a blue-painted basketwork chair because he thought it was the sea,” Spider reports from the darkness in his dry voice. He’s still on the sofa and won’t be able to see any more of me in the darkness than my faintly visible pale-colored doggie-pants.

I try to walk to the bathroom without my gait betraying at every step that the excruciatingly sharp corners are poking into the soft flesh of my crotch. I don’t know how successful I was, but thank God my denim shirt’s over a chair back on the way there, and I snatch it up and take it with me, while trying feebly not to slip into an apelike shuffle. And soon the bathroom door is shut behind me—and my denim shirt has pockets.

ECKE

Drowning one’s sorrows is never a good idea, but anyway the fourth glass has come to my table, as if by itself, since Angel and Spiderman left. I’ve given two men the brush-off and turned off one eager raconteur and decide to decamp into the desolation of my own pad—after this fourth drink, of course, just as I did after the second and third—when someone asks if they can sit at my table.

There don’t seem to be any empty seats anywhere else, so my companion’s clearly forced to sit with me out of sheer necessity, not interest. As it is, that’s a pity, for a first glance suggests the guy’s agreeable goods: obviously smart, tall and broad-shouldered but nevertheless far from being an Atlas-type, with round glasses, mustache, a full well-tended beard, dark brown slightly curly hair, longish at the neck, and, of course, an earring. Agreeable goods? No, by God. A second and third look, and the guy’s the catch of the month.

We toss a few ideas around, and then he makes a move that catches me pants down: he asks if I’ve happened to see Angel. At first I’m completely bemused, as he’s using the first name Mikael, but then he uses the more usual Michelangelo, and, God, I come out in goose pimples when he says it. But after describing a few identifying features—fair curly hair, tall, eyes like pieces of sky—I recognize Angel. I let it out that I’ve seen him but say I don’t
know him except indirectly. He shot off a while ago, I add. I don’t go into more exact detail.

The guy introduces himself. He’s Martti something, an advertising man. What he wants Angel for is no big deal—no, naturally not, nor for any of us here. He’s been trying to reach him, to check up on how some assignment’s progressing, but Angel’s studio hasn’t replied, and he gets voice mail every time he tries Angel’s cell. Here he confides his wonder that Mikael doesn’t keep his cell on. A freelancer ought to be available twenty-four hours a day. And, with that in mind, he decided to see whether Mikael might perhaps be at his regular watering hole. The commission’s important, really important, otherwise he’d not pester Mikael—just wanted to find out how the project was going.

He’s completely overdoing it. He’s obviously had several already, and something in this picture stinks anyway. Martti’s not one of us, not at first glance, but I’ve seen these tottering-on-the-brink types before. This has to be the hetero that Angel dumped Spider for.

“So you know—Mikael—well,” I throw out. I’d almost said “Angel.”

Martti breaks out again into unnecessary explanations: They’re colleagues in a longish collaboration, which led to a closer acquaintance. I greedily pump him for info. Angel comes from somewhere in northern Ostrobothnia, actually almost in Lapland, moved to Tampere as a little kid, went to school there, then to the Lahti photography course, then came back here to work. He’s a well-known photographer, much in demand, and nowadays as a virtuoso photo creative, a true magician of the Mac, a Freehand fakir, and prophet of Photoshop.

Each word proves that Angel is designed for me, tailored for me, meant for me, and that this guy had better not intervene, no way, and therefore I tell Martti confidentially, and as if by the way, that Angel is keeping company with a veterinarian, has been keeping company with him for a long time, and seriously.

ANGEL

It’s night, and the phone’s ringing.

Pessi’s so sick he doesn’t even really perk up his ears, though the dark room’s filled with the piercing noise that goes right through you. At the sixth ring I pick up the receiver.

“Mikael.”

At the other end there’s a moment’s silence, and then a voice I know, and it’s as if someone had slit my belly open with a single slash and hurled iced water on to my hot intestines. Dr. Spiderman.

“I hope it’s not a collie.”

I can only stammer. “What?”

“That damned animal you stole my anthelmintic for. Listen. If it’s a collie, the Scottish sheepdog, some damn relative of Lassie, then it has a known central nervous anomaly. It’ll die from the anthelmintic.”

“It’s not a collie,” I say, and I could bite my tongue off. There’s the tiniest little snort of cold, soft laughter from Dr. Spiderman.

“So don’t get scared either, then, when our friends the parasites die and briskly secrete toxins.”

“Toxins?”

“The beast’ll show symptoms of poisoning, but they’ll definitely pass.”

I don’t know what to say. The anthelmintic package is a light patch on the corner of the table.

“And then one more thing, my Angel . . .”

My heart thumps limply. A criminal charge?

“You could easily have got a medicine to do the same thing from a pharmacist. It’s called Piperazine.”

DR. SPIDERMAN

Angel’s almost sobbing into the phone. The cold and furious fire of vengefulness that’s been burning in me begins to die down, turning to gray ash. I’m starting to feel tired and old and stupid. I’m in the same painful, exhausted state as when I was still married and had gone off the deep end with my young sons—lashing out at them and scolding them for mindless things they’d done. I’m just as exhausted and deflated and agonizingly conscious that nothing I’ve said has gone home, not even dented the surface. In their eyes, the lashings and scoldings weren’t legitimate punishments, educational discipline, but pure demonstrations of my malice—a bigger person’s arbitrary use of power and sheer badness—leaving me with nothing but the fear: can they love me any more after this?

Why am I calling in the middle of the night? Why didn’t I wait until the next time I saw Angel in the Café Bongo? Then I could have brought the theft of the medicine forward in the most compromising light, making it a merciless counterblow to the pain he’s caused, a delicious weapon, an instrument of power.

Because I remember. I’m remembering subliminally a certain other conversation of ours. And now I go cold in real earnest.

“Angel. Listen. If it has . . . if the animal has . . . intestinal parasites, there are bound to be external parasites as well. Fleas or lice, or at least their eggs. Get some Program tablets from the pet store.”

“Program.”

His voice shows he’s mechanically fixing the name in his memory.

“It’s easy to use, one a month is enough.” I notice with horror that my words are taking on the tone of a professional consultation. “No toxic reactions . . . it’s not even a poison. Just a contraceptive pill for fleas, it won’t kill the bugs, just prevent their eggs from hatching.” I give a silly laugh.

At the other end of the line there’s a long silence. Then I hear Angel’s voice.

“Thank you.”

Then again he’s silent for a long time.

“I don’t understand why you’re . . . telling me all this.”

“No reason.” It’s my turn to pause. Our conversation’s full of black holes that whole universes would fit into. Then I manage to say it:

“By the way, have you found out what trolls eat yet?”

ANGEL

When I bought a disposable syringe at the pharmacy, they looked at me as if I were a heroin addict.

LEEA VIRTANEN (ED.),
THE STOLEN GRANDMOTHER AND OTHER URBAN LEGENDS
, 1987

In the Tapanila district of Helsinki, a neigborhood of detached single-family homes, a mother had put her infant of less than one in its baby carriage for a nap. She pushed the carriage into the garden and kept an eye on it through the window, going out every now and then to see how the child was.