James Thompson: Helsinki Blood

She was emotionally disturbed and had no business being on her own. I feared she would do herself harm. I was afraid she would take Anu and flee home to the States, maybe to Aspen, where she grew up. I spent much of my days concocting schemes to tempt her to come home. None of them were feasible.

My glass was almost empty. I contemplated whether to have more kossu or eat. I opened and closed my mouth. The pain was still riveting. More kossu .

A crash and sudden pain scared the living shit out of me. Broken glass showered the room. A half brick shattered the big window, flew across the room, struck the bookcase, and came to rest on the floor. Because my chair sits near the window, only good luck prevented me from being skewered by a large shard, but smaller fragments cut me in over a dozen places. My cat likes to sit on top of the chair, near my head. If he’d been there, he might have been killed.

I forced myself to stand up, to keep from getting blood on the chair, hobbled with my cane over to the foyer and put some sneakers on. I worried about Katt cutting his paws and locked him in the bedroom. I looked around, at a loss. Broken glass requires meticulous cleaning, which entails bending and squatting to the floor, and those movements were near impossible in my condition. No way I could get it all up.

I picked up the brick. “There are ten million ways you could die” was written on it with a black felt-tip marker. A reference to the ten million euros Milo, Sweetness and I had liberated from a faked blackmail scheme involving everyone from a psychotic billionaire to people in the highest levels of government.

I did the best I could, got a waste can from the kitchen, pushed the big shards into a pile with my good foot and put them in it. Because of my knee’s limited range of motion, I had to lie on one side, propped up on an elbow, and pick them up with one hand.

Then I took out the vacuum cleaner and made some awkward attempts at pushing it around. I used the attachment designed for such things and vacuumed my chair with thoroughness. After bungling long enough, although I still saw the glint of tiny fragments, almost all the glass was cleaned up, and I felt I’d done the best I could for the evening. I redid the floors with parquet when we bought the apartment. The glass left deep scars in it. That irritated me more than anything.

My cuts were all superficial and stopped bleeding on their own. Still, I covered the chair with an old blanket in case they opened up again. Exhausted, I got a beer and poured another kossu . I sat down and thought it through, narrowed down the suspects of who might be harassing me. There were too many to even make an educated guess.

Cleaning up the mess caused me to mistime the drug-alcohol combination. I fell asleep in my chair with the pizza uneaten.

Katt’s favorite spot, when I was in my armchair and in a reclining position, was to lie with his ass in my lap and his torso sprawled on my chest, staring up at me. He wanted to be petted, or for me to at least keep a hand on his back. He hated it when I slept. It interfered with his receiving attention. When he could no longer stand the boredom, he woke me each morning by climbing to the top of the chair and used the back of my head and neck as a scratching post. I looked like a pack of small, angry rodents had mauled me. That morning was no different.

When he was convinced I was awake, he grew content and took up his second-favorite position. From atop the chair, he placed his front paws so that they hung over my shoulders, as if to choke me, nuzzled his head against my neck and napped. I considered teaching him to stop scratching me by doing what he hates worst, squirting him with a spray bottle of water, but couldn’t do it. After all, he’s my best friend. Besides, he’s too stupid and obstinate to learn much of anything.

I let Katt snooze for a few minutes, then got up, limped to the kitchen with the aid of my cane and made coffee. Then hobbled back the way I had come, went out to the balcony and smoked a couple cigarettes while I drank a cup. I wanted to maintain some semblance of dignity and refused to smoke inside and stink up my home, so I tended to chain-smoke when I went to the trouble of making it outside. I came back in and looked around. Tufts of cat fur and glass fragments were in corners and under furniture. The place needed a thorough cleaning. I couldn’t push the vacuum cleaner around well enough to get under furniture, in corners, against baseboards, the places where most of the dirt collects.

I needed to make a call and get the window replaced. I promised myself I would call a cleaning service and get the place back into shape again, too.

I turned the radio on and one of the big hits of the summer was playing. “Selva Paiva”-“Sober Day”-by Petri Nygard. The song celebrates the rapture of being shit drunk. Aggravated, I put on Johnny Cash, American Recordings .

I took my morning dope. It knocked the edge off my pain and made my muscles relax, and moving my jaw hurt less. I sucked down a protein drink for breakfast. I was trying not to drop any more weight. Katt sprawled across me while I browsed the daily newspaper. A key turned in the lock of the front door. I took my.45 Colt from under the seat cushion.

Most wives, after abandoning their husbands, would call before visiting and ring the door buzzer when they arrived. In strolled Kate, without warning, to find a pistol trained on her.

I put my Colt back in its customary place under the seat cushion. Kate pointed at it. “Are you out of your mind?” The look in her eyes was one unfamiliar to me.

“Events of late have made me cautious,” I said.

Kate killed a man out of necessity. She saved all our lives. The trauma of what she’d done, though, threw her into a dissociative stupor.

I never should have let Kate leave, but how was I to stop her? Maybe I could have requested that her psychiatrist institutionalize her for a time. Leaving home soon after a psychological breakdown might have warranted it, but the shock of watching her walk out the door rendered me incapable of action. Afterward, for a while, she was distant, uncommunicative, but seemed stable enough. I often asked her to come home. She never refused, just said she wasn’t ready for that, needed some time alone to think. I could accept that, it was reasonable.

When she started sliding downhill, I didn’t see it for what it was: a headlong plunge into post-traumatic stress disorder. She started calling, often late at night. Sometimes she would scream at me for ruining her life. Sometimes she cried and begged forgiveness. Either way, I told her I loved her and asked her to come home. And she did, every third or fourth day, so I could see Anu. The first couple times she sat, often wordless, for an hour or two, while I doted on our child. The third time, she was unresponsive when I spoke to her. She put her arms around me and cried for a long time before she left.

The fourth time was bad. When you know someone really well, they don’t have to speak or even move. Their eyes will tell you everything. The look in Kate’s eyes told me she was in trouble. She had called the night before, at two in the morning. She didn’t speak when I tried to get her to explain why she was so upset. She seemed unable to articulate words other than “I’m sorry.” I listened to her bawl for over an hour, and then she hung up without saying good-bye or good night. This scared me. I tried to call her back. Her phone was switched off. When she showed up the next day, she had found her voice again.

Anu was in her pram. Kate parked it in front of me, placed an overstuffed bag of her things beside it, then gave our apartment an inspection walk-through, as I would a crime scene. The kossu and beer I hadn’t finished before I fell asleep the night before were on the table beside my chair. As luck would have it, the song “Delia’s Gone,” about murdering a lover, was playing at low volume. The booze and music didn’t make a good setting.