Antti Tuomainen - The Healer

“Of course I do.”

“Six and a half years.”

“I’m surprised. You remembered.”

“Of course I remember.”

She drinks her tea. It’s cooled a little, and she sips it normally now.

“The best years of my life,” I say.

“These years?”

“Yes,” I answer. “The last six and a half years.”

“Same here.”

She chases the bits of ginger in her cup with her spoon, they try to escape, and she quickly outflanks them. Finally gathering a sufficient quantity of ginger, she laps it up. I listen as she chews the raw ginger in her mouth. I love this woman so much—her personal, peculiar, even kooky habits.

“What would you change if you could?” she asks, once she’s eaten up her ginger and taken a gulp of tea.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I read a book once where anytime someone changed one little thing everything, the whole world, would change. And that may be true. In fact, I think it is true. If I were to change something, it might accidentally have an effect on everything else, might change things that I don’t want to change. I don’t want to change this.”

I give Johanna’s shoulder a squeeze. She’s wiry. The muscle under her shirt is a small, tight ball. She works out, and you can feel it when you touch her.

“You wouldn’t even change this day?” she asks.

“Not even this day.”

She puts her cup down on the coffee table, and the shadows take hold of it, its outlines softening, its contents invisible, completely dark.

“I could be wrong,” Johanna says.

“About what?”

“I used to think that if I got news like we got today the whole world would fall apart.”

“It’s not going to fall apart.”

“No, it’s not,” she says.

We sit in silence. Somewhere in the distance a door opens and closes. A brief blast and an echo, then it’s perfectly quiet again.

“What now?” Johanna asks.

“What do you mean?”

“From now on?” she says. “What’s next?”

“Nothing in particular, I guess,” I say. “The world keeps on turning. We love each other.”

“And then?”

“Like I said. The world keeps on turning. We love each other.”

She laughs.

“You’re quite a one-track guy.”

“You married me.”

“Yes, I did. And I was wrong.”

“How so?”

“I was wrong when I thought I needed something else to be happy.”

“What do you need?”

She walks two fingers up my arm. It feels pleasant, but it tickles a little. The dust motes’ dance has gone wild—a draft of air is moving across the room. It must have come from the open window in the kitchen.

“What do you need to be happy?” I ask again.

“This. You. Us.”

We sit in silence.

“Did you write today?” she asks.

“Every day,” I say. “That’s how I know where I’m going.”

“Anything good? In what you wrote?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t know?”

“Sometimes you know right off, sometimes not till later.”

“What about now?”

“A little later,” I say, “or maybe a lot later.”

Johanna turns toward me. She picks up her legs and lays them across my lap. Her feet are bare and her toes are almost cold, although it’s been one of the sunniest of summer days. I rub the soles of her feet and fold her toes in my hand. The little bundle of toes fits in my fist.

“I don’t want to say this,” she says after a moment.

“Don’t say it.”

“It’s already on its way.”

“I guess you have to, then.”

She waits a moment.

“What if something happens to one of us?”

“Something bad?” I ask. “Or something irrevocable?”

“Is there a difference?”

“There’s a big difference.”

“What if one of us dies?”

“The other one will still be alive.”

“No, really.”

From the open kitchen window you can hear someone ride their bicycle into the yard and put it on the bike rack. Then they lock the bike. The door of the building opens and closes.

“Life goes on,” I say.

“You always say life goes on.”

“Because it always does.”

“Except when it doesn’t.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Everything in its time, I guess.”

“If something happens to me,” she says, “I hope it doesn’t get you stuck. I hope that your life will go on.”

“Likewise,” I say.

The dust motes have less sunlight shining on their dance.

“But then,” she says, “if something happens to me and your life goes on in the wrong direction, I’ll definitely come and say something about it.”

“I knew there was a catch.”

“Naturally,” Johanna says. “There’s a catch.”

I rub her feet and watch her close her eyes. The soft, safe darkness surrounds us, and Johanna’s lips curl into a little smile. She’s about to fall asleep, or about to laugh.

“You’ve got to understand,” Elina said, but there was no conviction in her words. She didn’t believe them herself.

Friendship doesn’t end with a bang but with a flop, a letdown. I noticed Ahti wasn’t saying anything. I walked to the front door and pulled on my coat and shoes. For some reason, I turned around in the doorway. Ahti and Elina were standing at the other end of the entryway. They might as well have been standing in outer space.

What was there to say? Let’s treasure the memories of the good times, all the fun we had together? Let’s not let a small thing ruin a big thing, something that was complete and beautiful at one time? I went through the alternatives. I couldn’t think of anything better than “Good-bye.”

They say that if you don’t learn anything else in your life, at least learn to walk slow. I walked, deep in my thoughts, to the intersection that I’d been looking at on the surveillance video, without seeing anything.

The sun had set a while earlier and the sky was completely dark. The rain that had no beginning or end had lost its passion and power for a moment. The sky trickled little drops of rain here and there as if it had decided to scatter them, sow the earth with them, but then changed its mind and preferred to save its seed. I couldn’t be bothered with the cars honking their horns or the shoving pedestrians as I made my way down the street.

There was an acrid smell of burning plastic coming from somewhere, but I didn’t look around to see from where. The smell followed me for several minutes. I wiped the drops of rain from my face and realized I’d left my gloves somewhere. A disco across the street had its door open, and a steady, loud, menacing beat pulled people in. I looked at my watch, then looked at my phone. Time was passing. Johanna hadn’t called.

The last couple of days had been like one entire lifetime: voracious, crammed full, desperate. The buses and cars sped past with their motors yelling, and the exhaust left a dryness in my throat that I couldn’t swallow. I could taste gasoline and exhaust on the roof of my mouth, nauseating and provoking me. A group of youths came rushing toward me and I tried to move to avoid them but failed. I didn’t know what language they were yelling or why they were running. Two security guards ran after them. I understood their language. The young people kept running, although the guards shouted at them in Finnish to stop.

I reached the intersection, saw the camera bolted to the wall about ten meters up, and felt the raindrops falling on my eyelids. I looked in the direction the camera was pointed. I could see the intersection—both Urho Kekkosen katu and Fredrikinkatu. Hundreds of people, traffic, lights. All the things I’d been searching through trying to find Johanna.

Sometimes you don’t find something until you stop looking for it. That’s what Jaatinen had said.