Antti Tuomainen: The Healer

I nodded. I let my breathing level out and held the gun straight in front of me, although it was so heavy that my arm felt like it was going numb. I took a few short steps toward him. Not that I necessarily wanted to be any closer, but because moving hurt less and kept my legs from stiffening better than standing in one place.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Shoot me?”

I used all my willpower to calm my panting for a moment.

“If I have to,” I said, and greedily sucked in some air.

I was standing five or six meters away from him now. Another commuter train was already passing us on the right. It shook the ground and made my legs tremble. I could feel the deepest tones of the slamming sounds it made in my breastbone.

“Listen to yourself,” Tarkiainen said, and repeated my words. “‘If I have to.’”

His face was wet and shining, but otherwise appeared just as it did in the photos—confident and muscular, even handsome. There was an intelligent look in his eyes; his gaze was level, and his hair was short and modishly gelled. And there was nothing in his midlength coat, oxford shirt, jeans, and sneakers that my sense of style could find fault with. As he stood there on the railroad tracks, he looked like he could be posing for a fashion shoot: one of those spreads where they put pretty people in gritty environments—abandoned factories, old tradesmen’s shops, or, in this case, rail yards.

My breathing was leveling out, but my legs were twitching and the arm that held the gun had lost all feeling.

“You know what I’m looking for,” I said.

Tarkiainen didn’t say anything.

“Johanna,” I said, wiping the sweat and rain from my eyes with my free hand.

Tarkiainen’s expression remained unchanged.

“You seem to have already found Väntinen,” he said. I noticed he was looking at the gun in my hand. I glanced at it, too.

It looked the same as the gun that I’d left in Väntinen’s hand, the one lying in the dirt, sinking into the mud of Keskuspuisto.

I nodded and looked at Tarkiainen again.

“Hopefully he got what he deserved,” Tarkiainen said.

I nodded.

“A savage. A sick shit,” Tarkiainen said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Väntinen. As you know.”

“And you’re not?”

He shook his head.

“Even though you participated in murdering whole families?”

“Väntinen murdered them,” he said. “And he enjoyed it. I didn’t kill them. I just did what I had to.”

“And what was that?”

“There’s no need to pretend to be horrified or shocked,” he said. “You can be your own smart self and tell me you understand.” He paused a moment. “Because if you’re half as sharp as Johanna says you are, you do understand. You know very well that my purpose wasn’t to murder families. My purpose was to show that actions have consequences.”

“Tell that to those little children.”

“What are they going to miss?” he asked, and took a step sideways. I moved my hand, following him with the pistol. “Food running out, clean water running out, everything running out. They’re going to miss being slowly smothered, and eventually suffocated. What is there going to be that they would have got any pleasure from? Cannibalism? Plague? Everyone at war with everyone else on one gigantic trash heap?”

“Maybe they should have been allowed to decide that for themselves,” I said, moving the gun a little to the left again. Tarkiainen took a few small side steps toward the outermost rail. There was nowhere for him to run.

“That was the whole problem in the first place,” Tarkiainen said. His face was tense now, excited. “That everyone got to choose. Endlessly, with no limits. That’s why we’re here today. The two of us. You and I.”

Another commuter train clattered and rumbled past on the right. Someone had to eventually notice two men standing on the tracks. Where were all the guards and soldiers and police I’d seen in the station?

I glanced behind me. The station shone all the way through the rain, but it was likely no one there could see us in the darkness, half hidden by the rocks.

“Where’s Johanna?” I asked in frustration.

“What’s the rush? Let’s chat a little,” Tarkiainen said. A smile rose to his face. “Or you could always shoot me. Is that your plan? Or are you going to hand me over to the police?”

I remembered what Jaatinen had told me. The evidence had disappeared. Tarkiainen couldn’t be indicted, or even arrested. If I told him that, he would walk away triumphant. Then I would have no choice but to shoot him. I didn’t think I had that in me. On the other hand, I had heard that there’s something in all of us that’s ready to do almost anything.

“What do you want to chat about?” I asked, to win myself a few more seconds.

“Don’t you want to know what this is all about?”

“Väntinen told me. Greed. Business. Plus a taste for murder, I might add.”

Tarkiainen shook his head, displeased.

“None of those things,” he said decisively, as if we were on a talk show rather than standing on railroad tracks with a gun between us. “It’s about humanity, about what, in the end, is the right thing to do. Who do you think those murdered people were? Benefactors? Humanists? They were selfish, indifferent narcissists. They were the real murderers.”

A short, dry laugh erupted from behind his tight smile.

“There’s no other name for them. Even after they knew about the destruction they were causing, they kept doing it. They kept murdering—by lying. The worst thing is the deceit. All that talk about being friends of the environment, about ecology, respecting nature. As if electronics wrapped in plastic or cotton irrigated with drinking water could ever be anything but a detriment, the cause of the destruction, replacing something irreplaceable with a pile of trash.”

He took another step toward the outer rails. I followed him, stepping over one tie, then another. He continued talking, his voice rising: “You’re an intelligent guy. You don’t really believe that eating organic food or driving a hybrid car could solve the problem, do you? Or buying environmentally friendly products? What does that even mean? Why do marketers use Soviet-style language? That’s like talking about liberation through communism. Do you understand, Tapani? We’ve been living in a dictatorship. Shouldn’t dictators be opposed?”

He was standing next to the outermost track now. I had been listening and watching him without speaking. The ground started to tremble, and I glanced behind me. Another train had left the station. It would reach us within a minute.

“We’re in free fall, Tapani. All we can do now is what our heart tells us is right. Defend what is good, even if we know it’s too late.”

The train shook the earth. I could hear steel against steel, the wheels screeching against the tracks.

“I’m on the side of good, Tapani. There was a time when I strove for nothing less than saving the world. Now that the world can’t be saved, I have to make sure that good continues to live for as long as evil and selfishness does. Maybe justice isn’t winning, but it’s not completely gone.”

The train let out a long, low warning sound. I lifted the gun, not knowing why. The train was almost upon us. I took a couple of steps backward and looked in Tarkiainen’s direction again. He was standing in front of the train, in the middle of the tracks, lit up by its headlight. The low warning blast echoed from the rocks. Then the train passed just two meters from me and I couldn’t see him anymore. I lowered my gun.

When the train and all its cars had roared past and its noise had faded, I looked warily across the rail yard. I directed my gaze to where I had last seen Tarkiainen and prepared myself to see… what? Pieces of a person, the white bone, the varicolored internal organs?