Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

The second Jarmo's fingertips contact her gown, the angel begins speaking to him without moving her lips, explaining, perhaps, explaining or describing, traveling with him without stirring, and yet her soliloquy is lost on the boy, for he misunderstands every word she utters, replacing each syllable with another that starts with the same letter of the alphabet but appears slightly earlier in the lexicon. So all he can think of as he removes his hand from her shoulder is the chatter of coins falling from one of his palms into the other. He sees Senate Square in the sunny pith of Helsinki, a cobblestone vastness surrounded by orderly Empire-yellow and white nineteenth-century Russian architecture, the expansive staircase leading up to the cathedral, the statue of Tsar Alexander II, the man who gave Finland back its language from the Swedes, rising in the middle of it all. Near the entrance to the university buildings, he sees a large iron-barred structure reminiscent of an ornate Chinese birdcage. It houses a sleeping angel. Jarmo is collecting money in the black booth out front from the long line of polite patrons, and, with the efficiency of an adding machine, Sami retracts the black curtain covering the structure to reveal a peep hole through which each patron may behold this miracle for exactly fifteen seconds, then he drops the heavy folds back into place.

It seems to Sami as if the angel were whispering to him from the center of his brain, the sound of her voice smelling brownish red like cinnamon at Christmas. Yet somehow he also misunderstands every word she utters, in this case replacing each syllable with another that starts with the same letter of the alphabet but appears slightly later in the lexicon. In the current version, the angel asks for the boys' help to effect her return to heaven, from which she was cast out accidentally when God forgot to dream her for the briefest of instants because He was so busy just then dreaming myriad British soldiers calling out His name in desperation and despair as they expired on the battlefields of the Boer War. If the boys were merely to carry her to the top of the hill on the far side of the lake, she would be near enough home to take flight and reenter God's imagination in the time it takes to think of a word in a foreign language you knew very well three hours ago but has momentarily slipped your mind. As their reward, Sami is certain she told him (although nothing could be farther from the truth), the angel is prepared to tell each boy about what the last seven minutes of his life will feel like, and precisely how death will smell a temporal flitter before she descends upon him in a mad whirl of black rags and ululation.

Perhaps, next, the same slightly out-of-focus afternoon. Perhaps a different one. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell with anything approaching conviction.

The lake a powdery gray extension of the powdery gray sky.

In the marshy field near a deserted road, two brothers arguing about the fate of a wounded angel.

They could be rich, Jarmo is saying. Think about it, Sami. This young, and flush for life. All they have to do is carry her back to their farm, lock her in the potato cellar outside the barn, and prepare the wagon and horses for the long ride to Helsinki. Their parents would never need to work again. And, when the capital grew tired of their present, they could move her to Turku, then Tampere, then Oulu. And, when Finland finally grew tired of it, they could meander south through Europe — Estonia to Latvia, Latvia to Lithuania, Lithuania to Poland, and so on, ending up on the white coasts of Greece. There every day would be the same day. Sleep late, display their angel to the townspeople, eat slick mollusks and sip red wine beneath colorful umbrellas on verandas overlooking the bloody sea while the sun turned the sky the color of salmon meat. Sami shaking his head side to side. Sami not meeting his older brother's eyes. Sami saying no.

No, Sami is saying. That isn't right. The angel isn't theirs to use like some wooden spoon. She is beautiful and pure and wounded and she needs their assistance just like any traveler hurt along the side of the road. If you were lost and injured, Sami is saying, quietly, understated but firm, black hat crumpled to his chest in his grimy knuckled fists, wouldn't you want someone to come to your aid, Jarmo, give you a hand so you could find your way back to where you knew you belonged? Nothing could be simpler. All the boys would have to do is detour from their present course a single hour, two at most, in order to bring her to the crest of that hill over there. Surely it would take God only a matter of seconds to notice her, remember what He had forgotten, and in His infinite goodness commence to dream her once again. After that, everything would return to how it should be. All the bits of their world would settle back into place the way all the numbers in a complicated math problem resolve into its sum. While it is true their parents would never be rich, they would also never know that they might have avoided poverty, and thus they would never find themselves dispirited. They would ask the boys a few questions when the brothers returned late. This is to be expected. But it would be easy enough to fabricate an excuse or two. And then? That night, and on all future nights, the boys would be able to sleep profoundly, unimpeded by fears of visitations from their grandfather's skeleton. Equally important, they would always carry within them the knowledge of death's scent, and therefore would always be in a position to stay on guard against her cacophonous arrival.

Two brothers silently staring at each other, figuring.

No more talk after that, no more thoughts of fish soup or ham, no more rocks kicked along the road or lobbed far into the meadow. Only this: only two boys moving slowly and heavily along their barren route, improvised stretcher between them. A wounded angel hunching forward on the seat in the middle, head lowered, limp lilies of the valley clutched in her right hand. The hem of her white gown sweeps the packed dirt below her, yet somehow remains faultless.

Jarmo turning his solemn face toward the viewer — toward you, me. Accusing. Because he is exhausted. Because he is exhausted and frightened and angry.

Because he and his brother have been at this for years now.

It all seemed effortless in the beginning. They helped their charge onto the stretcher, carefully lifted the stretcher into the air. The wounded angel weighed virtually nothing. The sole mass the boys felt between them was that of the branches forming their litter. Sami and Jarmo strode rapidly for the first hour, the former contemplating the relationship and moral implications of the angel's weight to his own, the latter imagining the heat radiating from twinkling sand on southern beaches. Only gradually did it dawn on them they were making no progress. When the younger raised his head to check their bearings, he realized the landscape around them, their position with respect to it, hadn't changed in the least. Everything was precisely where it had been earlier: meadow to the right, hills across the lake, dirt road slicing their perspective in two. Startled, he shot an anxious look back at his brother, only to discover Jarmo surveying their environs grimly, deep into the task of absorbing the same dismal facts about their circumstances. They were suddenly lost without being lost, in need of assistance without there seeming to be anything whatsoever out of the ordinary.

It becomes night becomes day becomes night, each time they blink.

Sometimes they wake to find it is snowing heavily. The lake vanishes in a boil of flakes. Sometimes they wake to find the mid-summer sun brutalizing the arid countryside all the way to the dusty apricot horizon. Without warning, the voluminous bluegreen clouds of northern lights churn above them. Without warning, the boys are freezing. Their skin is oily with perspiration. It is raining. They discover themselves slipping and stumbling with their precious cargo through the mud. No. Autumnal reds and yellows rust the low foliage around them. No. It is a perfect spring dawn, only there are no birds anywhere, no signs of life far as the eye can see.