JENKEM

BY PEKKA HILTUNEN

Töölö

Translated by Owen F. Witesman

There are six of us. We fill the dark street, walking in a line. People coming the other way turn immediately. They are avoiding us.

They are avoiding fear. We are fear.

We walk the breadth of the street. All of Töölö flinched when we appeared from that big building. It was one of those old, expensive Helsinki apartment buildings with all the fancy decorations on the walls where people like us don’t belong. Groups like ours never pile out of buildings like that, which is why the entire neighborhood recoiled.

We were leaving Little Dude’s apartment, which we had remodeled for him. Destroyed more like. His parents aren’t going to believe their eyes when they get home. Little Dude, a distant acquaintance of one of us, is edgy and insignificant. We used him. We convinced him to let us into his house for the night and then threw him out. Little Dude is so timid that he didn’t dare come back to chase us out.

Rapa looks at me. Rapa, there’s something too sharp in your eyes. You haven’t sniffed enough. What do you want? We have Red Sun, and we have cheap-ass Bostik from the store.

Tonight we have everything. We have the whole city.

Toppe is walking in the road. Come on back over here, Toppe. A car swerves to avoid him. Everyone swerves to avoid us.

Our voices echo off the walls and the windows of the shops. People returning from the bars downtown are still trickling through the neighborhood, but our shouts keep our path clear. The night separates out the loudest and most piercing shouts. Everyone can hear us coming half a mile away.

The six of us walk slowly. Take a good huff, boys.

We stagger and laugh. What a night.

* * *

My five boys. They were all sniffing glue together at the Little Dude’s place. He didn’t have much booze, but we had our own stuff with us. I didn’t touch any of it. Glue and solvents and gas are for kids. Tonight I’m not even going to drink very much. But my boys huffed and laughed and huffed some more. They even hit the butane right off the bat, which always gives them wings.

My five little flying demons. I can point to what I want and they bring it. They steal it. They rip it to shreds.

“We’ll choose someone soon,” I say.

It takes a minute for this idea to sink in. Rapa gets it first, but still a little late. The idea wakes them all up a bit.

Toppe lets out a shout. Howl, boys, howl.

When we’re on the move, sometimes we choose a victim. We take anyone, theoretically a random passerby, but in reality everything but random: we choose a person and take everything they have.

A mere facial expression is enough to justify the selection. Or clothes. Expensive clothes, and you’re done for.

We’ve stolen everything from so many people that I don’t remember all of them anymore. At first I remembered, but over time they’ve become a faceless mass; the excitement of grabbing someone dwindled a bit, and they’ve become anyone. Just people curled up on the ground after we were done with them, half-naked, robbed—beaten if they tried to resist.

Someone is standing on the other side of the roundabout. An old woman. She has stopped, afraid of us, waiting to see which direction we will take.

The woman tries not to look directly at us, something grotesque and crooked in her stance. We caused that.

Rapa looks at me, waiting for the word. Let the woman go.

I lead the boys onto Mechelin Street, and the woman disappears. It isn’t her turn, and there isn’t any fun in humiliating old women anyway. After a life on their knees, tasting of sorrow and suffering, I can never get the expression I want to see out of them.

I want to see the shock when a person realizes how random the continuation of his life really is. I can get that with a younger person, by putting them face-to-face with death.

When I choose the person who we’re going to accost tonight, my boys will howl and bray and laugh, and I won’t even have to raise my hand to take from that person their feeling of security. The boys will do it all.

My boys: Rapa, Toppe, Mika, Marko, and Liban. Brothers bound by booze and glue, comrades already serving their future jail sentences in their hearts. They have abandoned everything normal, everything ordinary. They are up-and-coming losers united by their shouts and euphoria and hate. Big, bad boys. Inconvenient questions that no one can answer, living and in the flesh.

I am not one of them. I’m too grown-up for that. I lied to the boys about my age. They think I am twenty-six, but really I’m thirty-three. They are just thirteen, fourteen. Rapa is sixteen. They are at the age when they can’t tell the difference between twenty-six and thirty-three; to them, everyone my age is simply an adult.

Except that I’m not like the other adults, not their fathers, not their brothers. I am the leader of their group.

Fly, boys, jump on top of the cars. Slash to pieces the lives of these rich mortals, my little demons, fly. Claw marks in the sides of their cars and make these middle-aged fools weep. See the row of men at dawn standing on this street crying for their cars.

Shriek, boys, shriek. Is anything more beautiful than the guttural, mindless shriek of youth?

The night hears as we approach.

* * *

Toppe finds something and calls, his voice hoarse, from the edge of a small park along the road. I don’t go to see what it is. The boys know without being told that they should bring their discoveries to me or tell me what there is to see.

A pile of dog shit. Standing over a mound of dog droppings, Toppe waves excitedly. In these parks and carefully swept streets there shouldn’t be anything like that, but there it is, a big pile of crap that is sending Toppe on a tear.

“Le’s make jenkem!”

Is anything more beautiful than the guttural mindlessness of youth?

“What’s ’at?” Marko asks.

They gather around the pile. I don’t. I keep my distance.

Jenkem is a drug made from excrement. The others’ eyes go wide as Rapa explains. In the slums of Lusaka they put human shit and piss in containers to ferment and then huff the end result.

“Where da fuck is Lusaka?” Marko asks.

“Zambia,” Rapa says.

His quick response surprises me. This is the first time in a long time anything has surprised me.

Rapa, when did you get so smart? Are you getting too smart maybe?

“Oh fuck!” Marko yells. “Is dat true?” he asks me.

I think for five seconds. “No.”

Jenkem is mostly just an urban legend. No one really uses it much anywhere. The guys who have tried snorting it are mostly just kids living in the projects in America looking for new limits to how hard they can go. I remember a time when tricks like this spread across the world slowly, but now everyone knows about them everywhere at once. The slums of Lusaka, excrement, drugs—the combination is heavy enough to stop anyone, anywhere in his tracks. People believe jenkem exists because they want to believe.

But I simply tell the boys jenkem doesn’t exist. Half of my position as their leader comes from what I decide to tell them and what I decide not to tell.

Rapa, you look unhappy. Relax.

Take a huff, boys. Not from that dog crap, from the plastic bags Toppe and Mika are carrying.

I start moving again, and the boys follow me.

* * *

On Rajasaari Street we feel the sea before it comes into view.

In the warmth of the early-morning hours, a wave of cooler air—nights this warm don’t come along very often, perhaps four or five times a summer. Nights when you could lie down and curl up with the warmth.

We have to be outside on a night like this.

Summer changes boys this age. When they spend two long months free from school, they go wild like dogs put out of the house. Their coats change. Their barks change. They don’t come up to be petted as quickly as before. These boys haven’t let anyone pet them for years, and after a summer like this, they are dogs that bite.

As fall approaches, the boys’ anxiety increases. Vacation has been their time to graze, the time when the grip of parents and neighbors and teachers and child psychologists and the police and the whole organized world loosens on them. At the end of summer, they are almost uncontrollable. The knowledge of what is ahead begins to weigh on them, the knowledge that soon they will be chained and measured again.

Howl, run, fly, my demons. How many nights like this do we have left?

What more does this night still hold?

* * *

Toppe has found something again. He is tottering in the street, carrying something in his hands. Big balls that shine strangely in the gloom.

Heads of cabbage. Spoiled heads of cabbage, their leaves already covered in slime, their stench biting from yards away.

“They’s all kinds o’ stuff over there,” Toppe explains.

Someone threw a sack of trash on the side of the road. A discarded mound of food. Vegetables, smashed bits of someone’s meal. It looks like leftovers from a restaurant. No one has that amount of vegetables at home.

“Fuck yeah!” Toppe yells and throws a head of cabbage high in the air.

It comes down in the middle of the road, pieces flying everywhere. It’s a pale green artillery shell, a grenade sending shrapnel across the street, leaving only the heart.

There are at least five cabbages, but before the boys have time to throw and smash them all, I motion for them to stop.

“Practice,” I say.

Rapa grins, the only one in the group who gets it from just that word. He takes out his knife. Grabbing a cabbage, he launches it into the air. When it comes down, it splits in two.

The others join in. Suddenly they all have their knives out, and Toppe is hacking Rapa’s split head into ever smaller parts.

The sounds that come from them: yahh, hiyaaa, ugh-ugh-ugh.

Why do people always yell when they use a switchblade?

I don’t carry a knife. I don’t need one, and since I don’t have a weapon, I could never get caught using one. Not even on a security camera.

Helsinki is full of cameras. The life of the residents is filmed from every angle like an action movie, and everyone who carries a weapon gets recorded by the government as armed and dangerous. But here there are no cameras. Here where Rajasaari Street approaches the sea, the buildings fall behind.

Are you done, boys?

The heads of cabbage are all gone. The scent of grass and sea and spoiled food with young, unwashed sweat mixed in.

The boys sound bigger than before. They have slashed themselves up a size, filling all the space given them.

Shreds of cabbage lie on the asphalt, shining an insolent white in the night.

* * *

No one comes along. Not a single man, woman, or child.

It’s already past two, and despite the warmth no one is around at this hour. Perhaps the city is suffering from heat stroke, everyone lying in their beds panting and drenched in sweat. People don’t even come out on nights like this because it would break from everything familiar. On weekday nights, life in Helsinki crams into the buildings to sleep, to wait, to mourn.

Toppe and Mika send the plastic bags around again. Huff it up, boys, tonight is our night.

They stand in a ring, my five boys, slender bodies getting their cheap glue high. Every breath takes them somewhere farther away from here.

Rapa breaks the line, coming over to me. He walks without stumbling, but the stuff he was just sniffing will get to his legs eventually.

He looks at me. “Which one of us?” he asks. His voice is low and flat. An earth-shattering question uttered in the most muted tones.

Rapa, how you keep surprising me. You want me to choose one of us. There isn’t anyone else on the street, so why couldn’t the victim be one of the boys?

Rapa, you want to rise, you want to be bigger than the other four.

The intoxication of the choice rushes through me like the glue and solvents in the boys’ plastic bags.

Of course I will, Rapa, I’ll choose. You want to please me, and how could I say no?

We haven’t ever done this before. We’ve done a lot of other things as a group, but never this. Chosen one of our own and made something new of him. A person marked by us, who will carry that mark to his grave.

“Marko,” I say.

The boys hear it and try to understand the meaning of what they have heard. Their consciousness is saturated with glue that normal people use for patching flat bicycle tires. And butane, which can take down any man in a matter of years, a child in months if his luck is bad.

Once the name has been uttered aloud, nothing else need be said. My boys understand.

Why do they accept the idea of assaulting one of their own? Because I chose him. Because four of them are relieved that they weren’t the one. And they are afraid—all of them, except for Rapa, feel how weak they are.

They don’t have the strength to oppose the world on their own. Their detachment and little capers are a flaccid protest against this world’s perpetual, uniform decency. They want to follow me, the strongest-willed person they know, because in a tranquil, feeble country like this, people like me stand out. We draw to us those who have broken away from the herd.

And this is what these boys are capable of. Attacking anyone. These streets and parks are named for old composers, but my boys will never hear that music. To our right are big, fast motor boats, but none of these boys have ever ridden in one. My boys will hear other music, will drive other vehicles, and the only power they’ll ever know will be in what they are about to do.

Marko himself is the last one to realize.

The boys are still in their huffing circle. Rapa rejoins the group and takes one of the plastic bags from Mika in the middle of a sniff, offering it to Marko like a condemned man’s last meal, the last supper, the final breath before the end.

Marko takes the bag and stares into it. He looks at me, as confused as any fourteen-year-old can be, but he has just realized that the choice was him. He doesn’t know what is going to happen—none of us know with certitude—but it is clear that Marko will suffer at their hands.

He raises the bag to his face and breathes.

* * *

Closer to the sea, the boys’ voices sound different again. The deep canine growls coming from their chests disappear and their shouts become the thin, ear-splitting screeching of birds.

The others in the group shriek and yell, but Marko does not make a sound. The knowledge of what is to come silences him. He does not try to run. His fuzzy mind grasps that in his state he wouldn’t get very far. And if he tries to get away, he will only feed the bloodthirst of the other boys.

We walk slowly along. Everything slows down, the glue holding the boys, this moment caressing me.

Now there is nothing around, just the street, the park to the left and the sea on the right. Tall buildings loom ahead. Apartments for rich bastards.

I remember a time before them, and I remember how this whole area changed when they were built. It changed from a place for regular people into an expensive, artificial place. Buildings constructed to maximize views of the sea brought inequality and class division. These buildings sliced out a strip of permanent happiness for the well-to-do, just like the boys slicing cabbages.

Scratching cars isn’t enough right now. This night needs to be left with a more permanent mark.

I look at Rapa. I don’t need to say anything. He understands the look.

Rapa, you will become a problem for me someday, but now you are closer to me than anyone.

I make a cutting motion, a hand holding a switchblade slicing a cabbage in the air, and Rapa understands: on this night a person will be cut. Marko.

Driven wild by the summer and their detachment, how well these children will do the job.

To our right in the distance looms a seaside restaurant. Marko tries lazily to move in that direction, but his attempt is futile. No one has been in the restaurant for hours, and there’s no one out on the patio.

Marko gets back in line when Rapa follows him.

Why Marko? Why did I choose him?

Liban is everybody’s friend, the easygoing Somali who always agrees with everyone, too helpful to want to get rid of him. Toppe is stupider than Marko, Mika more sensitive and withdrawn and thus less useful. But Marko isn’t really anything. He has no personality. Cutting him will be like cutting air. The world would lose nothing if he just slipped out of it.

And in that moment I understand why I agreed to Rapa’s idea to choose one of the boys. The end of summer is affecting me as well. When the boys return to school, I won’t see them every day anymore. My grip on them will loosen. They will become tamer, weaker in my mind.

That is why I want to see them cut Marko.

I want to see how red the sea turns when drops fall into it from an opened boy.

* * *

I walk ahead of the group.

Marko staggers and spits, the glue making him cough, and I see that his body is seized with fear. He knows that pain is coming. Realizing that would sober anyone up, except for a teenager who’s spent half a day high on glue.

He knows that crying out won’t help. Our shouting has made the residents of the surrounding buildings numb—if anyone is still awake, they are undoubtedly cursing us.

The boat docks loom in the darkness. There. We will never forget what we are about to do. This we have to do in an open place, on one of these docks stretching out into the waiting sea.

Rapa hangs in the back. He is watching in case Marko tries to slip away.

Rapa, have I really taught you so much?

* * *

The giddy feeling that something big and uncontrollable is happening. That feeling quiets the boys. For a second none of us make a sound, and the loudest noise is Marko’s panting. His breathing becomes labored.

As we descend the steps to the docks, the stillness of the night continues to envelop us.

But then a thin, slightly distorted sound breaks the silence. Music, from a radio. I locate it instantly. On the farthermost dock is a guard booth. In it is a man, his head sagging down. From the windows of the booth shines a yellow light that we couldn’t see from the street, like the music that we couldn’t hear until we headed down to the docks. The man is dozing despite his radio playing old-school pop.

The situation changes. Even Marko, who has reluctantly climbed down the stairs to the docks, realizes it.

A boat guard is acceptable.

* * *

A soft splash as Toppe enters the water. Idiot. But the man in the booth doesn’t stir as Toppe paddles around the chain-link fence protecting the docks and crawls out of the water.

We hurry after him, still hardly making a sound. Marko tries to sneak off somewhere, but Rapa makes sure he stays with the group. And as we each clamber onto the dock, some sort of power flows into us.

I see the brightness in the boys’ eyes, the electric charge that comes from stalking another man. Their brains are full of Red Sun and butane and everything they’ve sucked in today—the mesmerizing walk to this place, and the knowledge that just moments ago we were planning to cut Marko but now we have a completely new victim.

We have a new Chosen One. A man swollen by too stable a life sitting slumped in an old T-shirt. I can see the ring on his finger. Somewhere there is a family who will soon awake to a call from the police.

The guard booth is unlocked. The door stands open a crack. We surround the booth. Toppe and Rapa approach the door, and Rapa pounds on it with his fist. The man shoots out of his chair.

He isn’t at all prepared for this, this slumbering boat guard. He lets out a yelp.

“Shut up,” Rapa says. “Get out.”

Then Rapa and Toppe are halfway into the booth, dragging the man out. He is bigger than them, but too taken by surprise to put up a fight, and with all his heavy breathing, the only thing he accomplishes is some flailing and a stream of confused sounds.

Rapa and Toppe have their switchblades out. Horror fills the fat man’s eyes. He staggers out onto the dock, forced by these boys.

“Down, get down,” Toppe says.

And the man collapses to his knees. We need something to bind him with. Even Toppe the idiot recognizes it and starts looking around in a nearby boat for a rope. When he finds one, he cuts pieces for the man’s hands and feet.

When the guard sees how the blade cuts the rope, his face twists into a grimace. He makes a sound again, but Rapa presses his knife against the man’s cheek and the sound stops.

* * *

There are four, maybe five nights like this in a Helsinki summer.

When Rapa sets his switchblade on the man’s cheekbone and flicks a slice in it, I feel the warmth of the night, I feel the flow of blood pulsing in the man, the frenzy of the boys, the dregs of society, surrounding me.

A dark line trickles down the boat guard’s face. He closes his eyes.

Rapa, give us a victim worthy of us. Mark this man so we will remember this night.

Rapa takes a step back and raises his hands.

In anticipation, I close my eyes.

* * *

So much happens in so little time. I hear steps: one of the boys is moving. But I don’t hear the strike. Where is the strike?

I open my eyes. Rapa has stepped even further back.

The boat guard before him sways on his knees. The man is ready to accept the blow. We are all waiting for the blow, but it doesn’t come.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Rapa says to the man.

The man yelps again and leaps from the dock into the sea.

Struggling in the water, he moves farther off until his feet find the bottom and his movements gain strength. Then he is on the shore and on his way up to the street. The only sound coming from him is sloshing water. Something keeps him from crying out. Perhaps there is only enough air in his lungs to get away.

Rapa turns to Marko. Still with his knife.

I can’t help but smile. On top of it all, the boy has a dramatic flair.

Where has this boy learned all this? From me?

Marko retreats, his eyes filled with blurry disbelief and distress. Toppe grabs and holds him tight.

Rapa, you are becoming an artist. Carve us a statue to commemorate this night.

The sea around us is black, the air unbelievably warm, and the switchblade in Rapa’s hand shines as he turns and moves toward me.

“Jenkem is real,” he says.

He sticks the knife in me, over and over again.

I have taught you too well, Rapa. Groping at my throat and belly, I see myself erupting in a torrent, not of drops but waves. I flow into the water.

And have just enough time to see how I make the sea turn red.