Schopenhauer was following me around, asking questions. Very quickly I realised I didn’t have any satisfactory answers. I gave him a plate of gamey food rich in minerals, prepared breakfast for myself, too, and sat down at the kitchen table. First I had two pieces of ryebread with sliced turkey, then a glass of live yoghurt sweetened with honey, and drank a cup of tea. I clicked away the business pages on my iPad and readied myself for the next phase of my morning routine. But I didn’t stand up. Instead, I stared out of the window and into the dark Kannelmäki morning. Before long I had the distinct impression that the darkness was looking back at me. Of course, I knew this wasn’t factually correct, but there was another dimension to the sensation: it told me how I really viewed my current situation.
Only a moment had passed since Juhani had reappeared. Only the blink of an eye ago, everything was fine, everything was in order, and everything looked promising. Now chaos and disorder threatened to ruin it all.
Sometimes putting everything in a timeline helped to clarify my thought processes. I placed the problems to be solved along the line in order of importance and urgency, and after this I categorised them depending on the resources they required. This way, I was able to come up with a strategy, and all I had to do was follow the strategy and trust the multiplier effects as I went: the planned and desired goal awaited right at the end of the timeline. I tried to do the same now too, but time and again it became clogged up right at the outset, started to curl, then wound itself into a knot that I couldn’t undo.
I stopped staring into the darkness and resorted to manual arithmetic, as far as was possible without pen and paper.
First things first, I had to respond to Toy of Finland. I believed I had almost solved this problem altogether. I had calculated a number of possible scenarios, and had then decided to combine two of them into one. Now I had a concrete proposal whereby both parties would, yet again, come out as winners. And despite the fact that Toy of Finland had threatened me and even insinuated that they might send Detective Inspector Osmala in my general direction, the thought didn’t worry me or cause me nearly as much anxiety as the immediate threat coming from closer quarters.
If Juhani’s vague promises had managed to cast a spell over all the staff in such a short space of time, what would his next move be? How far were they all prepared to go? Why did nobody seem to care that the pipe dreams Juhani encouraged would be quite simply impossible to implement? Why did nobody care to listen to plans that were based on long-term realism, careful calculations, market analysis and concrete facts? Why didn’t my staff, who only a moment ago had seemed perfectly content, just tell Juhani that what he was promising them was impossible?
My staff.
The assignation was deliberate because I still thought of them as such and – and this is how I interpreted the sentiment – I still cared about them. I’d thought of them as the closest friends I’d ever had. And now…
Schopenhauer rubbed himself against the back of my leg. He’d said something that I hadn’t heard, and now I noticed there was power in the way he pushed against me. I understood. I got up, opened the balcony door and let him out to observe the events of that cool November morning. He could see in the dark too, which meant that the darkness could never see him. The thought snapped me awake. I went into the bedroom and began getting dressed.
As I stood at the mirror knotting my tie, I recognised the fact that had been staring me in the face all this time: everything came back to Juhani, sooner or later everything would wind itself around him and – as I had noticed many times in practice – things would get so complex that even mathematics was of little use. The central question seemed to be: how far was Juhani ultimately willing to go? This was a hard question to answer, for many reasons.
Juhani had always been vague and remorselessly avoided using logic in anything he did, but he’d never been quite this irresponsible before. On the other hand, he’d never been this proactive either: in a very short time, he had engaged in group and one-on-one discussions with all the staff and, judging by the results, with great determination too.
All this together made him even more erratic and his next moves all the more unpredictable. But following this particular timeline in the opposite direction, from the end back to the beginning, we might make a discovery that could tell us something relevant to the current situation. What did this greater unpredictability and urgency tell us? One answer was: despair. Juhani had to act the way he was acting. This would explain the new-found harshness that I had sensed in him and that I couldn’t account for in the moment I saw it. He found himself without any alternatives, again. The last time this happened, he had died. What would he have to do this time?
My tie was straight, the knot symmetrical in both width and depth. I pulled on my suit jacket and glanced at the framed image on the wall. I didn’t know how many times I had quickly looked at Gauss’s equation only to stand there staring at it for longer. Something about the equation reminded me of Juhani. I knew it inside out, but somehow it always managed to surprise me.
I could almost hear Juhani promising all these things. It happened virtually by itself. It was as though Juhani had lit a bonfire, and the more enthusiastic people became, the more logs he added. The crazier people’s ideas, the more Juhani encouraged them, egged them on to go faster and faster. Eventually, a now-familiar turn of events would occur. Juhani would come crashing into a reality that was still far removed from … reality. Realising the plans required one essential factor: Juhani himself, who had to be able to steer the course of events. It was actually astonishing how many times he had succeeded in this. And it seemed he had succeeded now too. He had sold the park’s employees their own impossible dreams and presented himself as the key to them all coming true. The same must have happened with Toy of Finland. Juhani had said too much, promised too much, and got himself into a situation where he didn’t have any options left. And now I had to clean up the mess.
I let Schopenhauer back inside, and he gave me his report. After this, he glanced at me once more and headed to the sofa without looking behind him. His consistency and steely nerves were an example to us all. I pulled on my shoes and coat, wrapped my scarf round my neck, and thought that I too had everything I needed: meticulous calculations, a realistic plan and a carefully prepared schedule.
I wrote the email as soon as I got to the park. My offer was fair, reasonable and mutually beneficial in the long term. I offered to buy both the Crocodile Canyon and the Moose Chute, in one purchase and for one price. There was only one stipulation in the offer: I would only buy the two products together. I had drawn up a detailed payment plan based on the fact that the added revenue created by the Moose Chute would improve the park’s solvency in the years to come, and therefore the monthly repayments to Toy of Finland would increase over a two-year period. At the same time, I would be able to offset the dent in our finances brought about by the acquisition of the Crocodile Canyon at the start of the repayment period. But best of all, this offer would tie YouMeFun and Toy of Finland into exclusive collaboration for many years to come and would guarantee our mutual success. I read the offer through one last time, attached the spreadsheet with my detailed calculations, and pressed send.
I took off my jacket and went through into the main hall. I was on the move early. In the list of repairs that needed to be done, there was a note that the pedals in the last carriage of the Komodo Locomotive were twisted. Our customers might have been short and slight, but many of them seemed to have the destructive energy of a small neutron bomb. I decided to address the matter myself. The hall was quiet, save for the banging and clanking of my tools.
The spot where I was working gave me an unobscured view of one of Laura’s murals, the one painted in the style of Dorothea Tanning but with Laura’s own twist and subject matter. Because the mural was situated so close to the Komodo Locomotive and because Laura had wanted each of her six murals to communicate with their immediate surroundings, this piece was entitled Tanning Takes the Train. I’d spent a long time standing in front of each of her works, but this was possibly my favourite. Seeing it this morning made me think that Saturday, tomorrow, the day we were supposed to meet, was somehow desperately far away; it might as well have been on a different continent, another whole season in the future. I couldn’t say where this idea had come from, but it was powerful and there was something particularly unpleasant about it. I concentrated on the Komodo Locomotive.
I managed to straighten the right-hand pedal and began working on the left. Working at the adventure park had taught me to use my hands, and I suspected this might have been one of the reasons I felt a growing sense of attachment to the place. These days I was more than familiar with hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, Allen keys, chisels and saws, and I’d come to realise that, in the best possible way, manual tools represented a direct extension of mathematics. Everything had to be calculated before starting to screw, tighten or saw; once everything was in place, to use a tool was simply to draw an equals sign.
The left-hand pedal turned out to be more of a problem. I fiddled with it for some time but soon had to face facts. The pedal would have to be replaced and the spare parts ordered from Toy of Finland Ltd. I detached the twisted pedal, put in a temporary bolt and a tarpaulin over the pedal, and suddenly noticed something I should have noticed earlier.
There was no smell of food in the air. Neither morning buns nor preparation for lunch. I peered towards the south end of the park.
The Curly Cake’s sign was lit up and the lights were on inside. So Johanna was there. Which made the matter all the curiouser: by this time of the morning the hall was usually full of smells, and I knew Johanna took great pride in having everything ready on time. I inhaled again and expected all the familiar smells to rush into my nostrils: cinnamon buns, today’s lunch special, Marching Meatballs, gravy, coffee. But no. All I could smell was the grease from the Komodo Locomotive’s chains and disinfectant from the nearby polystyrene foam pool. I gathered up my tools and returned the kit to the storeroom. I washed my hands and walked back to the café.
It was a strange sight.
The doors were open, but the glass vitrines were empty. I couldn’t see any sign of food, and still couldn’t smell anything. The adventure park was supposed to open its doors in forty minutes, so by now the shelves should be filling up, there should have been clanking, hissing and boiling sounds coming from the kitchen. I walked across the café and stepped through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Johanna was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t in her work clothes. She was holding her phone to her ear, and when she saw me she held up her forefinger, which I took to mean wait a minute. I looked around. At this point, one minute was neither here nor there. The kitchen was still sparkling from last night’s clean, and the counters were empty. The ovens and hobs were cold, the cookers and blenders stood idle, waiting.
Johanna said yes, twice, and ended with, ‘You’re not wrong, bye.’ She looked at me, and before I could ask why nothing was being prepared, she said simply:
‘Industrial action.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘We’re striking in protest.’
One of Johanna’s most endearing traits was her ability to call a spade a spade. I assumed she must be doing so now too, and I was doing my best to understand quite what she was saying. Without much success.
‘Striking? In protest?’
‘Yes. Until midday.’
Even on a normal day, Johanna’s face was slender and sinewy, and her resting expression was such that anyone who didn’t know her might describe it as rude. Now I felt as though I didn’t know her either.
‘Striking for what?’
‘A better future.’
‘Against what?’
‘Stagnation.’
‘And who is involved in this … industrial action?’
‘Us. The staff.’
Us. That tiny two-letter word helped open up the conundrum. Or so I thought.
‘Does this have something to do with Juhani’s promises?’ I asked.
Just then, I heard the swinging doors swing open behind me. I turned and saw Kristian, who almost froze on the spot when he saw me. He said a subdued hello, avoided eye contact and sheepishly crossed to Johanna’s side of the kitchen.
‘Our eyes have been opened,’ she said, ‘to new horizons.’
‘Sounds like Juhani,’ I said. ‘And I suppose I represent stagnation, then?’
Neither of them replied. Johanna looked me right in the eyes, Kristian continued staring down, either at the floor or his trainers.
‘Is everybody involved?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Johanna.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, and it was true. ‘We are going through a very difficult period right now, and we have to continue following the same—’
‘The same old models,’ she said. ‘That’s precisely the problem. We want change.’
Kristian’s giant muscles were tensed, his face was glowing bright red. His eyes seemed to have fixed on the food processor on the countertop.
‘Kristian,’ I asked. ‘What has Juhani promised you?’
Johanna turned, but she was too late to stop him.
‘The board,’ he said quickly.
‘Sitting on the adventure park’s board doesn’t actually mean anything, it’s not even a paid position,’ I said, and now Kristian looked up at me for the first time. I didn’t know whether I had ever seen a more confused human being.
‘Can’t you see?’ I asked, speaking primarily to Johanna, but to Kristian too. ‘He promises you things you can never have; he’s just full of words that don’t mean anything.’
‘His promises feel cool,’ said Kristian, again quite quickly.
‘Cool?’
‘It makes us feel good. The atmosphere is better and—’
Johanna raised a hand to stop him, and this time Kristian obeyed.
‘We don’t want to be unreasonable,’ said Johanna. ‘We just want to send a clear message.’
I knew I shouldn’t show how incensed I was, but by now I couldn’t stop myself.
‘What if Juhani doesn’t start running the park?’ I asked. ‘Not now, not ever? What if, after your industrial action and everything else that’s been going on here, I’m still in charge?’
My questions seemed to land with both of them. They landed in different places, but both of them reacted. Kristian looked on in horrified disbelief, as if he had just heard that an oasis in the desert was in fact a hundred kilometres further ahead. A layer of tiny muscles tensed Johanna’s cheeks even further. Neither of them said anything. I turned and walked away.
I opened the park’s doors myself, sold tickets myself, and ran back and forth across the main hall: I checked the machines, handed out equipment, oversaw safety and security. Outside, the sun was shining and it was an unseasonably warm day, so there was only a modest volume of customers. Still, keeping the entire park running by oneself was too much. I had barely located a sobbing child’s shoe from inside the Strawberry Maze when I had to explain to a tired-looking father why his child wouldn’t be able to take part in the advertised music-therapy class today and why, at the same time, he would be unable to sit down at the Curly Cake Café for a cup of coffee and Clown Bun. A queue quickly formed at the ticket office. At the Trombone Cannons, someone started shooting the other players in the back, and I didn’t have time to consult the security cameras and serve as a referee because I still had to wash and disinfect the Doughnut of trace evidence left when one of our customers ran headfirst into the plastic wall and broke her nose. There’s surely more blood smeared across the wall of the Doughnut than there is left in our metre-tall customer, I thought.
Finally – just as I was about to run out of energy and found myself standing exhausted in the middle of the hall, not knowing where to run first – the clock struck twelve, the staff returned to their respective jobs, and my phone beeped as an email arrived in my inbox.
I opened the message.
Toy of Finland had declined my offer.
I walked off towards my office and peered over my shoulder. Both Esa and Samppa glanced at me surreptitiously. It looked to me as though they wanted to make sure I was finally walking in the right direction. Away from them.
As though I were the obstacle, to everything.