“Number Out of Service” by Timo Teräsahjo

Its body had already stiffened. The jaws were agape. Small needle-sharp teeth and a red tongue were visible. Eyes glazed. The fur beneath the neck had turned rust-red with blood. The wind gently stirred the black-and-white hair along its back.

In Eeri’s mind one image followed another: the cat’s supple body slipping through the crack of the door. The cat kneading its hooked claws in Eeri’s lap. The rough tongue on her palm and the lapping of milk from a yellow cup. The cup’s scrape on the tiled floor. All of it gone now.

Eeri let out a sudden, snuffling sound.

She had been in her nightgown on her way to the mailbox. The cat had frozen her already at the top of the steps. It was impossible to move. In the morning light the cat’s fur glinted on the scarred concrete. On the dead-end street behind the fence, dry maple leaves scraped the clayish road surface in little gusts of wind. Otherwise nothing moved. No one in the yards. No one on the bike path. No one who might qualify as the doer.

Of course Eeri knew whom to blame.

*

A couple of years ago—thereabouts anyway—they had already been pulling little pranks. At first just loitering in the driveway. A lazy shuffle out of the car’s headlights when she and her husband pulled in.

“What are they dawdling there for,” the man wondered as he cut the engine.

Silence offered no answer.

Then a growing presence. Taking out the trash, Eeri thought she heard some taunt from behind the hedge, but she couldn’t be sure.

A scratch along the car door. Something from the parking garage—or something else?

Nighttime calls. Sounds in the yard. Until one summer evening something hard clanked against the wall. Startled by the noise, Eeri had nearly stumbled as she came downstairs.

“What now, what now?”

The man couldn’t say. He only stared out the kitchen window.

“Tell me—what do you see out there.”

Stones thunked onto the roof and the wall and one thumped hard against a window, not quite breaking the glass.

The man jolted into motion. He clattered in the hall.

“Goddamn,” he roared on the stairs.

“Goddamn little punks!”

Eeri still didn’t grasp it. She stood a moment helpless. Couldn’t get herself to move at first, then suddenly dashed after the man and out the door. From there she saw him on the lawn, holding a boy of about sixteen by the collar.

“Stop it right this instant!” Eeri shouted.

Scuffling in the dark. Shadowy figures around them. The man turned toward Eeri, confusion across his face. The suspenders across his broad back hung loose after the tussle. His hair was wild, and blood was running from the back of his head. Eeri stood on the steps, afraid. The man walked toward the house holding his occiput where someone had pegged him with a stone.

The phone rang.

“Right, right,” the man mumbled, “—but still…”

“Yes, I understand, but…”

It was the boys’ parents, the man explained. Threatening to call the police. Eeri’s lips mouthed the word silently. Absurd, he admitted, but there it was. They insisted the man had assaulted children.

They’d compared notes among themselves. There was a video.

They had sat in silence at the dim kitchen table.

Afraid. For no reason they could name.

Then: the bicycle tires slashed. Disgusting streaks and turds of excrement in the mailbox. The man called, went to talk to the neighbors, but met only raised eyebrows. They didn’t call the police, at least.

One shouldn’t go that far, the man said. Eeri agreed. They had both thought the same: these things you ought to be able to handle yourself.

*

Now Eeri drew back from the cat. The lock clicked. She took off her coat. Stationed herself by the window, peering through the lace curtain. Listened to the oil burner hum. Outside, the lawn and the bluish gravel of the drive glinted in slanting light. The scene tightened, stretched taut as a drumhead.

Something in Eeri relaxed when she saw birds flutter into the yard and begin calmly pecking food from the grass.

She pulled on her husband’s green work trousers, cinched the belt, rolled up legs that were too long. She slipped into a sweatshirt and windbreaker. Glanced again out the window. Then, yellow rubber gloves in hand, carrying the cat firmly by the tail, she walked through a gust of wind, over the weedy, leaf-strewn lawn. She hesitated a moment before dropping the cat among the leaves of the compost.

Modest funeral rites. Eeri looked up at the sky, quiet.

She meant to go straight back inside, but on the way a stab of anxiety struck. She remembered: the place where the cat had lain—there the man had been too.

That was where he died.

Like the cat.

He’d fallen suddenly on the steps while Eeri raked the yard.

Eeri could hardly make out his words.

“What are you saying?” she had asked, annoyance first, then panic.

It must be the pain, he said. He gripped the railing so hard the whole rail shook.

Eeri had dropped the rake, run to call emergency services. Tried CPR, not remembering how many compressions and where. In the end she just pressed here and there like mad until the ambulance pulled into the yard.

Bright red uniforms. Fast feet and hands. A man and a woman. Voices on the radio.

Eeri had stumbled after the paramedics to the gate, where there remained, in the wake of the ambulance, a gap like an empty space.

And a yard too quiet.

Her gaze drifted to the street.

*

Had they ever learned to demand redress from anyone? She and the man.

Both had been afraid. They had been afraid before and afraid now.

In between, there had been a time when things were different. Many years. Decades.

They had both been evacuees. The man older, a veteran of the Continuation War, conscripted into the reserve. Seventeen years old. Too young for that business, but apparently good enough.

“There weren’t any branches on the trees, all of it shredded by artillery,” he had said of his first impression.

The story had become familiar to Eeri over the years. It had to be told from time to time. Again and again. And Eeri had listened. Not many from the man’s squad had survived. The Russians poured all the iron they had onto their enemy in the last hours of the war. Almost everyone died.

The man’s legs were full of shrapnel. Chance saved him.

Eeri herself had been a child then. She ran with her mother from home, through a village where even the dogs had been left in the yards barking. Dead lay on horse-carts. Children crying. Men exhausted. Terror rolled in from the east. Everyone was afraid. She and her mother had joined the others with no idea what was coming.

Their paths crossed. The man had had no home to return to either. Settled in the same village, they later found each other. And almost at once they set about building a new life—with such a fury that Eeri now could hardly understand it.

The house became a pleasant new build. To Eeri it had looked splendid. Fine and theirs. Big, too. Though nowadays it was, admittedly, only a pitiful cottage.

On either side now rose new houses of several hundred square meters that Eeri had never liked. There was something hostile about them. A foreignness exuded from the walls and shattered the fragile balance.

Bit by bit Eeri’s house had been shoved aside by them, to the edge of a little wooded islet, defying the zoning plan. Jutting out, contentious as a misgrown tooth.

*

Now Eeri decided to do yard work. She raked leaves off the gravel. Raked the lawn. Soon, though, she dropped the rake and stepped out of the yard: she headed for the path that continued where the dead-end street ended. Her steps slipped in the mud of the road.

It had once been a road, felt big back then. Now nearly overgrown trail. She walked fast. Grew short of breath. She didn’t know what she was really doing. Thinking about the culprits, she supposed. That perhaps they had come from here. She followed the thought, intoxicated. Eyes narrowed to slits. Her hand still gripping an invisible rake.

They had taken the cat, which… it hadn’t been her cat, really, but it used to come sleep at her place… she gave it milk… so almost her cat. It had come to eat, the way strays sometimes do, and then they had… killed it… That was what had happened.

Maybe in that little wood?

Hardly in their yard.

Who would do that? Why? And how had they killed it? Did it… suffer much… poor cat?

Her feet slipped in the mud as Eeri hurried on. Thoughts began to crosshatch again. Feelings all jumbled. Like a tangle of colors.

Eeri halted. At this point the woods rose on either side of the path. Willow and alder; in the wind she could hear the trembling of aspens.

She knew, she remembered: somewhere here the boys had had a place: a shelter of planks and plywood.

Eeri bent a branch to see deeper past the ditch. A flash of a blue hoodie flickered between the trees.

“Hello,” Eeri called. “Hello…” she went on, not knowing what she would finally say.

Then she shut her mouth and stepped back.

The stubble-haired one who appeared between the trees didn’t look friendly. Behind him in the shelter, two more. The boy looked at Eeri with a curl at the corner of his mouth, as if he were seeing something not worth commenting on. Eeri said nothing.

She backed away and started walking fast back home.

She thought she heard branches crack behind her, imagined the group of boys coming onto the path, pictured them reaching the road. They were older now, nearly men already. Mocking. Strong. The house ahead suddenly seemed far too far away. The grass on the meadow to the right flattened as if under an invisible giant hand.

Eeri’s heart pounded as she hurried across the meadow, at times nearly slipping into the ditch, with the mad feeling that the whole world had turned against her.

She locked the door. She looked at the phone, but what would she even have said to the police? The man wouldn’t have stood for such fussing anyway.

*

She calmed herself by walking from room to room. From the living-room shelf she picked up a photograph: the boy smiling. She sipped from the glass to which she had poured herself half a glass of brandy. Anti-stress tablets—the herbal sedatives the man had bought at a health-food shop—she had taken several, though she’d never noticed them doing a thing.

She walked to the kitchen with the photograph in her hand.

Outside, the spectral ripple of the grass kept on in the deepening evening. Ragged clouds were visible through the window. One bright yellow patch above the treeline. The big houses in the neighborhood lit up.

The photo of the boy was still in Eeri’s hand. It had been taken in the little woods.

The boy used to play in that very grove.

Right there, from where Eeri had just fled.

He had built a treehouse, and read The Three Investigators and Tarzans there. A real nest in the crook of branches.

Suddenly it felt important to think there had been good things, too.

The boy had put down a plank floor in his hideout, rigged some sort of tarp for a roof. There were sleeping pads there and a sleeping bag.

Before that she had read him stories. For hours they had lain side by side on the bed reading library books aloud.

The life of the three of them had been good.

*

A late garbage truck backed into the yard. Her heart thudded. Good heavens—had she ever before been startled by a garbage truck. As it rumbled on, Eeri poured herself another slug.

She looked up toward the stairs.

Suddenly she saw herself standing with a newborn on her shoulder at the upstairs window.

Back then the nearby airport was nearing completion. The first contrails of jetliners were being drawn across the sky. The world was only just being built. The moon not yet conquered.

The man had been building a survival stash in the cellar. Oh, it had been a bit embarrassing. Food, clothes, and of course a gun.

The man had taught her and the boy to shoot in the meadow behind the house. So they could defend themselves. He had hidden explosives in the walls. In the attic insulation, cartridges and two hand grenades. The gun, down under the stairs, behind a plank. Under space-pattern sheets, propane cylinders, and rows of canned goods.

People would have thought them crazy, no doubt, Eeri thought. But it was a point of view that had been forgotten in the surrounding houses.

Suddenly Eeri put a hand over her mouth. She realized she had laughed out loud. Quite by accident. But that must have been the liquor. The tension.

*

Now Eeri turned again to look at her yard. She really was here, not in the past—not in the past where she’d rather have stayed. The yard now seemed repellent. She wouldn’t tend it anymore. The roof could leak, since it had begun to leak. The grass could grow tall. Moss could spread over the well-lid. Everything could return to what, at bottom, it was.

The night became sleepless and muddled.

After her morning coffee, Eeri finally pulled herself together. She did have somewhere to go. She had forgotten. But she would still make it. Just quickly, coat on and shoes. She dressed in a hurry in the hall. Then she hurried off, handbag bumping on her shoulder, to the bike path where sparrows, harried by the wind, chirred in the hedges. She had been so deep in thought she had nearly forgotten.

It was time to go get her prescriptions.

A stitch started in her throat. Her pace was too fast for her condition. A flat-screen TV glowed a jittery children’s show through a window behind a hedge. At one gate a neighbor headed to work stood with a sullen look on his face. Or that’s how it felt, anyway. Eeri gave a hasty nod.

She hoped her regular doctor wouldn’t be there.

Better a substitute.

Last time that woman had gotten too familiar.

“Do you have family?”

“Do they keep in touch?”

“Do they help at all?”

“Is there anyone?”

Eeri grimaced. Not those kinds of questions now. She didn’t need concern. And to tell the truth she didn’t even know. There was only one who mattered. But the phone had been silent for years.

Eeri thought of her son for the length of the block it took to walk. For a moment the image warmed her, lived in her mind like a candle flame, but in the waiting room she sat numb in spirit, thoughtless. Then her name was called already.

She couldn’t tell the doctor about the cat. Not about the boy either—he had nothing to do with this. She stared, flustered, at the diagram of a skeleton on the wall. Her gaze slipped to a file box labeled “to be disposed of.” Prescription in hand she hurried down the clinic corridors. Turned the wrong way, hurried back, handbag swinging uncertainly. Chin trembling, she pushed the door open and stepped into bright light.

*

The first memory came on the way home, without warning.

“What’s wrong with me?” the boy sobbed.

“It can’t be that serious. Boys are boys,” the man answered. “Maybe you could just… speak a bit more normally?”

The boy’s voice was shrill, nasal, admittedly a bit grating.

The man tried to give examples from his own childhood. How you befriended the bullies.

“Best be quiet at least,” the man went on, a little irritated now that no answer came.

Eeri had fled outside so she wouldn’t hear. She fed, clothed, and cared for the boy, helped with homework, helped with everything: the man could handle this one.

She had shut the door, gone down the steps, crossed the yard to the road that had already begun to grow over back then.

*

Eeri remembered how they had tried to fit in.

Not just built a house—worked.

Eeri in the kitchen, modestly, but the man had earned respect as a tradesman. Tradesman friends even came by. Mara, Pertti, and whoever else there had been. Morose, odd, inward-warming men filed in through the door. Then the sauna and drinking.

Soon the man got invitations to build fireplaces at this cabin and that. He was always asked; there was more work than he could do. The man strutted. Wanted everything at home to look right. Tablecloths straight, the boy’s hair neatly cut.

Now there was a reputation to defend.

It didn’t do, then, to accuse other parents of letting their sons bully your boy, and it certainly didn’t do for your son to turn out homosexual, as he announced he was once he turned seventeen.

That evening had stunned them both.

What had he gone and done that for? He had spent the whole summer in the capital region soaking up influences.

That was when the man had his first arrhythmias. He explained his worry to Eeri: what would Mara, Pertti, and the rest think? What would happen with the jobs?

Eeri heard him tell the boy that now it was time to leave and not come back until he was cured.

They clucked their tongues over it together. Talked the matter over in the bedroom, she in the crook of the man’s arm. Eeri didn’t object. Sometimes a parent simply had to lay down the law. Surely they had handled it right. The boy only needed to adapt and get better.

Everything would still turn out all right.

*

Drinking was a sin. All the more determinedly, once home, Eeri poured herself brandy. She drained the glass. Stared at her fingers strangling the stem.

What on earth had been the point of those buddies of the man’s? The ones you had to revere and please so much back then. Whose opinions mattered more than the boy. Not one of them had ever come to help. All vanished when the work dried up.

Eeri peeked from behind the curtain. The grass swayed, and the treetops too.

The bottle necked with a peevish clink against the glass.

A bit more glugging.

Then silence.

Her bleary eyes found the bookcase.

A photograph of Lauri.

At once a loud snort. She was making noises constantly now.

“What are you doing over there in Belgium these days? Are you happy? Why don’t you keep in touch anymore?” Eeri realized she was speaking of her son out loud, but she didn’t care. Bitterness welled up.

She had sent packages, money even.

But perhaps the boy had wanted to cut ties with the whole homeland. Perhaps that was it.

Eeri studied the picture more and more closely. She was utterly still. Warmth stayed hidden all day long, but looking at the photo it always flared.

Now too.

*

Evening. The wind creaked the window. The hours passed monotonously as the drunkenness slowly ebbed.

Eeri pried her eyes open. A new sound. Different. She drew back the curtain. The yard wasn’t empty.

Four figures stood in the driveway in the falling dark.

She withdrew from the window. What did they want? Now Eeri heard muffled talk. A chuckle. She steeled herself to listen. No other sounds though, except the wind, which made the trunks groan and played the wind chime in the back yard. What if she ran out and shouted? What good would it do?

Eeri clenched her hands into fists. A flashlight beam flared in the living-room window behind her back. Instinctively she sprang out of the way. Another light came on at the opposite window, then a third. Beams crisscrossed the ground floor. They sliced one another. Lit the paintings and the rya on the wall.

Harshly illuminated the little objects of her life.

Then the lights snapped off.

Silence.

Could Lauri sense her distress? Maybe love wasn’t only in the head but reached across distances. And wasn’t—so Eeri now reasoned, gazing into the empty yard—love, in the end, the only thing that mattered. Love for a child, for a husband.

Night pressed in.

Eeri lay awake.

She hugged the pillow to her chest like her memories—all of it in that one pillow.

*

“Couldn’t you call? Call now. I’m in trouble.”

Silence.

Eeri sat up in bed. She did have a phone number, but she wouldn’t call. Same as with that doctor. She didn’t need anyone to come and advise her. Or pity her. It was the son’s duty to call, not hers.

“You don’t have to call,” Eeri said aloud and got up from the bed.

The devils had stayed away. A couple of days. That much time had passed since the flashlight beams. Eeri cooked food. Raked the leaves into a pile. Picked the moss from between the paving stones. Maybe they would leave her alone?

Then she dreamed. It was bright. Clear.

The man was crying on the bedroom floor.

It had happened in real life too. Early in their courtship. He cried for the Russian boys he had cut down with a submachine gun.

Just as young as he was himself.

Children shooting each other.

But now the man changed. He began to warn her. He waved his hand toward the door. He repeated a word Eeri couldn’t make out. He realized she didn’t understand and wrote something in a notebook that suddenly appeared in his hand.

“Danger. Beware.”

Then the dream shattered.

In place of the dim dream bedroom, this again: the real one.

Downstairs. Eeri’s eyes were open. She had woken to sounds. She rolled from the bed to sit up. She heard the doorknob turning.

A moment of silence.

Then a creak.

Eeri racked her brain for what the text meant, then sprang to her feet. She hurried down the stairs and just had time to see flashlight beams thrusting through the hall window before she tucked herself into the storage closet under the stairs.

Muted conferring outside the cupboard. Then a rasp. Footsteps up the stairs. Above, they clomped from room to room. The bed was shoved. A curtain ripped. The jingle of coins poured from a basket into a pocket. A sploosh. Was that dentures slung from a glass into the toilet?

Then a different trickling.

Talk, footsteps. The sofa creaked. Laughter. At last the house fell quiet.

At some point, Eeri fell asleep.

*

In the morning, Eeri set the mattress—ripped from its place—back where it belonged.

She fished the teeth from the toilet among the urine and flushed.

With a pole extender she got the curtain rod back up.

Then she sat on the bed and cried. She knew she had ceased. No longer a human being. She could evaporate, disappear. No one would notice the loss.

Even so, even for a non-person, hunger came.

Her stomach growled. She wanted something warm and salty.

Then she remembered the man’s stores. She didn’t need to go to the shop. No. She opened the cellar door and tore open the protective packages.

She would have instant soups for half a year.

She would have to fortify herself. Draw the curtains. Drag furniture in front of the windows. A table on the sofa. A footstool on the table. To brace that, a cupboard that scraped grooves in the floor. At the front door she stacked chairs into a pile. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.

She remembered the boy’s number.

Of course she wouldn’t call, but she dug it out from under other papers. She smoothed the wrinkled scrap against her skirt.

Well—maybe she would call after all.

She waited, but heard nothing for a while. Was there some mistake?

But she called, even though she had thought it was the boy who was supposed to call. She keyed in the number again and prepared to wait a long time, but a man’s voice said the number was out of service.

She almost called directory assistance but wouldn’t have known what to say.

After all, the boy lived abroad.

*

Evening, darkness, and the beams of flashlights. Unlike her own, these boys you could rely on. There they came. Chairs avalanched into the hall as the door was shoved. Eeri withdrew from the boys into the cupboard under the stairs.

“Having fun in there in the closet?”

“Granny making jam in there?”

“Or is it a darkroom?”

Laughter.

“Oh, fuck.”

Someone laughed till he choked.

“Gimme some too.”

They were talking to each other now.

“I won’t. I’ve only got this one bottle.”

“Yoo-hoo, granny! Wanna make a porno together?”

Again they remembered her.

“Old-people sex!”

Eeri no longer believed there was any reason for any of it. She lay at the back of the cupboard, her back beginning to ache. She ate canned meat with a spoon straight from the tin. She stared into nothing.

The man had known: this is what people were like.

Then Eeri heard music. A radio somewhere in here. She turned her head toward the ceiling of the cupboard. Where? In the living room? Or in her own head?

An hour or a day. You could hardly tell the difference anymore. She crawled from the cupboard into the living room, but soon went back.

The patterns in the wall changed to clouds and to a forest scene she knew from childhood.

Across the wall spread a lake’s open water.

The wash of waves. The cries of gulls.

Her father in the bow of the boat, setting the nets.

Silence.

*

The house looked drowsy, let its eaves droop, huddled like in a nightmare. It would be torn down very soon now. The plans had already been made. The surrounding land would be reworked. Open it all up—the whole slope, the whole forest gone—machines turning the ridge to a slurry of mud, out of which rows of new buildings would quickly rise.

There, then, side by side, gray boxes and black roofs. And black soil into which lawn would be sown and the beginnings of hedges planted.

It would be beautiful. New families with their trampolines and pools, SUVs and grocery bags.

Soon a school and a new day-care would be built. The pulse of new life.

Officials had now appeared in the yard to expedite this business. Reluctantly. The old lady hadn’t answered calls and letters hadn’t brought any contact either.

A policeman who had visited the premises assured them the lady was still alive, if not terribly talkative and not in the best hygiene, either.

One man held drawings in his hand, one a briefcase. They were prepared to negotiate in a very simple and straightforward way.

After knocking for some time, the men pushed the door open, and out drifted the crash of a pile of chairs. Then the door closed as if swallowing the men.

It is better now to watch events from a bit farther off. Let us watch from the forest’s edge. From there the shots could be heard only faintly. But they could be discerned even from there, as flashes of light: first downstairs, then in the white-framed windows upstairs. The last, as if more considered, came a moment after the others.

That was enough.

Reached the next day by the police in Belgium and shaken by the events, the son said he had no idea what motive his mother could have had.