The Finn, Pt 3

On the way out I wrapped myself in despair as thick and soft as a cashmere coat. I had the coat, too, a velvety job custom-tailored overseas in Hong Kong. It was like wearing a grey herringbone cloud. I couldn't afford it on what I made; and then again, maybe that was the whole point. Outside of the daily grind of my job, I took every effort to appear as elegant and refined as possible. If I had to subsist on bread and cheese for a week to afford a bespoke suit or a pair of English-made boots, I would do it.
But beneath the clothes I found myself drifting aimlessly. I once spent an hour sitting on a stone balcony staring vacantly out at nothing, not asleep but not awake, until I suddenly snapped out of my stasis. A dispassionate feeling of not caring about anything had crept over me and trapped me beneath it. Like a beetle in amber I could see myself struggling to move and slowly giving up.

I departed the bus and walked quickly through the stiff breeze, staring up at the Citgo sign, now glaring down at me. This part of Boston was grim and dirty, and I kept my head down and walked forward through the overpasses and the colonies of the homeless around the ATM booths. It had begun to rain now, and the drops fell in streams around me in the silver lamplight. My umbrella leaned on my shoulder without much conviction – I wasn't sure if umbrellas represented an elegant stylistic touch or a foppish, almost effete affectation. It was probably too much thought to put into such a minor detail anyways. So I waited with my umbrella, leaning against the doorway and trying to look inconspicuous.

To get into my girlfriend's dorm, I had to check through a security point run by bored, irritable campus police. It made me feel like a burglar or a rapist, as if I was a paroled felon who can't vote, drive, or visit his girl-friend. On an all-girls campus, I was the intruder, an alien element in the neatly paved, trimmed and tailored walkways of Simmons College. It couldn't have been more different from where I lived - all traditional Boston red-brick, old ivy and manicured lawns. This was what a college was supposed to look like.

I found myself wondering what sort of school the Finn had gone to. In my mind, European campuses all looked like Oxford or Cambridge or Hogwarts from Harry Potter: elegant and stately arches, bell-towers and grand halls and stuffy headmasters with antique studies. What would a Finnish college be like? Perpetually drenched in snow, surely – that was the only way I could envision the country. Perhaps they sleighed to class, or skied. I couldn't see a Scandinavian landscape that didn't involve those elements.

The academic paradises of Boston seemed blasé to me, with familiarity divorced from contempt. Harvard Yard was like comfort food – known, remembered, and somehow separate from the school that had rejected me. I could sit in the Yard and reminisce or philosophize without feeling envy towards those who the Yard really belonged to. Maybe the Finn had gone to Harvard. It would explain his presence in my slumbering little suburb.

She poked her head out from behind the door and nudged me, her hair falling like a damp picture frame around her face – from the rain or from a shower I didn't know. She was wearing a long white coat belted around the waist that made it look as if she was wearing nothing underneath.

“Hey, babe.” For such a short girl, her voice was always surprisingly deep and throaty.

“Hey,” I said, giving her a quick kiss and a glance sideways at the police. “Let's get inside, OK?”

The Finn, Pt. 2

The Finn, continued:

When I returned to school I did not go back to my dorm. Rather, I walked slowly up the almost deserted paths of Brandeis to the top of the hill that dominates the campus. The buildings and trees seemed ghostly and derelict in the electric light. Its not that there
was no one about, but the palpable sense of emptiness suffused the campus. The paths were paved in a moist layer of dying leaves. All the pictures of the school show it in spring, when the trees are rich with foliage and the flowers and bushes are in full bloom. But that is only a tiny portion of the year that we spend here among the bare skeletons of the oaks and elms.

From the Castle that dominates Brandeis’ campus, all of Boston and its suburbs are spread out, the skyline twinkling on the horizon. I watched the glow of the iconic Citgo sign slowly cycling its way next to the Prudential building. Its neon brilliance seemed curiously out of place to me.

As a child, I always wanted visit the base of the sign, to see where it lived. For a long time, I thought that Citgo was the city’s real name. From my home and from the river, the red triangle seemed to hover over the cityscape, independent and above it. I still want to go it every night, launch myself from the top of the castle and soar over the woods and roads and homes. But that is for a different reason.

I stub out my cigarette – I only ever smoke at the top of the hill, leaning on the fire escape of the Castle. I don’t know why, although maybe its so the exercise makes me feel less guilty. Smoking down amongst the buildings and classes of campus it feels dirty. At the top of a stone tower at night it feels lonely and noble, like a sentry burning the night away in the red cherry cupped in his hands.

I stop in the library on the way home to look up Finland in the Encyclopedia. Actually the Wikipedia, because who bothers with paper books anymore? I find that “Finnish is one of the few European languages not of Indo-European origin.” I guess that means the Finn spoke a language nobody but Lapps and Nokia officials could understand. That’s an immensely depressing thought.

I also find that Finland is the world capital of cellphones, with 103% cell phone ownership. That 3% is puzzling. One has to wonder what would compel someone to own multiple phones that way. In my imagination, the only people who need them are the double agents in gangster films who call their Mafioso bosses on one phone and their police bosses on the other. I have a hard time imagining the Finnish mafia. What would they fight over? Snow? Reindeer? Maybe cell phones.

Also, Finland was invaded by Russia. Five times. That has to be enough to make anyone depressed. I try to imagine fighting a war in a frozen arctic landscape of ice and fir trees, but my imagine fails me. In my mind, wars are hot, brutal, and steamy, like Vietnam, or urban nightmares like World War II and Kosovo. The thought of waiting for frostbite and pneumonia to cripple your adversary is profoundly depressing.

Coming home from Starbuck’s I am dirty. Covered in sweat, shards of coffeebeans and splashes of chocolate and vanilla. I feel like a walking dishrag, studded with all the most disgusting things in the world. Lady Macbeth scrubbed at a black spot on her hands in vain – Starbuck’s partners have to rinse their whole bodies of blacks spots the same way every night.

Today, of course, was a thousand times worse – the feeling that blood was on my hands, on my shirt, on my face. We had never even touched the Finn’s body but the sensation was there. How could I help but feel guilty that a man had stared at himself in the mirror and then blown his brains out less than two yards away from me? The worst was, in the roaring noise of the Starbuck’s, we hadn’t even noticed until a customer had pointed out the door was locked for half an hour. I’m not sure why he locked the door. Was it a sense of privacy? Maybe he didn’t want anyone to walk in unprepared. He was a remarkably neat suicide.

I step into the shower and turn it up as high as it will go. The water feels like a scourge on my skin, and it is good. I can feel layers peeling away, scoured away by the blast. Unexpectedly, I am crying, the tears blurring instantly with the jet of water. I turn my face into the stream to clean away the tears, clean away my face, clean away everything until I am a soft, featureless creature.

With only a little warning, the water becomes icy, shocking me to the bone. Have you ever seen those videos of a seal lying peacefully on an ice floe when suddenly its whole world erupts and a killer whale lands on top of it? That is exactly how I felt. I flailed for the spigot and managed to slam it shut. For a while I stood there, dripping, and then I heave myself out and get ready to go back downtown.

to be continued...

The Finn

A few months ago I posted a fragment of a story of mine that was being turned into a graphic novel.

Well, that project never came to much because the newspaper was just too disorganized and it sort of fell apart midway through the semester. But I've been playing around with the story and some of the ideas in it so I'm going to post the first portion of the story, which leads up to that point:

The Finn

The day the Finn shot himself in the bathroom was one of the worst the store ever had. It was probably fairly bad for the Finn too, but unfortunately no one had a chance to ask him how he was, or indeed why he shot himself. Mark suggested it might be because he was Finnish, a line that met with awkward laughter until we remembered that Finland had lost its quarter-final round game in the World Cup to Bahrain. After a quick search the internet to ascertain whether Bahrain was a real place, the store turned its attention to the more pressing problem of what to do with a self-created Finnish corpse.

Starbuck's has manuals and procedures for every eventuality. The company's overriding policy was “Just Say Yes,”as in 'Can I get two coffees instead of one...Yes! Can I get them for free because I had a bad day...Sure! Will you bring them to me on a gilded tray in porcelain cups and then shine my shoes...Absolutely! Unfortunately this didn't help as the only question the Finn might have asked was “Can I shoot myself in your bathroom?” and that particular path of action had already been settled.

Oddly, Starbucks doesn't have a concrete policy on in-store suicides, so we had to ad-lib it¹. The police were nearby, and after assuring the customers that everything was under control and perfectly safe, we resumed business. After all, as tragic as the death of the Finn was, it paled in comparison to what might happen if we denied our clientele service for an entire afternoon. There were recorded instances of physical violence in response to unscheduled closings.

So we called the cops and stood around awkwardly. People would come in for coffee, and, not knowing what else to do, we sold it to them. That’s what we were there for. We had been programmed, like a cadre of automatonic hipsters, to vend coffee to any and all passerby. The mere fact of life and death playing out a room over, while disturbing and tragic, wasn’t about to throw us out of our rhythm. Indeed, the police sirens, EMTs, and firemen attracted such a crowd that we did record sales that day.

As consolation, we all got $75 dollar mental stress bonuses in our next paycheck and an extra day of paid leave. I suppose that was to help us cope with the psychic damage that the suicidal Finn had thoughtlessly inflicted on us. In reality, the only lasting impression of the incident was the reddish stain we were never able to thoroughly excise from around the toilet. In what we judged to be typically Scandinavian fashion, he’d blown his brains out directly into the bowl. I guess he was trying to spare us the trouble of cleaning the whole room.

We never did figure out why he chose our store to end his life. It wasn’t as if he was a regular or anything. Or maybe he was a regular and we’d just never figured it out. I fancied that maybe his whole life was like that, a permanent fixture at a job, a gym, a coffeeshop, maybe even in his own home, never recognized from one day to the next. Just a tall, blonde cipher drifting through life.

My reverie was interrupted by the manager politely but firmly² asking me if I didn’t have anything important to do. Sometimes, waiting at the register, watching people approach and then retreat as if testing your defenses, you doze off a little and find yourself staring into space, counting the cracks in the brickwork or the stains on the ceiling.

At Starbucks, you learn not to work too fast. I guess it’s true of any retail job. Do nothing and you’ll get something horrible to do. So you find something that’s time-consuming but mindless, and then lose yourself in it. As long as you can claim that you are busy aligning all of the cups so that the logos are straight or rearranging the bags of coffee by region, you have a protective amulet against being forced to scrub grout out of tiles behind a dairy fridge.

On this particular occasion, I was making sure that each and every tray of sticky, nauseatingly sweet pastries was perfectly straight when I turned around and bumped into one of my coworkers carrying a pot of coffee. She dropped it into the sink and breathed a sigh of relief that it hadn’t gone on to the floor. It was at this moment that, perhaps in response to some primitive defensive instinct, looked up and was hit in the face by an encyclopedia.

To be fair, it was only one volume. The other volumes were busy tumbling down amidst the urns, grinders, brewers, and assorted paraphernalia of the coffee business. In some distant Paleolithic era, when the store had only just been converted from Joe’s Coffee or Jack’s Beans or whatever into a Starbucks, some enterprising manager had sought to lend the place an air of intellectual authenticity by stacking rows upon rows of books in the store. At ceiling level. In rickety wooden bookcases. Indeed, it was a miracle that the literary downpour we were currently experiencing hadn’t happened earlier.

Standing amidst clouds of decade-old dust, shattered spines, and dust covers lying half-in pools of dingy water, I heard a voice oh-so-quietly saying…”excuse me?”

I turned around and found myself staring at a pretty, timid-looking young girl, half-wrapped in a bright yellow balaclava and peering at me from behind a pair of thick-rimmed, square glasses. Her hair fell across her face in a diagonal line, as if someone had been cutting her hair and suddenly slipped violently to the floor.

“Welcome to Starbuck’s,” I replied. “How can I help you?”

***

I worked but I didn’t manage to find satisfaction. That was Boston’s fault. This town had dulled me with its persistent winds, and I was slowly wearing away in the rain, the snow, the battered sidewalks and cracking roads. In this city, every thing was a defense against the elements, every day was a task. And the people, clannish and irritable, could become as cutting as shards of glass. Every one shuffled around in coats and scarves, each a castle, a fortress, with layers of battlements and almost never visible. Boston wore at my soul and I could not escape.

A vast melancholy swept over me as I sat on the embankment, waiting for the train to take me home. It was one of those cold New England nights where your breath comes in freezing clouds that glow in the stainless steel moonlight. I could see the train coming half a mile away along the tracks, its running lights reflected in long beams down the rails. The track ran straight and then curved at the last minute before the station, so as it approached all I saw a was three flashing lights bearing down on me with an increasing roar. The cars blew by in a blast of hot air and roaring diesel that splashed through my mind like an ocean wave.
On the train, I sat facing the wrong direction, watching Belmont and then Waltham slide silently by. Staring through the scratched glass of the windows, I watched the tattered remnants of New England's industrial past slide by – battered redbrick buildings covered in cracking paintwork and dying ivy, junkyards filled with rusting trucks and stripped tires, men standing around in flannel shirts and dirty workboots the color of old wheat, smoking cigarettes. I looked down at my own shoes, chestnut boots polished to a waxy sheen, and then at the shoes I wear at work, scuffed and filthy with cheap leather. Why did I feel the need to change them every day before I left?