ODD? (17 page)

THE NIGHT OF THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION CURVE

Leena Krohn
Translated by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela

Leena Krohn is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, artificial intelligence, and issues of morality and conscience. Her short novel
Tainaron: Mail From Another City
was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. The following story was written for this anthology and has never before been published in any language.

“Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,” Rosa said.

The wind had flung wide a half-open window, and a frigid gust had carried a dried-up maple leaf onto the kitchen table.

“Would you mind closing the window since you’re sitting right next to it? And turn off the radio,” I said in an unpleasant voice.

A sharp easterly wind had the porch roof rattling, the espresso machine spat and gurgled, and Rosa had the morning news blaring. Another coup had taken place somewhere. By-standers were screaming, and sirens were howling. A migraine was beginning to take shape, adding an abrasive edge to every sound.

“Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, pestilence-stricken multitudes. . . guess who?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Shelley,” Rosa said.

Rosa has a marvel of a memory. She knows dozens of poems by heart and has a habit of reciting them. It can be exasperating sometimes. That morning she was behaving somewhat unusually. When she finally closed the window, switched off the radio, and picked the dead leaf off the table, she froze and stared at something on the tablecloth.

I stared at her.

“What are you looking at?”

“This thing that the wind blew in through the window,” Rosa said. “It looks like a piece of string.”

Indeed, a pale and thin curl, a string or ribbon some four inches long, lay on the table.

“Or could it be some kind of worm?” Rosa said.

“I should get going, the sampling theory seminar starts at quarter past ten,” I said, swallowing a pain killer and washing it down with coffee. I focused my attention both on the ache and on and a feeling of disorder somewhere deeper, one that had been growing in the past years. It bothered me like a digestive problem, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe I had been infected by the restlessness that had spread everywhere in the city. Maybe it was simply my age catching up with me and couldn’t be helped. Pestilence-stricken multitudes, indeed.

Rosa picked up the piece of string and turned it back and forth on her palm. She bent it, lifted it to her nostrils and sniffed it, licked it, and finally even bit it. She offered her open palm for me to see.

“Take a look,” Rosa said.

I obligingly put on my glasses and examined the object on my wife’s soft palm, took my glasses off again, and announced, “Garbage.”

Rosa clicked her tongue and said, “Garbage! Now there’s an analysis.”

“Yes, garbage,” I said. “Of course, it’s all a matter of definition. A bit like art. When you put something on display at the museum of modern art, it becomes art, no matter what it was before. You of all people should know.”

I said that because Rosa had only recently gotten a part-time assistant’s position at the museum of modern art.

“What do you know?” she said.

“Leaves are leaves so long as they’re on the tree, but once they wind up on the kitchen table, they become garbage,” I continued unbothered. “Garbage is something that is in the wrong place and that has no use.”

“Save your lectures for your seminar,” Rosa said impolitely.

“That thing the wind blew onto the table is clearly a piece of garbage. It doesn’t belong here and we have no use for it. Throw it away,” I said.

“You didn’t look at it properly,” Rosa said. “I know how to look, my profession has taught me that. It looks like a piece of string, but it isn’t string. It’s extremely light, as if weightless, and extremely thin, but when you bend it, it springs back to its original shape. It’s something very special. I’m not going to throw it away.

“As you wish,” I said and threw on my overcoat. “I need to catch the next train. Put it into your jewelry box or take it to the museum. Maybe it’s not garbage after all. Maybe it’s art.”

In the middle of the night I woke to a vague disturbance. First I thought I’d woken from a restless dream. In the dream, I had been sick and guilty of something, but I couldn’t recall how or of what. Perhaps the dream had been a product of the migraine that the medication hadn’t fully been able to tame, as the left side of my forehead still throbbed. Or maybe it had been caused by the wind, which over the course of the evening had increased and was beating an uneven rhythm on the window with the branch of a maple tree. Or maybe it was provoked by my sampling theory seminar, where one post-graduate student had pointed out an embarrassing calculation error I’d made, loud enough for everyone to hear.

A faint gleam of light flickered in the room. I raised myself to a half-sitting position and saw a light coming from the direction of the window, but not through the window. The sky was still pitch-black and there were no streetlamps outside the bedroom window. The glimmer came from a glass ashtray, which sat on the windowsill. It was slightly odd, as the ashtray was a design piece that Rosa had brought home from our honeymoon in Murano, and I don’t think anything had ever been stubbed out in it. Neither one of us smoked, and if any of our guests practiced that vice, they were ushered onto the patio to light up. Even though there couldn’t possibly be smoldering cigarettes in the ashtray, something there was nevertheless giving off a soft glow.

The room was cold and drafty and I didn’t want to get out of the bed warmed by our dreaming. I lay down again next to Rosa, who was lying almost without a sound with her hand under her cheek, exuding nocturnal peace far away from me and from other distractions. Closing my eyes was of no help; the light flickered through my eyelids and sleep eluded me. The disturbances continued both inside and outside of me. Before long I was fully awake. I pushed the blanket aside and got up to investigate the strange light.

The ashtray held the string-like object that the wind had cast onto the breakfast table along with the leaves. Rosa hadn’t taken it to the museum. It was still as thin and the same size and shape as it had been in the morning, yet it looked different. Now it stood upright and flickered blue-tinted light, a bit like a firefly or a glow worm. It throbbed and moved about, twisting into the shape of a bell as symmetrical as an omega. It wasn’t just any old thing, and it especially wasn’t garbage. It looked like something living. Maybe in the morning it had only been dazed by the cold wind.

I put out my hand with the intention of picking it up. I didn’t need to. The creature climbed onto my hand by itself. It moved the way an inchworm does, with its hind end—if it can be called that, as both of its ends were identical—moving right up to its front end, so that for a moment it resembled a loop. Then its front end would stretch forward—always the same distance—over and over again. In this steady, almost mechanical manner, it climbed up my left pajama sleeve until it reached the crook of my elbow. There it stopped.

I now looked at it up close. My head no longer hurt and my vision was keen and clear, like it often is after a migraine. I was amazed, and that amazement had led me to a state of alertness and joy the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I didn’t have my glasses, and obviously the creature didn’t have eyes, yet I still felt that it, too, was observing me. Besides, the shape of its curve, very distinct and simple, began to remind me of something. Of course! To me, an assistant professor of statistics, it was as familiar as could be.

“How did I not realize it right away? A normal distribution curve, that’s what it is!” I said out loud, overcome by joy. “The Gaussian function! The bell curve! The law of error! Alive, in my own home, in my own hand!”

Rosa awoke and asked, “What are you on about? It’s the middle of the night!”

“Come see,” I said. “Come look at the thing that the storm blew onto the kitchen table this morning. Or maybe it wasn’t the storm that blew it in, maybe it flew in by itself.”

I lit the lamp on the night stand. Rosa got up and came to look. The creature was now motionless. It stood on my pajama sleeve in an upright position and glowed to itself.

“It’s not garbage,” I said. “You were right.”

“What do you think it is then?” Rosa asked.

“It’s an admirable universal truth,” I said. “It’s simultaneously a mystery, an abstract idea, and the most normal of normal, the most natural of natural realities. It has taken this physical form and revealed itself to us. Of all the people in the world, I don’t know why it chose us. What an honor!

“Are you out of your mind?” Rosa said. “Is this because of the migraine or are you just trying to annoy me? Is that even the same thing as the one in the morning? That looks to me like some sort of insect, a type of glow worm.”

“Don’t you remember what you said about it yourself this morning? That it’s something extraordinary? And it truly is! It isn’t just any biological entity. Neither is it an artifact. No human made it, no human could have made it. Do you know what Sir Francis Galton wrote about it?”

“How on earth could I know? How could he have written anything about it?” Rosa suspected.

“Perfectly well. I’ll show you!” I said.

I don’t have a photographic memory, and I couldn’t recite Galton as fluently as Rosa did Shelley. I had to search the bookshelf for the right book.

“Here it is.”

I held the book carefully and flipped the pages with my left arm held stiff, to keep my new friend from falling.

“Listen to this! Sir Francis Galton wrote, ‘I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the “Law of Frequency of Error.” The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion.’”

“Oh boy! I should have thrown it in the garbage after all,” Rosa said.

“Don’t you understand, Rosa? This is something indestructible. It’s part of the foundation of the universe, of the unchanging order of eternity. It describes something essential about everything, absolutely everything: astronomical units of measure, heredity, physics, intelligence, health, stock prices, populations . . . It bears witness to the connections between and oneness of everything in the world. It proves how wondrously
normal
the universe is, how stable and durable despite all the horror and chaos that surrounds us.”

“Come back to bed,” my wife said, already tucked back in.

But I wasn’t sleepy. As I watched that natural and mathematical creature, a living curve, I recalled once more why I had started to study mathematics and statistics. I remembered how in my early youth, in the darkness of the night, I had contemplated infinity, the laws of nature, the fractal nature of snowflakes, Fibonacci numbers, the world of Ideas and Plato. How I had imagined that one day I would be able to solve Hilbert’s sixteenth problem.

I said to the creature, “So what if storms toss you and the rest of us about? What does it matter if chaos and disorder seem to spread? It’s nothing but a surface delusion. You know, and I know, that even disorder has its order and errors their own law.”

I had hardly said that when I felt a painful pinch and instinctively shook my arm. The curve fell silently from my sleeve onto the floor and dashed out of the lamp’s sphere of light. I tried to search for it, and searched for a long time. But its glow had faded, and I could no longer distinguish it from the pattern of the rug and the shadows of the room.

UNMAKING

Amanda le Bas de Plumetôt

Amanda le Bas de Plumetôt is a Melbourne-based fiction writer and poet whose work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, among others. “Unmaking” is previously unpublished.

I wasn’t comfortable before. My throat was hoarse and sore because I yelled at them. They deserved it. I screamed at them and swore and cursed when I felt the smooth weight of the sedative leaning down on me, pressing into my lungs. They had no right. I’d been entitled to that meal and sedative wasn’t supposed to be part of it. I’d have kept eating. The rest of the lamb, potatoes roasted golden and crisp so that they shattered when I bit into them, all hot and brittle and salt. There was soft cheese and plums and pears and peaches. I’d have kept eating, eaten beyond the sanity of balance, eaten until my gut split and I died in the pain and wonder of too much of everything.

They hid it in the brandy. So dense and sweet, gravity and lightness and fire in my mouth and throat, the captured bitterness of it, all love and hate and regret, thick and wonderful, and they’d drugged it.

I am comfortable. Pain is a scream, trapped inside this terrible comfort. Pain is wanting to move, to run and hurt and love and feel and freedom and no one and nothing. Pain is life and so I am comfortable.

They placed me on a bed and brought me in here. It’s white and blue, this room; it’s silver and grey. All so pale, except for their faces. The doctor’s eyebrows are dark arches above blue that is either his eyes or just the walls of this place reflecting against his soul and a wisp of brown hair shows, just beside his left eye, at the edge of his cap. The light in here is bright, but it doesn’t shine into my face. All along the far wall are trays and bowls and troughs, stainless steel. Cold.

There are assistants, I’m not sure how many. Like the doctor, they are dressed in blue. Unlike him, their faces are covered. They shuffle about, turning towards me and then away. I see the darkness of their eyes. I can hear them, the rustle of their clothes, the slip of feet on floor, the sibilance of voices in this. They speak, but not to me.

This room is a theatre, that’s what they told me. A theatre. A place where performances are staged. It’s full of old machines, grey and shiny, all steel and holo displays. There are plastic tubes, laid out, ready for use. Ready. They’re ready for me to star in their show, silent in their anticipation, waiting to open their mouths inside my flesh. On the other wall there's a mirror that’s really a window. Witnesses are on the other side, watching me as if I’m television. But I’m not. I’m not television. I’m real.

The doctor smiles and nods. I want to believe that somewhere in his face I will find compassion. I want him to say that I have been pardoned. I want him to say that I have been given an extension. I want him to whisper
I have a plan.
He holds up a syringe so that I can see it. Taps the side of it in order to raise a bubble of air which he expels.

“You may have this in your arm or your leg,” he says. “Which would you prefer?”

I prefer to not have this happen.

They didn’t believe me when I told them about the beach. Day after day they pointed to the schematics and told me that there was no beach and no sky. I thought the psychiatrist might have understood how there can be a beach, even when it doesn’t show on their plans, because he started talking about race memory and collective unconscious. Then one day I went to see him and it was a different psychiatrist.

I cannot speak. My throat’s stopped up with fear. I’m shaking. I don’t know if the doctor can see this, but it’s because my heart is beating so hard, so fast. It’s as if I’ve run and run and run. As if I was allotted a certain number of beats, back at the beginning of my life, and my heart knows that it’s never going to use them all up now, but it wants as much of its allocation as it can get. I’ve tried to make it stop. I wanted to take that away from them.

The needle is small and very sharp. It will be the last thing I ever feel and I want to
feel
it. What if he stuck it in my eye or the palm of my hand or the tips of my fingers? What if he stuck it in my cock? Wouldn’t that be punishment enough?

“Arm is easiest,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. My voice is small and dry. Catches between the muscle spasms in my neck.

The pain is not enough. A fleeting scratch and then warmth. Silent warmth sliding up my arm and down my fingers. Into my shoulder and into my chest and then suddenly it’s everywhere. A weight and a lightness all at once. I am awake in a vivid acuity. The light in the room seems lighter, but it might just be the drug’s affect on my eyes.

“You won’t feel this one.” He holds a second syringe where I can see it.

Blurry, up close, the needle goes into my face. Dipping, up and down into me. A moment later my vision returns to normal and the feeling has come back into to my tongue and lips. I could eat if I wanted to. I could drink, I could kiss and shout and laugh and bite and blink and frown and smile. They have only done this so that I can speak.

“I want to live,” I say.

“Life is balance,” he says.

The assistants’ feet scrape and hiss across the floor. They lift me. I can’t feel their hands. I’m on a table now, the unfelt cold bench that’s part of the props of this theatre. Head up, arms by my sides, legs out in front. There are gutters running down the sides. One assistant wheels away my bed, one strips the cotton blanket from me.

I am naked, just wearing this body one last time. Assistants bring basins of water. In silence they wash me, arm by arm, leg by leg, careful to sponge clean the wounds and bruises. I can hear the small trickle of water as they dip the cloths and then wring them out. I can smell the tang of soap. I wish that the cloth would press against my mouth, that I would taste the water or the soap, but they hold it so carefully with their blue gloves. They place my hands on the table, palms up and away from my body. No part of me even touches me.

There’s a sudden hiss of sound and I’m confused for a moment and then I hear the magistrate’s voice coming from a speaker somewhere in the room. She says: “Commence.”

The doctor stands at the foot of my table. An assistant wheels in a cart. There are knives and scissors and blades laid out on the tray of the cart on a cloth that’s blue as the sky I’ll never see again. Blue as the sky that they deny even exists. Blue as it was that day.

The doctor steps to the right side of the table and lays his hand on my dick. This part of me, such a paradox. So soft, so hard. Anger and ecstasy. Piss and come. I want to feel it one more time but I can only see it. “Don’t do this.” The words seep out of me but in the time it takes to say them he has the blade in his hand and already blunted me with a tourniquet and I can see a line of red. It blurs and blurs. How can they do this? How can they do it to me? I can't breathe, I've forgotten how, the blade buries itself inside me and I expect pain but there’s nothing. The assistant holds up scissors, the ends of them are flattened, and buries them in the wound. The bleeding slows. Bleeding. My dick and balls all small and pale and limp in his hand and then in a bowl and I’m bleeding. Like a woman. I can smell it: smoke and meat; and then the thick protein smells of blood and piss. I can’t even tell that I’m pissing, except for the smell.

It’s gone. The assistant carries the bowl to the window and holds it up for the witnesses, though there are cameras everywhere; they watched the cutting in close-up. The magistrate’s voice hisses over the speaker and I don’t hear her at first. There’s something white dabbing and poking at my face. One of the assistants is wiping my eyes and nose.

“. . .and the delivery system has now been excised. In accordance with Paragraph (a) of Section II. Order of the line will be considered on sexual maturity if the get is male. Until such time, a core-sample of generative material will be cryogenically maintained.”

They could stop this now. They could even reverse it if they really wanted to, but they could stop. Just stop. Sew my wound. Let me sit to piss. I could live like this. No harm to anyone. Neutralised. No more ferals. It would be so easy. “Please,” I say. “Please. . .”

The doctor looks down at the wound he’s created. At the stump where I end now. His gloves are red and purple and blue. He tucks a thread of flesh back inside me. I’m too messy for this world. His fingers run up my right leg, blue on my skin, at the broken flesh and the black, purple bruises. “That must have hurt.”

“I was running.” Running so fast. I thought I could get away from them. I tripped in the thick sand and fell. Snap of bone and the pain. I screamed when they rolled me onto my back and my eyes were watering from the sand in them and the sun.

Worse than the pain is their continued denial.

The doctor’s fingers tap against my leg. The bruises fade under the press of his finger and then turn dark again.

“I wanted to get into the water. I wanted to swim. I could have swum a long way. There are islands.”

The doctor does not look at me.

One assistant brings a big rubber sleeve that reminds me of a toy I had when I was a kid. A möbius sleeve forever turning itself inside out, slipping through my fingers, almost impossible to hold onto. Assistants tuck my foot into it and push it up the length of my leg; their thin, blue fingers burrow into the wound of my groin as they push and push. The sleeve has squeezed the blood out of my right leg and it looks pale and diseased, the bruises all green and purple. Another assistant ties a wire around the very top of my leg. I can see the flesh bulging up against it. That should hurt. They roll the sleeve off. My toes are turning blue.

The doctor’s blade burrows into my hip, thigh, groin. The assistants wipe away small amounts of blood and click and snip with their little, flat scissors. Blue smoke hazes their blue hands and I can smell meat cooking.

“Fixing a break like that is a huge resource drain.”

The doctor is right, of course, but I never asked to have it fixed. I offered it to them. I said they could take it away. I said they could use it.

Smoke haze drifts and swirls around the assistants, their voices low murmurs. Tools whine and screech, shuddering through my foundations so that I can’t see properly.

This is all a process, like the processes in factory rooms where clothes and chairs and phones are put together. Only this is the reverse. They rock me from side to side and wrap their arms around me to hold me steady against the cutting and hammering. The smell of blood is so thick. I am immersed into the salt of it, into the ocean of it.

“I loved running. I was so fast. She ran with me. You know that.” They can hear me. The doctor and the assistants, the magistrate and all the witnesses. “She ran with me. She saw it all too.” It was only a game. It was only everything. That speed and strength and lightness and power. That race and rush and fall and fuck. Sand and old seaweed sticking to my arse and her on top of me, laughing and smooth and hot and her tits and my hands and her face and mouth. We were beating like the surf, her laughter shrill as a gull and all the soft and hard of us coming together.

Blue assistants move like waves at the beach. I can see the red and white and yellow of meat. Those flat scissors hang from where my leg was. One assistant wheels that trolley to the window for the witnesses and this time I hear what the magistrate says.

“Right lower extremity. This material will now be recycled as skin matrix, protein and mineral resource.”

When I shut my eyes, they are gone. I wish I could shut my ears; it's hard to ignore the small sounds of them, the whispers and the plotting. I can feel my face from the cleft of my chin to the top of my eyebrows. A narrow band of sensation: mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows. Right leg.

It startles me. I might have said something, I’m not sure. Several of the assistants turn and look at me. The doctor frowns. It isn’t there, but I can feel it. Not cold and broken, lying in a trough but strong now. My right leg! I flex my toes and aim a kick at the doctor’s head. Nothing happens, of course.

The assistants take the sleeve to my left leg. To my perfect and beautiful left leg.

I breathe slow. Air slips over my top lip. I can’t feel my lungs filling or my chest expanding, I only know that they are.

“You could stop. You could stop now.”

The doctor begins the cutting of my left leg.

“You could stop after that.” The pulling and the little noises. The small, water sound of my blood caught in the table's gutters. “I’d be balanced then.” I could learn to move about on just my hands. “I wouldn’t be a drain on the resources. I wouldn’t need as many calories and the feral will only be small, it will take years before he or she needs to consume very much. Equal to two legs for a long time, all that mass of muscle going into the protein vats. I’ve given back. I’m giving back. Isn’t it enough?”

An assistant beside me, holding me. An embrace that I can’t feel. Now I end halfway up the table. They’ll be a good mineral resource because I took care of them. All that calcium. All that protein. All that sand.

“Stop!” For a moment, they hesitate, the trough and my beautiful leg almost there, almost at the mirror-window. “There's sand. Check under my toenails. Just look. There's sand under my toenails from where I was running on the beach. Can you look? You can look. You can just—you can look. You should.” But they move on and they don't reach for my toes. They won't even look. They won't look for the sand. She ran with me and I can feel it. My legs are pumping, jarring against the sand, slipping and twisting in it. I open my eyes and see smears of blood where my legs were, I close them and feel the stretch and thrust of each stride, the prickle of salt air against my thighs.

“She saw the ocean.” She saw it. She laughed and pulled strands of her hair covered in sand away from her mouth. She kicked sprays of water at me and she dove in, her hair and clothes streaming and foamy. It was real and she knew it, so why did she deny it when we stood in that courtroom?

“Why won't you even look?”

“We’re going to lay you back a little now,” the doctor says. “Just so you don’t slip down the table.”