The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [51]
Spring? Spring seemed to have some allure and rang a bell. But why not, just as well, autumn, or January . . . ? No, not January, that rang no bell. Not summer, either. Spring, though, made him think of a young hare, and that made him think of a bigger hare, his own . . . and that suggested autumn. Autumn made him think of Christmas; and now it felt almost like spring—March, most likely.
On further reflection, March didn’t feel right, either. More likely it was the bitter end of winter.
Nausea rushed back. He barricaded a disgusting fluid behind his teeth, burst out of the carpet, saw two other sleepers on the floor, realized that the bathroom door was straight in front of him, and rushed in.
He threw up violently; as he retched, the contents of his stomach poured into the toilet bowl; he dribbled slobber; his eyes popped; his stomach contracted like a cow’s after giving birth, then felt as if it might come out of his contorted mouth, with his heart banging his head off.
And then, suddenly, the nausea was gone; a delicious confidence in the indomitableness of his system came back like a refreshing shower. He raised a purple face to the mirror and stood looking.
It was a colored page torn from a porn magazine. He washed the sweat off it, bared his upper body, and washed his chest and armpits with a cold washcloth. He found a comb in his pocket and ran it through his thick, matted hair. The hairs stuck to the comb. Pulling them away, his stiff, awkward fingers pulled several teeth out of the comb. He threw it all into the toilet bowl, gargled several times, then flushed the whole mess. When he opened the bathroom door and returned to the other room, he remembered with astonishing clarity who he was, remembered it must be Christmas, but found recent happenings a complete haze.
The room was small, tidy, clearly a dentist’s office: chrome chairs and drills glistened in the sun flooding through the window. He sat down on a sofa by the wall, hands dangling between his knees like a farm laborer’s, and took a look at the two other people lodging here in this odd setup.
One of them was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. They had woken and piled up by the wall the sofa cushions they’d been using as beds. Vatanen greeted them. Both seemed familiar, yet so unfamiliar. He couldn’t bring himself to ask where he was and who the other two were. He supposed time would clear up these mysteries.
The young woman, for she was more than a girl, clarified matters by saying the taxi ought to be paid off so the driver could finally leave: two hundred twenty-two dollars. Vatanen felt in his back pocket; his wallet was gone. The woman produced it from her handbag and handed it to him. The wallet contained a large wad, over nine hundred dollars. Vatanen counted out two hundred thirty dollars and gave it to the woman. She gave it to the man, who thanked her and handed back eight dollars. So the man was a taxi driver, Vatanen concluded.
“Good-bye, then,” the man said as he left. “Quite a time we had. Cheers.”
“Take these,” the woman said, handing Vatanen some red vitamins from her handbag. “They’ll do you good. Just swallow them whole.”
Vatanen managed to ask where the hare was.
“No need to worry. It’s safe in Helsinki, with some professor. It was left there before Christmas and can stay till the New Year. It’s all fixed up.”
“Before Christmas? Is it after Christmas?”
“Yes, yes, don’t you remember?”
“I’ve gotten a bit vague about things. I must have been drinking a little.”
“A little more than a little,” she said matter-of-factly.
“It feels like that. Who are you?”
“Leila.