2011

Chapter 14: The Big Decision "I can't breathe." "Aino, listen to me." "I can't—" "You are breathing." Elisa's voice reached her through the phone, but for a moment it seemed impossibly far away, barely audible beneath Aino's pounding heart and the shallow, frightened breaths that refused to fill her lungs. She sat on the closed toilet lid, one hand pressed against her chest and the other gripping her phone so tightly that its edge dug into her palm. Her whole body had tensed without her permission. Her shoulders were raised, her legs trembling, and her heart hammered against her ribs so rapidly that the beats seemed to run together. Aino tried to take a deeper breath.Somewhere halfway down her throat, it seemed to stop. A fresh wave of panic swept through her. She stood up without meaning to, struck her knee against the toilet-paper dispenser and dropped back onto the lid, barely noticing the pain. "I can't." "You can. You're doing it right now." "No, I'm not." "You are. I can hear you." "My throat feels wrong." "I know." "It's closing." "Aino, listen to my voice." She tried. She really did, but her body was providing far more convincing evidence than Elisa's words. Her throat felt narrow and strange, her fingers were tingling, and the pale bathroom tiles in front of her kept slipping in and out of focus behind the tears filling her eyes. When she swallowed, the sensation in her throat changed just enough to frighten her all over again. "And my eyes—" "I know. You've told me. Stay with me." Aino squeezed them shut, immediately discovered that this only made the itching worse and opened them again. The bathroom around her smelled faintly of disinfectant and something damp she couldn't identify. A fluorescent light hummed overhead, and somewhere behind the walls water moved through a pipe with a dull metallic groan. She had locked herself in the cubicle because it was the only place in the office where nobody could see her, although now the locked door seemed less comforting than it had a few minutes earlier. Her nose was completely blocked, her eyes were swollen and watering, and angry red patches had appeared across the irritated skin around them. Her head hurt, her throat had been scratchy for most of the morning, and every part of her face seemed either to itch, burn or throb. None of that was particularly new anymore. What was new was the absolute certainty that something terrible was happening to her. It had begun at her desk with a strange tightness in her throat. She had ignored it; her throat had been irritated for days. She had kept entering another invoice into the system—date, supplier, invoice number, amount, VAT—until, without thinking about it, she had tried to take a deeper breath. It hadn't felt deep enough. So she had tried again. That one had been worse. Within seconds she had become intensely aware of every movement of air through her throat. The more carefully she tried to breathe, the less natural breathing became, until she could no longer remember what it was supposed to feel like when she wasn't thinking about it. Her heart had begun to race, her fingers had tingled, and the office seemed to contract around her while one thought pushed everything else from her mind. Something is wrong. She had stood so quickly that her chair rolled backwards into the wall. By the time she reached the bathroom, the thought had become something much worse. I'm going to stop breathing. She had called Elisa before she'd even locked the cubicle door. "Aino." "I'm here." "Good. Put both feet on the floor for me." Aino looked down. Her shoes were already touching the tiles, which made the instruction seem particularly pointless. "They are." "All the way. Flat against the floor. Feel it under your feet." "This isn't going to help." "Probably not if you argue with me the entire time." Under any other circumstances, Aino would have pointed out that this was not a particularly sound argument. Right now, however, constructing the objection seemed to require more mental effort than simply doing what Elisa said, so she planted both feet firmly against the tiles and pressed down. "Good." Elisa's voice was calm without becoming unnaturally soft, and Aino found that she preferred it that way. She wasn't being spoken to like something fragile that might break if handled incorrectly. Elisa simply sounded like Elisa, except that every trace of hesitation had disappeared from her voice. At first there were noises behind her: footsteps, a door opening, someone saying something Aino couldn't make out. Then another door closed and the background fell quiet. Elisa had apparently found somewhere private. "Now tell me where you are." "In the toilet." "I know that. Tell me what you can see." Aino swallowed carefully and stared at the cubicle in front of her. "The door." "What colour?" "Grey." "Of course it is." Something escaped Aino's throat that might have become a laugh under better circumstances. "What else?" "The floor… … Elisa" "I'm listening." Aino wiped her wet cheek with the heel of her hand and forced herself to look around properly. "The tiles are white. There's a bin and toilet paper and..." Her eyes moved upwards. "There's a stupid picture of a flower on the wall." "What kind of flower?" "I don't know." "You're the mathematician. I won't hold it against you." This time the almost-laugh actually happened, although it came out shaky and wet and disappeared almost immediately. Then Aino felt her bladder let go. She froze. For several seconds the sensation barely seemed to belong to her. Warmth spread into the padding between her legs while she sat perfectly still, too overwhelmed even to react until another fear found its way into the space the first one had begun to leave behind. "Elisa." "I'm here." "I… I peed." There was no change in Elisa's voice. "Okay." Aino looked down at herself, but through her skirt it was impossible to tell whether the diaper had leaked, or how badly. "I didn't mean to." "That's okay." "What if it leaks?" Her voice had started climbing again. She could suddenly imagine wetness spreading through the back of her skirt, onto the toilet lid, another problem she would have to somehow deal with before she could leave this horrible room. "Aino, don't worry about that right now." "But—" "You're wearing a diaper. Let it do its job." Aino swallowed. "It might leak." "And if it does, we'll deal with it." The simple certainty in Elisa's answer quieted something in her. "But what if—" "Then we'll deal with it," Elisa repeated. "Nothing terrible is going to happen because your diaper leaks." Aino pressed her feet against the floor again. The warmth was already fading into the familiar heavy dampness of the padding, and as far as she could tell, nothing had escaped it. "Okay." "Good. You don't need to check it right now. Stay with me." Aino took another shaky breath. "Okay." For the next few minutes Elisa kept her talking, asking questions about things so completely unimportant that Aino gradually understood their unimportance was the entire point. The flower had six purple petals. The metal lock was cold beneath her fingers. One of the white floor tiles had a crack running diagonally across one corner, and the rubbish bin was almost empty except for a paper towel that had somehow missed it and landed beside it instead. The fluorescent light made a faint electrical buzz that Aino was fairly certain she would never have noticed under normal circumstances. Whenever her thoughts began circling back towards her throat, Elisa found something else for her to describe. Slowly, without Aino being able to identify the moment when it happened, the bathroom stopped feeling like the place where she was going to die and became an ugly office bathroom again. Her heart was still beating too quickly, but there was space between the beats now. Her breathing remained uneven and unsatisfying, yet air kept moving in and out whether she concentrated on it or not, and the walls had stopped seeming as though they were creeping closer every time she looked away. "There you are," Elisa said softly. Aino let the back of her head rest against the cubicle wall and closed her eyes again, more carefully this time. "I'm scared." "I know." "My eyes are burning." "I know." "And my throat still feels strange." "I know that too." Aino wiped her face again. She was exhausted now, almost absurdly so, as though she had just run somewhere rather than spent the past several minutes sitting on a toilet lid. "Can you leave the building?" Elisa asked. Aino opened her eyes and looked towards the cubicle door. "I suppose." "Then leave." "But it's the middle of the day." "I don't care." "Tarmo will." "I care even less about Tarmo." Aino's mouth twitched despite herself, but then she imagined what leaving the building would actually require. She would have to unlock the cubicle, walk back down the corridor and enter the office to collect her coat and bag. The cardboard boxes would still be waiting beside her desk, probably with another stack of papers on top, and the stale smell of the room would reach her before she had even sat down. Her heart immediately began to accelerate again. "I can't go back in there." "Then don't." "I mean tomorrow." There was a pause on the other end of the line, brief enough that Aino might not normally have noticed it. "I know what you mean." "And the day after that." She rubbed at the damp skin beneath one eye, then stopped when it began to sting. "Elisa, I can't keep doing this. Every day I feel sick, and then I go home and it gets better, and then I come back and it starts again. And I can't even do anything useful while I'm here. I just sit there typing numbers from pieces of paper for eight hours, and I'm not allowed to fix it even though I know how, and—" Her breath caught again, frightening her enough that the rest of the sentence disappeared. "Aino." "I can't." "Then stop." For a moment Aino wasn't sure she'd heard correctly. "What?" "Stop." "I can't just stop going to work." "That's not what I said." Aino frowned at the purple flower on the wall, trying to work out what alternative meaning the sentence could possibly have. Elisa let her think for a few seconds before supplying it. "You can resign." The words were so simple that Aino almost didn't understand them. Resigning was technically something people could do; she knew that. It simply hadn't existed in her mind as one of the available solutions to this particular problem. "I can't." "Why not?" "Because I need a job." "You need to be able to breathe." "I need money." "Yes." "And I have rent and bills and my apartment in Finland, and this place, and—" "The company is paying for Tallinn." "That's not the point." "I know." Aino rubbed her forehead. Her thoughts were beginning to move properly again, although now they were rushing towards an entirely different set of problems. "I can't quit without another job." "Who says?" "Everyone." "I don't." Aino gave a small, miserable laugh. "That's helpful." "I'm serious." "So am I. I have rent. I have bills. I can't just decide not to have an income." The silence that followed was longer than the previous ones. Aino could hear Elisa breathing on the other end of the line, slow and even, as though she were weighing something. "Elisa?" "Move in with me." Aino stopped rubbing her forehead. For a moment she simply sat there with the phone against her ear, staring at the six-petalled flower while her mind tried to rearrange the words into some other sentence. "What?" "Move in with me." "You mean—" "I mean exactly that. Resign. Give up your apartment when you can, come back to Helsinki and live with me." The suggestion was so much larger than the problem Aino had been trying to solve that she didn't immediately know how to compare the two. "You can't solve everything by letting me live with you." "No. But I can solve the part where you're paying rent for an apartment you're barely using while making yourself ill in Tallinn because you're afraid you can't afford to leave." "Elisa..." "You don't have to decide this second." That was sufficiently absurd that Aino almost laughed. "You've already decided." "I've made a suggestion." "You said it like an instruction." There was a short silence. "Fine," Elisa said. "Perhaps I could have phrased it more democratically." Aino's mouth twitched. "Would you, Aino, perhaps consider the possibility of resigning from the job you hate, leaving the office that appears to be actively poisoning you, and moving in with the woman who misses you terribly?" Aino's eyes filled again, but this time the tears arrived without the accompanying terror. "You miss me?" "That is the part you chose to focus on?" "Yes." Elisa sighed, although Aino could hear the smile in it. "Yes. I miss you." Aino pressed the phone closer to her ear. Only minutes earlier, the entire world had seemed to consist of a locked bathroom cubicle in Tallinn and the terrifying conviction that she couldn't breathe. Beyond that immediate problem waited another one that had seemed almost as impossible: she couldn't stay in the office, couldn't afford to stop working and couldn't imagine returning the following morning to begin the same cycle again. Now there was suddenly another possibility, and Aino wasn't sure whether that made things simpler or considerably more complicated. Moving in with Elisa after knowing her for only a few months was a very large decision. Their relationship was even newer, and giving up both her job and her apartment at approximately the same time probably violated several pieces of sensible life advice. On the other hand, it involved waking up beside Elisa. Aino had to admit that this weighed rather heavily in its favour. "Would you really want me there?" "Aino." "That's not an answer." "Yes. I really want you there." Aino wiped beneath her eyes. "With Bunny?" "Obviously with Bunny." "And the others?" There was a tiny pause. "How many others are we talking about?" Aino laughed, and the sound came out wet and shaky. "Several." "We'll negotiate shelf space." Without thinking about it first, Aino drew in a long breath. Only when her lungs were comfortably full did she realize what she had done. The air had gone all the way in. She sat very still for a moment, waiting for the tightness to return. It didn't. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay what?" Aino looked at herself in the mirror across the cubicle. Her eyes were swollen and red, the skin around them was blotchy, and tear tracks still shone on her cheeks. She looked, by any reasonable assessment, absolutely terrible. But she wasn't terrified anymore. "I think I want to come home." Aino stayed in the bathroom until her hands had stopped shaking. She washed her face with cold water, although the result in the mirror suggested that this had done very little beyond making her face wet, and then stood there for another minute gathering enough courage to return to the office. Elisa had wanted to stay on the phone, but Aino had told her she was all right now. That wasn't entirely true, but it was true enough for the short walk back to her desk. The stale smell hit her almost immediately. Her throat tightened in response, and for one frightening second Aino thought the panic might begin again, but she kept walking. She wasn't staying. She only needed her coat and bag, and then she could leave. Tarmo was standing near the printer. He took one look at her swollen eyes and, for perhaps the first time since Aino had met him, seemed to forget about procedures. "Are you all right?" "No." "Do you need a doctor?" "I need to go home." Tarmo hesitated. For a moment he looked as though he might ask something else, but whatever he saw in Aino's face apparently changed his mind. "Of course." He didn't ask her to fill in a form or explain when she would be back. He simply stepped aside. Aino was grateful for that. She returned to her desk and began gathering her things. Her coat was hanging over the chair, her bag underneath it, and the five remaining archive boxes stood exactly where she had left them. She looked at the boxes. The instructions come from Helsinki. The thought appeared almost from nowhere. Aino stopped with one arm halfway into her coat. For the first time in days, she remembered the strange telephone call she had overheard from Juhani on her last evening in Helsinki. There was no obvious connection between that and the boxes, and Tarmo's mysterious instructions from Helsinki could easily have been nothing more than ordinary corporate bureaucracy. Probably they were. Still. Aino sat down and woke the computer. Her access here was nothing like it had been in Finland. In Helsinki she had been able to see broad financial and analytical data from across the company; in Tallinn, almost everything available to her consisted of local accounting material, old exports, spreadsheets, scanned invoices and miscellaneous administrative files. Nothing about it looked particularly interesting, let alone suspicious. She opened her bag and found the small external drive she usually carried in one of the side pockets. For a moment she looked at it, then, before she could think herself out of it, plugged it in. Copying everything she could access took surprisingly little effort. There was far less material than she would have had access to in Helsinki, and most of it appeared almost aggressively unimportant: invoices, receipts, supplier lists, old spreadsheets and scanned documents. Once, footsteps passed in the corridor and Aino glanced towards the door, suddenly conscious of how difficult this would be to explain. Probably nothing. Aino watched the progress bar reach the end. Only then did she properly consider what she had just done. Taking company data home without permission was very obviously not allowed, and curiosity was equally obviously not a valid justification for doing it. She ejected the drive anyway and slipped it back into her bag. Perhaps she would never even look at it. But if there was something there, she wanted the option. Aino shut down the computer, pulled on her coat and left the five boxes beside the desk. She didn't look back. Back at the apartment, Aino packed slowly. There wasn't much that truly belonged to her in Tallinn, which should have made the task simple, but she found herself moving from one small thing to another without much order, still too drained from the afternoon to approach even packing with her usual efficiency. Most things were easy to sort, until she found the alpaca Juhani had given her sitting at the back of a shelf. Aino picked it up and frowned at it. There was no particularly good reason to take it with her. Unlike Bunny, it had never been important to her, and the fact that it had come from Juhani seemed like an excellent argument for leaving it behind. Then she remembered the small zipper hidden beneath the fur on its back. Aino looked towards her bag. The external drive was still inside it. For a moment she looked from the alpaca to the bag and back again. She still had no idea whether there was anything meaningful in the files she had copied. Perhaps Juhani's strange phone call meant nothing. Perhaps the instructions from Helsinki meant nothing. Perhaps she had taken several gigabytes of exceptionally boring accounting data for no reason at all. But she didn't know that yet, and Aino had never been particularly good at leaving a problem unsolved. She took the drive from her bag, opened the zipper and pushed it carefully beneath the alpaca's stuffing. Once the zipper was closed, there was no sign that anything was hidden inside. Aino looked into its permanently cheerful face. "You can go when I know what he was hiding." The alpaca went into her suitcase. Aino sat down at the kitchen table, opened her laptop and wrote her resignation email before she could invent enough reasons not to. When it was finished, she read it through three times, corrected one unnecessary comma, and pressed send. For several seconds she stared at the confirmation on the screen. Then she opened another tab and started looking at ferry tickets to Finland for the following day.

Fun story. This Hunter is such an ass.

I agree, she thinks Paul is her personal little play thing i think.  I just haven't liked her from the get go. 

Kitten

After this win, I'm gonna let others win for a while.