Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

to do it." He seems almost on the verge of tears.
    "What do you mean, Markku? You're not making sense. Have you had—"
    "You make me weak. You've always made me weak. And now I understand why."
    Joseph tightens his grip on his cane and eyes his suitcase, sitting at Markku's feet. He doesn't understand. But oh God, I think I'm beginning to.
    "We're both a long way from home," Joseph says in what's meant to be a comforting, conciliatory voice, and smiles with no teeth, in the way that people sometimes smile at snarling dogs. He keeps looking at his suitcase.
    Leave it. Just run.
    "You. Your whole people. The Nazis figured it out. You're a fucking contagion. Corrupting everything that's healthy, turning it sick and twisted and—"
    "That's not true, Markku. You know it isn't. We're friends , Markku. Remember th—"
    "Go to hell."
    He pulls out a pistol and sends us there.
    ****
    June 1965
    What is it with the awful Swedish food in the cafeteria today? These meatballs taste like wood pulp. I finish my plate anyway, because I've been on my feet for about six hours straight, at this point, and I need the protein buried somewhere in these sorry grey lumps.
    The coffee's good here, though, and the view can't be beat. Looking out the big seaward window, the Baltic's right there , summer blue and dotted with jaunty ships. I sip my coffee and come alive again, watching with veiled interest as a couple of new resident doctors file up to the cafeteria counter, talking to each other in voices too low to eavesdrop on. The third in line catches my eye—or rather, his short-cropped ginger hair does—but I quickly look away. He's too pinky-pale, his hair too coppery, his skin too dappled by freckles.
    I've been dreaming of a red-haired man since I was a little boy. Well, that's kind of an incorrect statement. He's not always a man. Sometimes he's a sickly little boy and sometimes he's a teenager. Sometimes I think he's me.
    But maybe not, because sometimes he's a man, and those are the times I wake up fevered or twisted in my sheets or in a cold sweat or crying or so rock fucking hard I have to grind against the mattress for relief.
    Sometimes he's dying. In a hospital or after a horrible motorcycle accident, or in some frozen winter woods or in a dirty post-apocalyptic alley surrounded by rubble. Those are the cold dreams, the dreams where I wake weeping and I don't know why.
    My younger sister, who's done a couple semesters in America and brought back a taste for Hare Krishna and power crystals and the Kalevala set to electric guitar (and maybe a few psychedelic drugs if my mother's to be believed) says it must be my past life. The dreams do seem old fashioned, like watching an old movie where people say things like "dame" or "flatfoot" or "whistling Dixie", but to be honest the first thing that comes to my mind isn't past life , it's purpose . And I'm not sure I care to know what that purpose is. I'm happy—for a Scandinavian, I'm positively ecstatic—without one.
    I can't help being curious, though. Maybe she has me believing a little bit of her mixed-up nonsense.
    So I'm on break at the hospital cafeteria, and instead of leafing through the smiling faces in Suomen Kuvalehti , I'm carefully cracking the pages of an English treatise on the transmigration of souls in Jewish theology. I'm good at the language—I've always had a gift for languages—but it's still pretty damn arcane.
    I don't get very far before my break is over.
    I put my book away, down the last of my coffee, wash my hands, and start my round. The summer sunlight helps me stay alert. This hospital is modern, with a few full walls of windows, exploding with natural light, a far cry from the old stone dungeon in Turku where I did my nursing practicum.
    Walking the halls, I'm relieved I'm on day shift. Nights here can be downright spooky sometimes, especially if you're the type to believe in ghosts, which—I hate to admit—I am. Even in the middle of the day I get this kind of creepy sense that there's somebody watching me, following me, not to hurt me I don't think, but still.
    The other day I was doing a night shift, seven-to-seven, and I swear to God I saw this old-fashioned nurse, like the ones in the class of '41-'42 group portraits that hang in the hallways of my old dormitory, skulking around down in ICU. She looked right at me, beckoned as if she wanted me to fetch her something—pillows, an IV bag, who knows—and then she sighed, and shook her head