Work Text:
The hangover felt like something physically occupying the space behind Holappa's eyes, something with a heavy weight and sharp corners. He'd had worse. He'd also had better, considerably better, in the era before the era before the one he was stuck in, back in the part of his life that existed now mostly as a reference point for how far rock bottom had turned out to be from where he'd first thought it was.
What a life it was.
Holappa sat on the concrete steps and smoked, his gaze focused on nothing.
He somehow always ended up here. He came here the way water found the lowest point in a room - not purposefully deciding to, not not-deciding to, just arriving because it was what he was destined to do. His feet knew the route better than he did: past the dormitory, past the work site, left at the wall with the graffiti he'd stopped reading years ago but could picture perfectly in his mind, down the sloped sidewalk to the steps. The railway crossing just a few meters beyond.
He had sat on these same steps in rain and in cold and in the particular suspended light of a summer night that never fully turned itself over to the dark, and throughout the years he had sat and smoked on these steps and watched the crossing, and it had never been an accident that he came to this specific place. He just never thought about it too hard.
The 11:03 train was about to pass through.
He watched it, as he always did. He could feel the speed of it - the way it made the air move, the way it displaced the world in front of it, the pressure-change Holappa could feel in his chest and his ears even from the distance, a vibration that traveled up through the concrete steps and into the bones of his legs and settled somewhere behind his sternum.
The train made the world feel briefly larger than it usually was. It made him feel, briefly, like a body occupying a specific point in space rather than just a set of full moments recurring weekly, monthly, into eternity, the way a machine cycles through the same motion until it wears itself down into nothing. And then the train was gone and the crossing was empty and the world contracted back to its usual dimensions, which were small, and familiar, and just fine.
Fine.
Fine was a word he used a lot, inside his own head. Things were fine. He was fine. The equipment at the worksite needed replacing but the foreman had it handled probably, fine. The bunk in the dormitory smelled like whatever poor soul who'd had it before him, fine. His hands shook slightly after a day without drinking and his back ached in the mornings and the shaking and the aching had become indistinguishable from who he was, just features of the landscape of being Holappa - like the crossing was a feature of the landscape of this particular section of Helsinki, just there, just always there. And it was fine.
Holappa drew on the cigarette and thought about the train.
The thought was not unfamiliar. He had been having it - in one form or another, with more or less clarity - for long enough that it had lost the quality of a passing, fleeting thought and instead was just there, the way the tracks were just there. It would be quick was not a dramatic thought. It was, if anything, the opposite of dramatic: the calmest, most efficient thing he had ever considered, almost sensible given where Holappa was in his life.
His body ached in the cold. The drinking cost money he had to earn at the worksite. The worksite required him to be upright and functional at seven in the morning, which required not drinking too much the night before, which he reliably failed at, which meant the worksite cost more of him than he had, which meant the dormitory cost more than he could sustain, which meant the drinking - it went around and around, the last dregs of an unremarkable life swirling around the drain.
Holappa took a drag.
He had no particular plans for the afternoon, or the evening, or tomorrow, or the week after, or the future in general. He had a shift on Thursday and then on Friday if they hadn't let him go yet by then. He had thirty euros in his coat pocket and a mostly-empty bottle tucked between the mattress and the wall in the dormitory and he had Huotari, who was reliably good for a drink and for briefly not-thinking about the thoughts. He had these things and a hangover with a bite, and he sat with all of it in the flat grey of a Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever day it was and the crossing was just meters away.
Holappa was, in all the ways that mattered, a man no one could pick out of a crowd.
The familiar horn.
The 11:40 now. He felt it first as vibration - in the steps, in his spine, in the specific frequency of the persistent hangover which resonated with certain sounds. He heard it build. He looked at the crossing. The light at the far end of the tracks was not yet visible, that meant he had maybe ninety seconds or so.
Holappa stood up, his joints protesting at the movement. He'd done this before. He was on his feet. The crossing was not more than five meters away.
He could feel his heart, the presence of it doing its work, sixty-some beats a minute, more on the days after drinking, fewer on the days he was almost sure he would be dying. The average of a life he had not asked to have and had not particularly chosen to continue and had not particularly chosen to end either. He was just having it. That was all.
And that was fine.
The horn again. Closer.
Holappa thought: the bar opens at noon.
He thought, with the same flat texture as all his other thoughts: I could just. Before noon. Before the bar opens, before the shift on Thursday, before the dormitory and the bottle and Huotari asking if I am coming out, I could just step off the kerb. It would be-
It would be so much simpler than Thursday.
Holappa stood on the bottom step and looked over at the crossing and thought about Thursday. He thought about the walk to the worksite in whatever weather the city had decided on, the foreman's expression, the equipment that had been about to go for six weeks now, the sound the machine made when it ran too long, the bottles hidden out of sight, all of it exactly as it had been yesterday and would be tomorrow and the Thursday after this one. He thought about euros in his light wallet and empty bottles and the shape of the next ten or twenty years if he bothered to have them, which would look like this, which would look exactly like this, the same costs and the same income, the same dormitory smell in the early mornings and late evenings, the same walk to this random building, the same concrete steps in the same flat grey. Over and over and over again.
The vibration in the steps beneath Holappa was continuous now.
He thought: it wouldn't even hurt for very long.
He thought, in the voice of a man reading from a particularly uninteresting paper: I don't have anything on Thursday I particularly wanted to do.
Holappa was on the steps. He was not on the tracks. He was aware of the distance, of the gravel between the steps and the tracks, the particular sound that gravel would make when stepped on. He was looking at the crossing and his cigarette had gone out - he registered distantly - and the horn was very loud and the light was visible now at the far end of the tracks, the light that meant the 11:40 was a real and present thing and not just a vibration, not just a distant sound, but rather a thunderous thing that drowned out everything.
Holappa stood there.
The train came through.
Holappa was still on the steps.
He did not entirely remember the moment it passed - there was the light, and the noise, the specific violence of the noise which at this distance was more physical than auditory, and his heart which had been doing sixty-some beats a minute was doing considerably more, and then the train was past and gone and the crossing was empty and the world had contracted back to its usual dimensions and he was standing on the steps with a dead cigarette between his lips and his heart still announcing itself in his ears.
Holappa sat back down.
He sat on the steps for a while after that, not thinking about anything in particular. The rain had started at some point - he noticed it now on his shoulders, in his collar, a fine and indifferent mist that had extinguished the cigarette quietly while his mind had been occupied elsewhere. He dropped the cigarette between his feet. He looked at it. He looked at the crossing, the dark iron slick now with rain, going away in two directions, and he thought nothing, felt nothing, just sat with the weight of his thoughts.
He checked his watch. 11:58.
He pushed himself to his feet. He turned up his collar. He looked at the crossing and then he put his hands in his pockets and walked across it, and didn't look both ways, and nothing happened, and then he went to the bar.
Ansa had told him to come over.
Holappa jogged down the stairs. His footsteps on each step sounded different than they usually did - more purposeful, maybe, or maybe that was something he was adding, maybe his footsteps sounded exactly the same and he was the different thing. He reached the bottom and pushed open the door. Outside, he could smell the familiar scent of rain yet to fall.
He stopped for the briefest of moments on the top of the concrete steps and breathed it in. The street was quiet. He thought about the paper going in the wind - the piece of paper with her number, how he'd had it in his hands and then he hadn't. He thought about the night with the flask, the hurt in her eyes, the way her voice had sounded, the way-
He wasn't going to think about that right now. He was going to get to her apartment sober, and he was going to think about what to say when he got there.
He walked down the steps.
The street was wet and the streetlights were doing what they did in rain, turning everything soft around the edges, and he thought about what to say, he thought about mistakes he'd made, he thought about the time spent trying to find her again, he thought about her face in the cinema in the dark, turned toward the screen.
Holappa would finally tell her his name.
He would tell her at the door, before she asked, before anything else. Just say it. He had not told her. She didn't know his name, and he thought about this and felt something large and shapeless about it, the accumulation of it - all the things she didn't know about him, all the things he hadn't offered, all the ways he'd shown up to her life half-present. He would tell her his name. He would stand at her door and say: my name is Holappa. He would finally be a person with a name, a person with a future, a person worth being.
As he walked, Holappa was thinking about Ansa. His feet knew the way. He wasn't thinking about the crossing, about the uneven pavement, about the gravel. No, he was thinking about her face and the paper in the wind and the way she'd looked when she found him with the flask, the way she had sounded when he told her he had stopped drinking - and whether that was enough, to show up and be the person who had poured the bottles out and still didn't quite know how to explain it, just: I'm sorry. I'm going to meetings. I want to try for you.
The horn.
Holappa turned his head, and his world turned one solid color.
Not the flat grey of the steps, not the amber of streetlights reflected on the street - but white, absolute light. And then there was the sound, metal screeching on metal, the screaming of wind, the desperate blaring of the horn, the sound of it inside the sound of it inside the sound of it. And then there was his heart which was going so fast it was just noise, noise like the horn like the brakes like the wind like the gravel crunching under his feet which he could still feel, distantly, the sensation that would be the last physical information he had.
For one impossible second, Holappa thought only of Ansa opening her door.
My name is-
The first drops of rain touched Holappa's cheeks.