June 5.
My doctor the Candyman prescribes a bottle of sky blue pills. I pop a few at the airport after I pass through the x-ray machine. By the time the plane takes off, I’ve already slipped away into some Benzo beyond. A place where the passing hours are ground up into fairy dust that sprinkles down from 30,000 feet and seeds the clouds below.
The pills carve straight through my short term memory, like a pharmaceutical channel of forgetting. That’s the best and worst side effect of those pills. When the plane lands, S. tells me that I wake up and stumble through customs, but I can’t remember any of that. It could have been worse. When you’re blissed out on sky blue pills, all sorts of things can happen to you. You might get an embarrassing facial tattoo or lose a kidney to an organ smuggler. But all I got was a passport stamp from a Finnish border cop.
S. and I make our way to the ferry to Suomenlinna, an island not far from the city center. Back in the 18th century when the Swedes were in charge, they fortified the island to defend against the Russians. It didn’t work. The Russians captured Suomenlinna, then built an Orthodox church with five onion domes. After the Russian Revolution, when Finland gained its independence, the Finns yanked the onion domes off the church and installed a lighthouse on top of the place. A church that’s a lighthouse is a rare thing. There’s one in Ukraine. Another one in South Korea. Just a handful of lighthouses in the whole world to keep your prayers from being dashed against the rocks.
Suomenlinna in early June is covered with lilac bushes in full bloom. It’s unreal. Like a paradise planet on an old episode of "Star Trek.” The crew beams down from their starship and discover a planet that’s sweet perfection. Pretty soon, everyone is ripping off their uniforms and frolicking under the lilacs. It’s a trap, of course, dreamed up by cunning aliens. A trap the prey is happy to get caught in.
S. and I are on Suomenlinna because there’s an artist residency here. Our studio is in one of the old barracks. We’re working on a project we’ve named P.A.P.A.— the Public Address Protest Amplifier. Our idea is to connect some megaphones— the kind people use at protest rallies— to cell phones. The cell phones are connected to a website. When you type a protest message on the website, the website automatically calls the cell phone and a computer voice recites your message through the megaphone. The idea is that you can participate in a street protest anywhere, even if you’re a whole ocean away from it.
An intern at the residency checks us in. She tells us that people in Finland think of themselves as Nordic rather than Scandinavian. The distinction has linguistic, historical, and political nuances, but mostly it’s because the Finns don’t particularly like the Swedes, she says. Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden for centuries, and no one likes to be occupied. Besides that, Sweden is richer and flashier than Finland, which annoys the Finns but makes them kind of jealous, too.