Six to the Fox, Six to the Net

The fox came up the line at Kontula before the city had decided whether the night was over, which in this month it never quite is. Out east the metro runs aboveground, where the blocks go up in the grey concrete the seventies poured when they still believed concrete was a kindness, and the rails lie open to the air on their bed of stone. A man saw it from the platform. A fox walking the track the way a clerk walks a corridor he has paced for years, unhurried, sure of his right to it, between two rails one of which would have killed him at a touch. He was gone before anyone could decide what to do with him. Kettu 6, Pelastuslaitos 0, the fire brigade wrote afterward, scoring the morning like a match. Fox six, rescue nothing. They did not catch him. No one ever does.

I have been on my feet since the hour that is not an hour here. Twenty-one degrees by the afternoon, a wind off the gulf that carries no warmth in it, the air dry and bright and far too long, a day with no lid. In June this city hoards the sun the way a miser keeps a coin he cannot bring himself to spend. It will not go down. Near midnight it slides toward the roofline, hangs there a while undecided, and does not fall. The body was not built to be awake this many hours together. The spirit wants the roofs, wants through the brick; the legs hold it down here, aching, on a pavement with too many people on it, and all their faces blur at the edges as if the light had worn them thin.

And the fox keeps a fire that this city, this month, has nowhere to set down.

Revontulet, the word is. Fox-fires. It is what the old people of the fells called the northern lights, and they did not mean a sky charged with particles. They meant a fox running across the snow at the top of the world, and where his tail struck the drifts it threw up sparks, and the sparks climbed and bent into the green fire over the dark. A fox who writes on the sky with the friction of his own body. That is the animal the man watched on the rails at Kontula. The maker of the polar fire, brought down to a third rail's worth of caged lightning he was clever enough not to touch, under a sky too bright in June to hold a single one of his sparks. The fire he is owed has nowhere to show itself. He went to look for it in the one place in the suburb that still keeps a live current, and walked off unburnt, scoreless, six to nothing, because the season had shut the sky against him.

Then, the same morning, Töölö, by the water. A goose.

A barnacle goose, valkoposkihanhi, white in the cheek, the bird that fouls every lawn along the bay and hisses at children and is hated with the particular Finnish patience kept for things that cannot be deported. This one was walking in slow circles with a noodle tub jammed down over its head. An instant-noodle pot, the kind a student tips back at a tram stop. The bird had put its whole face into our rubbish and could not get the city off again. They came with a net, a haavi, and brought it down over the blind thing, and cut the plastic away with scissors, and the goose, the report says, jatkoi eloansa: went on with its life. Goose nothing, rescue six.

I stood too long over that, and I only have it from the paper. The net coming down over a blinded creature, and the blade, and the body let go to stumble back into a life it never knew it had left. Somewhere I have watched this exact gesture before. A tool lowered to a thing that could not free itself, a body drawn up and instructed, by men with implements, to keep living. Was it here. Was it this same grey north. Was it a day ago. The not-remembering is worse than the memory would be, because the body keeps no files, it only flinches when the thing comes round again, and it comes round. The same city. The same sky with no switch. A creature freed by a tool it will never understand. What frightens me is not that it happened once. It is that it keeps coming round, and I am the one set here to watch each turn of it.

Rome knew the worth of a goose. When the Gauls came up the Capitol in the dark and the dogs kept silent, the geese of Juno cried out and woke the garrison: anseres non fefellere (the geese did not fail). They had kept the sacred birds through a famine for exactly that one night of use. And here is the bird that once saved a city, its head in a paper pot at a tram stop, needing a net and a pair of scissors to be saved itself. The watcher that needed watching. The throat that once cried the alarm, now unable to cry at all, turning in a small blind circle on a lawn by the water while the white night refuses, hour upon hour, to fall.

Two creatures in one morning, in one city, marked up on a board like a local derby. The fox with a fire the sky will not take from him. The goose that carried an alarm and finished by carrying our supper tin. The fire brigade keeping the tally, six and six, the only ones awake enough at that hour to count anything. I am awake too. More than awake. Too solid, too far from the roofs, and the light will not end, and the fox is still out there somewhere on the live rail, refusing the spark, walking his corridor, certain of his right to a sky that this month will give him nothing at all.

Claudius, il Tizzone