I felt a complete and utter lack of emotion. No love. No hate. Nada. Kate and Anu visited. I felt nothing, I smiled and pretended that I was glad to see them. Pretending was hard. I was glad to see them leave. Over the coming weeks, I practiced smiling to hide my lack of emotion. I knew that I must love them, because I remembered loving them. I could feel the yearning affection and desire for them that I did only a couple of days ago, but only as a memory.
This lack of feeling changed my attitudes. I lay in bed alone and psychoanalyzed myself. My overriding emotion in life had thus far been remorse. My life had been a constant struggle to make up for what I perceived as my failures. Every day, for more than thirty years, I mourned the loss of my sister Suvi and blamed myself for her death, because she was under my care when we were skating and the ice broke under her on the lake, even though I was only a year older than her. No longer.
I bore no responsibility for her death. Our father was the responsible adult. He, however, was busy sucking down a bottle of whiskey and ice fishing rather than tending to his children. In fact, I remember now that I didn’t even like Suvi. I resented her because, even though our age difference was slight, I was often given the responsibility of looking after her, when I wanted to be out playing with my friends. After her death, my father began beating me for the slightest infractions, an unspoken punishment for failing to safeguard her. He beat my three brothers as well, and my mother on occasion, but not with the same severity as he did me.
I remember taking a slice of a pie left cooling on a windowsill. As punishment, he made me eat the whole thing and I vomited. He made me eat that, too. And he laughed.
I thought I had forgiven my father for beating me as a child. Why should I forgive him? My father has never even apologized for his abusive treatment of me. I had forgotten the frequency and severity of the beatings. The memories came flooding back. I thought I should go to his home in Kittil?, pull his pants down as he did mine, bend him over the same chair as he did me so many times, and, as he did to me, beat him with a belt.
He never beat me so severely at any one given time, but I would hit him hundreds of times until blood feathered the walls, to make up for all those beatings at once. That would only make it about one hit for every hundred times that Dad hit me, but still, the symbolism would be there. I should make my mother watch, as she watched and did nothing while Dad beat me. Maybe I should gather the whole family for the event and let them watch, like they watched him thrash me. I realized they were afraid of him, but collectively, they could have stopped him.
As a young boy, we had no indoor plumbing. I hated going outside in winter to take a piss, would hold it as long as I could, and once in a while would wait too long and wet myself. Once, he made me walk to school in pissed-on pants. It was twenty below, and as I walked, my crotch hurt, burned and then went numb. When I got to school, I went to the bathroom and looked at my dick. It was gray, a first sign of frostbite. And as the day went on and my pants warmed up, my dick hurt like hell and I stunk like piss and didn’t live it down for months. I considered that I should make him drink several liters of water, deliver his beating before his work shift, wait until he pissed himself and then force him to walk to work. A shared experience between father and son.
I felt no anger, no nothing, while I formulated this plan. It wasn’t revenge I contemplated but simple justice. A punishment born of rational logic.
Jari visited to check on me. He tested my basic motor skills and pronounced them sound, asked me how I felt. Without going into great detail or relating the nature of my thoughts, I told Jari I had gone emotionally numb. Jari said not to make too much of it, it would likely pass. He said it was a common symptom of tumor removal called “going flat.” Where there once was tissue in my head, there was now only empty space about the size of a small egg. It took time for this space to fill back in, and this was sometimes the result.
“How long does it last?” I asked.