Silence by Jan Costin Wagner

name.
    Pärssinen.
    Later, he had kept meeting people with the same surname. Only a few months ago he’d sold a property belonging to a Pärssinen, a nice house in Vantaa, very close to Helsinki airport, but there was no problem with air traffic noise. A wonderful house, and the name Pärssinen had been nothing but a marginal note in his files.
    Marjatta. Laura and Aku. They were close to him, it would take him only seconds to be with them, and it was good to know that; the knowledge calmed him slightly.
    The name had been Pärssinen.
    He couldn’t remember what the man looked like; in the following days and weeks he had spent a lot of time trying to erase Pärssinen from his memory in a way that would leave no trace behind. It had been clear to him right at the start that Pärssinen was the key, for once that man seemed never to have existed, none of the rest of it was real. That had worked. It had worked because he had wanted it to work. Because he had realized there was no other option.
    Once the link was broken, none of it was real. If you made up your mind, if you really made it up, there was nothing left. He had known that ever since; he knew it better than anyone else.
    It had worked, and now it wouldn’t work any more. As simple as that. It could all be reduced to that so simply, and for a moment he felt a kind of satisfaction, because he had finally managed it, because he was alone at last and able to think.
    He closed his eyes and felt Pärssinen coming back to life in his mind. Everything that Pärssinen had been. He let it happen, because there was no avoiding it. He leaned back and let it happen.
    Pärssinen. A stocky, powerful man with a round face and sparse hair. He had been living in the grey block of flats on the outskirts of the city for several months when Pärssinen came to act as caretaker, and moved into the flat on the ground floor.
    For some time they had said hello in passing; it was summer and university vacation. He used to sit on his balcony with his books, reading a little, watching the children playing a little, and Pärssinen had clipped hedges and mowed the lawn round the block of flats.
    Then, on one of those summer days, Pärssinen had spoken to him. He said he had been watching him, he had an eye for certain things that other people didn’t notice. He remembered. He remembered perfectly; it was all coming back now. He felt it flood into him. Not just the memory of that conversation, but also the memory of what he had felt like. Pärssinen hadn’t needed to say any more, because he had understood at once. He had seen himself reflected in Pärssinen’s eyes, had seen what no one knew, what no one could know, not Pärssinen and least of all himself, and he had understood that, against all logic, Pärssinen had simply seen it, and he had felt the moment of understanding and the moment directly after it as a huge and deeply alarming relief.
    Pärssinen had smiled in a calm, even friendly way, and invited him into his flat.
    That was how it had begun, and now the memory came back, now everything came back. He looked at what his son had scratched into the wood of the table, and once again he saw the flickering projector, the Venetian blinds pulled down, the dappled sunlight on the floor, the films … Pärssinen taking the rolls of film off a shelving unit, that particular film, the one he had wanted to watch again and again, his favourite scene in that film, his hand on his thighs, and Pärssinen laughed when he saw that; then he had laughed too and felt free for the first time in his life, entirely free, and Pärssinen had wound the film back until the girl was sitting on the edge of the bed again with her head bowed, her hand moving up and down a fat penis; then the girl had raised her head to look at the camera and he had seen a strange, beautiful face; he had straightened up slightly, his trousers fully open now, let out a soft cry and ejaculated on Pärssinen’s floor.
    Pärssinen had