A backpack sits upright on the bed, its zippered jaws agape as I scramble through my room, throwing random things in—underpants and odd-paired socks, a hardcover by Nietzsche I’ve pulled from my parents’ shelf, half a pack of cigarettes, a blank journal, and a rye bread sandwich hastily wrapped up in too much cellophane. How am I supposed to know at fourteen what to take with me when running away from home? 

Soon I’m sitting on a morning train to Tampere, a city a hundred miles south of my hometown, and staring out the window at the Finnish countryside with glassy eyes while guilt burns the lining of my empty belly. Any time now, my sister will tell Mom and Dad I’ve run away, as I asked her to. The taste of stomach acid in my mouth, I know my parents have done everything right: home-baked birthday cakes, trips to museums in Paris and skiing resorts in Lapland, bedtime stories from Astrid Lindgren’s books, constant care and affection without being overly controlling. What’s there to run away from?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve felt like a stranger. Everything that’s supposed to make for a happy life leaves me hollow, and I simply can’t go on anymore. I need some distance to figure out what’s wrong. 

The distance doesn’t do much. After checking into the Tampere YMCA, I sit on my bed, which smells like insect repellant, and try making sense of Nietzsche, desperate for some answers. But his rantings merely make me more confused, so I sit in silence and wait.

Three days crawl by as I chain-smoke Lucky Strikes at the hostel balcony, leaf through the incomprehensible classic, and fail to hitch a ride to Helsinki (unaware as I am that cars are not allowed to stop on a highway). Nothing happens. I’m waiting for a lucky strike of insight, for an inner voice that would tell me what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with this world, but instead, all I hear is traffic noise five stories below and echoes of solitary steps in the hostel hallways. 

                                                                        # 

I decide to retract my mistake, hoping that nobody’s even noticed my absence. But they have. Walking toward my parents’ red brick house from the bus stop, I see my dad approaching on my old bike. He’s pedaling barefooted, wearing a loose t-shirt and denim cutoffs—happy to have left his white coat in the hospital locker for the summer. On his way to our local beach to get my little brother, he stiffens when seeing me; his smiling face turns to granite. Having always carefully avoided the mistakes of his own overbearing father, his parenting relies on kindness, mutual trust, and autonomy. It’s afforded him the unquestioned idolization and deference of his children—until now. Now, his oldest son has just slapped him in the face. He nods at me and rides right past without saying a word or looking back. 

When my mom comes home, she finds me lying on the floor of my room, drawing. I’m making a picture of myself holding my arms up and breaking shackles above my head. A portrait of my family attached to the chains is tearing apart along with the fetters. She sits down close to me and speaks in hushed tones—something highly unusual for her. Why did you leave? If I only knew. And why’s my left hand moving the ballpoint pen as if I had no control over it, producing this strange image? I have no desire whatsoever to break up my family.

Chapter One: Family, Faith, and Fatherland

Army generals herd me and my three friends, along with a couple hundred boys in their late teens, into a high school gym hall that smells like rubber and stale sweat. They’ve set up sports event–style bleachers against one wall, and in front of them is a large screen. 

“Please be seated,” one army officer says.

We clamor up the bleachers, as far from the front row as possible. My heart’s thumping, but I’m not going to show my panic to anybody. After being seated, I glance behind me and see three shaved-up youth in black pilot jackets, Finnish flags patched on their left arms. One of them has a silver swastika hanging from his neck, and he glares at me when our eyes meet. What are the odds that, out of thousands of possible seating configurations, the small-town Hitler Jugend happens to land their Aryan hinds right behind us?

“Let us stand up to sing the national hymn,” the medal-studded general in front of the bleachers says in a ceremoniously grave tone. 

You’ve got to be kidding me. 

Every single one of the couple hundred boys stand up, except my three friends and me. 

“You maggots better get up right now, or we’ll beat the shit out of y’all,” one of the pilot jacket boys leans over and hisses down at us. They’re big dudes, whereas we are lanky punks and thin-wristed art school types. No chance of running or winning a fight, so we get up slowly, seething with resentment.

“I’d just looove to shear that slimy mop of yours,” another pilot boy whispers over the shoulder of my best friend and bandmate Rami, who’s let his long brown hair mat up into scraggly dreads since becoming a Rastafarian.

Our land, our land, our fatherland,

Sound loud, O name of worth!

The two hundred mouths bleat in unison. My friends and I keep our traps shut. How can this kind of fascist intimidation be legal? Finland is supposed to be a liberal democracy. Yet annually, all seventeen-year-old boys have to go through this militaristic rite of passage and pledge in front of their peers that they’ll serve in the army, ready to kill for their government. It’s a clever intimidation tactic on the part of the army to sway those who want to opt for civil service over military training—both being wholly legal options, yet the former purposefully made to feel like treason.

After the national hymn, the general starts his sales pitch for the war machine. 

“Our great nation stands on the solid foundation of Family, Faith, and Fatherland.”

There it is, the pet slogan of the conservative underbelly of my homeland. By the age of seventeen, I’ve already desecrated two out of the three sacred pillars: The Family one fell when I ran away from home three summers earlier. Also, for a few years now, I’ve sworn to never have children of my own or get married, prompting my sister to say I should “come out of the closet.” 

The Faith pillar crumbled when I divorced the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland a few years back, which in the early 1990s is almost as much a part of being a Finn as having a Finnish passport. Yet not many Finns actually believe in the religious teachings of the establishment. It’s simply one of those things you do because your neighbors do too. You don’t want to stand out, now do you? My rejection of the church was so unusual that my religion teacher—who probably hoped to use her teaching post as a covert missionary crusade—gave an alarmed speech at parents’ night. She cautioned against the spread of irreligion: a “chain effect” of other kids leaving the church due to my example. According to her, I was some kind of a leader. To her eternal credit, my mom stood up from one of the awkward, red school desks the parents were seated at and blew up on the dry little woman, telling her to mind her own goddamn business. 

I’ve also rejected the national faith by looking for wisdom in neo-paganism, Buddhist texts, the Bhagavad-gita, Carlos Castañeda, and pretty much whatever books on mysticism I can get my hands on—the kind of stuff that, according to the Lutheran orthodoxy, will express-lane me to the burning basement. 

And finally, today, I’m about to push over the Fatherland pillar of my nation’s foundation by refusing to butcher others on the government’s order. 

Once the gray-suit general is done with his sales pitch, each of us boys is to be called one by one to a room where we pledge our fidelity. While I’m waiting for my turn, marching music blasts from the loudspeakers in the corners of the large gym hall, and black-and-white footage of the Winter War of 1939 flashes on the large screen in front of us. Russian fighter planes storming over white spruce forests; shrapnel, tree pieces, and dirt blasting in the air; red-cheeked, helmeted boys laying in the snow, making their Finnish-made machine guns sing at the Russian dogs; Molotov cocktails crashing against Communist tanks, fire engulfing the vehicles, enemy soldiers burning inside.

 I think about my grandfather, who lost his two brothers, his left lung, and nearly his own life in the war. Why do we have to do this to each other, to ourselves? Is there really no better way to exist than giving in to our animal instincts of dominance and greed and lust and murder? 

When my name’s called, I’m escorted to a classroom. All the chairs and desks have been pushed against the walls, and in the middle of the empty room sit four or five army officers—motionless, like taxidermized predators—behind a long desk that faces the door. They make me stand alone in front of them in the empty space, purposefully highlighting the power-disparity and giving me the distinct sensation of standing butt-naked in a shark tank.

“Tuomas Mäkinen,” one of them says.

“Yessir,” I respond, my throat growing thin and tight.

“Will you be serving your due time in the military?”

“No.”

The assembly falls quiet, their already frowning faces growing darker. I’ve given the wrong answer, one they do not hear often.

“Tell me, Mr. Mäkinen, if somebody intruded into your home and threatened to rape your sister and kill your mother, would you refuse to protect them?”

Seriously?

My heart pounds against my chest, armpits turning moist, but I make every effort to come off aloof. With a facetious smile, I say, “Have you gentlemen ever heard of Mahatma Gandhi?”

One of the generals can’t help his lips from curling. He grins at me and shakes his head lightly. The other four don’t find my arrogance funny.

“I take it that you would not,” one says with a tinge of disgust sweeping across his face.

“What will you do, then?” one of them asks. Like Rami’s older brother, the most extreme dissenters even opt for prison over civil service. The generals wait to see how crazy I am.

“Civil service,” I say. And so, the third pillar falls over and breaks into pieces. An image of my grandfather in the trenches flashes in my awareness, stabbing me with guilt. But at least I know my dad will be proud, as he has no love for any type of hierarchical system, especially organized religion or the military.

#

Only when I reunite with my misfit friends by a staircase outside of the gym hall does my throat loosen up and my heart rate come down. Then, right behind my buddies, I see the three pilot boys sizing us up from head to toe and making jokes to each other. As we head for the exit, silently dreading the possibility of them following us outside, one of them hisses, “Maggots,” undoubtedly fantasizing about smashing our teeth in but restraining himself due to too many eyewitnesses. 

This kind of harassment is nothing new for Rami and me. It started a few years back when the hockey jocks and bullies at school learned about our anti-militaristic convictions. In addition to constant name-calling, they’d push us against lockers before recess. They once attacked me by stuffing into my mouth a shredded anti-patriotic poster that I’d pinned to the school message board, after which they banged my head against a wall. Another time they threw empty beer bottles from a moving car at Rami and me, brown shards of glass shattering everywhere under our bicycle tires. Through its indoctrinated youth, society’s making it clear that we’ve crossed the line. There are consequences to living according to our conscience rather than by the rules.

Is this really my “fatherland,” my people, where I belong? Are these the values that I want to base my life on, where neo-Nazis are more socially acceptable than conscientious dissenters, people who refuse to hurt others? A nation where religion has nothing to do with deep spirituality and internal change but has everything to do with covert materialism and sheepish conformity to social customs and hierarchies? If this is what home means, I’ll proudly be a rootless maggot.