A dog barks as it leaves the topmost apartment of the northern end of the building. Nurminen, eightytwo years old resident of the flat responds with loud goodbyes and also farewells the people now guiding the dog towards the elevator. Both parties close doors and along with the disappearances the stairway empties. A couple of months earlier the apartment door was often ajar, and the guest whose voices emanated to the stairway was his spouse who due to the increasingly difficult disease did no longer remember she was home and thought she was supposed to be somewhere else. The cause of the disconcerting sounds turned out to be clicks of a shackle lock unopened and her wondering why she can't go home, a quest that would require mental travel instead of physical, although considering the utmost formation of things mental and physical can hardly be separated. Slowly build since birth, the connections between signals and recollections inside the mind had started to disintegrate, the memories that had linked the concept of home to the attributes that defined it to her had become brittle and were falling away. The speech still had the determined descending melody but the content of the sentence was like a flock of dogs trying to herd each other not knowing where to go. Do dogs stay together as they drift along? I sure do hope so.

Behind a door and a half of a wall Appu Jasu lies in his bed and hears the barking and the loud but well-meaning incomprehensible speech of his neighbor only in rising and falling pitch. After the stairway has emptied the only thing left there is the low hum of the elevator, but in the apartment the sound of the maple leaves behind the open window simultaneously strengthen. The sound floats the body outside, hovering among the branches in the air. It is not noon yet. Besides the bed in the inset of the room, wrapped in foam rubber, silk paper and glossy plastic, are artworks from an exhibition held this summer. Lined with blue paddings are three large photographs framed with dark varnished wood, whose small pigment dots build up pictures in which appears seventy-five small pieces of cardboard, in which are printed dates that indicate back and forth travels during several years' time. In the travels conditions vary from black air to light traversing every hue. In front of the framed photographs packed in glossy plastic is a one hundred and ten centimeters long and wide photograph, where above immersing blue background is a dense circle made of hair, a strong and even consistent shape, creating a vortex that entwines itself around the darkness. The glossy plastic has the name Rita Anttila hand written on it with a marker. Aside the big packages there is a small cardboard box that holds twentyfour little photographs in which a shadow of an airplane that is seen from a window of an airplane approaches slowly until the plane and the shadow connect as their tires touch the asphalt.

Now the barking emanates into the apartment through the open window. The dog has advanced down in the elevator, then towards the front door in the lobby and through the door outside, and its voice now travels correspondingly back but in an inverted shape, first up from the ground along the facade of the building then making a ninety degree turn in from the open window into the apartment, all the way to its farthest wall. The window gives a view of a yard confined by adjacent apartment buildings, by the other side of which lies a short road. On the sidewalk of the road walks an elderly woman carrying a bag with the logo of Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team on it.

A bit later dog's (dog number two) barking is heard from behind a tall wall in the outskirts of the city. Dog barks at the cyclists driving by, who see the dog as a nearly continuous vision that forms from the short sequential flashes seen from the gaps of the fence, likes frames of a film. The sound rings out uninterrupted. The other cyclist remarks that despite the barking the dog is waggling its tail, indicating it might not be totally furious after all.

The cyclists are moving without a plan, imperceptibly following a loud but distant sound of music drifting from an unclear direction. They are in the western side of the city, in an area that rests bordered by a railroad making a soft turn of ninety degrees. One road they follow ends up into an empty sand field restricted by a barrier, another one ends to a fence siding the railroad. The music comes from a direction straight on the other side of the railroad, from a direction where a fox is running on the other side of the tracks. Allured by the fox and the music they climb first one barrier to the tracks and then over another into yet another empty sand field. The fox is not visible anymore, but the music is audible louder than before, its direction now clearer but still wide, a direction where only adjancet fields, woods and a power line can be seen, not one building nor a human. Appu imagines that the source of the sound must be somewhere in the middle of the woods, and that if you'd go search it you'd have to walk a long way during which it feels like the amplitude of the music would increase inside your head but the distance from it would stay the same, like the reverberation/echo contained in the sound which in this case builds up from hundreds or thousands of trees, kilometers of grass, moss and dry twigs, random deer and hare, hills and trenches, would be included in the sound inherently already in the point where it comes into existence, not only in the ears of an arbitrary listener kilometers away. Finally the walker would arrive to the spot where the sound arises, but instead of a speaker or a vocal cord there would be only empty air, and what might look like vibrations from the power of the sound waves. They climb over one bank, see only more fields and woods, and decide to give up searching. They hear the music, but can't seem to find it.