Kerrigan in Copenhagen (23 page)

On the ceiling are art deco lamps shaped like tulip bulbs. A stained-glass door bears the same colors as the painted flowers in the ceiling recesses. The white-haired man, cane between his knees, jerks his empty glass aloft again.
More!

Across the street, through the front window, Kerrigan can see the Baily at numbers 2 and 3, from which Mr. Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, in the Dublin of James Joyce's
Ulysses
, retreated in disgust from the gobbling pub-grubbing faces to dine on burgundy and blue cheese, which Kerrigan eats now, ninety-five years later:

He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now and then. Cashed a cheque for me once. Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuck-stitched shirt-sleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin … Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate … Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.

On the walls, painted murals of smiling people in a dark wood over a bright beach behind a light mountain—painted, Kerrigan knows, by the father-in-law of Brendan Behan.

Joyce drank here, too. And across the street in
The Duke
, where he and James Stephens had their first meeting. The Duke was then called Kennedy's, and Stephens invited Joyce in for a tailor of malt whereupon, according to Stephens, Joyce confided that he had read the two books Stephens at that time had published, pronouncing that Stephens did not know the difference between a semicolon and a colon, that his knowledge of Irish life was non-Catholic and so non existent that he should give up writing and find another job he was good at, like shoe-shining, as a more promising profession.

Stephens claimed to have responded that he had never read a word of Joyce's and that, if his protective wits were preserved by heaven, he never would read a word of his unless asked to review it destructively. Yet years later, in 1927, when Joyce was near despair over the negative critique of the bits of
Finnegans Wake
he had so far published under the title
Work in Progress
, he is said to have entertained the idea of inviting Stephens to complete the book for him.

Stephens was born in 1882, the same year as Joyce and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seven years before Adolf Hitler, the year Charles Darwin died. Joyce died in 1941, FDR and Hitler in 1945, and Stephens in 1950, at the respective ages of fifty-nine, sixty-three, fifty-six, and sixty-eight, Hitler's life the shortest of the four. Stephens had been one of Kerrigan's father's favorite poets, especially the poem he had read aloud to young Terrence on frequent occasions about a rabbit caught in a snare whom the narrator of the poem can hear crying out in pain, but cannot find even though he is searching everywhere. Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, his real name Jalâl al-Dîn (1207–1273), born in north Afghanistan, wrote a similar poem about the helpers of the world who run toward those screaming in pain simply because they can hear them.

Kerrigan smokes a cigar thinking of this, and of the fact that he doesn't do much for anyone in a helpless situation. The old man jerks his pint up once again.
More!

This time the response is immediate. A fresh pint of Guinness before him, cane between his knees, glowering, he surveys the room like an Irish king. Kerrigan nods with respect and moves out into the May night.

Through the gates of
Trinity
(CYCLISTS DISMOUNT), he treads across the cobblestones to
Building 38
where, watching himself in the mirror brush his brownish pearly whites, he fears sleep, recognizing that he will die someday, that he may die in bed feeling sweaty and alone beneath an overwarm blanket, knowing he is going far away and not a friend in sight to understand this journey, the awareness of which we all block out as long as we can, are almost incapable of thinking about, an ending
which, though known, comes always as a surprise we secretly believe we might be exempt from simply because of the very special nature of being one's own unconditionally self-beloved self, self-contempt notwithstanding.

If there was a phone in this room, he would call his Associate and berate her, make her pay for his unhappiness for no reason other than that he suspects she would allow him to do so because of her apparently great heart.

For a moment he thinks he loves her and will propose marriage, but quickly dismisses the thought, knowing that it would involve other people, too, her daughters, witnesses, officials. In any event, marriage will do nothing to alleviate this pinpoint of death fear. It is all illusion, delusion, and the job of human beings is to maintain that delusion in order to enjoy themselves and accomplish their work upon this earth: to live and be happy and love the heady liquor of the drink known as air, and that, anyway, is something. The word
delusion
is immediately accompanied in Kerrigan's mind by an image of Licia in her bikini blue as the false blue of her eyes.

Because he cannot face the task of removing his hairs from the plumbing fixtures, he plops still unwashed onto the bed in his skivvies, considering how Thea's fragrance will still be there somewhere yet, probably stale now, and even as he reaches for himself, he is off in a distant land, and his father waves from an even more distant shore, smaller now, but glad of face as Kerrigan calls out, “Dad! Dad! Come over for a pint!”

And he is in the house where people sit in darkness; dust is their drink and clay their meat. They are clothed like dark birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness … the house of dust.

Ireland has a standing army of five thousand poets, Patrick Kavanagh once said, though the Irish do not, he asserted, give a fart in their corduroys for culture.

And near as many pubs or more, Kerrigan cannot but think. He considers volunteering to do a volume on Dublin's pubs for the series, as he sets off to visit some of Kavanagh's old haunts, having dreamt inter alia
of his own father waving from across the river—his father who had read him Kavanagh's “The Great Hunger” years before Kerrigan was capable of appreciating more than the music of its language, of the narrator's being suspicious as a rat near strange bread when a woman laughed.

But first he visits
St. Andrew's Church
to light two candles for the dead and one again for the still living but stolen from him, kneels in a pew to which is affixed a plaque that says, PRAY FOR THE SOULS OF JOHN AND ELIZA D'ARCY.

Instead of praying for the D'Arcys, Kerrigan retreats from the church and stops at the
Chemist Shop Sweny's
at 1 Lincoln Plaza, where he sniffs a bar of lemon soap, thinking of Bloom buying one of these, even as he knew Molly was preparing to cheat on him with Blazes Boylan. He buys a soap oval wrapped in tissue paper and stores it in his hip pocket in honor of Poldy, poor peaceful cuckold onanist Jew—just like me, though I'm not Jewish—planning to give it to his Associate if he ever sees her again. Soap successfully delivered. For her, not for me.

“Is it for herself?” asks the sweet elderly lady with a twinkle behind the ancient wooden desk, and Kerrigan smiles, nods, steps out to note that what used to be called
Kennedy's
public house across the street, mentioned by name in Beckett and Joyce, is now called
Fitzsimmons
. He strolls north a block toward
Merrion Square
, past the birthplace of Oscar Wilde at number 1, who died in 1900, same year Nietzsche died and Thomas Wolfe was born, Joseph Conrad's
Lord Jim
appeared, and Joyce's first piece of writing, “Ibsen's New Drama,” was published, a review of Ibsen's last play,
When We Dead Awaken
(1899):

We only see what we have lost

When we dead awaken.

And then what do we see?

We see that we never have lived.

You are so blind
.

Remembering another of Ibsen's plays,
An Enemy of the People
, published the same year Joyce was born, the quintessential modern play
about the willful poisoning of the environment for profit, and
The Wild Duck
, equally about blindness as was Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex
, he pauses to look at the door of number 82 Merrion Square, where Yeats spent six years—remembers that Yeats had been one of the first to experiment with mescaline, imported by Havelock Ellis from Mexico in 1894 when Joyce was twelve years old. Kerrigan recalls his own experiments with LSD in California in the sixties, can recall standing on a cliff over the Pacific in Ocean Beach, San Diego, thirty-three years before, watching the sea crash on the sandstone in a wild splash of electric color, droplets of red and green and yellow flying up into the moonlit evening. He remembers lying on the floor of an adobe cottage with a young woman, both of them wearing jeans and nothing else, his fingers on the denim at the fork of her thighs, and she held his hand there, projecting images upon the ceiling of writhing blissful bodies in embrace that in some mysterious way they
both
claimed to have witnessed. And he can remember convincing himself that, since his body was composed of atoms in movement and the door was composed of atoms in movement, if he would only move purposefully and with true belief, there was no need to open the door, for his atoms could slip right through the spaces between the door atoms. The trick was to do it quickly, not to get welded in there, like
The Fly
. And he did that.

His painful bloodied beak brought him back to earth fast and ended his psychopharmaceutical experiments forever. And just as well. Those sixties were dismal in truth.

He moves on to 84 Merrion Square, where Æ (George William Russell, 1867–1935), lifelong friend of Yeats, wrote
Voices of the Stones
, which Kerrigan's father so loved:

Uncover: bend the head

And let the feet be bare;

This air that thou breathest

Is holy air

Sin not against the breath …

And J. P. Donleavy reported receiving a letter signed Æ in 1957 in which the letter writer suggested that
The Ginger Man
made men worse than brutes, poisoned the minds of children, dragged the Savior's name in the mud. “The Holy Name of Jesus,” he wrote, “belongs to a Person who will judge you soon.”

Donleavy called it his first-ever fan letter. This Æ of the 1957 blue-nosed fan letter could not be the Æ his father so admired, for that Æshuffled off twenty-two years before, in 1935, at the age of sixty-eight, having repented of his initial dismissiveness of Joyce's
Ulysses
.

“And there's no use giving you my name,” the bogus Æ declared, signing only with those two letters.

Sin not against the breath
.

And what else is poetry but a struggle for breath, a column of breath, the spirit jet upon which the soul conveys its desire and its wisdom in words?
Are you in possession of wisdom, Kerrigan?
he asks himself, thinking how wrong he was about Licia, how he had ignored signs, imposing on himself the belief they were happy together. The sex had been great until the last year or so. Then she didn't want as much anymore. None at all, in fact. He still loved her, decided that there were seasons to everything and congratulated himself on his wise patience, his patient wisdom in not forcing the matter, when in fact she was no doubt already getting it somewhere else. Who was her lover? The neighbor? But no, the neighbor stayed on when Licia disappeared and abducted Gabrielle. So who?

Then once when he had come home from a weeklong literary conference, suddenly she welcomed him into her bed after months of not wanting him. Once. She locked her feet at the small of his back forcing him to come deep in her. Once. And announced a week later that she was pregnant. And she was gone six weeks after that.

He foots on to Grand Canal to look at the door with the fox-head knocker at 33 Haddington Road, one of Patrick Kavanagh's many south side residences, a poor place with a tiny broken door pane, and Kerrigan asks aloud, “Who bent the coin of my destiny that it sticks in the slot?”
remembering his own father reading him Kavanagh's “The Great Hunger” in which that question is posed, apparently thinking it applied to his life of a loveless marriage, but Kerrigan thinks now it was prophetic of his own life. Did the reading by his father of that poem to Kerrigan at the tender age of thirteen, did that very act bend the coin of Kerrigan's own destiny so it stuck in the slot, had him running from involvement as from the smell of strange bread until he was ready to be duped by a beautiful young woman of false blue eyes?

He expects no answer and lets his oxblood-shod feet trot him past Parson's Bookshop, now a sundries store, and down to the
Waterloo
and
Searson's
on Upper Baggot Street. Not certain which one to visit for a pint, he visits each for a glass, finds himself mumbling Kavanagh lines into the second, which causes two persons at the bar to look with surreptitious deadpans his way.
I'm not the only one in Dublin muttering to myself
, thinks Kerrigan, who has seen several already in protracted conversation with themselves.

But takes his leave all the same and crosses to the
Grand Canal
and sits on the bench of Percy French, dead in 1920 at the age of sixty-six:

Remember me is all I ask

and yet

If the remembrance proves a task

forget.

Kerrigan blushes remembering having written an epitaph for himself. Licia chided him for being morbid, and he thought he could see fear of his death in her eyes.
You are so blind
, he thinks, feeling his stupidity and vulnerability and his belief that she truly loved him, as he did her.

INSTRUCTIONS ON MY DEPARTURE

When I die, please cry

Big tears from your blue, blue eyes.