Kerrigan in Copenhagen (27 page)

What'll it be, sir?

A pull of beer, please. You mean a hivert? Yes, please.

He crosses
Kultorvet
, the Coal Square, where the outdoor cafés are folded out to the late-May sunlight. Can hear Happy Jazz playing from with in the White Lamb, singer and chorus:
I'm the sheik of Araby, your love / belongs to me / (He's got no pants on!)
Written by Harry B. Smith and Ted Snyder in 1921.

On
Amagertorv
, he pauses to observe the tabloid headlines mounted on placards outside a newspaper kiosk, all apparently dealing with the same heinous crime, like some medieval ballad: BABY CORPSE FOUND IN STREAM AND BABY CORPSE FOUND IN PLASTIC BAG AND BABY LIVED TWO HOURS IN BAG IN STREAM … Why do we so relish this gore?

A little girl outside a bakery window says in Danish to her mother, “I want my cake
now
, Mommy! I want it
now
!”

Kerrigan pauses and looks down at her. “So do I,” he says, “And I've been waiting
much
longer than you.”

The girl closes her mouth and gazes up at him with large blue eyes. The mother's mouth is mirthful. Kerrigan, the hero of the moment, smiles at Mommy, whose cleavage is lovely as this spring day. Known in Danish as a
kavalier gang
—cavalier passage. Such a beautiful thing, the passage between the breasts that bear the milk of human kindness, two tiny miracles.

A woman cycles past illegally on the Walking Street, but Kerrigan doesn't mind for she wears a miniskirt and each pumping turn of the pedals flashes the peachy cream of inner thigh, visions of eternity, the immortality of humankind.
Write an ode to women's inner thighs
. She sees him looking and smiles. And that is another reason why he loves Denmark. Write an essay: “Why I Love the Kingdom of Denmark,” by Terrence E. Kerrigan. Women don't mind if you take a discreet peek.
Yes, I'm beautiful
, her smile says.
Thank you for noticing. Did you enjoy the look? And you're a noble gent yourself, despite the rumpled clothes and cheek stubble—manly that. And I can tell your jeans must've cost. Hundred dollars I bet. Ceruttis, no? You're a luvlie man. Love your green tie. Nice Italian jeans there—don't want you to think I was looking at your bottom. May I squeeze it?

Of course, madame, yes, and you are a vision in a dream of all the lovely weightless lightness that causes the heart to soar with poetry. Light as a bird, not as a feather.

A man slouches by with two rottweilers on leashes held short. His sleeveless muscular upper arms adorned with dark-blue tattoos, bracelet-like. Viking designs perhaps. Or Celtic. It seems to Kerrigan this man must be very afraid in his heart and therefore perhaps dangerous.

A hand-lettered sign near the Amagertorv fountain proclaims that ALLAH IS THE ONLY GOD while a representative of the Association for the Advancement of Islam stands ready to field questions, and from farther down the walking street, a group of marching fools appear bearing placards that pronounce:

NO SEX NO CRY! And FAMILIES FOR PURE LOVE! And NO MORE FREE SEX! And SEX IS NEVER FREE!

The Association of Families for Pure Love descends upon him like a flood, hollering, “Yee-
ha
!”

Will you please shut up!
he thinks.

The Pure Lovers recede toward the King's New Square, and Kerrigan eyes a pregnant girl who bears her belly proudly.
Must
be triplets. Touch it for luck? You are so beautiful with your swollen nose and lips so all abloom and stuffed with the life growing inside you. Oh how I would love to lie with you, touching with most gentle respectful affection your body swollen with the gift of life to the world, you beautiful humble life-giving goddess!

There a young man keeps a small beanbag of some sort constantly in the air by the deft manipulations of his feet and knees, and two women walk past, one with a sleek midriff and crumpled-up face. O city of the hundred vices! Kerrigan sees a poster plastered to a trash basket that says LA PETIT GAGA and another advertising a play by Hans Christian Andersen about a mother. The cunt giveth and the cunt takeThaway.

The walk has once again winded him.
Why is this happening?
Has he sinned against the breath? He cannot get air into the bottom of his lungs. He reverses direction, heading back up Købmager Street toward the Coal Square, and looks up as he approaches the central post office to see a green bronze statue of
Mercury
leaning out from high up on a roof across the way. Always astonishes him when he accidentally glances up to see it there—long, lean body, seeming to be about to leap into the air, to fly, sculpted by Julius Schultz in 1896, another gift to the city from Carlsberg. Drinking beer and smoking cigars benefits art here!

He wants to think about his Associate and whether or not it is important whether or not she said that thing, particularly in light of the fact that he might be dying, but a plan is hatching in Kerrigan's skull for a nonlaborious exercise in point of view that will allow him plenty of sitting. He once had a professor of creative writing who complained about manuscripts that kept shifting point of view from character to character, saying, “It's like going to the theater and being forced to change your seat every five minutes.”

Kerrigan's plan is to drink a pint of beer in every café on the Coal Square, moving full circle around, clockwise perhaps for the sake of symmetry, to see what variety of wonders this exercise in point of view—pint of view rather—might reveal to him, changing his seat after every pint whilst keeping his consciousness from pinching. And then, when he has done that, perhaps he will have a new perspective on his Associate, whom he longs to see.

Stepping onto Kultorvet, the Coal Square, he gazes around at the trees and cafés and bustling people. This square was established in 1728, after the first great fire which raged for sixty hours and destroyed nearly 30 percent of the city.

He stops first at
Vagn's Beef and Sausage Wagon
to fortify his stomach from among the wares offered:

Settling on a Vienna sausage on a tiny bun, the ends hanging out on bothsides, center piled high with mustard, ketchup, chopped raw onion, and paper-thin slices of pickled cucumber, he bites. A treat! His cholesterol sings marvelous hymns in his blood, and he munches happily as the sexy woman in the flower stall wraps a bunch of pink carnations in white paper for a smiling, snub-nosed woman who clearly intends to brighten her rooms somewhere while a wiry blond fellow in the fruit stand alongside sings out, “Hey ten delicious plums for a tenner! Ten Danish plums for a tenner!”

Another bite, tangy mustard on the palate and onion sweetening the
breath for an earthy kiss perhaps. Nibble those drooping ends with their little stubs of fried string. Yum. You are what you eat: Kerrigan pictures himself as a hot dog consumed by a lovely young maiden with out mercy. There's a fantasy for his giant Norwegian headshrinker, who once called him mini-Terry, giving him an erection of irritation and humiliation. Aren't wolves dangerous? So are wiolins.

Now the flower lady is calling out, “Hey ten pretty roses for a tenner! Ten pretty roses for a tenner!”

Before starting his cycle of Coal Square cafés, he weaves through the benches at the southeast corner of the square where derelict Inuits loiter, drinking export beer with gold foil at the neck.

“Any surplus today, friend?” one of the Inuits asks, and Kerrigan tosses a five-crown coin into the man's hat.

He enters the Biblioteksboghandel—the Library Bookshop (now, alas, replaced by a candy shop), so named because the business school alongside it used to be the main branch of the Copenhagen library, now moved to Krystal Street, alongside Café Halfway.

He drifts down to the basement and rummages among cut-rate offerings—novels, poetry, history, coffee-table books about airplanes, war machines, Madonnas, art, masks … There are how-to's and opera books, travel guides, a wall of cheap classics that he feels as though he has read and would not admit to not having read, though in truth he has barely ever more than scanned a good many of them. Read a few, though, more than a few, yes. He takes down Lucretius, reads on the back what is said to be the only existing biography of Lucretius, by St. Jerome: “Titus Lucretius, the poet, born 94
BC
. He was rendered insane by a love philter and, after writing, during intervals of lucidity, some books, which Cicero amended, he died by his own hand in the 43rd year of his life.” Then he takes down a slim paperback volume of Matthew Arnold, looks to see if “Dover Beach” is included. It is. “Dover Beach” is an essential poem for him. Written in 1867, two years after the end of the American Civil War, three years after the loss of the southernmost Danish province to Germany.
Where ignorant armies clash by night
. He
remembers reading it to Licia, and her false blonde enthusiasm for it. Dover Bitch more like it. Dover Cunt. But he will not turn against Arnold's masterpiece because of Licia. No.

Kerrigan buys both books, two ten-crown bargains, buck and a half, that fit into either rear pocket of his Italian jeans (
Don't want you to think I was looking at your bottom
, said the lady from the Isle of Man) and goes back out onto the Coal Square. Still smacking his lips with the memory of his sausage, he starts his café carousel at the
Rice Market
, little tucked-in section of four or five tables with a slung-jaw Turk happy to provide him with a pint glass of amber lager.

Who can be happier than a man with a pint and a cigar (no inhaling today and I did not have sex with that woman) at a table in the early afternoon sunlight with a book of pre-Christian Latin poetry, purchased for a pittance, on the table before him?

Here in this very café he once sat with the Danish novelist Lotte Inuk, whose real name is Inuk Hoff Hansen, christened Inuk because by chance born in Greenland, and who in addition to writing also reads tarot. She read Kerrigan's cards and the last card she turned down was of a man lying on his face with seven swords buried in his bleeding back.

“This is not an unalterable future,” she told him. “And please remember that the swords are meta phors for devotion to quests for something base.”

What does he quest for that is base? he asks himself, but is distracted by a gal in rust-colored pants clinging just so to her big powerful butt! He gazes with devil-slit eyes upon it, imagines horns upon his own head, a love philter emptied in the beer that drenches his parched mouth. Let me die of love, then. Let me die of dedication to the beauty of the feminine species. Let me, as the Danish poet Karsten Kok Hansen once advised me, “Love love love as though your life depended on it 'cause it does.” Or as the Frenchman gesturing to the fork of a woman's thighs once said, “
Rien sans lui
.”

But he is aware that he has been running from involvement all his life. Until Licia. And that was an error. He wonders if it will be an error with his Associate. Whether you marry or not you will regret it.

From where he sits he can see diagonally across the square the opening into RosengÃ¥rden Street where the night men and executioner used to reside, thinks of the night men in their “chocolate wagons,” collecting the shit of the city in the days before sewers, right up to the early part of this century on whose outer edge he perches, imagining himself as a curiosity being studied by some citizen a hundred years hence, the year 2099.

Kerrigan greets the eyes that read these words. Is
anyone
, in fact, reading this? Who are you? Are you free or slave? Do you have to read this in secret? Do you have beliefs, or is all belief long dead? Even the with drawing roar finally utterly with drawn? Do you live in fear and shackles? Do you know the passionate joy of intellectual speculation? The beauty of the human body? Do you have a lover to caress? Do you know the golden pleasures of beer? Do you know, dear children of a future time, that love, sweet love, was once a crime?

You can see me but I can't see you, and by the time you read this,
if
you ever do, please remember that my blood was Celtic and the season spring, and Georg Brandes's
Thoughts at the Turn of the Century
, published in 1899, will seem a true antiquity, two hundred years old, longer than any person can ever hope to survive unless medical science and the world economy make leaps not yet imagined possible. But where will there be room for all the surplus population of those long lives? And foodstuffs?

Kerrigan will ask no questions of his reader a hundred years hence for he is aware he is ill equipped to do so, just as Brandes was when he said in 1899 that the prime question about the future of European politics was whether the twentieth century's greatest world power would be Russia or England.

And the world Brandes described in 1899 was one in which the great powers were dividing the globe among themselves. Their aim was to do so as peacefully as possible to avoid a world war. But still, for their own economic advantage, they victimized not only the unlucky nation but all the smaller surrounding nations, subjected to sword, fire, horror, and engulfed in the interest of national unity, used for barter, or delivered to brutality so that peace could be preserved. It was in that manner, while
Christian Europe looked on with consent, that the sultan permitted the slaughter of three hundred thousand Armenians.