Kerrigan in Copenhagen (28 page)

With but four fingers of beer remaining in his glass, Kerrigan's mood turns glum, considering the place that used to be called Yugoslavia, the bombs and missiles, slaughter, rape. He considers the fact that but eight years before, in 1991, he was the happy editor of a small anthology of Yugo slavian literature, and none of the work he gathered for it seemed to focus anywhere but on the profound, universal, existential matters that go beyond national concerns. Yet there were horrors to come, concentration camps, slaughter, massive rapes when the country fell apart after Tito's death, separated into its five republics with only a single one, Slovenia, escaping from war, a country of two million that was so well organized that it could escape that fate.

And what happens now? What is the great question of the century about to begin? Between Eastern Europe and Western Europe? In the Middle East? The Muslim world? China? Africa? What?

Go to the next café.

He drains his beer, moves three meters south to an outdoor table at
Ristorante Italiano Pompei Pizzeria
, obtains a pint of green Tuborg at the counter, and places himself at the outer perimeter, and it occurs to him that, for him, the great question of the century about to begin is perhaps far more personal. Perhaps more like, What is he going to do with whatever years remain to him? He might have as much as a quarter century remaining, even more, although not, perhaps, at the rate that he is attempting to keepeth his reason from pinching. Perhaps he has a future with his Associate. Or perhaps that is a blind alley. Which way to regret it?

To his right, a commemoration of the past: a 1990 bronze sculpture by Hanne Varming of a bench with an elderly man and woman seated on it, a representation of the couple from Hans Christian Andersen's “The Elder Tree Mother,” first published in 1845 by P. L. Møller, a womanizer, who eventually would, according to Henrik Stangerup's fictionalized account of Møller in
The Seducer: It Is Hard to Die in Dieppe
, die in
syphilitic madness in Normandy. The old couple fit right in on the square, watching the world through century-and-a-half-old eyes.

A ladybug lands on the back of Kerrigan's hand, alongside a pale age spot. He blows her off his hand into the air with a fanning out of spotted wings. She lights up in the sun, and what could be more beautiful and full of hope than the new full pint of golden beer he hoists into the air to toast the unknown faces watching from the future?

Who are you, my friends? Singular, really. For you can only read this on your own, one person and a book, I can only address one of you at a time; only one of you at a time can let me in. Unless you are being read aloud to by a third person. Maybe you found me in some carton in a basement or an attic, and out of curiosity you turned back the cover and began to read. Perhaps you are leafing through, reading a page or a paragraph here and there. Kierkegaard's “rotation method.”

Or maybe books are obsolete in your world. Maybe you are reading me on some manner of screen, all books having been abolished in this paperless world. Or maybe these pages have been fed into some manner of machine that converts them to a voice, perhaps speaking into earphones. No matter.

If you have come this far, you could only be a friend. Let me tell you where I have buried my fortune, and if you hurry you can find it before anyone else gets there. It requires the ability to decode black scratches that are symbols of the sounds we make with our mouths and allow any human being to transmit the secrets of his or her mind to the skull cages of others. Lucretius, Arnold, Andersen, Joyce, Kierkegaard, Kristensen, Cavafy, et alia.

The Coal Square most likely still will be here, but housing what? Owned by whom? Dedicated to what pursuits? What changes might occur here—even in a de cade? A dozen years? This square might be torn up completely and reshaped, trees torn out and others replanted. Sculptures changed, facades, a fountain dug—nothing is permanent. He looks across at the White Lamb café from 1807. Even the Duke of Wellington's entire fleet of gunships did not succeed in undoing the
Lamb, barely nicked its roof. Nelson and the Duke of Wellington are dead, and in 1966 the IRA blew away the pillar in Dublin commemorating Admiral Nelson, who put the monocle over the blind eye, but the White Lamb's golden beer flows on nearly two hundred years after Nelson and Wellington's attacks on this city, and perhaps will still serve its useful function one hundred years from now, at which time virtually all currently treading or crawling the earth will have dust for brains. After all, Hviid's Vinstue is still around, and it is ninety years older than the White Lamb.

What else? That corner building that houses
Klaptræet
, the Clapboard Café, where Kierkegaard lived in 1838—surely, yes. And these trees? How many of them? He sits up, rotating in his chair, and counts. Ten of them, spaced irregularly around the square. Larch trees and beech. How old are they? Some are large and old, some slight and green and new, witnesses to all this life and bustle of shoppers, mothers and fathers pushing baby carriages, Vagn selling sausages, a bookshop that for a mere ten crowns a volume, a dollar and a half, gives me this slim back-pocket volume written two millennia past by a Latin poet driven so mad by a love potion that he took his own life at forty-three, a fact Kerrigan considers at the age of fifty-six with his suddenly impaired lungs. Yet managed to make use of his lucid moments to record words still read now, more than two thousand years later. And another volume with “Dover Beach,” written in 1867 by the then-forty-five-year-old Arnold who then had twenty-one years left and who summarized in one poem of thirty-seven lines the then-contemporary society's loss of faith in God, likening it to a receding wave on the beach, in “its melancholy, long, with drawing roar”—still with drawing for nearly a century and a half.

And these two books he has for a mere three dollars.

In truth, how vast is the culture of this brave new world!

He shifts his chair and tips back his head to gaze upward—and is surprised to discover his lungs fill better in that position—at the spreading branches of the beech tree above him, the little fig-shaped leaves, branches overlapping to form a protective mosaic whose shadow drifts on
the ground beneath—shelter from sun, from rain. Who would cut down these trees?

Then, incongruously, he remembers the love philter which his Associate produced on the occasion of their last meeting when she whispered, or he imagined her doing so, that he was blind, or possibly kind, or maybe he only thought it—in his Associate's voice?! That tiny phial concealed in her hand. Poppers. Amyl nitrate. She shook it and sniffed, held it to his nostrils, and the sensations of his palms against her skin were charged, electric. For but a few seconds, their copulation was truly golden, then, and he should have purchased that golden pen with which to write about it all.

Kerrigan sits with his head tipped back to better access air with his lungs, and from a distance he hears tramping, and the Pure Love Brigade comes marching across the square again chanting, “No sex! No cry!” and “Yee-
ha
!”

American bluenoses out on a spree, damned from here to eternity, Lord have no mercy on such as ye. He promises himself that if they come again, he will, by God, moon the bluenosed fools with his hairy fat pimpled pink butt.

Yee-ha!

He can see a window open on Peder Hvitfeldts Street with bed covers hanging over the sill to air out all the sex and fuck germs. Just think of all the prick, cunt, asshole, armpit, feet germs clinging to them. Then the breezes carry them away in the air, floating right over the heads of the marching prudes—Yee-
ha
! Take a shower of sex germs!

Free as the air. Over Kerrigan's head, too. They land on his scalp, remnants of love illicit and sacred, perversion, inversion, missionary couplings, and the partakings of oral joys and solitary pleasurings. Love whippings, cock suckings, cunt lappings, and humpings galore! Golden showers, secretory overflows. The germs dust down over his face and shoulders and his rod goes stiff. He breathes through his mouth ingesting sex pollen, washes it down with the remainder of his pint of golden beer, and moves to the next café,
Phønix
, slightly hunched to conceal
his secret, thinking,
God's sacred teeth, I'm half pissed already and my lungs are not filling right, and I am so fucking horny still even at my advanced age sweetening all lamentation!

I'm pissed and I'm proud! he chants privately, crossing the few meters to Phønix, noting that it says
UFF
on the storefront behind the café in yellow and black letters with black outline. UFF. And QUALITY USED CLOTHING. Ironically he detumesces in the Phønix, where he should rise from his own ashes as a fiery bird.

He settles with a beer delivered by the plump-wristed hand of a daughter of God whose taps are in a kiosk like the one on the King's New Square that he wanted to bid on in auction. Her smile as she hands over the frothy glass would change the mind of Gilgamesh from going off to seek eternal life.

Oh you gorgeous bitch!

The beautiful women are multiplying. Their men must neglect them or they would not be out parading their loveliness this way. Or perhaps they parade their loveliness because their men have made them mindful and proud of their magnificent forms.

Or maybe they are the goddesses of the new paradigm calling forth the most beautiful of desires, to gaze with joy and wonder upon the body, to create new life. Even if those new lives were stolen by the Dover Bitch.

But there is no denying these women are all gorgeous bitches. People of a future time, if you still have the concept sexist, please know that I am
not
one, I just adore women. So, okay, maybe I am a sexist. But I don't know any better, okay? I am an exception.

The sunlight through his beer gleams on the table before him, a glass of golden fire, cool and wonderful in his mouth as he swallows deeply, and deeply again.

On the back of his hand he tallies the pints with the strokes of his Montblanc, just to know, because one loses count so easily, and sees there are already four strokes as he takes his table at the
Clapboard Café
and surveys the square from this pint of view, taking inventory:

There are seven outdoor cafés, one sausage bar, four restaurants, a business college, a bookstore, one employment agency, a fucking 7-Eleven, one used clothing store (UFF), one unused clothing store, ten trees, a flower stall, a fruit stand, a travel agency named Albatross (“Upon my word I slayed the bird / That made the breeze to blow …”). The apartment that Søren Kierkegaard called home in 1838 and the White Lamb serving house that the Duke of Wellington's cannon failed to destroy in 1807, though it did dent the roof. The duke was then known as Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), born in Dublin and commemorated there in Phoenix Park by a 205-foot granite obelisk (1817) located just inside the park's main gate, on the eastern side and but a stone's throw from the feet of Finn MacCool, who sleeps beneath Dublin, dreaming the history of the Irish race.

Yellow leaves blow across his table. The sky above Kerrigan's head, as he tips it back to increase his air intake, is blue and tarnished silver, and he watches a woman with a rump he would give an award to if he were chairing a committee charged to do so. She sits. Happy the chair beneath her, said Leopold Bloom.

There goes a woman eating a big green apple with her white teeth, how her lips compress over the tight green skin, and see, that infant there can hardly walk, tottering after the copulating pigeons who move on, hopping with a scurry of wings, foiled in the act by a tot:
Yee-ha!

Now comes a party of Rollerbladers swooping through like marauders, at the speed of frustration, as Lance Olsen put it in
Burnt
, and there up above the Niels Brock International Business College, Kerrigan remembers, on the forth or fifth floor, are or were the offices of
Det Danske Selskab
, the Danish Cultural Institute, whose publications department once was run by a woman named Kate Hegelund whom everybody loved for her gentleness and who one day for unexplained reasons at a most untimely age was dead.

Her smiling face, her braided golden hair, her gentle ways never to see the new millennium.

Now he runs a line across the four strokes on the back of his hand and buys a little bag of crisps to munch along with the green Tuborg draft
purchased from the
Nico Café
alewife, trying to remember the books that Kate Hegelund gave him, and there must have been one by Sophus Claussen (1865–1931) because Kerrigan recalls a poem by Clausen in which he asks who does not think that the forest's thousand silent branches witness, though we think we are alone. And another in which the poet Thorkild Bjørnvig explores the many facets of Karen Blixen's identity—as an idea of nature, a marionette, a wild animal, a teller of tales, and a creature free of identity, relieved of and escaped from identity, in a state of “permanent adventure and pleasure.”

Kerrigan thinks now of that escape from identity to a state of permanent pleasure and wonders whether that is possible. He has been attempting something similar, although he is also trying to construct an identity out of a mosaic of facts, dates, names, statistics, history. But now he can barely get sufficient breath to fill his lungs and will lie in his bed this night, his only partner the dread of extinction.

The glass is empty, and Kerrigan's intoxication has ebbed with five strokes of his Montblanc on the back of his hand as he glances from tree to tree around the square, their leaves trembling with the life of the air that touches them, wondering if their silent branches sense his presence, immediately dismissing the thought as worthy only of his own ego cage, for it is the question of an ego, the least important part of his being, albeit the only conscious part.

The outdoor tables administered by
Det Hvid Lam
, the White Lamb serving house, are few, a double row of two, and he strokes the back of his hand with the nib of his Montblanc, beginning the second set of five pints, his mood heavier than he would have expected it to be.