Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  England and Denmark were at peace. The two countries were friends. When General Wellesley (the Duke of Wellington) sailed his fleet into the harbor on Wednesday, September 1, 1807, passing the fortification, the fleet and fortress exchanged cordial salutes. By that evening the British artillery was in position, and England demanded the surrender of the Danish fleet, received a response that did not satisfy, and began to bombard the city for three days. The hundred thousand inhabitants, their dwellings crowded into the city, seeking to flee, bottlenecked in the winding, ancient streets. From Wednesday evening until Saturday afternoon, the bombs fell and all those men, women, children were killed.

  In comparison, Kerrigan considers that at Pearl Harbor under the Japanese sneak attack 134 years later, twenty-four hundred Americans were killed.

  Ultimately Denmark aligned with Napoleon in retaliation, which wound up costing them Norway—a penalty awarded to Sweden.

  Anyway, he thinks, after the bombardment, when they rebuilt, they incorporated the idea of chamfered—angled or rounded—street corners, which really improves the atmosphere of inner Copenhagen and turns every intersection into a small square.

  Kerrigan hears music from Det Hvid Lam, the White Lamb. He climbs down to the half-submerged green door. Inside, Asger Rosenberg is spanking his bass, a picture of a screaming mouth mounted on the wall just above his head. He croons George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland,” and Kerrigan thinks this moment of Asger crooning the Shearing melody has entered his heart until it turns to dust. Asger speaks into the mike with his mellifluous voice. “We will now take a short but intense break following which we will be replaced by …”

  Kerrigan misses the name of the replacement group but realizes he is buzzed, watching the white face of the clock that says 8:45 on the wall between two windows that look out on the still-light square while the sweet young barmaid, whose rounded form Kerrigan appreciates, puts on some pause music: Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker blowing “Bernie’s Tune,” which he happens to know was recorded on August 16, 1952, in Los Angeles, with Bobby Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums, same day they recorded “Lullaby of the Leaves,” which comes on next. Just over three and a half decades later, on May 13, 1988, Chet Baker would take his fatal fall out an Amsterdam hotel window to die on the pavement. Who knows what lies ahead—tomorrow, next year, in five minutes?

  Mulligan’s baritone on “Lullaby of the Leaves” reaches into Kerrigan’s heart while Baker’s scales lift it into an agreeable melancholy. A very old woman in a large hat sits at the covered pool table with a glass of beer and a bitter dram in a little stem glass that she lifts in Kerrigan’s direction, tendering a smile. He raises his near empty pint to her, and a fellow at his side says with admiration bordering on awe in his voice, “That’s Lotte. She used to be an executive secretary. She’s eighty-six years old.”

  Chet Baker is singing now, another fifties L.A. number: Let’s get lost … lost in each other’s arms …, his voice weird in its whiteness. Asger’s bass stands face-in to a corner like Man Ray’s seventy-five-year-old Violin of Ingres, painted on the back of a naked woman by Ray, who was born in 1890, one year before Henry Miller and eight after James Joyce.

  Kerrigan decides it would be wise to take a walk and climbs up out of the White Lamb to the Coal Square, makes a right away from Kierkegaard’s apartment, and another right down Købmagergade, Butcher Street, thinking about the fact that James Joyce was born in 1882, the year before Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, and Heineken beer received the Diplôme d’Honneur Amsterdam, seven years before the birth of Adolf Hitler, when Queen Victoria was sixty-three and Sigmund Freud twenty-six. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, one of Henry Miller’s earliest literary heroes was Hans Christian Andersen; if Lotte was eighty-six, that means she was born in 1913, when Joyce and Miller were young rogues, both in Paris or headed there.

  He stops outside of Rundetårn, the Round Tower, the oldest observatory still standing in Europe, a five-year construction project started in 1637, completed in 1642, built by King Christian IV (1588–1648). The British bombed it in 1807 but failed to damage it seriously. In 1716, Peter the Great of Russia rode his horse up the inner spiraling ramp, thirty-five meters to the top, and his wife, Catherine, did the same in her carriage, while in 1902, an automobile drove up the ramp to the top and back down again, and recently there was a skateboard race from top to bottom. And the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, for whom it was built, never saw it, for the king, miffed at something he did, exiled him before it was completed. Still, a bust of Tycho Brahe stands on a pedestal alongside the tower.

  On the moon is a crater named for Tycho, who discovered it. The Tycho crater is also mentioned in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the place in which the mystical monolith is found buried in moondust.

  Kerrigan sits on a stone slab in the tiny square beside the tower, contemplating Tycho’s crater, Kubrick’s monolith, and what the actual year 2001, but twenty months away, will really bring, but his thoughts all float on a background of Chet Baker’s eerie white voice singing—Let’s get lost—and he remembers Keir Dullea in the Kubrick film, ancient, dying in bed, raising a trembling aged finger to point at the monolith. Kerrigan starts wondering how he himself will die. Alone? In bed? Alone?

  There is bird shit on Tycho’s bust, and over to his left, Kerrigan regards a monument with large medallion portraits depicting the eighteenth-century poets Johannes Ewald and Johan Herman Wessel, sculpted by Otto Evens in 1879. The monument is topped with the sculptures of two protective cherubs whom someone has crowned with a broken-down blue bicycle, which is what drew his attention in the first place.

  Kerrigan lights a cigarillo, thinking of Lotte the eighty-six-year-old executive secretary, wondering if she has ever read Ewald or Wessel, both of whom were born in the 1740s and died in the 1780s, who lived in the time of Struensee, middle-aged lover of the teenage Queen Caroline Mathilde, and who were Sturm und Drang contemporaries of Goethe, whose skull was found to contain a small quantity of gray dust by East German bureaucrats one dark November night in 1970.

  He considers the overview of history he labors to gather in his own skull and its fate. Gray dust that no one will even bother to peek through his eye sockets at. But just to see history once, almost clearly, before then. A complete history and juxtaposition of nothing less than everything—or even just a history of the place where he is living—to clothe himself in it would be very fine raiment indeed.

  He looks at the medallion of Ewald (1743–1781) on the monument. Ewald is said to be one of Denmark’s greatest poets, but Kerrigan knows only a few lines of his forgotten “Ode to the Soul”:

  Confess, you fallen, weak, wretched

  Brother of angels!

  Say why you spread unfeathered wings?

  Confess what, precisely? he thinks, knowing only that the question is addressed to the fallen soul of mankind—confess why you spread unfeathered wings? Ah! he thinks then. Must be to Lucifer!

  The companion medallion is of Wessel (1742–1785), who was born in Norway, moved to Copenhagen as a teenager, and produced a small body of comic-parodic anti-illusionist drama: “I sing of—well, no, not really, I’m not singing, I’m actually telling about it, quite directly …”

  Kerrigan finds himself wondering whether or what Licia will directly tell Gabrielle about him. Will she tell her lies, that he abandoned them? Or maybe that is Licia’s truth. More likely she will tell her nothing, deny his existence, claim that the man she ran off with is her natural father.

  He drops the stub of his cigar and grinds it out beneath his shoe and realizes that he is a tad drunk, yet at the eye of his drunkenness is a sphere of startling clarity. He rises, concentrates on walking evenly along the ancient pavement back to the White Lamb, climbs down the three steps, and discovers Olie Olsen blowing his eyes out on a tenor sax, one of a five-piece jazz band: Eddie Pless on trombone, Mogens Petersen on piano, Mogens Jensen
on bass, and Tue Bjerborg on guitar. No entry, no cover, beneath a white lamp, the notes of a raunchy honking sax filling the smoky air.

  He orders a pint of lager and carries it to the tables in the rear, takes one all to himself, and lights a cigar, and the difficulty of doing so informs him once again that he is drunk and moreover drunk in public, exposed, and has to deal with a sudden flash of terror of this exposure.

  This is it, then? Hopeless alcoholic? Where the fuck is she? Why wouldn’t she come when I called her? Prince of cups, indeed!

  He looks up to see the blurry sax man blowing a blurred red tenor, which evolves into “Autumn Leaves.” But it is still spring, and Licia is gone with the baby, and his Associate is not here. His cigar is cold in the ashtray alongside a slender white vase of carnations, which in Denmark do not have the pungent fragrance he remembers from carnations of his childhood, pinned to his lapel for first communion, confirmation, dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day, pink carnation for the prom, but he does not want to remember that anyway, so it is just as well they do not have that pungent fragrance.

  His beer is empty, and he raises his face to a pair of lamps in pink shades mounted on the wall. Their twoness touches his oneness and blurs into the “Autumn Leaves” trombone solo, about an abandoned lover, or dead lover, Jazz Jastrau’s Jesus moving to him like a gentle hand to a whore where he sits without his Associate; without new information to wind round himself like a cloak, without the hope of a kiss, he sits.

  He stands to fetch another beer. Blurrily he sees a woman with a coarse nose sitting by herself nursing a small glass of beer at the next table from his own.

  “Hello,” says Kerrigan.

  “Hello, then,” she says in British. “I like your Italian jeans. Can see the label. Not that I was looking at your bottom or anything.” Her accent makes him think of Basil Fawlty’s wife in Fawlty Towers: I kno-ow, I kno-ow.

  Kerrigan asks her, “Why are women so beautiful?” and she says, “Aren’t you the sweet talker?”

  Then his gaze skitters upward to a detail: One of the lamps on the wall above his table is dead. He sits with a thump and watches: One lamp lit, one lamp dead. And his head lolls forward, his glasses hit the hard wood surface and skitter across it. He knows more than hears the sound of a lens cracking, and without shame or care recognizes a new depth in his day, in his life perhaps, as his arms form a cushion on the table for his lowering face, and he farts loudly, twice, to his chagrin, as he gives himself to this void he has spent the day purchasing.

  The nudging hand that shoves him back to consciousness is about to evoke his anger, but he looks up to see two blurred jade-green eyes. The musicians have packed up, and only a few people remain scattered throughout the bar.

  “Mr. Kerrigan,” she says. “Thirty dollars an hour is hardly enough to babysit a baby of your proportions.”

  “I can’t quite see you,” he says.

  “No wonder. You broke your glasses. I put them in your shirt pocket. Only one lens left.”

  “It was I who placed them there on the table for him,” says the British woman with the coarse nose, still seated over her small glass of beer.

  “Good for you,” says his Associate in charming English. And to Kerrigan adds, “So. Pjanking, too?”

  “Sorry?”

  “At pjanke. To flirt.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Are you his Mrs., then?” asks the British woman.

  “I think I’m his keeper,” she says, without looking from Kerrigan.

  “Jesus,” he says. “I love you. You’re jealous!”

  “Please. Spare me your shit. Sit up and buy me a drink. Better yet, just give me some money, and I’ll buy the drink myself.”

  “Me, too. Vodka.”

  “You can have a Danish water.”

  “How the hell’d you find me?” he asks, and she takes a fifty-crown note bearing the portrait of Karen Blixen from the little pile of money on the table, glancing sharply over at the British woman, who huffs and picks up her glass, retires to a table farther toward the front. Kerrigan is sorry to see her go, thinking how nice it might have been to share a bed with both his Associate and the coarse-nosed Brit.

  “How did you find me?” he asks.

  “Easy,” she tells him. “You told me when you called where you would be.”

  “Well I might have changed my plans. After your harsh rejection of me. You said you weren’t gonna come.”

  “I got bored.”

  “Ha! You were thinking about me. You missed me,” he says, but she has already stepped over to the bar. He rallies a bit when she sets a small beer before him, and he lights a Petit cigar, wondering what time it is—he cannot see the clock and is embarrassed to ask. He says, “Skål” and “Nostrovja” and “Slanté” and “Terviseks” and “Multatuli,” and “Earth, fire, suffering, and ejaculation.”

  The effort wears him out. “Now,” he says, “We will take a short but very intense pause,” and lowers his face once again to the cradle of his arms, too blitzed for shame. “Occupational blizzard,” he mutters and is gone, though he hears in the distance sniffing sounds and her voice asking, “What is it that stinks of piss here?”

  Three: Jax!

  … the best way to compare

  and quickest was by taking off our clothes.

  O, we loved long and happily, God knows!

  —LOUIS SIMPSON

  The very high white ceiling to which he opens his eyes is not familiar. Two blurred, myopic flies move lazily in circles around its faintly crackled surface, the distance to which he tries, blearily and in vain, to determine.

  He is in bed. A radio is playing in the next room. Gauzy curtains drift at a tall open window. Beneath an eiderdown, he is naked. And the history of his recent past is obscure. Vague clots of memory tease him from behind a dark curtain.

  A door at the corner of the room is ajar and now swings in toward him so he sees his blurred Associate standing there in black jeans and a black tank top.

  “He lives,” she says.

  He listens, uneasy, with interest, to the words that form on his breath. “I had a very unpleasant dream.”

  “It was no dream.”

  He fancies that in the blur of her mouth he can see a mixed expression of amusement, chagrin, incredulity, and sadism. He says, “No, I mean, I dreamt I … peed my …”

  “It was no dream.”

  “You mean I really broke my glasses.”

  “Among other things.”

  “You didn’t …?”

  She nods.

  “Jesus.” His face is hot. “How much do I owe you?”

  “If I start taking money for something like that, I shall have to begin to vonder vhat my profession really is.” Her v’ed w’s make him aware she is speaking English. Perhaps this situation feels foreign to her. Kerrigan’s face is so hot he feels sweat on his brow.

  “At least,” she says, “you have the decency to blush.”

  She leaves him to his shame, and he buries his mortified head beneath the pillow. The thought of it. Her seeing him like that. Removing his wet pants. Cleaning him like a baby, or a doddering old man.

  He recalls once at a family gathering years ago an aunt had an epileptic fit after dinner—she fell to the floor and began to vomit her entire dinner, it spread like a sea across the hardwood floor. The quantity was awesome. The men present held back in uncertainty and disgust while the women went to work instantly to clean her and the mess. Women could do that. Would do that.

  And what Licia did.

  In washed and ironed drawers, clean shirt, jeans washed and tumble-dried and ironed, hung in the tall open window to air, reborn from a long steaming shower, he brushes his teeth at great length with a throw-away toothbrush, spits in the sink, and studies his pearly whites, which are less than pearly thanks to his increasing cigar appetite. The OTC codeine painkillers his Associate has given him have killed not only his pain but a good bit of his shame as well, and he fairly d
ances into her enormous plank-floor living room with its three-meter ceiling. Some jazz music on the stereo has him feeling spry-footed, thirties raggy stuff, and he recognizes the voice of Leo Mathisen advising himself to take it easy, smoke a cigar, and let the others do the hard work.

  In the sunlight from the window, he can see her age, but she is a trim dancing fay of a girl nonetheless. He wonders if he could get her into bed with him. Always randy with a hangover. Hangover horns. He turns her once across the floor, delighted that she dances along, light as a feather on her feet, in his arms.

  “Where are we, by the way?” he asks, endeavoring to slip the question in nonchalantly in hopes it will not be noticed sufficiently to spotlight the fact he was too drunk yesterday to remember being transported here.

  “East side,” she says. “The near east. Holsteinsgade. And I’m not surprised you don’t remember.”

  “Know it well,” he says briskly. “Home of Holsteins Bodega, where I once went to hear jazz that turned out to be rhythm and blues. Good rhythm and blues. American black guy, great big guy named Dale Smith. Sang ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll,’ with the original sexy words that Jesse Stone wrote for Big Joe Turner, not the cleaned-up white-guy cover lyrics.” Kerrigan is feeling hot for her bod, clad in tight black. Hangover horns driving him toward her. And he can see she sees right through him. Her smile is sweetly teasing, and Leo is singing “To Be or Not to Be,” turning Hamlet’s question of suicide into a love song.