Beneath the Neon Egg (27 page)

He finds the blister pack of pills and eats two of them, crawls back into bed.

The sound his telephone makes is hateful to him as it burbles into the peace of his sleep. His eyes open. The ringing has stopped. Or did he only dream it? He sits up and pain rises through his chest to his nose. The pain is familiar now, no longer so worrying, only a dim reminder of the fragility of his bones.

He sits up on the edge of the bed, sees daylight at the window, but his eyes are too heavy to care to look out. Then the telephone is burbling again.

His voice sounds different in his own ears, resonating through the cracked bone as he speaks into the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Bluett?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Anders Finglas.”

Bluett lifts to the sound, sits up straight in the chair by the phone. “Hello, Anders, how are you? How are you doing?”

“I thought you might like to know about the funeral services. Dad will be cremated at Garnison’s this Friday.”

“Friday? Excuse me. I’ve been ill. What day is it?”

“It’s Tuesday. There are still some formalities at the Forensics Institute, but we have been able to set the ceremony for Friday. Ten
a.m.
”

“Forensics?”

“Yeah, they always do that with a . . . when someone takes his life.”

Jesus. “Anders, thank you so much for telling me. I’ll be there. Friday. At ten.”

“There was a strange thing,” the boy says. “They didn’t find any cancer. They didn’t find anything at all.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No, nothing. No cancer, no sickness.”

Bluett’s mind is lifting through the heaviness, returning to a place he has already abandoned.

“It must have been something else.”

“Maybe,” Bluett says, “maybe he was just depressed, very . . . depressed, and
thought
he was ill . . .”

“You mentioned that he was together with someone, a woman. I heard you say that to the policeman.”

“I, uh, I spoke too rashly there, Anders. I didn’t really know anything. I don’t really. Sam mentioned something in passing once, but I didn’t really know anything at all about it. I spoke without thinking. Off the top of my head. But I do know he was depressed. I could see it, last time we were together. If only I could have done something, but it was . . . he just didn’t want to talk.”

That done, there is still the box, the pictures. But he cannot think now for the pain across his nose. On the bathroom shelf is the blister pack, two pills remaining. He throws them into his mouth and takes water from the tap into the cup of his hand to wash them down, and his eyes are already closing as he makes his way back to the bed.

He does not know how much time has passed, but when he wakes again, he thinks perhaps he is beginning to feel better. He realizes he must call the unemployment insurance office to apply for compensation for these days of missed production, looks at the clock on the stereo, but it is the middle of the night. He puts his head back to the pillow, expecting to sink, but his eyes are open, his mind clear.

Get up. Eat. He shuffles to the kitchen, pops open the refrigerator. Three eggs, butter, tomato juice. The juice brings the memory of Sam’s eyes again. He scrambles the eggs, makes toast, eats from the frying pan standing at the kitchen counter and when he has forked the last of the egg into his mouth, he spoons marmelade on the last half-piece of toast, drains his glass of tomato juice, pours more, drinks again.

Palms on the counter edge, he licks his teeth and thinks he might be well now. He thinks of music, but somehow he does not want music just now. He wants silence, stillness. His ribs ache only a little as his hand reaches up for the Stoli bottle. He fills a tumbler with ice and sits on his sofa, pours.

The ice cracks and steams beneath the clear liquor, and he lifts the glass.

He finds himself staring across the room at the mask with the corkscrew eyes. The smell of the vodka seeps into his cut nose, and he does not think he can drink. The eyes have fixed on him. The mask is full of mockery and his stomach turns with the smell of the liquor. The eyes seem to spiral, drawing him, even as he recognizes the thought as nonsense, and it occurs to him those insane corkscrew eyes have monitored his life, have seen everything, mute, blank, staring witness of it all, mocking him, and it might have been himself hung there on the wall, a dead wooden face that saw everything and did not speak and did nothing.

His hand is tight on the glass, trembling, and it too, the glass, the clear cold liquor, mocks him, a glass of mockery with a vile stench. His breath heaves in his lungs, his heart bangs behind the sore broken ribcage, and all at once, he sees beyond a blankness in his mind a pair of eyes. Sam’s eyes, staring mutely from the other side while he sat and watched his friend, thinking,
What? What is it, Sam? Tell me. I can’t see into your mind. I can’t see what you’re thinking. Tell me!

Why hadn’t he spoken? Why hadn’t he insisted, demanded.
Sam, what’s wrong? Tell me what it is, Sam. What can I do for you, buddy? What? Don’t go, I won’t let you, stay here and talk it out with me!

He is on his feet and his hand lifts back as he hears the cry escape his throat and the glass flies, spraying vodka back across his own face. The tumbler smashes on the wall, but it is not enough, he has the bottle by the neck.

You fucking no-good stinking loathesome fucking .
 . .

For a splintered moment he sees what he will do, and then he is only the doing of it as the bottle shatters across the corkscrew eyes.

Glass fragments geyser outward on the stinking liquor. The mask plunges to the floor, and he is on his knees over its dull wood obverse, a jagged crack stitched open.

He has never before heard such sounds as issue from his throat. He might have been a woman, a child, the shameless tortured sounds that left him as Sam’s eyes watched him there, finally knowing one another, finally seeing one another and neither able to speak, to ask, to offer a single word.

And Bluett thinks,
A woman would have asked, would have insisted to know, a woman would not have succumbed to Sam’s silence .
 . .

He sleeps again, rises in the dark once more and hobbles to the living room, smells the repulsive stench of vodka. Stepping carefully over the shards of glass, he opens windows, gets the vacuum cleaner from the cupboard. He wraps the cracked mask in newspaper and lays it on a closet shelf. Then he vacuums up the glass.

When the rug is clean and the freezing night air has chased the stench of liquor, he closes the windows, drinks a glass of water from the tap, returns to bed and closes his eyes, sleeps.

Then there is a sound reaching in to him. The telephone. He opens his eyes—it is day—throws back the covers, moving too quickly, sits groaning on the edge of the bed as pain shoots out from his ribs, and the phone keeps ringing. He speaks to it as he hobbles across the living room carpet, “All right, all right, all right, I’m coming, keep your pants on.”

It stops before he gets to it. He turns, smacking his tongue, thinks of juice. The phone rings again before he can look at the clock. He speaks into the receiver and listens tensely, his heart lifting to hear Raffaella’s voice.

“El,” he says. “Hi, honey, how are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“Well, that’s good. What’s happening?” Staring out the window, he can see the lake has begun to melt. The surface is soupy, and patches of broken ice reveal water rippling in the breeze. “What time is it now, anyway?” he asks, playing with his upper canine with the tip of his tongue. It is wobbly and he tastes blood.

“Around three thirty.”

“God, I slept half the week away, more. You want to join me for lunch or something, El? Dinner?” He remembers his face then. “But don’t get shocked when you see me. I’ve got a bandage on my nose and a few bruises. Hey, you can bring Jens-Martin if you want.”

“Oh, Dad,” she says. “It’s all
shit
.”

“You two have a fight?”

“He is
so
 . . .” When she does not speak further, he asks, “Is it serious?”

“Who knows? Who
cares
?”

“You want to come stay over here for a while?”

“Could I?”

“You bet you could. Listen, you got any money? Pick up a couple good steaks on the way, I’ll pay you back. I’m hungry. We’ll have us a nice dinner here. I’ve got some wine. I’ll pay you for the steaks.”

He hangs up and stands at the window watching sunlight ripple on the cold melted water, the edges of broken ice, his tongue playing at his tooth. On the other side, two swans swim in the melted water. He goes to the bathroom mirror to look at his loose tooth, but he can see nothing other than that he looks like hell. The swelling of his mouth has gone down, but there is still a red bruise across the side of his face. His forehead, too, is bruised, and the white tape across his nose is dirty.

You were lucky
, he thinks, looking at himself.
You can still walk. Your head is intact
.

Gently he sponges his face with a hot washcloth, washes beneath his arms, his groin. He washes his hands thoroughly, runs water over his scraped palm, scrubs and trims his fingernails, cleans his teeth, careful to avoid the loose canine. As best he can, he sponges dirt from the bandage on his nose so it appears more presentable.

He wonders if he will ever feel safe on the street again, thinks about acquiring a weapon, but cannot imagine himself using it. He certainly could not use a knife or a sap. Perhaps he could wield a pistol, but then he might use it, and the thought of firing bullets into someone is abhorrent. He would end in jail himself and the thought of that is worse than abhorrent. Defenseless. But you need some kind of defense, protection.

Those men were sent, he realizes with certainty. They were definitely sent. Just like the photographs. It was a message, a warning. Persist and we break your back. We send the pictures to Sam’s kids and ex-wife. The very thing he killed himself to avoid, so his death will have been utterly pointless. Their power to blackmail is dead with Sam. Except for this pressure to keep Bluett’s mouth shut out of respect for his friend’s memory. For that matter, out of fear of another beating.
I’m no fucking hero
.

What would it do for Sam’s son to know the details?

Nothing.

So they win?

Yeah. They win. What they got out of it. Let them choke on it. Let them have their own filthy world to themselves.

Then there is a knock on the door, and Raffaella is there, clucking over her father’s bruised face. He enjoys the attention for a bit, then tells her it looks a lot worse than it is, tells her it was some drunk on Nyhavn, nothing important, no serious damage.

“Want a drink, honey?”

“Got any Coke?”

He takes Coke, too, and they chat, about the melting lake, the end of winter, the lengthening days—here it is, nearly five, and still half light. El tells him something his son said about him recently, about how cozy he is as a father, and Bluett feels the water in his eyes. “Timothy said that?”

She nods several times, smiling, happy to see how happy it makes him. She does not mention Jens-Martin again, and he doesn’t ask, allowing her to take her time coming around to it. She puts on a Carole King CD. She says she is studying that CD for her singing lessons. Then she takes the CD off and sings a number for him a cappella that she is working on. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” She sings it slow, strong-voiced, contemplatively, and Bluett closes his eyes in gratitude that he did not skimp on the lessons, that she would care to sing the song for him.

“You sing like an angel,” he says when she is finished.

“Oh quit exaggeratin’, Dad,” she tells him, her cheeks flushed with pleasure.

In the kitchen they work together to prepare the steaks, two beautiful slabs of entrecôte she bought from the ecological butcher on Frederiksborggade. She washes lettuce, quarters tomatoes, dices cucumber, while he peels an onion before the open window, cold water running, mixes a dressing of olive oil and seven-year-old Balsamico red wine vinegar, mustard, sea salt and freshly ground pepper. She has also bought a little plastic tub of fresh béarnaise, which he heats slowly in a saucepan. He shoves a platter of frozen oven-ready fries beneath the grill, pops a frozen baguette into the oven, and spills half an envelope of frozen peas into boiling water.

With a clean linen cloth spread across the oak table, he uncorks a bottle of Pomerol and puts on Mozart’s Horn Concertos and lights a candle in the old-fashioned brass stick his ex-wife gave him for Christmas once.

They get lucky with the steaks, perfect medium-rare and tender, and she doesn’t talk about Jens-Martin at all.

“The birds are back on the lake,” he says.

She nods. “Maybe we should take a walk down and feed them some bread afterward.”

“Let’s do that,” he says.

She runs a French fry through the béarnaise on her plate, munches, smiling. “Dad, ’member when you used to sing to me at bedtime?”