Kerrigan in Copenhagen (25 page)

Kerrigan bounces the clump on his palm. “You're sure?”

“
Told
ya, mister. Not mine.”

Kerrigan shrugs, pockets the lump, and exits the back door with out visiting the gents' after all. His heart is beating. He steps into the doorway of a secondhand bookshop to see if he is followed and thinks then,
Why the hell did I do that?!
He regrets pocketing the boy's stash.
For what reason?
He should have left it on the floor. But now it is too late, so he continues across
Drury
.

Through
Dame Court
, across
Dame Street
, down
Temple Lane
, he enters the Temple Bar, where he retires to the basement, closing himself into a stall to empty his bladder and study the brown lump. He smells it, touches the tip of his tongue hesitantly to it. Then worries that it might be literal shit. But he returns it to his pocket and jogs up the stairs to breathlessly order and carry his pint out into the sunny backyard, where he takes a seat alongside a barrel.

He can't catch his breath, can't get air comfortably deep into his lungs. From jogging up a flight of stairs? Maybe need to cut down on
the Petits. Maybe just one. No inhaling. He lights a cigar, observing the antique tin signs mounted on the walls advertising Powers Whiskey; Bagots, Hutton & Co. Fine Old Whiskey; Murphy's/From the Wood That's Good; Bulmer's: Nothing Added but Time; Crested Ten: John Jameson & Son; Murphy's Extra Stout: On Draught and in Bottle; Lady's Well Brewery-Cork; Cantwell's Café au Lait …

And he recalls Kathleen Cantwell, who never so much as poured him a kind word, in his first-grade class in Blessed Mother Catholic School in Elmhurst, whose sweet young Debbie Reynolds face caused all the boys to dream of sweet tender love. But it was the mouth of little Ellen Childe who caused his string to thrum. Maybe a clue to Licia there. Maybe Kerrigan, by virtue of his double diminutive dark name, is prone to the darker nature of women, sees the dark as light, the treachery as blonde, the false as bright blue eyes.

Finally the air breaks through to his lungs and he inhales deeply, abandoning the Petit in the ashtray. A yellow crane lifts up above the rooftops against the blue sky with its scatter of soft white clouds. A young man at the next barrel says to him, “I like your green tie” and reaches to take it between his fingers. Kerrigan nods, concealing his annoyance at this transgression of perimeters, and the young man's young woman says hoarsely, “You are a luvlie man.”

Kerrigan remembers once in McDaid's then, years ago, he had come from some literary conference and inadvertently forgotten to remove his name badge, which said, DR T KERRIGAN. A woman approached him and said, “Now what would you be a doctor of?”

Kerrigan, taken aback, noticed his tag then and said, “Oh, of, uh, literature actually.”

“I think you are a doctor of bullshit,” she said.

He laughed, thinking she could scarcely have known how closely that description fitted his dissertation on verisimilitude, and the woman's husband appeared.

“And what are you drinking?” the husband asked.

“I was actually having a mineral water,” Kerrigan said. “Fizzy.”

“You'll have a large whiskey,” said the man, and as things progressed,
in the morning, the three of them sailed on the choppy green water through the chill misted dawn air of Dublin Bay in the couple's ten-meter sloop. They parted swearing to stay in touch but never did of course, and in honor of that memory, Kerrigan now goes to the bar to request a taste of potcheen. The bartender gives him half a tumbler for which he will accept no payment.

“Sure it's hardly a taste at all, and it is not the real stuffanyway. If you want the real stuff you'll have to go to the Garda. They confiscate it all to keep on hand for their celebrations.”

“
Uiske beatha
,” he says, raising the glass of clear liquor. “Whiskey. It keepeth the reason from stifling.” Wise words spoken 422 years before by the Chronicler Raphael Holinshed.

While he nips the potcheen to keep his reason from nipping too tight, his lungs rebel again and he begins to cough, which leaves him gasping, seriously short of breath, frightened now.

What is happening to me?

After several moments the air begins to filter down, just as a lad of perhaps nine in a dirty T-shirt steals in the back door, peering cautiously over his shoulder to be certain the bartender has not seen him.

He approaches Kerrigan. “Would you like to buy a solid gold pen?” the lad asks, his hair red and face pale, his eyes puckish. Kerrigan waits until he is sure his lungs have settled, then asks where he got the pen, and the boy says, “Me mother was tired of it so she give it me, but I cannot write.”

“How many karats is it?” Kerrigan asks.

“Oh, 'tis not a vegetarian pen at all,” the boy says, and Kerrigan laughs and gives him all the coins he has in his pocket. “That's not enough for the gold pen,” the boy says, and Kerrigan tells him to be off. The boy complies, but stops at the back door and shouts in “
Bollocks!
” before he takes off running.

Instantly Kerrigan regrets that he didn't buy the pen.

In Donleavy's old room at Building 38 in Trinity (CYCLISTS DISMOUNT and KINDLY REMOVE THE HAIRS FROM THE PLUMBING FIXTURES AFTER
SHOWERING AND PILFERERS WILL BE SEVERELY DEALT WITH), it is not reason that stifles Kerrigan as he bathes in the tiny cake of hand soap provided, thinking gloomily that he has no faithful Penelope nor even an unfaithful lusty Molly to bring the soap to, and is not in a mood for a honeymoon of the hand. Perhaps he will bring the Bronnley's to his Associate, fulfilling the unfulfilled by Leopold. He cannot be certain that he even has a chance with her, who may or may not have whispered that he is so blind.

He sits on the edge of his bed gazing out the tall window to the green, breathing heavily, and quotes Donleavy's O'Keefe aloud: “In this sad room / In this dark gloom / We live like beasts.”

Then he recalls a fact he acquired from an article in
Time
that he glanced through on the plane, that most heart attacks occur between four and six P.M. on Mondays and Fridays. It is currently, he calculates, Friday, but the hour of six P.M. is long past. His legs are tired, and he wanders to the sink, which he leans over to look at his face in the mirror, mouth shallowly gulping in air.

Is he having a heart attack? He is not unwilling to die, should this be what this event signals, but not at this specific point in time because he still has a book to complete, and he will be damned if he will allow all this expensive research to lie fallow—he has not even submitted his expense report this month—even if he does not wish to complete the book at all but merely to continue researching it with out end amen.

Regretting ever more greatly that he did not purchase the golden pen, he rinses his mouth, sees his face in the mirror over the sink, pouchy eyes, not quite able to get the air where he wants it, deep in his lungs. He looks at the eyes, thinks of George Seferis, Nobel Laureate from 1963—
if the soul is ever to know itself it must gaze into the soul
—noting that the pouches are now more than incipient; they are in fact greenish of hue and definitely pouched.

And he lies sidewise naked on his bed to sleep, relishing the chill through the open window, curious to see if he will dream, fears he will die with out an opportunity to observe himself doing so.

And naked in the chilly dark, curved atop his knubbly bedspread,
he fancies he can hear the streets outside his window, the river beyond the Trinity walls, the voices of strangers in the courtyard speaking softly, the sound of a runner's feet moving swiftly over the barbered grass.

Taxiing out to the airport, Kerrigan stares, gloomily unseeing through the side window, breathing shallowly and thinking about death while the driver complains about his wife.

“She's moody, y'know, and like I'm out last Sunday for me birthday, and I come home, she asks me next day when did you come in? I says, How do I know when I come in? I was blind drunk. I don't know, I don't know. She's moody.”

Kerrigan nods, pays lip service. “with the best of them it's hard.”

“And isn't it the truth? Been here on business?”

“Escape really.”

“Wife lets?”

She's, uh, we're separated.”

“Ah, I figured as much, y'know. No excape with out. Like the French fella says, what's his name?
No Exit
. How you say that in Frenchie, y'know?”

“
Huis Clos
,” says Kerrigan. “Hell is other people.”

That's exactly right. And no excapin' it. She's moody.”

All my life, on and off, at least ever since Licia tooketh away her illusion, but even before, even as a child, I've more or less wanted to die, thinks Kerrigan. And perhaps now I will. For real. Comes to every man, also to me. Why not now?

He lights a cigar outside the door into the airport but immediately begins to cough and flings it to the ground and twists it out beneath his shoe. If I am dying, he thinks—the breath not quite deep enough into his lungs—and if there
is
an afterlife, I will perhaps have the opportunity there to meet many of the people I have admired. That is if, in the afterlife, there is not the same kind of ranking system as here upon this earth. No reason to suppose so, however. For that matter, no reason to suppose there is an afterlife at all. Or that even if there is, the egos that distinguished us while living will still be in function.

He steps into the airport just as his flight is announced, and he heads for the departure gate. A tall black-T-shirted professional man is boarding the plane just in front of him and laughing happily over something he apparently is reading on the last page of the
International Herald Tribune
, and Kerrigan feels on the edge of death that he should do something, but doesn't know what.

He should have bought the golden pen.

We have a huge barrel of wine …
Every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again.
They say there is no future for us. That's right.
Which is fine with us.

—RUMI (TRANSLATED BY COLEMAN BARKS)

The early flight from Dublin on Scandinavian in a Boeing 737 is nearly empty in business class. Handful of suits scurrying home after doing business with the Green Tiger. Early, but not too early for a chill champagne with warm scrambled eggs and a single sausage, fried cherry tomato, and a chanterelle mushroom. To which the young professional in the black T-shirt, Kerrigan notes, four rows up the aisle, is also amenable. How the stewardess smiles in this section. Smile fades when they go aft, through the curtain to the economy class, where they dole out raw fish from a wicker basket.

“You know what Churchill said about champagne,” he says as the flight attendant beams and cracks the seal of the little bottle of Lanson's bubbly for him. She tilts her head obligingly, as if to say,
No, what?

“Three prerequisites: It must be dry, it must be chill, it mustbe free.”

Oh, you kid! She smiles and touches his arm. Maybe she genuinely likes me.
You're a luvlie man. You're so blind. Can't you take a joke? You're as sane as I. I vant to dance vith thee woman. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO THROW FOREIGN PARTICLES IN THE VC BOWL. Pilferers will be severely dealt with. Sin not against the breath
.

He uses the tiny red plastic clothespin to attach his napkin to the lapel of his shirt and digs in. The eggs are runny, the champagne lukewarm. Luxurious problems. Kerrigan sees a picture in the
International Herald Tribune
of a very young-looking American soldier and remembers
himself at Fort Dix in '61. Wanted to be a true American. Fantasies of action in Cuba. Jump the wall at Guantánamo, bayonet between the teeth, BAR beneath the arm, lobbing hand grenades. Medals and decorations for service above and beyond the call. What a sap! Him and Benjamin Blicksilver, the six-four wiry-black-haired and bespectacled intellectual from Columbia who was so good at absence.

Blicksilvah!
First Sergeant Robert M. Coover used to bark breathily.
Whar the hail is Blicksilvah!

And where is Blicksilver today who had recommended Kerrigan to read the last sixty pages of
Ulysses
to find the blue parts. “That,” said Blicksilver with a smile on his slightly wobbling face, “is the reward that awaits you after plowing through the first few hundred pages.”

And Kerrigan quotes: “… how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Trieste-Zurich-Paris
, 1914–1921. [THE END]

But the past is not a dimension it is wise to cavort in with all the dark of its disappearances so he is grateful for the fact that some manner of hard thing irritating his hip brings him back to the here and now. He digs into his pocket to find a kind of dusty stone there that he drags out precariously, careful not to upset the breakfast on his fold-down table. He finds himself staring at a large brown lump resembling a petrified turd. Then, just as recognition finds its way to his consciousness, he senses a figure standing over him, looks to see the shining stewardess whose smile indicates she is fully aware, beneath her respectful gaze, of the nature of the thing in his fingers.

“Would you like to buy some duty-free items, sir?” she asks, indicating the many sleek and shiny cellophaned packages in her trolley, but her smile says something quite else. And now a businessman in the seat across the aisle is also looking at the brown lump, though not smiling at
all, and Kerrigan feels the blush ignite his face. He wonders what the fellow in the black T-shirt would say.