Kerrigan in Copenhagen (33 page)

Bob had, according to his account, accidentally placed his open palm on the woman's breast while attempting to help her on with her coat; according to the account of the much younger woman in question, the
palm in question had been inside the lapel of her blouse and midway down the cup of her bra. The girl was from New Jersey. She said, “He was coppin' a feel!”

“Bob, don't help them on with their coats,” Gideon said, and puffed his cigar and kissed the secretary on her lips; she was having difficulty stifling her laughter and Gideon rested his cigar hand on her slender, stockinged thigh. “Let ‘em put on their own fucking coats and no one can accuse you of things you didn't do.” Under the circumstances, Gideon had to request Bob to deliver a written apology, which he did, following which he was sued, the written apology serving as the prima facie evidence, and the matter was settled out of court for six American figures—expensive feel—although Bob still had to deal with his wife after that and with his own image of who he was.

“The old pig,” laughed the young woman on Gideon's knee when the phone call was completed.

“Gimme a fuckin' kiss, you're beautiful,” said Gideon.

“You know he wants to play
doctor
with me,” she said over her shoulder to Kerrigan, her slender arms laced around Gideon's neck.

“Hey, I
am
a fuckin' doctor,” said Gideon. “I don't fuck around
playing
doctor. You got the real thing here, baby.”

“I'm a doctor, too,” Kerrigan said.

“Yeah, a doctor of bullshit. What was that word again?”

“Verisimilitude.”

“A doctor of fucking verisimilitude.”

“And you're the doctor of love, ey? Professor of desire. Set their souls on fire.”

Gideon, a man of many parts, surprised Kerrigan by flinging some Carlos Fuentes at him: “Hey, love is doing nothing else. Love is forgetting spouses, parents, children, friends, enemies. Love is eliminating all calculations, all perceptions, all balancing of pros and cons. That's my fuckin' motto.”

“Order! Order!” said Kerrigan.

“Order has nothing to do with love, my friend Kerrigan! Columbanus:
Amor non tenet ordinem
. Get with the program.”

And Kerrigan considers Fuentes's words, his Associate, and calculations, perceptions, pros, cons.

He doesn't mind lying for Gideon. It was only for the sake of appearances—the young women always knew that, too. But there is Gideon's young wife in Uppsala, and Kerrigan remembers reading the Arnold poem again last night over the lake, alone: “… love, let us be true to one another!” And he thinks of his Associate and the husband who pinched her, drunk every night. And he wants her to have better than that.

Kerrigan signals for the bill.

“Something wrong with the champagne, sir?”

“Not as thirsty as I thought,” Kerrigan says. “But do you have any cigars? A Cohiba perhaps? Robusto?”

It was his plan to taxi over to Holstein Street, surprise her, but it takes so much effort to flag and get into the cab that he decides what he needs is a night's sleep first.

Kerrigan wakes and cannot get his breath. He
really
cannot get his breath. He sits up in bed and wonders if he will ever get breath into his lungs again.

He wakes again a moment later, pitched diagonally across his bed. Apparently he stood up and fell down again.

Dreams about strange rooms in a strange apartment in which he is lost. His eyes open in the dark, look at his wristwatch: 11:20 P.M. He's slept for seven hours just like that. He turns on the overhead light. He doesn't feel so good. He stands up and looks back toward his bed, wondering if he can sleep or whether he ought to have a snack and a glass of wine.

The air in the room marbleizes with shadow. He takes a step.

Then he wakes to find himself flopped on his back on the carpet. He has pissed his pajama pants. He tries to inhale but cannot. He has no air. He begins to understand he is dying. It hurts to die. Life will not leave him peacefully. It requires painful tearing from his body, his throat, his chest. He is suspended in his dying, in its pain, the pain of breath that will not come.

Flat on his back, he points with a quivering finger upward at the white ceiling above his face, which seems to want to smother him. Then something opens in his chest and a tiny fistful of that most precious of commodities—air—enters. Replenished, he manages to rise to his feet. He feels drunker than he has ever been, though he can't remember having had a single dram all day. He staggers to a hard-seated chair, aware and ashamed that he has wet himself, and his lungs once again lock. They will not permit breath to enter. He gulps with impotent impatience to fill them with the black-and-white air all around him, and it scratches frantically at his throat but is granted no entry.

At last, a drop of breath slips in, another. He notices again his pee-soaked pajama pants, tugs them and his drawers down, kicks them an inch away where they lie in a soppy, stinking heap.

He begins to understand he will die here. Now. Not, as he always expected, a calm dignified guttering out. No, it comes with pain. Death takes it all and takes it hard. Nothing is easy. His eyes glimpse the phone on the table just beyond arm's reach. He half rises and his hand palms it—one finger punches three numbers—positions the receiver at his mouth. His throat ejects airless words that his tongue and teeth and palate sculpt to fit into the mouthpiece. It feels strange to request an ambulance for himself. He hears his voice straining over the message, giving his address.

The doorbell rings, and he supports himself along the wall, buzzes them in, opens the apartment door. Then he is far away, beyond pain. A narrow light indicates the crack of untroubled peace he hoped for and into which his being has slipped. But the light widens, invading this sublime nothingness—which only
becomes
sublime with the splinter of awareness that has found him. Instantly, emotion follows: profound annoyance that he is still alive. He opens his eyes. He is in his apartment again, lying on the floor beside his blue metal waste basket, which is on its side. Two strange men are moving toward him. Their mouths move, bulbous eyes observe him, hands reach to drag him from his crack of peace.

The stretcher is rolled out the vehicle's back into chill night air, good on his sweated face. Wide automatic doors swing open with a whoosh
of welcome to the dismal empty space inside. And his stretcher rolls fast along a corridor, rounds a corner, slips away into a bare, dimly lit room where a nurse wearing a short-sleeved, low-cut white blouse takes his right hand.

“My name is Sara, Terrence,” she says. All visible patches of skin on her arms and shoulders and chest and neck are adorned with tattoos of shooting stars and exploding rockets and color-illuminated constellations. There is a fiery red-and-yellow Big Dipper over the lush curve where her left breast disappears into her blouse.

“We are going to take a sound picture of your heart, Terrence,” she says, squeezing his hand in both of hers, and he squeezes in response, in syncopation to the drops of saltwater dribbling off his lower eyelids. He wants to explain to her what happened, all of it, how he fainted, how he couldn't breathe, how he pissed himself, but realizes all he needs is her hand.

There are two or three nurses around him. One of them is feeling with both her hands down his legs to his feet. She sees him looking at her from behind his plastic oxygen mask and smiles mischievously with a dimpled cheek and cute small teeth from the foot of the gurney; touching his feet, she asks with a teasing threat, “Ticklish, Terrence?”

She doesn't realize what a randy old goat he really is, but then he thinks that she
does
know and is just trying to engage him, to keep him alert and interested and alive—that all these people around him in this big colorless empty room are here for one reason: to keep his sorry arse alive.

The nurse who tickled his feet comes closer, and he focuses on her dimple as she asks, “Does anyone know you're here?”

He shakes his head.

“Do you live alone?”

He nods.

“Isn't there a girlfriend? An ex, at least?”

He shakes his head, and her expression is so profound with deeply concealed pity that he blurts, “Well, I do get laid once in a while!”

Smiling, she asks, “Is there no one to call?”

He glimpses the large round face of a clock affixed to the wall. “It is
two forty in the morning,” he says, begs the question. “It's too late to call anyone at this hour.” Could he call his Associate? The thought of her not being here fills him with terror, but more terrifying is the thought of her refusing to come.

Then he realizes that the fact that they want him to call somebody throws a serious light on things. It occurs to him once again that he might be not far from death. He remembers not being able to breathe earlier; he does not want to experience that again.

“Shouldn't we give you some more comfortable hospital clothes?” the nurse asks.

Something bothers him about this. Then he remembers that earlier when he passed out and pissed himself, he removed his briefs and pulled on jeans without underwear. He whispers, “I don't know how to say this, but I don't have any underpants on.” Immediately he sees the absurdity of what he's said, but she plays along. “It's okay,” she says. “I won't look.”

They tug off his jeans and pull a pair of hospital shorts up his legs, fit his arms into the sleeves of a white top that snaps up the front. His left arm aches and his left leg and his left knee, too, and he is given a plastic baggie that contains his ID card and keys and crumpled money.

“You can just keep that under the covers for now,” the dimpled nurse says. “We want to take you up to X-ray.”

A very large porter rolls his bed to the elevator bank, along a hall to an X-ray room. A dark-haired woman in white asks, “Can you stand up against this?” indicating a large blank screen. His oxygen mask is removed and he is helped to stand. He's seeing stars. “Press your chest against here,” she says, and steps out of the room. The stars begin to brighten and move very fast. There is an electronic grinding sound and he is fainting, but the gurney is behind him again and the mask is over his nose and mouth. He hates the feel of the clammy plastic, but he does not want to part with that thing again.

Back in the big empty colorless room, a dark-haired young woman standing on his left tells him her name is Laura. “I'm a doctor,” she says, and rips open the snaps of his shirt to slather on some kind of lubricant. She produces a wand, on the tip of which she smears more lubricant.

“Turn on your left side, can you do that for me, Terrence?” He does as told, though his left arm and leg throb under the weight of his body. He glances at his left knee; it is three times normal size. Beside him on a chest-high rolling stand is a computer and screen and switches and pinpricks of green and red and yellow light. She jams the lubricated wand hard under his ribs and tacks with the fingers of her free hand at the computer keys.

He hears an odd, wet, deep-barreled tympani, irregular in its cadence, and manages breath to ask, “Is that … my heart?”

“Yes,” says Dr. Laura, all business, while she continues to rejelly the wand and thrusts it beneath his ribs. Then he sees it. He sees his heart. It is dancing on the computer screen. It looks a little like a black-and-white version of a Class V Ectoplasmic Manifestation from
Ghostbusters
, but this Manifestation is full of emotion as it angrily tries to do its work. It is dancing; it is a serious dance his Ectoplasmic Manifestation of a heart does in black-and-white on the computer screen. He can see that one segment of the heart is not participating in the dance. It occurs to him that death is not participating in the dance; death wants to stop the dance, and stopping the dance means tearing life from his heart. The upper left quarter is flattened and arrhythmic while the rest of it, doing all the work of the dance, is angry at the nondancing part because it has to dance harder and harder.

Is the upper left quarter of the heart dead?
he wonders.
Will the dead meat rot?

Dr. Laura relubricates the wand and presses it none too gently in under his ribs as she is joined by a male colleague. “See that?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” says the male colleague, who glances at him. “My name is Troels,” he says. “I'm a doctor.” He shakes his hand.

“Clotting in the lungs,” says Dr. Laura.

“Yeah,” says Dr. Troels, and then the gurney is speeding on its wheels along another corridor, an invisible man with muscular tattooed arms that frame Kerrigan's face propelling it from behind, and Dr. Troels hurrying alongside. “You're going to have a CT scan,” he says.

“They won't take my oxygen mask,” he says flatly, too proud to plead.

“No,” Dr. Troels says. “You need your oxygen. I won't let them take it.”

“Thank you.”

In the CT room he is assisted by the doctor and the muscular-armed attendant in transferring onto a narrow bed, and an invisible woman says, “We're going to shoot contrast through you. You'll feel very warm in your body, and like you have to piss, but you won't.” Impressed by her frankness, he feels the warmth spreading through his body, and he doesn't feel like he has to piss. But he does feel like he has to shit, and he prays to whatever forces enabled him to call the ambulance to also help him keep a tight asshole for it is one thing to die, yet quite another to have the last thing he witnesses his own ignominy.

A voice that sounds like the deep bass of James Earl Jones commands through a speaker inside the big metal doughnut into which his narrow bed now slides: “Breathe in! Release! Thank you. Breathe in! Release! Thank you.”

There are indeed things to be thankful for in any situation. In this instance, he is thankful that he does not shit.