Falling Sideways (13 page)

Up the street she saw Flemming’s silver Mercedes roll to a stop in the parking space beside the clinic. She watched him climb out of the car and zap the locks with the thingamajig in his hand and jog up the steps into the clinic. Jaunty. Danced practically when he moved, even if he was heavy. And older. In his fifties.

“Slip out of your pants and climb up on the table, let me take a look at you,” he’d said that time when she’d asked something about a discharge, and she almost had … but no, no, she couldn’t.

“Thanks, Flemming. I have my own gynecologist.” A woman. What would Flemming have thought if she had done as he’d said? Looking at her like that.

“Are you shy?”

“Flemming, a woman who’s had three babies can hardly have an ounce of shyness left. Just the same, though, I’ll stick with Amanda. She knows me. But thanks. Really.”

Picture him looking. Fingers up in me.
Would he have called in the nurse? Would he have said something to Martin? She had heard him comment on a couple of the other patients. Not very kindly, though he had made her laugh. Or did she laugh just to accommodate him? One of the nurses had told her, “Flemming has to protect himself from all the patients who fall in love with him.” She had leaned closer. “You know his reputation? They say he’s the only gynecologist in Denmark who never has to lubricate his finger prior to an internal.”

“Are you shy?”

“Not a gram of it left.” After all the prodding, poking fingers and God knew what else up inside and the cutting and the stitching with half a dozen people surrounding your lower half. That was with Adam.
Easier with the twins. Put me to sleep.
Cesarean. Adam’s had been a long birth. Twenty-three hours. She thought she never would again. He was enough for her, sweet Adam, so troubled now, but he’d come through. He was softer than Martin. They had to understand that about him. A shy boy.

“Are you shy?”

If you could only read my thoughts, Flemming
, she didn’t say.

Smiling tartly, she flipped the cigarette out the window and lit her second. It occurred to her perhaps she should have waited a few moments, but she was already drawing on it, filling her lungs. If only Martin smoked. Even just a little. That was a terrible wish to have. Better wish for some of his self-control. She thought again of his strong fingers finding her soft spots, that fierce look in his eyes, fixed on hers. Thinking what behind that stare, those eyes?

Even after eighteen years she didn’t know, only little bits here and there, tiny breaches in the facade, or was it a facade at all? Maybe he really was just Martin all the way through and down and in, Martin and Martin and Martin.

One more drag of the second cigarette, and she flipped it away into the road, leaned back against the car seat to enjoy the last inhale, down to the base of her lungs, while her eyes lingered on the withered linden leaves along the street, slender branches and twigs twitching in the gray, autumn air. Slowly she exhaled the pale gray smoke.

Time to go in.

She slid the plastic lighter into the crumpled pack alongside the last remaining cigarette and buried it in her purse. The realization that she had only the one cigarette for her lunch pause tickled a tiny edge of panic in her. Perhaps she would skip lunch, walk up to the kiosk by the train station, buy another pack of ten. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe.

Maybe just one last pack, and that would be it, then.

16. Harald Jaeger

Behind the cloakroom on the top floor of the Tank was a door to a small elbow of space that gave access to a WC that for some reason was rarely used by any of the staff. Jaeger thought perhaps no one knew about it other than the few old-timers. Because of the sense of privacy it gave and that little anteroom to isolate the noise, whenever he had to shit at work—which was usually at least once a day—here was where he did it.

And this was one of the days. Besieged by a spastic colon as he’d sat, “chatting” with the CEO. Bonding, maybe. Kampman had “invited” him to come in (“Would you like to come in for a moment, Harald?”
Do I really have a choice?
) but had yet to explain the reason. Jaeger had seldom seen Kampman so forthcoming and personal.

“You’re looking fit, Harald.”

“I try to keep in shape, Martin.” The first name was stiff on his tongue. He usually didn’t call the CEO anything at all. It felt too servile to call him by his last name when he called Jaeger by his first, but somehow the first name popped out today and alerted Jaeger to watch himself, which triggered his colon. He tightened the sphincter.

“Good,” said Kampman. “Reflects.”

Reflects? Reflects what? That was the kind of thing that worried him.
What am I to understand of that? Guess? Deduce?
Jaeger had always hated crossword puzzles and riddles because he was so bad at them.
What should I say now? Thanks?
“Thanks,” he said.

And Kampman lifted his glance alertly, as if to examine on his face what Jaeger might have meant. But Jaeger had not meant a thing. He retightened his hold on his sphincter and smiled. Kampman tilted his face. A question. But what question?
Why am I sitting here? Why did you call me in? Why did you invite me to join you at the conference table instead of keeping the desk between us?
Jaeger wanted to ask questions, but he was afraid anything he asked might be contaminated by the information Fred Breathwaite had given him the night before—right or wrong, honest or deceitful.
I’m not cut out for this.

“Well,” Kampman said then. “Have you given some thought to it all?”

It all?
“You mean, economies?”

Kampman nodded slightly, watching him. Or
had
he nodded? Jaeger could not stand it; he plunged on. “Actually I was thinking a lot of small economies could easily be …”

Kampman’s mouth wrinkled, as at a bad taste. “Afraid this isn’t small,” he said.

“No, of course, but a lot of small economies add up, don’t they? I was thinking about the plastic folders we use. Hundreds of them. And the open supply cabinet. I mean, it’s a luxury. All those nice fiber-tip pens and Scotch Tape and yellow sticky pads. Rulers! I mean …”

Kampman smiled. “I admire your loyalty.”

Jaeger smiled and did not go on.

“The biggest item on our budget, the obvious item, is personnel. We have to be looking at that now.”

Jaeger retightened his sphincter and held the agonizing question he yearned to blurt out:
Me? Was Breathwaite shitting me? Do I go?

“I’d like you to work with Fred Breathwaite, keep cultivating the international connections. There’s income there. Not inconsiderable grants and grant sharing. How is the Japanese contact coming?”

“I’ve been e-mailing Ito regularly.” Kazumuri Ito was Jaeger’s counterpart in the Japanese Tank. He had never met him, only e-mailed to invite him to visit the Tank in Copenhagen. “He seems definitely interested.” “Seems definitely” sounded lame in his own ear, so he repeated, “Definitely interested.” And remembered a dream. He’d dreamed he met Kazumuri Ito as twins, one male, one female. The twins were also man and wife. The male Ito said to him about the female Ito,
She got her pocket picked empty
. Now what the hell could that mean? Ito? I too? I too what? But
I to
in Danish also meant “you two.” You two what? Or just You too?

“I want you to take the lead on the Irish cooperation.”

Jaeger blinked. “Those are Fred Breathwaite’s close friends, aren’t they?”

“They’re
our
friends, I hope,” Kampman said vigorously, with an indignation that seemed more for effect than from emotion. “Let’s make sure of that. When they come in next week, we’ll be holding a dinner for them. I want you there. And I’d like you to speak.”

“Speak?”

“At the dinner. Set the keynote. Say the welcome. You’re not afraid to speak, are you?”

“Not at all,” said Jaeger, constricting his sphincter more tightly.

“Let’s get you out from behind the desk, then. Would that interest you?”

“I … certainly.”

“Good. Let’s talk again later this week.” He rose. Jaeger rose. Time’s up. He moved for the door and Kampman said, “Tell Fred.”

“Right, Martin, thanks,” said Jaeger, and was halfway down the hall toward the secret WC, taking quick short cautious steps, before he asked himself,
Tell Fred what, for Christ’s sake!?

He preferred not to be seen entering his sanctum, so it seemed a lucky break that no one was in the hall or the cloakroom. He was inside and seated not a moment too soon, face in his hands, trousers around his feet, sighing.

Tell Fred what?

It occurred to him sitting there that he had half a hard-on, which seemed very odd to him. Hard-on of irritation, perhaps. He recalled hearing or reading somewhere that in times of crisis and threat, people tended to copulate more. Explained the post–World War II baby boom.

Finished with his business, he sat there and watched himself stiffen further.

Why is this happening to me?

He needed to collect himself. No time for this. He considered relieving the tension with his hand, remembered then the terrible moment that Vita had caught him at it. Beginning of the end right there. He didn’t know what got into him. Yes, he did, but that had been his defense. Nondefense.
I don’t know what got into me, honey.
What had gotten into him was the desire to sit naked in one of their new beige leather armchairs in the living room, holding over his face a pair of Vita’s used panties, retrieved from the bathroom hamper, inhaling and kissing them as he jerked off there, knowing full well that Vita might walk in at any moment. That was part of it. A large part. That agony of tension at the possibility of being discovered. But it was only the tension he wanted, the possibility, not the fact, and the fact was that she did walk in. When he heard her keys in the front door, he tried to make a break for it, but she caught him halfway across the living room carpet, in flagrante, chasing his hopping pole to safety, panties in his fist.

She smiled at first. For just a fragment of an instant. Like a gas pain. Then the storm broke: “You fucking
pig
!” She circled him, hurling epithets and insults. There were questions, too, demands. What exactly was that in his hand? What exactly was he doing with it? What exactly was he thinking? What else did he do when he was alone? Where else did he do it? What if the girls had walked in? And then, the light of unswervable enlightenment and conclusion in her eye, she summed up the case against him: “You
wanted
me to catch you.” She watched him, a fascinated glint of horror in her eye. Then she whispered, “You are
sick
.”

Now, in his sanctum in the Tank, the memory helped deflate him enough to facilitate the zipping of his trousers. He washed his hands and let himself out, and in the little elbow alcove, he heard a loud whirring sound just outside the window. Eager for distraction, he flipped the latch and shoved open the casement in time to see a helicopter in the air immediately above, lifting over the roof of the Tank building. A brown helicopter, flying low, headed north toward the State Hospital just a couple of blocks away. It was a medical chopper, he knew, flying in a frozen heart from a patient who had just died in Århus or Ålborg to a patient here who would die without it. Or maybe a liver, a kidney. Could be from Sweden, too. Land on the roof of the State Hospital and people come rushing out for the icy box. Packed in dry ice, maybe. Or would that damage the tissue?

A sense of awe rose within him at the accomplishments of human civilization.
Just think: a fucking machine that flies in the air delivering a heart that surgeons equipped with the most refined technology have salvaged from a dead man in order to prolong the life of another man or woman who would otherwise die. Just think of all the factors, all the things, that have to go right to complete this successfully, and it is being done every day, everywhere.
The thought overwhelmed him with an immense gratitude for all those who had built and kept his civilization functioning, followed immediately by a sense of his own futility, his uselessness.
What do I contribute? What if it was me who needed a new heart?

Imagine someone else’s heart in your chest. Seat of emotions.
You are in my heart. My heart is in you
, says the dead man, now heartless. Hole in the chest where his heart should be.
Will you be my valentine?
asks the heartless man of the transplant. Paper hearts on the Christmas tree, strung on a thread.
My heart is in your hands. Your heart is in the surgeon’s hands, about to be stuffed into me.

No thanks. Wouldn’t want it, wouldn’t want another heart. They cut with a saw right down your sternum, crack the bone like a lobster shell, and pry open your rib cage. Snip out the old, sew in the new. There’s a reason we have no hinge in the sternum; protect the soft heart in a hard cage of bone. Heard about a man who got a woman’s heart once. Would it make a difference? Couldn’t, really. It’s the endocrines that matter there. Ductless glands pouring hormones directly into the blood. Can’t really picture it.

I’d just as soon die as go through all that. Wouldn’t take it. Don’t think I would. Rather commend my spirit to the great whatever. Now, a prick,
maybe
. Give me a new prick if this one wears out. Helicopter flying prick and balls from Sweden. Here comes the cavalry. Whole new set. Learn to do it like a Swede. Swedes are supposed to be good in the sack. This one I have comes too fast. Give me a slower one that only stands on command. Maybe a bit bigger. Definitely not smaller. Make that a condition. Eight inches minimum. Everybody adds an inch or two. Preferably nine or ten. And every bit as stiffable as mine now, please. Stands at attention to watch me shave in the morning, not hanging down to watch me tie my shoes. Remember Clausen’s dick that time in the showers after we swam? He tried to hide it in the towel, but I saw what a little dinkle it was, on such a big body. Thank God mine is okay. Still, a man could always use an extra inch or so. Imagine if they flew in a horse prick, grafted it on. Whale prick. Me with a whaling three-footer like the petrified one I saw at the Erotic Museum on Købmager Street. Looked like an elephant tusk, only a bit straighter. There goes Jaeger with the meter-long sausage. Sell tickets to the girls.