Falling Sideways (16 page)
“How so?”
“Overhead, for example,” Kampman said. “Contingencies.” Then he smiled.
It cost Breathwaite not quite 30 percent of his settlement. His little bag of good-bye moneys was now little more than a pouch. Like the little pouch of useless jewels between his thighs.
But the boy was in the door. And that, anyhow, was something.
The sense of conclusion, of release, buoyed Adam’s step up Callisens Way, past the drear rows of villas and ligustrum privet hedges. House after house of the sort he knew his father expected him to throw away his life for, day after day, just for the hope of locking the remainder of his days in one of these yellow-brick boxes. For what? To be able to say he lived in Hellerup or Gentofte or Charlottenlund or Rungsted Kyst? Why? Who wanted to?
But now, with each step along the chilly street to Ryvangs Way, he felt he was leaving them behind forever. Now it was all changed. Now his future was uncertain, and he was released from the certainty that had always been assumed for him. How could he have failed to see this option before? Every time he had ever voiced anything even remotely like a question about the necessity of an academic education, his father’s response had always been quietly relentless:
Do you want to destroy your future?
A question that had always seemed unanswerable. It answered itself irrefutably. There was only one future for him, and it must not be destroyed, for then all that remained was the yawning pit of futurelessness that awaited all boys who failed to attain an academic high school diploma with a high average followed by six years of university education in law, political science, or government with a high average. There were also medicine and dentistry.
But are you sure you’re hard-nosed enough for that, son?
There it was again. The nose. And, of course, theology.
But really, Adam, is that a viable option? You might as well take humanities and ensure yourself a spot on the unemployment line.
The questions always answered themselves.
If you think you might like to try an M.B.A., well, let’s discuss that when the time comes. But IT is a one-way ride to oblivion. Journalism? Oh, come on!
Oblivion. The pit again.
The only option that had never been discussed. If you destroy your future, then some other future could be waiting. All the other futures. It might be anything. Maybe even happiness. To destroy one thing was to create another.
Outside Hellerup Station, the smell of frying sausage coiled out the open window of a grill bar into his nostrils, and the water began to run in his mouth. He took a step toward it, but the sight of a man standing in the doorway deflected his course. The man was fat and sloppy, smoking a cigarette.
Without understanding why, Adam went instead for the stairway down to the Hellerup Station platforms and lost his balance. He glimpsed a poster plastered to the wall advertising a film called
Graceland
, and his knee went loose. He stumbled, clawed for the railing, and fell, banging his hip and the small of his back as he slid over the sharp edges of the steps and rolled to the dirty concrete floor below, biting his tongue so that he tasted blood.
Blushing furiously, he rose at once. Someone, a man with a cigarette, was descending toward him, speaking. He spun away and hurried for the Copenhagen track, ran for a train whose doors were sliding shut, jammed them open, and leapt in. The doors remained open as the train signal sounded, and he glimpsed someone, a man, boarding the car farther down. Then the doors slid shut, and Adam started hurrying, limping, toward the opposite end of the car. He still tasted blood in his mouth and spit into his handkerchief, wiped his lips.
At Svanemøllen Station, he got off the train and ran, hobbling, for the next car. He saw dirt smudged along his hand and the side of his gray jacket. He took a seat but saw he was in the smoking section, rose again, and moved farther up as the train pulled into Østerport. A small heavy man boarded—had he come from farther down in the train?—and stood in the aisle outside the smoker, lighting a cigarette.
At Nørreport, Adam waited until the train signal warbled over the PA system and leapt through the doors just before they closed. The man with the cigarette stared at him from behind the glass windows of the doors. Without looking behind, Adam limped rapidly up the steps to Frederiksborg Street and headed north, toward North Bridge.
The pain in his hip was getting worse. He shoved his hand in under his shirt and his fingers stung against the skin of his back. He was cut. He leaned over the curb to spit into the gutter and saw the pink gob fall from his mouth. He limped quickly up Frederiksborg, looped through the vegetable market on Israels Place. He slowed, pretending to study the wares, glancing at the sexy women in tight slacks, who were hawking fruit.
“Hey, ten bananas for a tenner! Ten good bananas for a tenner!”
“Oranges! Juicy! Oranges! Seven for a tenner! Can I help you, honey?”
Honey!
In her tight, tight jeans. He stumbled on, shaking his head, trying to see if the man from the grill bar was behind him. Had he been the man on the train? Was it…? But he couldn’t tell, couldn’t remember.
Am I going nuts!
Continuing north, across the lakes, he hooked over to North Bridge Street. The shopfronts and the dirty sidewalks here seemed embedded in the mystery of his new future. Details caught his eye. Signs written in Arabic script. The old signs of now defunct businesses still imprinted like pale shadows on dirty brick, old and new jostling together. Odd names in shops whose purpose he could not imagine. One with a sign that said, “Function 2.” An old chiseled brick sign spanning several windows: “L. V. Erichsen A/S. Al Rafiden gold and silver watches.” Across the lintel between a GUF record shop and a sportswear store, a flat gray canopy advertised, HOTEL CONTINENT.
Adam gazed up at the four floors of grimy windows above the sign: one with a lit yellow lamp behind checkered curtains. Who was in there? Doing what? Across the street from him a shop sign said simply, “Food Store” and “Dhadra Indian Specialities.” A pub called Munkestuen, the Monk’s Room, with a price list propped outside the door: “House Spirit 12 crowns a unit. Beer schnapps bitters 15 crowns. Billiards and Pool One Flight Up.” Who was in there? Behind the dark windows? People who would have been excluded from the life of his old future.
He crossed Stengade and glimpsed a tall fence dripping with withered wisteria. Women with scarf-covered heads walked past, and a dark man said to another, “
Salaam aleikem
.” Then there was a cemetery, Assistens Churchyard, where he knew Søren Kierkegaard was buried, Hans Christian Andersen, too. Tall trees rose from behind the yellow wall—firs and poplars, leafless elms and lindens. He doubled back, past a street called Solitude Way, a dead end closing on a bunch of chestnut trees and a grimy-fronted bar named the North Bodega. He heard the chant of an Arabic voice drifting through the air. The call to morning prayer? How strange it seemed suddenly, how foreign, to call to prayer, to pray. When had he ever really prayed?
Crossing over along ælled Way, he passed a burial shop, the Restaurant Opium, the Restaurant Barcelona, Rita’s Danish Open-Sandwich Shop. He looked into the window of a halal butcher, and a thin man with a stubble of gray hair looked out with a dark smile.
At the corner, he came into a square with a single linden tree, saw a sign over a café that said, “Pussy Galore.” He felt a little dizzy, and the aroma from a sausage wagon drew him. In his pocket he found a hundred-crown note and an envelope on which his mother had written, “Adam, honey, please don’t forget to copy the keys for Jytte. Keep the change. Love, Mom.”
He was famished. He ordered a fried medister with raw onion and stood at the counter of the wagon munching it as he gazed around the square. The raw onion dice stung the cut inside his mouth, but he kept chewing, dipping the meat into the blobs of ketchup and strong dark mustard the sausage man had dolloped onto a square of butcher paper.
As he swallowed the last bite, the elation of the fatty meat lifted, and he felt sleepy. He sat on the edge of a strange sculpture there and felt desolation descend upon him. Idly, he watched the sausage man behind the window of his van. He wondered what you had to do to get a job like that. The man was reading a newspaper, one of those they give out free on trains and buses. It seemed it might be a simple life, a good life. You could live off the sausage, read free newspapers, just sit in there all day by yourself and watch the world go by, no one breathing down your neck all the time. By comparison, his own life seemed impossibly complex and frustrated.
Then he noticed a key-and-heel bar across the street. He could give the keys to Jytte himself. It would give him an excuse to talk to her.
When he entered the shop, a short foreign man wearing a black cap and gray robe seated at the shoemaker’s bench called out, “
Salaam aleikem!
” And, “Good day, my friend, welcome.” He rose from the bench. “My colleague will help you,” he said, and pushed through a dark curtain to the back.
The young man behind the counter looked familiar to Adam. He put the keys down on the Formica.
“One of each?”
“Yeah.”
Adam watched the young man’s hands move deftly to place the shank of the key into the jaws of a kind of vise, flip a switch, and begin to file the key pattern into a red metal blank. The young man looked back at him.
“Don’t I know you? You look familiar.” Then, “Are you Martin Kampman’s son?”
“Yeah.” Uneasiness began to crawl inside Adam’s stomach, turning the sausage there.
“What’s your name?”
“Adam.”
“No shit? My name’s Adam, too. But I use my middle name, Jes. No offense, but like, you know,
hello
?
Adam?
”
Adam laughed. “Actually, Adam is
my
middle name. My real name is Isaak—for my mother’s father—but my father didn’t like it.”
They looked at each other and cracked up over the coincidence.
Jes removed the key from the vise, blew away the filings, and started on the next. “My old man works with yours at the Tank. Works
for
him, I should say.” He glanced up, as if assessing, then plunged on. “The downsizer, huh?”
“Huh?”
“Your old man. Professional downsizer. They bring him in to fire people. Read about what he did at Western Gulf. It was in
Information
.”
“I think he worked at Western Gulf a couple years ago.” Adam thought the young man was maybe a Communist.
“Damn right he worked there. He shit-canned thousands of people. Hundreds, anyway. You want a bag for these?”
“Huh? Nah.”
“So what do you know about that?”
“Huh? Nothing. I don’t know anything about it.”
“No, I mean about our meeting like this.” With an exaggerated singsong Danish accent, he said in English, “Danmark iss a lit-tle land.”
Adam paid and tried to think of something more to say to prolong the conversation. “So you work here?”
“Yeah, it’s fat. Best boss I ever had.”
“Who, that guy there in back? He’s your boss?”
“Owns the place. Got out of Aghanistan before the Taliban. ’Course the Americans put the Taliban in. Then they took them out again. Except, of course, they’re still there. Some world. Listen, I get off in like five minutes. You want to have a beer?”
“Uh, I’m only seventeen.”
“So?”
“Well, you have to be eighteen, right?”
“Right,”
Jes drawled. “You mean you never even been in a bar? Come on, it’s time, boy.”
For the second day running, Breathwaite left the Tank early. Down the back stairs.
Getting to be a habit.
But not for long. Outside the botanical garden, he decided to cross through and take the city train home from North Port. Crisp air livened his cheeks and leavened his spirit as his big feet walked him slowly along the paths of brittle leaves, their dusty smell lifting to his nostrils with an agreeable edge of death. He had always loved that about autumn, the chill sense of dark ahead of him.
He was in no hurry, scuffling his shiny black Lloyds through the crinkly foliage. Dust on the shine. He crossed paths with a woman leading a golden retriever on a leash. The dog smiled at him. Such a kind animal. Sad for Kirsten that she had been so yearning for a dog ever since Jes moved out. He remembered her hinting about her boss’s golden having puppies. But Breathwaite saw no reason for taking on avoidable unnecessary baggage. Now they had their castle to themselves, why complicate things? Sad for her. And how much longer did they have their castle, anyway?
Past the palm house and observatory, the pond and botanic museum, past the statue of Echo leaning forward, calling out her own name in the woods, and out on the corner of Gothers Street, down into the subway at North Port, and right into a waiting train. Good timing. Lucky. The warbly, high-pitched sound of the door signal, it occurred to him, sounded exactly like the opening notes to the
Mission Impossible
TV series theme. Then the train wheels clicked into a long fast starting riff of
naynaynaynaynaynaynay
, faster and faster, before quieting to a smooth slide, rolling out the tunnel into the light as he gazed dreamily through the dirty window, seeing nothing, thinking nothing that he was aware of.
And he missed his stop at East Port. No matter. He got off at North Harbor and stood on the platform, gazing over the water. To the left, black warehouses with blue trim, the brown concrete towers of the agricultural firm DLG. An orange yacht cutting the harbor water before it in a white V and, to the right, red cranes reaching up into the sky. Farther out, the tall spinning steel propellers of windmills against the chill blue sky—windmills no Don Quixote would get worked up over—and just fifteen miles across from Copenhagen, the evil humps of Barsebäck. Swedish nuclear reactors. After all the years of Swedish promises, now finally closed. But for how long? Let’s see them dismantled first. And where will they dump the waste? Why have so few people ever been particularly worked up over them? More concerned with closing Christiania. Picture a meltdown. Sound the alarm! Run for your life. Run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. See them boil up a tidal wave laced with strontium 90. Here comes everybody’s worst nightmare! Another flood is coming, but not the kind you think, there is still time to shrink, and think. Incredible shrinking man. All worldly goods swept away. These small problems of today dwarfed by it all.