Falling Sideways (6 page)
But not from me. Not just yet.
No doubt she already knew some of it, maybe all of it, maybe more than he himself had.
Maybe go see what she has? No, find your own footing first.
A voice from within offered instruction:
You can survive this. Just turn the spotlight on someone else. Be the guy focusing the beam. And be seen to be. Show you want to help cut away the deadwood.
Then he heard his own thoughts and shuddered. He would not be that person. Kill or be killed. No. Live and let live. Live to fuck another day. The image of Birgitte’s black curls rose to the screen of his mind.
Oh, Birgitte, Birgitte!
Her slender chest and lovely round breasts! It occurred to him that after a while the splendor of a woman’s body was kind of used up. The glow dimmed from use. The aura of each of its parts wore out. But with Birgitte it might be different. It
would
be different. The real thing. This was a woman he could truly love forever.
He sat over his opened laptop, elbows on the desk, mouth pressed against his fists. He was sweating.
Am I going to get fired?
He thought of his little girls, his little angels. What would happen to them? What would happen to him?
No, no. Work. Prove your value. Work.
He hit the mail receive on his laptop and watched the new messages fall into place. Spam, mostly. Few that needed action. Favors, mostly. Easy stuff. After all these years, he knew most of the answers without having to think. He directed a query from the secretary of a member of the board to a fellow whose name he knew in a parliamentary tourism committee. Good one. Answered three more in a row. Greetings. Friendly greetings. Best greetings. Loving greetings in response to one who had signed off with “MKH”—with loving greetings. Modern type. The subject line of the next mail was, Check out my wife’s butt and tell me it’s not hot! Click here. With regret, Jaeger deleted. Can’t risk a virus on a ruse like that. He continued scrolling down.
Spam.
Spam.
Sex spam.
Political spam.
Political spam.
Sex spam.
Jaeger had once been surfing porn sites and got into a series of pretty hot S&M pages that he checked out at some length. Later that day, in the canteen, he glanced across the room and saw a young woman from IT, big lovely butt and blond braids piled atop her head, smiling at him. Then, eyeing him, she casually clapped her open palm against her bottom and winked at him. This was a woman he had never said boo to. She didn’t know him well enough to seek his eyes with a smile like that. What was she thinking? Of him checking out the butt of some spam man’s wife? Did this mean the IT people could amuse themselves watching what he was watching online?
He didn’t like it.
No more surfing on the job.
Across the hall and two doors down, Breathwaite’s telephone rang. He was tipped back comfortably in his five-footed hydraulic safety chair and did not feel like making the effort to reach for the telephone. The view out the window of the yellow wisps of a weeping willow on the other side of the street was soothing to his eyes. He did not want to think, he wanted only to gaze upon the shadows and light on that tree and the grass around it. But the phone did not stop. Normally on the fourth ring it would channel automatically over to his secretary if he didn’t take it, but now it was ringing five times, six times. He jerked forward and reached for it.
Quiet voice: “Don’t you read your e-mail?” Kampman.
“Uh, no, I have to admit, not yet today, I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not the biggest gadget guy in the world. Was there one from you, Martin?” Using Kampman’s first name reminded Breathwaite of the fact that his boss very rarely addressed him by his name, either first or last. Occasionally he spoke to others about him in his presence as “Fred Breathwaite.” Sign of respect, or distance?
“Never mind. Why don’t you come on in here. And would you bring the Irish file with you?”
“That’s not really a file so much, just a couple e-mails.”
“Well, then, why don’t you bring the e-mails? That is, if you’ve looked at them, being that you don’t always do. Look, I mean. At the e-mail.” Followed by a “heh heh heh” that Breathwaite recognized would be accompanied by a rhythmic lift and fall of shoulders, simulating laughter.
Before Kampman’s desk, Breathwaite remained standing and handed the e-mails across to his CEO.
“That’s it?” Kampman asked. “Two sheets of paper? No file?”
“It’s … so far it’s been pretty informal. These are people I’ve known for some time. I can tell they want to open a cooperation, and they have a fat European Union grant. Green tiger and all. We’re talking many millions of euros.”
Kampman was nodding, his face bland. “Good,” he said with a flat intonation that conveyed neither praise, encouragement, nor enthusiasm. “Would you brief Harald Jaeger on that. I’d like him to take this over.”
The sunlight that had previously illuminated Kampman’s conference table was at the far edge of the room now and glinting through the slats of the blinds into Breathwaite’s eyes. He shifted his position and tilted his head to be free of the glare. “Uh …?”
How to address this? These Irish guys are
my
contacts.
“I’m hoping you’re willing to follow it through with Harald to the end.”
Am I hearing this?
Breathwaite only watched the younger man.
“Yah!” Kampman said then, and slapped his palms onto his thighs before moving them to the arms of his chair and raising himself to his feet. “Let’s go sit at the table, Fred.” He picked up his chrome thermos can. “Coffee? Water?”
An old Danish song kept running through Breathwaite’s consciousness. Gnags. Late 1980s or early 1990s, perhaps. Århus rock. A song about a man whose plan for his old age was just to sit on a bench. It was all Breathwaite wished to do just now. A slow stroll out into the late October afternoon sunlight to sit on a bench and watch the city walk by in its curious shoes. Warm enough still to be out without a topcoat. Unseasonably mild for Copenhagen.
He had been about to look in to his secretary to say he would be gone for the rest of the afternoon when he heard her quiet sobbing from the office next door, and he held back, listening behind the opened slit of his door. She wasn’t getting the ax. Was she sobbing for him? He wasn’t even sobbing for himself. Had she heard already? Or maybe she’d known in advance. Secretaries know everything that is essential—the human side, at least. He did not feel prepared to offer comfort just now. Then he heard footsteps in the corridor and Jaeger’s voice: “Marianne! What is it?”
Breathwaite pictured her at the desk, behind her keyboard, a large, capable, diligent, pretty, sweet-natured woman, a hankie balled at her nose. And himself too small to go in and tell her. But Jaeger could never resist a woman in distress. He’d do fine.
Just hold your panties up, Marianne.
He returned to his laptop, open on the wing of his desk, and sent her an e-mail:
Dear Marianne,
I’ll be gone the rest of the afternoon. See you tomorrow. Chin up.
Greetings, Fred.
It was Marianne who had nurtured their e-mail culture here, insisting on formal salutations and complimentary closings. No staccato telegrams here.
Breathwaite: You’re fired. Kampman
He hit send and hurried out quietly, down the back stairwell, his mental litany shifting to Auden’s poem about the one-eyed veteran who did nothing with his single eye but look at the sky.
A plan already forming in his head, he lifted the cell phone from his breast pocket and keyed in Jaeger’s number to leave a message: “Harald, listen, I’m sure you heard. Could you stop by my place for coffee this evening? Say, eight? Got a splendid malt to crack. Not a word to Kis, okay? No need to call back if you can make it.”
Something good could be salvaged out of this. Jaeger owed him a couple of favors—although, of course, that did not mean he would necessarily deliver. Still, he could try. As the Danes said, If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, well, maybe it will work anyway.
Headquarters were on East Farimags Street, beside the old Commune Hospital, across from the botanical garden. Breathwaite slipped past Ole Suhrs Street and paused on the corner, uncertain where he wanted to go, as a short, craggy-faced, black-haired man walked past with a German shepherd on a leash, tugging him forward. “Easy, Samson,” the man grumbled. October air slid gently through Breathwaite’s hair. Hard to believe such gentle air this time of year. The galleries and northside lakes to his left, Silver Square cafés ahead, East Park to the right. Any number of amusements available here: He could drink a sugared absinthe at Krut’s Karport just ahead and bask in the light of that sweet waitress’s smile. Or wine and a delicate selection of excellent cheeses at the Café Kaava farther down. Café Under the Clock, diagonally across, still had tables out. Rare for October. Could enjoy a thirty-crown beer there from big, quiet Hans. Try to carry it up from the basement bar yourself, and he always says, “I’ll bring it up to you.” Down in the cozy basement with the bookcase of glasses imprinted with names of the regulars. Breathwaite had never made the bookcase.
There were two museums to choose from—the Hirschsprung Collection there on Stockholms Street, sculpture outside of a small equestrian barbarian, three heads hung from his saddle.
Put mine there, too.
Or the National Museum, across from Brandes Place. He hadn’t been there in an age. Strange sculpture in the doorway—what was it? He’d noticed it one day last summer. Couldn’t remember, but it was strange.
But he had it in his head to go sit on a bench, so he turned toward East Park and strolled among the tree sculptures, dead of elm’s disease and transformed into art. Ought to do that with human beings. Bleach and carve the mighty bones of the dead.
There stands my father’s white thigh like a narwhal tusk, pointing to the sky. And there my mother’s pelvis through the port of which you can view the reverse story of my life.
Might as well admit it now, Breathwaite: We have fucked up this world, and you did not a pin to stop it.
Guilty as charged. So do I burn in hell? Does, say, Hitler burn in hell? Or not? Because if Hitler’s not burning, I must deserve a peaceful sleep.
He came at last to just the bench he sought. He sat in a dapple of sunlight through the wizening leaves and watched a pack of young men on a small field, grass still green enough, run furiously at soccer. He himself was that rare American who had managed his way through grammar and high school without ever having engaged in any manner of team sport apart from a few mandatory hours on the basketball court, a tiny bit of lacrosse, softball, soccer even. He had been agile enough and large, sought after for football, but it didn’t interest him. The spectacle of bulk smashing bulk to capture a ball. The whole idea of competing, of fighting to win a symbolic battle, had always seemed so … unnecessary. If you work hard, you will prosper; no need to try to bring the other man down.
It made him sad now to see these young men fighting together, testing themselves against and for one another, hooting, groaning, laughing, cheering. Red sweaty faces full of grin and grunt. Clapping of hands and triumphant pump of the arm:
Yes!
How unlike Molly’s “Yes.” The Y of YHWH.
Sport,
he thought,
serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.
Orwell said that. It’s bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
Or what?
Maybe I was wrong.
Then he remembered, some forty years before, knocking out Hugh Powers’s teeth. That sick, pointless feeling of ugliness.
He rose, his solid black Lloyd 46s strolling him on dirt, north, toward where his youngest son lived, the only one of the three who still interested him, the only one who was making a fuck-up of his life. The others were all so …
set
. IT consultants, the two of them, with their villas, respectively, in Brønshøj and Albertslund, three kids between them so they jointly matched the national average. They didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, went out running every day, mountain biking on the weekends (in the flats of Zealand). They watched television in the evenings, had voted central right, both of them, flat and happy as clams with kids to match. No doubt in ten years or so they would divorce to match the statistics in that sector of this disintegrating society, too. A terrible confession he would never make, secret observations locked inside the vault of his skull.
Only Adam (what a handle to give a kid!)—named for his mother’s brother, middle named for Breathwaite’s beloved dead brother, Jes, the name he went by—only Jes gave him cause for concern and hope. But the kid didn’t have a chance. Too many dreams. He’d dabbled in post-modernism, and he’d dabbled in post-traditionalism and in post-colonialism, and he’d dabbled in post-ethnicity and in behavioristic post-ethicism and no doubt in post-postism, too, leading up to pre-ism, retro-ism, which could end only in now-ism, and then on to neo-nowism ad infinitum, until time stops its survey of all the world. As far as Breathwaite could determine, he was a very bright kid with an understanding of everything and a grasp of nothing. The boy had all the right ideas and not a chance of realizing them. He worked in a bloody key-and-heel bar run by a Pakistani, and every year that passed, the limb he was out on grew farther from the trunk. At least he had an apartment. He’d invested in a three-room on Blågårds Place at a time when such a place was an idiotic investment for a quarter million. Breathwaite had tried to talk him out of it, but the boy would not be swayed. Twenty-one-year-old Marxist capitalist. Breathwaite only wished he himself had had the good sense to follow the boy’s lead and buy three such condominiums, for he would have quadrupled his money already. At least the boy had that to fall back on, but you needed someplace to live and you couldn’t eat bricks.