Kerrigan in Copenhagen (34 page)

Now the gurney is racing back down to the anonymous blank room where his heart danced on the screen, and Dr. Troels, who he now notices is a dark-haired handsome man of perhaps thirty-two—is jogging beside it, saying, “You have clots in both lungs. That's why you can't breathe. Have you traveled recently?”

“Couple times.”

“Did you wear support stockings? Move around in the plane to keep your blood flowing?”

“Not really.”

He shakes his head ruefully. “The only thing to do now is a massive injection of blood thinner—heparin. That should dissolve the clots. Did you hit your head when you fainted?”

“Don't think so.”

The doctor is running his fingers over Kerrigan's skull, pressing here and there. “Any soreness?”

“No.”

“Have you urinated blood recently?”

“Not since a few years ago when I had a bunch of prostate biopsies.”

“Did they find anything?”

“Not a thing.”

The doctor's young eyes meet his, smiling faintly in collusion. “Does, uh, your, uh, still function at all for you?”

“It still knows what it wants, and it does okay.”

He looks with interest at Kerrigan, and for a moment—Kerrigan, the old dude, and he, the young doctor, are men in a bar, ready to exchange stories of rapture, but the young doctor seems to remember himself and instantly grows serious again. “Have you ever had blood in your feces?”

“No.”

“This procedure should do it for you,” Dr. Troels says. “But I am required to tell you there
is
a risk.”

The stretcher is back in place in the big dim anonymous empty room now, and it occurs to Kerrigan, face clammy behind the mask, that this is a fitting room in which to die, a blank empty colorless room in the bowels of a modern state hospital with a sculpture outside somewhere of a monolith that represents civilization in constant fall but never actually landing. Kerrigan closes his eyes and visualizes the sculpture.

“What is the risk?” he whispers.

Dr. Troels meets his gaze. “The massive dose of heparin we have to give you might induce bleeding in your brain. You might have a stroke.”

The young doctor's eyes tell Kerrigan that there is no other way. Either risk this or let the lack of air rip life from him. And he has already had a taste of how that is and does not want another.

Two plump warm hands take his right, and he turns his face toward Sara with her shooting-star tattoos.

He looks again at Dr. Troels. His lips are sweaty behind the plastic oxygen mask as they form the word
Okay
.

A needle is stuck into the side of his stomach, and he can feel liquid rushing in as another needle slides in under the knob of bone in his left wrist, and he is surprised that he can register pain at all anymore. Sara has his right hand again. He looks up into her eyes. “You are so sweet,” he whispers.

“My partner might not agree,” she says with a twinkle. “Actually I'm something of a bitch.”

He smiles.

Her eyes grow serious. “The heparin was injected about five minutes ago,” she says. “The risk of stroke generally lasts for an hour. I'll be here with you.” He follows her eyes to the large round face of the wall clock. Its hands say 3:45. He watches the second hand spastically twitch away spent instants as he waits to see what is next. Paralysis of left side? Right? Loss of speech? Loss of bowel control? Drooping drooling lips that cannot speak? A brain that cannot produce and develop words, that cannot truck them to the page?

Sara seems never to tire of squeezing his hand with her two, perhaps because he has them trapped in his chilly claw. The phrase “death grip” floats to the surface of his mind as the clock blurs before his eyes. It is not possible, he thinks, to fall asleep during this part of his own story, but he feels his eyelids sagging, his vision losing focus as his thoughts grow dreamy to the rhythm of the oxygen blowing into his lungs; its hiss as it leaves the tank hooked to the foot of the stretcher fills his ears to overflowing, and his thoughts are dreamy collages, scraps of face and talk and gesture. The dimpled nurse's pitying expression asking whether he has a girlfriend, Sara's twinkle and her tattoos, and a fleeting image of his Associate beside him on Grønningen, gazing at the sculpture of the reclining girl, his Associate—Annelise—leaning into his body. The image is a weight belt that sinks him a few feet beneath the surface of consciousness. He hears a snore burring at the back of his throat, which makes him smile; he didn't know he could snore into an oxygen mask. It is a cozy sound, and he is safe as long as Sara's warm grip anchors him.

There is nothing then. A shallow immersion.

Until his eyelids lift, and his vision focuses on the clock face: 4:50. His eyes turn to Sara. She is smiling. She seems very, very happy. Her tattoos blaze like celebratory fireworks. Her green eyes—why did he not notice before that they are green?—fix his, and her fingers move against his cold but warming hand.

The street door buzzer rings without hesitation, and he wonders as he crosses the lobby what she will look like, whether she will be as lovely as he remembers. Barefoot. Fingers and smock spattered with oils.

She is already at the door as he turns down the hall.

“Are you drunk?” she asks.

“No,” he says, and she steps back to let him in.

“Long time no see,” she says. “Where were you—oh, you're limping, what happened?”

“Had a fall.”

“Drunk?”

“No, I wasn't drunk. I fainted. I'm not going to drink anymore,” he says.

Her green eyes explore his face. “This is new.”

“Not going to drink any less either.”

She continues to peer silently at him, moving him to add, “Maybe a little less.”

She keeps staring.

“Okay, maybe a lot less. If that's what it takes.”

“If that's what it takes for what?”

“You do realize that I like you quite a lot, don't you, Annelise?”

“I like you quite a lot, too, Terrence.”

“But no twelve-step city for me. I'm not on that road. Three drinks a day is what I'm told I may have.”

She peers at him. “Told by whom?”

“The health authorities. They tell everybody that.”

“Oh, well, did that ever stop you?”

“I'm hoping that we can have our three drinks a day together.”

Once again he finds himself not wanting to tell her something; he doesn't want to tell her about his lungs and his blood, the blood thinner he has to take every day. He doesn't want to tell her that the whole left side of his body is one big purple bruise, or how close he came to dying and having a stroke. Neither does he want to tell her about the optimism, the sense of beauty that has opened in him from being so near death, from coming back.

“I'm not a fanatic,” she says. “Would you like something now?”

“Any of that cava left?”

She brings the bottle on a tray with two flutes and a jar of caviar with crackers and a spoon and chopped raw onion and sliced fresh lemon.

“That looks delicious,” he says, unwrapping, unwiring, and uncorking the champagne with an agreeable pop. Then he adds, “You look delicious, too.”

“The same,” she says with lowered eyes, pursing her lips into a faint smile.

He pours. They toast. Then she sits—not beside him on the sofa, but on the two-man sofa across from it. They don't speak for more minutes than he is comfortable with.

He says, “I brought you a tiny present from Dublin,” and takes the Bronnley's lemon soap from his pocket, rises to hand it to her. “It's”—he begins, decides on not going into the whole story about Joyce and Bloom, content to have succeeded in bringing it to her—”lemon-scented.”

She puts it at her nose, smells, hums with pleasure.

He gazes at her. She is as lovely as he remembered, lovelier. “Have you read Proust?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “Do I have to read Proust to be your friend?”

“No, no, I've read very little Proust myself. I only pretend that I've read him. But what he said about love is really worth thinking about, I think. He wrote about the impossibility which love comes up against, that we imagine we can know someone because we can know the body that encloses him or her, but we can't know all the points of space and time he or she has occupied, and will occupy, so we don't and can't know them completely. We grope toward the person but can't find them.” He wets his lips with cava. “I'm very attracted to you, Annelise. I'd like to be your friend. I'd like to be your best friend if I can. And try to help you be happy. I'd like to know you—as much as I can.”

She peers into his eyes. “There is something about me that almost no one knows but me,” she says, and is silent.

“Will you tell me?”

“Do you really want to hear?”

“Very much.”

“On March twenty-first, 1945, I was trapped in a bombed building. Bombed by the British. It was an accident. They were aiming at the building the Germans had taken over as their gestapo headquarters and they succeeded but they also hit a school and some apartment buildings, including the one that I lived in. The girl who was watching me took me to the basement when the bombs started exploding, and we were buried in the rubble for a whole day. I kept speaking to her, asking questions—her name was Mette. After a long time, I realized she was not answering me. She could not. She was dead. I understood that she was dead. Then I decided that I had to dig myself out. I was four, nearly five. I remember it in detail. There was a lot of fire. And water from the pipes filling parts of the basement. I heard years later that several other children boiled to death. I heard the screams.”

“Oh, God,” he says. “I'm so sorry.”

“It was an accident. The British bombers were doing their best. They liberated us. Montgomery was our hero. And all his men who risked their lives and gave their lives for Europe. English and Scots and Welsh and Irish, too. And of course the Americans. But those hours in the basement … talking to Mette, and her not answering … and then I knew … I still get frightened sometimes …” She sips from her cava, blinks, looks at him. “Why in the world are we talking about this?” she says lightly, chuckling, closing the subject.

“Look,” he says. “Let's go ahead and finish the book.”

“Do you really want to finish it?”

“By my calculation there are a total of 1,525 serving houses in Copenhagen. I have that figure from a report of Copenhagen County's Health Committee. They recently issued a plan to reduce alcohol consumption by five percent by closing seventy-seven serving houses. The public laughed in their communal faces, so they dropped the plan. There are still 1,525 serving houses, but we only need to pick a hundred of them for the book, only about fifty more. Then we can move on to some other project. I think we work well together. Will you?”

“What's in it for me?”

He thinks for a moment, reaches to his breast pocket, lifts out the Cohiba he bought all those days ago, unwraps the cellophane. “You like music?” he asks. She nods, and he hands her the paper ring from the Cohiba. “Here's a whole band for you.”

She slips the gilt-paper band over the pointed red nail and knuckles of her slender ring finger and stretches her hand out as if to admire a diamond.

He says, “I lied before when I said that I liked you quite a lot. Actually, I adore you.”

She smiles at him with her sad green eyes. “I'm just a girl, Terrence.”

“You're a goddess to me,” he says. “
Je t'adore
.”

She says nothing, but her eyes smile. Then they lower. “Thank you,” she whispers.

“Maybe we should, like, plant a tree together somewhere,” he says, and can barely hear his own voice. “It could be our … tree.”

“We could do that, Terrence.”

“Who knows what sorrow might await us?” he says.

“
Den tid, den sorg
,” she replies. “Old Danish proverb: That time, that sorrow.”

He raises his bubbly to her. “Love, let us be true to one another, for the world … and so on and so forth.”

“May I hear the so on and so forth?” she asks.

He sits forward on the edge of the sofa, watching her, about to recite, and she asks, “Why are you sitting all the way over there, Mr. Kerrigan? All by yourself.”

He rises, crosses to her CD rack, hoping, finds just what he wants, and puts it on. As the first lilting notes of “The Beautiful Blue Danube” drift across her century-and-a-half-old rooms, he bows beneath the three-meter ceiling, extends his arm. She accepts it, smiling, and leading with his good leg, he believes himself transported to a higher salvation with his lady as his hand takes her slender waist and they dance, turning, across the broad plank floor, and the world spins dizzily with them.

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