Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  He tries once again for a while to get the knack of the circular breathing technique that will make it possible for him to play for ten or fifteen minutes without stopping, but he cannot succeed in squeezing the air out of his mouth while drawing more in through his nose. Each attempt throws off the quality of the tone he produces through the wood, so he contents himself merely with playing for as long as he can release air from his lungs, perhaps a minute at most.

  Sitting there on the carpet, he fills his lungs again and again, letting the air through the gnarled pipe in a steady, modulated flow that fills his ears, his mind, as he stares up at the vortical eyes of the painted mask, drawing him in toward their tiny black centers to the place of wandering he both yearns for and dreads. A love supreme a love supreme a love supreme a love supreme . . .

  When his lips begin to itch, he puts the instrument aside. He feels calmer now; things seem more clear. You were just bullshitting yourself once again, he thinks. Enjoying what she gave you of her body and allowing yourself to believe it was for free. And the end result is she winds up sitting at home feeling lousy and used and foolish. You should have seen the signs. Now all the pleasure turns to irredeemable sadness, all the intimacy to fake closeness.

  She hates him now, so he feels even more alone, feels the denial of whatever it is he is, its validity rebuffed. You are not good enough. You will not do. What you stand for is unacceptable. You are a man cut loose from the society of men. You are alone, away from your own country, devoid of ancestors, removed from your family, from the religion you grew up in, working in solitude. He considers these facts, considers himself considering them, rises above the consideration to think, You are not unhappy, not really. You have nothing to be unhappy about. What is connection, really, but another form of illusion? How can you connect but as an act of heart and will from somewhere beyond the place of illusion? Benthe, for example, her desire leaving him basically unsatisfied despite her physical beauty; he did not want to pursue her—emptiness . . . But isn’t true intimacy possible? A meeting of two people’s deepest natures? For a moment he believes he has arrived at some point of understanding, but at once it turns opaque again and the understanding, if it ever was there in the first place, dissolves.

  He stands at the window looking across in one direction at the slanted peace sculpture, the other way at the neon outline of the chicken and the eggs, which are not yet lit, are now mere faint glass outlines on a brick wall in the afternoon sun.

  He misses his children, the way they were when they were little, the sense of family the four of them had together. For a while. The sense of family when he was a boy, frosted windows in a warm living room in winter, the balmy air through screen doors in summer, the smell of honeysuckle, of cooking—ham, bacon, potatoes—a mother and father who believed in you as you did in them, brothers and sisters who were on your side—even though that is long gone. He still misses it at times. He even misses his wife, partner of his life for twenty years even though so much of it was sham and pretense, secret bitterness, bickering behind a charade for the children’s sake, for the sake of maintaining the illusion that there really was such a thing as family, the cornerstone of civilization. Maybe there is, maybe there was, maybe you have just failed. Both families failed, the one you were born into and the one you created, too.

  But the children are not a failure, he reassures himself. The children are new lives moving forward in time. Only the children make sense to him.

  Across the lake now the building tops are in silhouette like houses on a monopoly board against a pink blue sky. He is thinking about his own parents now, about how long it took for him, living across the ocean, to come to terms with what he really thought of them, and he wonders if he has in fact betrayed their memory. His mother was so good and sweet she bored him, and he could weep at that thought, he could tear out his hair that he would think such a thing about the woman who had meant him nothing but love and support. How he wishes now that she were still alive and he could invite her to lunch—she loved to eat in restaurants—and sit and allow her to enjoy for a couple of hours all the empty meaningless chitchat that made her feel alive and connected. How he wishes he could think of his father as standing up clear-eyed on two strong legs instead of staggering across the living room floor and falling on his butt and sitting there dazed and groggy-eyed.

  How he wishes he could think of his three brothers as something other than what they had been, troublemakers who went out picking fights in bars. Larry waking up one morning with two teeth lodged in his knuckle that he had punched out of someone’s mouth. Sean, who did nothing but try to amass money, putting every penny aside, literally; even when he had a good job and went to work in a suit and tie, he would not pass a trash can that had an empty bottle in it without fishing it out for the deposit, picked up used newspapers off subway seats to save a quarter. Or Billy, who became a teacher at the local Catholic school and hit the kids, bragged about it, used a stick that he called “Clarence,” threatening the kids that they would “have a chat with Clarence” if they got out of line, bragging and laughing about it to his friends. His next to oldest sister, Mary Ellen, had ended in an institution, locked in an obsession that her body was shot through with disease, that disease lurked everywhere, on the surface of every object, mixed into her food, her water. Sometimes medicine could bring her out of it for a little while, and she would be the person he had known as a child, smiling and tender, quick to laugh; but it never lasted somehow. Sooner or later, her eyes would begin again to take on that edge of terror, and she would begin to open doors with her handkerchief, to hold the telephone away from her face, to pick through her food with a fork.

  There is only Noreen left. The only one he can still communicate with. She the oldest, he the youngest of the siblings. They cling to one another, feel they are the only reasonable ones, merely humor the others, who each seem so locked into their foibles; but who is really to say who is normal, who is seeing clearly? Could he and Noreen not just as well be locked into a folie à deux? Who is to say for sure that the others were wrong?

  Yet at home they loved so fiercely, all of them, were all so dedicated to the family, they would kill for you, their love at home so fierce and unquestioning for so many years, insofar as outside threats were concerned, but what went on within the house was something else again.

  How long it took him to see that, how he had to get so far away, across the ocean, to see finally how blind and mad it all was, the whole thing, the way they professed to believe in God and Christ, went to confess their sins, take communion, attended Mass and still were locked into all their petty madness, locked into a closed little house where they believed only in the infallibility of each other, and then each of them going out to start their own families on the same premises, to rear their kids to do the same hopeless thing.

  The worst of it for him was that they saw him, young Pat, as their own messiah. The genius savior bound for glory who would light the way for them all. There was no way out for him but to run, run from people who loved him blind in their own blindness and get away to where he could breathe and shake free of them and, once he was free, to ask himself why? Was he better off now? What had gone wrong there with his people? Why couldn’t he save them from themselves? Or join them? Just be one of them? Be of the time and place and people that had produced him? Unquestioning.

  9. The Damned Don’t Cry

  There are at least forty-seven books on his shelves that he has never read, that he paid good money for and placed on his bedside table, then put up on the shelf and never opened. Or opened it to read a page, a few pages, then for some reason stopped and put it on the shelf.

  It is only Friday afternoon of a three-day weekend that should have been dedicated to pleasure, and he still has the coaster with the telephone number of Birgitte Svane in Albertslund, where he has vowed he will never go again. Perhaps she would come to the city to meet him.

  He considers this, sees himself with her in a rest
aurant, reaching across the table to touch her hand, admire her eyes, her throat.

  Asshole.

  You could as well call Benthe and go through that series of movements toward emptiness.

  He stands before his bookshelves, eyes roaming over the multicolored spines, picks out a black one, a white one, a green one, a blue and black one, a flowery one, another white one. All books he has been meaning to read. Could make a pot of Irish tea. Or sip wine, nibble bits of cheddar.

  He sits on the sofa with the stack of books beside him, holds a thick volume in his hands: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs and the Conference at M.I.T. by C. D. B. Bryan. He reads the epilogue: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” From Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. He wonders that a supposedly scientific study should use a work of crime fiction for an epilogue, sits considering that, gazing at the white page, feeling the vellum between his fingers, finds himself closing the book, taking another.

  Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. He feels his eyes closing as he reads the preface. The Loneliness of the Dying by Norbert Elias is appealingly slender. He begins to read with gusto but by the end of the second page he feels a door opening in his mind behind which is lurking an intense anxiety he is not prepared to face at this moment. He slaps the book shut, takes Castaneda’s The Art of Dreaming, reads the first sentence, begins to wonder if he is in a state to read at all.

  There is something between his teeth. He gets up for a toothpick, stands digging with it, staring at the lake. The sun reflects in the windows of a building across the way and back onto the ice in a pattern of nine glowing oblongs, which makes him almost think of something but he cannot remember it. He returns to the sofa, looks at the next book in the pile, Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, wonders if he ever truly had meant to read any of these books, or just bought them to support an illusion of himself as a serious man, goes to the next one, Poems on the Underground, leafs through, reading lines at random:

  When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

  I all alone beweep my outcast state . . .

  O rose thou art sick . . .

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;

  Its loveliness increases . . .

  They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

  Through Eden took their solitary way . . .

  Among them He a spirit of frenzy sent

  That hurt their minds and sent them with a mad passion

  To hasten their destroyer . . .

  Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.

  The last book in the pile he has selected is a translation of Dan Turèll’s poetry. He leafs through it, stops at “I Should Have Been a Taxi Driver.”

  That’s what I should have been!

  I would have been a great taxi driver!

  The cab driver to end all cab drivers . . .

  He considers that, ponders whether, if he had chosen a simpler life, another life, his life would have been better. Still trapped inside the same confused mind, though.

  Spinning through pages, he stops at random, finds one of his favorite poems, “Last Walk through the City.” About a man taking his final walk through Copenhagen before he dies. Turèll wrote that in his thirties, imagining his death, but never imagining that he would be dead a dozen years later of a sudden cancer, not much older than Bluett is now. He thinks of Turèll, of Copenhagen, thinks of stopping in the Café Golden Rain for one last shot of bitter snaps as Turèll imagines himself doing in that poem.

  The thought of drink has found his heart and he sits considering various bars, places where he might meet some drinking companions, remembers his encounter in the Bo-Bi Bar, remembers Milt Sever recalling Andreas Fritzsen writing things he did not wish to know about child pornography. He thinks of his American criminologist friend here in Copenhagen—Dave. Bluett phones him. No answer. His Danish-Czech friend, Per, a novelist. Tries him. No answer. Thinks of Sam across the hall, but no doubt Sam is with his Russian mistress.

  Then he remembers that strange look in Sam’s eyes last time.

  I should have been a taxi driver, he thinks, carrying the books back, placing them one by one in their empty slots on the shelves.

  In the kitchen, he takes tomato juice, Tabasco, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, Stolichnaya, and concocts a pitcher of bloody Marys, which he carries on a tray with bowls of nuts and chips across the hall. He balances the tray on his hip and hammers on the door. “Open up, Finglas!”

  He waits, hammers again. “Sam!” Hears nothing, no stirring. Silence.

  Trying not to think of Sam with his beautiful Russian girlfriend, he returns, puts on Coltrane’s Complete Africa/Brass Sessions. “The Damned Don’t Cry.” And his heart lifts that it is the perfect music to sit at his oak table with, sipping bloody Marys, nibbling nuts, watching the frozen lake get soupy in the gleaming sunlight.

  What is light? he thinks, abandoning himself to the pitcher, the spice and 80-proof numbing of his lips and teeth. He nods to the great sax, smiling as the inevitable Coltrane disintegrations draw him down to where you see beneath the music, the machine room of sound, scary as hell but powerful as god and then the horn comes back to show you from the outside again, smooth hot beauty, bringing the two closer together, a marriage of heaven and hell.

  Trane leaves off and Reggie Workman takes it on the bass alone before Booker Little’s trumpet and Coltrane joins him on soprano, on oboe, tuba, and the rhythms swing out of this forty-year-old sadness cut into wax.

  Bluett drinks his bloody, refills the glass and stares at Coltrane’s face on the CD jacket, grateful to that dignified face for these sounds. He leans back, tongue numb now, stands and does a little dance, slaps his thighs, turns to the bookshelves, grabs Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and slams it back, his hand charged with the touch of it as Coltrane’s soprano blows “Africa,” lifting upward like a bird cry of thought. Bluett closes his eyes and smiles, leaning on the chairback, nodding to the rhythms.

  He steps to the window, opens it to breathe in the icy air, gazes down one story to the bright, cold street. That gray-eyed foreign guy again on the corner. The unknown neighbor, standing aside in the freezing afternoon to let a young couple pass—a tall young man in a leather jacket with a woman, slightly older, who turns to smile at the foreigner, her blue eyes so light he can see their glow from here. “Mange tak,” she says with warmth, “Many thanks,” and they walk on away from the man, who stands in a strangely twisted posture, as though he has back pain, and watches the couple for a moment as they disappear up the street, and Bluett experiences a spooky moment of recognition, of a constellation of four lives, trajectories crossing at this moment of Coltrane’s soprano, continuing away.

  Then a banging reaches up through the music into his consciousness. He moves to the stereo, lowers the volume.

  Someone is in the hall. He shuts off the sound and looks out. A young man stands at Sam’s apartment doorway knocking, hammering at the door. The young man glances back at Bluett.

  “Have you seen my father?”

  “You must be Anders,” Bluett says. “Sam always talks about you. He’s proud as hell of you.” Bluett can understand Sam’s pride. The boy is good-looking, well-dressed, an intelligent face. Bluett introduces himself.

  “My father is supposed to meet me today. I was supposed to meet him here twenty minutes ago.” The boy’s English is accented, sibilant esses.

  “Tried him before myself,” Bluett says, “but no luck. If he was supposed to meet you, he’ll be home for sure any minute. You want to come in and wait here?”

  The boy looks skeptical.

  “Don’t you have a key?” Bluett asks.

  “Uh, I forgot it.”

  “Well, listen, I can let you in. We hold keys for each other. Wait a sec . . .” He goes in and finds the key, which he has hung on a red cord beside the refrigerator, opens
the door for the boy. “Give Sam my regards when he comes.”

  He returns to his apartment, his table, stares at the CD player, the red half-empty pitcher, wonders if he can revive the mood, if he even wants to. Then there’s a knock on his own door this time. Sam’s son again, but Bluett can see at once something has happened.

  The boy’s face is drained, frightened, the same startled blue eyes as Sam’s. His voice is very slight.

  “Someone has . . . killed him. My father.”

  10. Blood Count

  The events of the day bring him down from his vodka cloud, but the chronology is jerky. Now he sits alone again at the end of a weekend, and it occurs to him that this is a continuous situation, fleeting days vanishing in a blur.

  There was the boy Anders’s stricken face. What had at first seemed murder later was seen as suicide. In the boy’s hand was the note that Sam had addressed to him, telling about cancer, that he could not face a drawn-out eating away of himself, months of pain and dying and dependence, that it was better like this, that he hoped it wasn’t unfair but that he wanted his son to be the one to find him, to find this note so that he could read it for himself, so he could say once more how much he loved the boy, how proud he was of him and of his sisters Annette and Mie, that they should not think harshly of him if they could avoid it, this way they were spared something much worse, that they should take care of one another and know always how much their father treasured them.

  Bluett did not want to see Sam’s body but wound up in the man’s bedroom nonetheless, and his immediate sense was that something was more than wrong. The room, the apartment was tidy and clean, and there was a plastic bag over Sam’s head. His hands lay on his breast with a necktie wound around his wrists. Bluett backed out as quickly as he could without startling Anders, who stood in the little hallway behind him.