Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  He nods.

  “You want crutches?”

  He shakes his head gingerly, sees the policemen are waiting by the outer door for him. He also sees, as the nurse hands him his Burberry, that it will have to be dry-cleaned. He hopes the blood will come out.

  In the back of the police car, he watches Blegdamsvej roll past in the dark, a fuzzy blur of wall and light, and considers his options. What does he have to give them? What can he say? What can he prove? He realizes that he doesn’t even know for sure himself whether the attack was a coincidence. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know if there is the least evidence for a case against Svetlana Krylova or the Satin Club, whether some other facts could explain, or be made to explain, his own hasty conclusions. And whatever else, if he tries to go into it, he will have to reveal what was in Sam’s box, just what Sam wanted to keep from being revealed.

  He thinks of a poem by Dan Turèll and sniggers grimly. The poem is a parody of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the Turèll poem ends with someone taking a shot at the narrator, and he thinks, Now I understood everything! Except what was happening, and why, and who was after me, and for what reason.

  It is a short ride from Rigshospitalet to his apartment on the lakes. The taller policeman gets out and opens the door for him, supports his elbow as he swings his legs out slowly, one at a time, and hoists him to his feet. Bluett grimaces.

  “Want help up the stairs?” the policeman asks.

  “No. Thanks for your help.”

  “Okay, you think of anything else, just call the station.”

  “Who should I ask for?”

  “Whoever answers will help you. They’ll have our report. We’ll be out now looking for a group of troublemakers. They might still be roaming around drunk. If we find anyone you’ll be contacted for a confrontation.”

  Is that a threat? he wonders. A warning? And he realizes that he is halfway worrying that the police are part of a conspiracy, recognizes that for what it is and decides all he needs now is sleep.

  “Give you some good advices,” the taller policeman says in English in a not unfriendly manner. “Stay away from those Satin Club places. Find yourself a nice woman your own age. Man your age shouldn’t be running after young whores in places like that. Only bring you to troubles.”

  Bluett grunts, smacks the car door shut after him.

  He lets himself in and climbs the winding wooden stairs slowly, gets the key into the lock on his door after a few tries, hits the switch for the overhead light and goes immediately for the dresser drawer where he thinks he can remember having stored his old glasses just in case. He finds them in the bottom drawer in a plastic case, an old pair of tortoise-framed plastic lenses. The one earpiece is stained with white streaks of discoloration, and they fit loosely, but his heart floods with gratitude at the ingenuity of opticians as the world around him adjusts into focus.

  All the necessary things available in a society, the pool of ingenuity. Eyeglasses, medical care, food, housing . . . That’s what holds us together. Commerce. He pictures living in the woods, in a tree. Never could. Trapped in civilization. Instead of bears in the forest you got the Russian mafia. And police protection instead of a spear. Only hope is to keep clear of it all. Don’t go into the forest at night.

  Then he remembers the dream monkey, suddenly wonders at the vividness of the image of the prayer, like a shrill psalm: Blessed be His name!

  He hobbles out to his oak table, lowers himself into a chair, considering his next move. He glances at his wristwatch: The crystal is shattered, the digital display blank. The clock on his stereo says 3:56. Nothing to do now but try to sleep. His ribs and nose are throbbing, first in unison, then in counterpoint, and he begins to notice a number of other sore and tender points on his back, his right, his rump. His right hand hurts and he notices the heel of his left is scraped badly. He feels less anger than bafflement. How odd that such things transpire.

  Then, glancing through the open door into the little hall, he spots something white that had apparently been slipped under the door on the carpet, an envelope. He hoists himself to his feet and limps over to it, squats slowly, catches it between thumb and forefinger, rises, muttering, and proceeds to the kitchen, where he fills a glass of water from the tap and pops two of the pills from the blister pack the nurse gave him.

  It occurs to him she did not tell him what they were, whether there were side effects, whether it is dangerous to mix them with alcohol; but they would always claim that anyway. She only said they were very strong. Morphine maybe. Ketogan. Would they make him sleepy?

  Standing over the kitchen counter, he looks at the envelope. It trembles in his fingers. It is plain, cheap gray paper, nothing written on it. He peels back the self-adhesive flap. There are photos inside. He holds them in the circle of light from the ceiling lamp.

  The first shows Sam wearing stockings and a garter belt and bra. He stands facing three seated persons viewed from the back. Sam is the only identifiable person in the picture. His hands are behind him like a soldier at parade rest, and he looks very happy. To one side of him is a person wearing a leather mask and wielding a paddle.

  In the next, he is on a table with his ankles tied into gynecological stirrups while a woman, again viewed from behind, holds a black dildo above him. He is smiling like a puppy dog.

  The last shows him tied naked to a cross. A woman, viewed from behind, stands in front of him holding a whip alongside her leg. Sam is not smiling. The quality of the photo and composition are poor, making it seem even more seedy.

  Bluett tucks the photos back into the envelope. He limps back to the oak table, switching off the lamp on the way, and sits staring out into the dark morning. He finds he is most comfortable sitting straight up, his back even with the back of the chair. He nods there, thinking perhaps the pills are also a soporific, but wakes again a few moments later. It occurs to him that Sam died, that Sam paid out the equivalent of a couple of million crowns to keep these photos from being shown to his ex-wife and children. He can imagine no other explanation for this. Simple. Svetlana Krylova won his trust, extracted information, determined his weak spot, applied the pressure. He paid her, then killed himself both to stop the extortion and in shame for having been caught in a trap fashioned for him of his own hunger.

  Still there is the question why, when he knew he was going to kill himself, he hadn’t burned the stuff in the box. Bluett dozes again, wakes, noting that his broken bones have stopped throbbing except in the most distant, almost beneficent manner, his bruises numbed. He realizes he ought to try to sleep while the pain is gone, supports himself on the edge of the table as he straightens his knees, notices again the envelope on the oak table, thinks. Maybe he just wanted to feel that one other person in the world, one friend, might know him, might understand him, might know him and not hate him for what he knew.

  You took it all too seriously, Sam. Yet how would I have felt in your place, thinking of those pictures being shown to your kids? Maybe she just asked for it a little bit at a time and you kept thinking you could just give her that much and that much more until you were so deep in, it was all too late.

  Undressing is an ordeal, but finally his clothes lie in a pool on the bedroom floor, and he sidles in under the feather blanket. Ugly thoughts come to him as he lies there. An article he read in the New Yorker recently about a cult in Nebraska where the leader decreed that wayward members could be declared slaves, that torture was an acceptable means of correction with murder as the extreme necessity. The leader’s name was Ryan and the article included excerpts from the court transcript of some of the things Ryan had done to his followers and to their children, how he had taped the mouth of one to muffle his screams, and, using razor blade and pliers, had literally skinned him alive. Bluett could not believe what he was reading, yet it was quoted directly from a court record, as reported in the New Yorker magazine.

  Bluett feels feverish there beneath the blanket, feels as though his brain ha
s shaken loose, and he is spinning. His thoughts sink slowly away from him and his brain calms into sleep, but not before he sees again, for a fleeting instant, the monkey: Blessed be His name!

  At some point he rises again to consciousness and opens his eyes to see the snout of a black dog against a blood-red sky staring into his face. He is not frightened. He thinks simply that this must be death, come to take him, and closes his eyes again and sinks into a place of fragments where existence drifts on the water of consciousness through a long channel of blankness that eddies into a patch of images: a street of many people where he walks again in the dusk to some unknown place. There are too many dreams to remember, too strange and wordless, one that is the broken fragment of a rib, a curved jagged bone, an object that knows pain without mercy. He steps off the subway onto a high, narrow, stilted bridge and requests information at the booth but cannot understand the language spoken by the black woman there. The bridge sways on its stilts high above the road. He clutches the railing and then his mother is there, very thin and naked, her nipples, and he offers her his comforter, and is grateful then to breach the surface of sleep and understand he is awake in his own dark bedroom, his nose clogged with dried blood, mouth arid.

  He eases out of bed and hobbles to the kitchen for water that he gulps from the tap. He clears his nose, tries to fathom what day it is, remembers what has happened to him. He thinks he needs help to come through this and finds himself at the door, about to go to Sam, but remembers his friend’s eyes staring at him wordlessly, imprinted in him.

  In the bedroom, he looks at his watch, which is cracked and blank, sighs, phones the time operator, learns that it is 2:13 a.m. on Tuesday. Two days have passed. He ought to eat.

  On the kitchen counter are two blackened bananas. He gobbles them with a glass of skimmed milk, refills the milk tumbler, stands smacking his lips at the kitchen window, looking across to the dark wall, the dark line of rooftops, a shaved white globe of moon peering down through the window with dusty pale light. The sheepdog is lying outside the door in the courtyard, chin on paws. For some reason he makes Bluett think of the monkey in his dream, but the monkey is no longer vivid. He doesn’t hear the words of its psalm, and the dog does not look up at him.

  He finds the blister pack of pills and eats two of them, crawls back into bed.

  The sound his telephone makes is hateful to him as it burbles into the peace of his sleep. His eyes open. The ringing has stopped. Or did he only dream it? He sits up and pain rises through his chest to his nose. The pain is familiar now, no longer so worrying, only a dim reminder of the fragility of his bones.

  He sits up on the edge of the bed, sees daylight at the window, but his eyes are too heavy to care to look out. Then the telephone is burbling again.

  His voice sounds different in his own ears, resonating through the cracked bone as he speaks into the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Bluett?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Anders Finglas.”

  Bluett lifts to the sound, sits up straight in the chair by the phone. “Hello, Anders, how are you? How are you doing?”

  “I thought you might like to know about the funeral services. Dad will be cremated at Garnison’s this Friday.”

  “Friday? Excuse me. I’ve been ill. What day is it?”

  “It’s Tuesday. There are still some formalities at the Forensics Institute, but we have been able to set the ceremony for Friday. Ten a.m.”

  “Forensics?”

  “Yeah, they always do that with a . . . when someone takes his life.”

  Jesus. “Anders, thank you so much for telling me. I’ll be there. Friday. At ten.”

  “There was a strange thing,” the boy says. “They didn’t find any cancer. They didn’t find anything at all.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No, nothing. No cancer, no sickness.”

  Bluett’s mind is lifting through the heaviness, returning to a place he has already abandoned.

  “It must have been something else.”

  “Maybe,” Bluett says, “maybe he was just depressed, very . . . depressed, and thought he was ill . . .”

  “You mentioned that he was together with someone, a woman. I heard you say that to the policeman.”

  “I, uh, I spoke too rashly there, Anders. I didn’t really know anything. I don’t really. Sam mentioned something in passing once, but I didn’t really know anything at all about it. I spoke without thinking. Off the top of my head. But I do know he was depressed. I could see it, last time we were together. If only I could have done something, but it was . . . he just didn’t want to talk.”

  That done, there is still the box, the pictures. But he cannot think now for the pain across his nose. On the bathroom shelf is the blister pack, two pills remaining. He throws them into his mouth and takes water from the tap into the cup of his hand to wash them down, and his eyes are already closing as he makes his way back to the bed.

  He does not know how much time has passed, but when he wakes again, he thinks perhaps he is beginning to feel better. He realizes he must call the unemployment insurance office to apply for compensation for these days of missed production, looks at the clock on the stereo, but it is the middle of the night. He puts his head back to the pillow, expecting to sink, but his eyes are open, his mind clear.

  Get up. Eat. He shuffles to the kitchen, pops open the refrigerator. Three eggs, butter, tomato juice. The juice brings the memory of Sam’s eyes again. He scrambles the eggs, makes toast, eats from the frying pan standing at the kitchen counter and when he has forked the last of the egg into his mouth, he spoons marmelade on the last half-piece of toast, drains his glass of tomato juice, pours more, drinks again.

  Palms on the counter edge, he licks his teeth and thinks he might be well now. He thinks of music, but somehow he does not want music just now. He wants silence, stillness. His ribs ache only a little as his hand reaches up for the Stoli bottle. He fills a tumbler with ice and sits on his sofa, pours.

  The ice cracks and steams beneath the clear liquor, and he lifts the glass.

  He finds himself staring across the room at the mask with the corkscrew eyes. The smell of the vodka seeps into his cut nose, and he does not think he can drink. The eyes have fixed on him. The mask is full of mockery and his stomach turns with the smell of the liquor. The eyes seem to spiral, drawing him, even as he recognizes the thought as nonsense, and it occurs to him those insane corkscrew eyes have monitored his life, have seen everything, mute, blank, staring witness of it all, mocking him, and it might have been himself hung there on the wall, a dead wooden face that saw everything and did not speak and did nothing.

  His hand is tight on the glass, trembling, and it too, the glass, the clear cold liquor, mocks him, a glass of mockery with a vile stench. His breath heaves in his lungs, his heart bangs behind the sore broken ribcage, and all at once, he sees beyond a blankness in his mind a pair of eyes. Sam’s eyes, staring mutely from the other side while he sat and watched his friend, thinking, What? What is it, Sam? Tell me. I can’t see into your mind. I can’t see what you’re thinking. Tell me!

  Why hadn’t he spoken? Why hadn’t he insisted, demanded. Sam, what’s wrong? Tell me what it is, Sam. What can I do for you, buddy? What? Don’t go, I won’t let you, stay here and talk it out with me!

  He is on his feet and his hand lifts back as he hears the cry escape his throat and the glass flies, spraying vodka back across his own face. The tumbler smashes on the wall, but it is not enough, he has the bottle by the neck.

  You fucking no-good stinking loathesome fucking . . .

  For a splintered moment he sees what he will do, and then he is only the doing of it as the bottle shatters across the corkscrew eyes.

  Glass fragments geyser outward on the stinking liquor. The mask plunges to the floor, and he is on his knees over its dull wood obverse, a jagged crack stitched open.

  He has never before heard such sounds as issue from his throat. He
might have been a woman, a child, the shameless tortured sounds that left him as Sam’s eyes watched him there, finally knowing one another, finally seeing one another and neither able to speak, to ask, to offer a single word.

  And Bluett thinks, A woman would have asked, would have insisted to know, a woman would not have succumbed to Sam’s silence . . .

  He sleeps again, rises in the dark once more and hobbles to the living room, smells the repulsive stench of vodka. Stepping carefully over the shards of glass, he opens windows, gets the vacuum cleaner from the cupboard. He wraps the cracked mask in newspaper and lays it on a closet shelf. Then he vacuums up the glass.

  When the rug is clean and the freezing night air has chased the stench of liquor, he closes the windows, drinks a glass of water from the tap, returns to bed and closes his eyes, sleeps.

  Then there is a sound reaching in to him. The telephone. He opens his eyes—it is day—throws back the covers, moving too quickly, sits groaning on the edge of the bed as pain shoots out from his ribs, and the phone keeps ringing. He speaks to it as he hobbles across the living room carpet, “All right, all right, all right, I’m coming, keep your pants on.”

  It stops before he gets to it. He turns, smacking his tongue, thinks of juice. The phone rings again before he can look at the clock. He speaks into the receiver and listens tensely, his heart lifting to hear Raffaella’s voice.

  “El,” he says. “Hi, honey, how are you?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Well, that’s good. What’s happening?” Staring out the window, he can see the lake has begun to melt. The surface is soupy, and patches of broken ice reveal water rippling in the breeze. “What time is it now, anyway?” he asks, playing with his upper canine with the tip of his tongue. It is wobbly and he tastes blood.

  “Around three thirty.”

  “God, I slept half the week away, more. You want to join me for lunch or something, El? Dinner?” He remembers his face then. “But don’t get shocked when you see me. I’ve got a bandage on my nose and a few bruises. Hey, you can bring Jens-Martin if you want.”