Falling Sideways

  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.

  Breathwaite crossed the lakes, chiding himself for his hard and pessimistic frame of mind. What the hell? Just been fired. Got a right to be sour. He followed Nørrebrogade past the grimy streets where he’d had his own first apartment in Copenhagen, he and Kis when they’d started out, a two-room on Peder Fabers Street that they’d bought for nothing, sold for triple what they paid, but which now would have been worth a cool million. Mistake to sell that, too. Now, apart from their summer house, they had nothing, a rented luxury flat. Money out the window every month.

  Mistake.

  He paused on the avenue to gaze across through passing traffic. In the gaps between the cars whizzing past, he could make out the broad face of a burial association. Danish terminology always made him smile, straight from the shoulder as it was. No portentous purple metaphors here. No funeral parlors—which was to being dead, he thought, as a cocktail lounge was to being crocked. This particular shopfront advertised, ARBEJDERNES LIGKISTER—literally, “Workers Corpse Boxes.”

  At Blågårds Place, he stopped at Café Flora and ordered a pint, sat in hopes his son might happen by, and found himself thinking about his conversation with the CEO. Shit-canned at fifty-nine.

  “Unfortunately we have to cut from the top as well as the bottom,” Kampman said. “I’m sorry.”

  Breathwaite had entertained this possibility but considered it a long shot. The international work at the Tank had grown increasingly important with the growth over the past decades of the European Union from six member states to nine to twelve to fifteen to twenty-five, soon to twenty-seven. How in the world could they do without his experience? Well, clearly, they could. His salary was second only to the CEO’s and equal to the administrative chief’s. He had counted on staying until he was sixty-five to build up his pension in the last five years. By stopping him now, they saved at least six million plus benefits. The arithmetic was simple and clear. But even though Kampman was only thirty-nine, he had finesse enough to let that say itself.

  Breathwaite knew he had to say what he had said next, though he profoundly regretted it. “And if I took a cut?”

  Kampman only shrugged slowly, smiled ruefully, more a firming of the lips than a smile. An answer that was not an answer. Unquotable. They learned these things in their management courses. He would get not a golden, but a silver (rather a silver-plated) handshake. A half year’s severance. Half a million crowns. He converted to dollars—something he still had to do to get a real sense of the value of the figure. Not quite eighty thousand bucks gross.

  Nothing, really. Nothing. Considering the Danish tax structure.

  And conditional, it went without saying, on his delivering his Irish contacts.

  Breathwaite considered what else he might say. He found himself thinking how old guys know how nasty young men are because that’s how they once were themselves, covetous and impatient, overrating themselves as they lunged out after what they wanted and did not have, what some older man was occupying, blocking them from. I was never like that. I wasn’t. I fought with hard work. Or am I kidding myself? If the soul is ever to know itself, it must gaze into the soul. That is, if you even have a soul. Anymore.

  Then he remembered what he’d wanted to say to Kampman: “We knew this was coming. We saw it coming two years ago. Longer.”

  “It was a possibility,” said Kampman with firm lips.

  “Why didn’t we prepare for it?”

  That shrug again. That rueful smile that was not a smile. Conveying what? An answer that was not an answer.

  You saw the advantage in this, Breathwaite did not say.

  Now, in the café, a black fly landed on the back of his hand resting on the tabletop. He flicked it away. It rose and landed again on his wrist. Another flick and it buzzed his nose. He backhanded at it, but it landed again a few inches from his beer, lifting and falling on its spindly legs that sawed against each other. Hideous little bat the size of snot. Breathwaite wondered if he would be fast enough to flatten it with the tip of his index finger, but at his first movement, the fly was up and buzzed his ear. This was unfair. It buzzed him again, and then he thought, What is that fly trying to tell me? As if it had an urgent message. As if I am a glorious planet, it lands here and there on me, touching down again and again despite my every effort to discourage it, to indicate that it is not welcome. Does it want me to kill it? Is life as a fly so miserable?

  He finished his beer and strolled back toward the lakes, stood on the bank of Peblinge watching the swans float around like question marks. A duck crawled up onto the concrete lip of the bank and waddled over to him, perhaps thinking he had bread to share. The duck looked up at him and honked twice.

  Which, Breathwaite thought, translated from duck as, No bread.

  9. Kirsten Breathwaite

  It was love at first sight. Leaving him behind about broke Kis’s heart. An eight-week-old golden retriever pup she had been offered by her boss for practically nothing. He looked like a little furry clump of golden sunlight, and the minute she set eyes on him, a name popped into her head. Amon-Ra. Who was that again? Then she remembered it was the name of the Egyptian sun god. Or, no, it was just plain Ra, wasn’t it? Better yet, and that was what she would call the pup. Ra. If she could call it anything.

  Fred would never go along with it.

  She stepped away from the building front on Østergade where she worked and felt the ache of emptiness in her arms where the little thing had been. So sweet. So sweet. She felt like a child whose father had refused her a pet. Helpless. Hopeless. She would do anything. I’ll take care of it, Fred, you won’t have to do a thing.

  Turning up Strøget, the Walking Street, she decided that if Magasin’s outdoor café was still open, she would stop for a cappuccino—no, for a glass of wine—and do some thinking. But it was not open. So—to hell with it!—she pushed through the side doors of Magasin and rode the escalator down to the basement café and ordered a glass of merlot.

  She lit a cigarette and found herself thinking about the pope. It was his fault that she couldn’t have a puppy. Fred was all locked up in guilt. Martin Luther was right. The Catholics had it all wrong. Guilt and shame. Kneeling and bowing the head—bowing for what? the butcher’s knife?—and beating the breast. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Ow my tit, ow my tit, ow my most battered tit!

  And that story about the guilt wheel in the heart that some damn priest had told Freddy when he was a boy. If you do a bad thing, the guilt wheel starts to turn and its sharp edges cut into the tender skin of your heart and the blood of shame and pain spills from the cut. But the more bad you do, the duller the edges get, so finally you can’t even feel the pain anymore. You just sin and sin and sin and you don’t feel a thing.

  Sounds like a plan to me, Freddy.

  He had liked that. He didn’t want the guilt, and he’d come a long way from it, she thought, but still it was the guilt that made him fold into himself and cut him off and fear being engaged with others. If
you were engaged with someone, you might do something wrong, something to hurt them. When you were alone, there was no one to hurt but yourself. Not even a puppy!

  It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s that he doesn’t dare. She was certain of that. It had to be that. If it wasn’t that, she didn’t know him at all, and if she didn’t know him after all these years, why then …

  He had done so much better when the children were little, when they needed him. Such a loving father. But his expectations were so great and his disappointments, too. When the children didn’t do what he saw as best for them, then the guilt got cooking, and it was his fault, and there it was again.

  Sometimes she wanted to shake him, shock him. Freddy, you’re your mother’s son! You’ve got an Italian heart, not an Irish one. You’re not Catholic, you’re an amorist! A hedonist! No wonder your mother cheated on your father! Who could stand to live with all that guilt and piety? It’s enough to make a sinner of anybody!

  But of course, she wouldn’t say that. Such words were not spoken or even insinuated.

  She lit another cigarette and signaled for another glass of wine, which the waiter brought with a dazzling smile, a tall, slim boy with tight black pants pinching his delightful ass. Tight at the front, too. Nice thick wad to wrap your palm around. Oh, to have Fred’s prick in me again! But all he thought about these days was his disappointment with Jes.

  “That boy has greatness in him, Kis,” he had told her once.

  “Who needs greatness? Let him live and be happy. All a person really needs is a little love in his life, Fred.” (Or her life, she didn’t add, but he heard it anyway.)

  “Want me to try Viagra, Kis?”

  “No! What if you get a heart attack? Anyway, it only works if you have the desire—I read all about it—and if you have the desire, why in the world would you need Viagra? This is all mental, Freddy.”

  “Since when are you such an expert on everything?”