Other Copenhagens

by Edmund Jorgensen

  “We might get a new customer out of it.”

  “In another world,” said Mr. Pope.

  “Of course–in an alternate retrograde world-line. Just like we offer our clients.”

  “Dr. Novak, I could not care less whether a different Mr. Bradley purchases services from a different me–and I know that you could not care less, either: you have maligned our value proposition too many times in my hearing. Why are you really sending the magazine back?”

  Dr. Novak took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his lab coat.

  “Dr. Novak?”

  “All right, fine: I thought it might help Miss Smalls–in an alternate retrograde world-line, but still. She championed us, and lost her job because of it, and I just thought–it would be a nice thing to do for her.”

  Mr. Pope narrowed his eyes and steeled his gaze.

  “This run will come out of your paycheck,” he said. “Future Perfect Brands is not going to foot the bill for some schoolboy crush you’ve developed.”

  “What paycheck? We haven’t paid ourselves for three months.”

  “Your equity, then.”

  “Fine with me,” said Dr. Novak. “You want it all? What’s 50 percent of 0?”

  “I have a meeting with some potential investors,” said Mr. Pope. “They are only in from Moscow for one night, and I prefer not to arrive upset and frustrated when so much is on the line. We’ll discuss this further in the morning.”

  “I don’t think we will,” said Dr. Novak, coming closer. “I don’t think we’ll discuss it tomorrow, or the day after, or ever again. I’m done. You can tell these potential investors of yours that besides an infusion of cash, you need a new chief scientist.”

  “Dr. Novak, I think perhaps you need to calm …”

  “I don’t need to do anything except get away from here–and from you. How did I even let you talk me into this venture? It’s insane–a perversion of my work.”

  “Let me talk you into this venture? When I found you, you were nothing but an underfunded, dead-end researcher in a second-rate university! I gave you the means to make your research real. I gave you an opportunity to commercialize your ideas. And this is how you express your gratitude?”

  “Get out,” said Dr. Novak, pushing Mr. Pope into the hallway. “I mean it. Get out! Out!”

  Mr. Pope recovered his footing and turned around.

  “If you take anything,” he said, “and I mean anything, I’ll have you in court for the rest of your life.”

  Dr. Novak slammed the door in his face.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he shouted through the door, “tungsten isn’t a rare earth metal!”

  “Well,” Mr. Pope shouted back, “it should be!”

  Dr. Novak listened as Mr. Pope’s footsteps faded down the hall. He was still standing there a few minutes later, letting his breathing slow and the fire leave his cheeks, when a tinny “ding”–like that of a cheap microwave–marked the finish of the run. The lights in the lab brightened noticeably, the surface of the coffee he had left on the lab bench calmed and unwrinkled, and the dull whine of the machines faded and finally stopped altogether.

  In the silence that followed, Dr. Novak felt the stirrings of an old anxiety–the same anxiety that had sidled up to him in the moment he had received each of his three diplomas. He felt as if he were standing on deck looking out over an open sea–that same endless, open glare that had inspired his twelve year old self to forswear any future fishing trips. What would he do tomorrow, if he didn’t come here to the lab as usual? What about the day after? For that matter, what would he do tonight, without any work to bring home?

  Beset by such thoughts, Dr. Novak took his time rustling up a cardboard box from the storeroom. He had almost finished packing the few possessions he cared to bring with him–some notebooks, the chipped mug he had lifted from his undergraduate lab–when the attack hit. His vision blurred and doubled, a wave of nausea surged up from his stomach, and along the center line of his head he felt as if someone had delivered a sharp blow with a huge mallet and chisel. No doubt about it: this was what dying felt like, and as one scientific corner of his mind, out of habit, considered distance to various phones and the slim survival odds, the rest of his mental energy was consumed not by fear but regret: how could he have been so afraid a few moments ago, when life had once more spread out before him, pathless and infinitely possible? He fell to the ground, crying not because of the pain but the wasted years, the missed opportunities, the cowardice and smallness of it all.

  And then, as suddenly as the attack had started, it was gone, leaving no aftereffects but a metallic taste in his mouth and a few beads of sweat on his brow. For a good five minutes Dr. Novak continued to lie in the same spot and attitude, at first wondering whether he were already dead, then expecting the attack to recommence. Finally, almost in embarrassment, he stood up, testing his strength slowly but finding nothing out of order.

  All was–it seemed–just fine, and there was nothing else to do but finish his preparations as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Which he did, though with an aura of strangeness he could not quite shake.

  He was just about to turn out the lights for the last time, pausing to look back over the lab that had been his real home these last few years, when he saw it: there at the edge of his lab bench, where nothing had been a moment ago, was a slip of paper, and on the paper–in the subtle sheen of tungsten ink and his own handwriting–Janine Smalls’s name and telephone number.

  Other Copenhagens

  At the moment when Dr. Gibbs decided it was too late to call him, Derek Field was still very much awake, and his phone–which he had tossed on the passenger seat beside the warm six pack (now five pack) of Heineken–was switched on. But even if Dr. Gibbs had called, and even if the ring tone had managed to cut through the Phil Collins blasting from the radio, Derek would not have answered. He would not have wanted to explain to the psychiatrist treating his gambling disorder why, in direct violation of every piece of clinical advice Dr. Gibbs had ever given him, as well as all common sense, Derek was speeding westward along the Mass Pike, open container in hand, on his way to a casino.

  As the car climbed a long, slow hill, Derek glanced back at the few remaining lights of the city in his rear view mirror and began to sing, snapping his head forward on the beat and belting at the top of his voice.

  “I can feel it, com-in’ in the air, fuck you … Bos-ton …”

  Just in case Boston had not gotten the message, he wedged the can of Heineken between his thighs, rolled down his window, and gave the entire city the finger, holding it, holding it high even as his hand ached from the cold wind and then went numb, holding it until he had crested the hill and that pathetic excuse for a night skyline had dropped safely behind.

  Although this level of vitriol was something recent, Derek had never had much good to say about Boston. During his first 32 years of life he had thought of the place mainly as the home of the pesky Red Sox, whose drunken fans had always insisted that some “rivalry” existed between their glorified farm club and the expensive, well-oiled win-machine known as the Yankees. In recent years, Derek had been forced to admit that the Red Sox had finally learned to spend, which softened his critique somewhat. But even during the three years since he had moved here to become Dr. Gibbs’s patient, Derek had never come to feel comfortable or easy on the Beantown streets, and for the last few months he had rarely left his Commonwealth Avenue apartment except to keep his weekly sessions with Dr. Gibbs, or–when he could not face another delivered meal–to visit one of the restaurants or the specialty grocery on Newbury Street.

  New York had always made sense to Derek. In New York he could never be sure that a passerby on the teeming street–no matter how bad the fabric or tight the fit of his suit, no matter how torn or dirty her jeans, no matter how closely he might resemble a junkie staggering through his last days–was not in fact an entrepreneur returning from a brunch where he had just sold h
is third company, or a supermodel on her way to a go-see, or a recording artist with the accumulated royalties from ten platinum records tucked away somewhere in savvy investments, earning eight percent. This state of affairs appealed to Derek. It was natural; he understood it. No other city in the history of the world had approached the sophistication of New York, because no other city enjoyed such a correct and widespread understanding of what constituted personal worth.

  In New York you had an entire metropolis–eight million people plus–who argued about everything, who shouted at each other from bikes and jostled each other in the subway and stole each other’s cabs at rush hour, who picked each other’s pockets and wagered away each other’s retirement funds–but who were, beneath this surface strife, brothers and sisters in a way that no outsider could participate in or perhaps even comprehend. Because to be a New Yorker was to understand money. It was to understand that money was so important, so essential, that it did not need to be flaunted, or even displayed–like courage, it had only to be possessed. Of course the streets of Manhattan were laid out with such order and harmony. What else would one expect from a populace so sane and well-adjusted, so strong on the fundamentals?

  In Boston, on the other hand, matters were inverted and sinister. Here puritanical savages walked the switchback, provincial streets, toting–instead of secret stashes of cash–concealed brains. In Boston, Derek could never be sure that the apparently homeless man who had just burst from the alley was not actually a storied MIT professor, or that the contents of the shopping cart with which he had nearly run Derek down were not a perpetual motion solution to the world’s energy crisis, the blueprints for which–and this was the transgression that Derek could least overlook–the professor would undoubtedly publish free on the Internet for the benefit of an undeserving world.

  Derek did not hold it against Boston that it was a poorer city than New York, but he could not excuse that Boston did not seem embarrassed by that fact. Behind all the cultural snobbery and Brahmanism lay a simple failure to recognize that the purpose of the brain–the entire human nervous system in fact, and the squishy apparatus it animated–was to make money, and that any other use was frivolous at best, and at worst obscene.

  Despite this fundamental antipathy, for three years Derek had done his best to tolerate Boston and its culture of concealed brains, because Dr. Gibbs himself was very much of Boston–in appearance more like a second-generation Dunkin’ Donuts mogul than a nationally known psychiatrist with a best-selling book to his name–and Dr. Gibbs’s concealed brains were Derek’s last best hope to break the Curse. And in the end Derek had not been the one to shatter this uneasy peace. It was Boston who had broken the truce–Boston had made it personal.

  Five days ago, experiencing a rare bout of cabin fever, Derek had decided to kill some time wandering around Copley Square before his appointment with Dr. Gibbs. The weather had been cold but bright, and the bitter wind kept everyone so bundled up that, if he didn’t look too closely, Derek could almost imagine New Yorkers under the mufflers and overcoats. He had not been enjoying himself exactly, but he had, for a moment, almost relaxed. Walking a little taller, looking around for once at the passersby and the buildings instead of at his shoes, for just a moment he had let his guard down. And Boston, sensing its chance, had pounced.

  Derek had never been vain about his looks or ashamed by them–in almost any room with 100 randomly chosen men he would have ranked himself 50th without pride or envy. Naturally he examined his own reflection multiple times in the course of a day for purposes of basic grooming–and occasionally he would note a new gray hair, or some extra sag beneath his eyes, and reflect for a moment that he was not growing any younger. But he had never on any of those occasions seen anything remotely like the figure that stared back at him that day from the street-level glass of the Hancock Building.

  It was not that his paunch had grown–he had always been a largish man–but that there was no longer anything in his weight that spoke to unsatisfied or insatiable appetites. This was defeated weight, weight that sagged and jiggled through the motions without immediate financial purpose. It was not that his eyes appeared tired and bleary–but that they did not even widen in horror as he absorbed his own image. Those were the eyes of a man in the grandstand at Suffolk Downs, registering no reaction whatsoever as the pony on which he had put the rent drifted further and further behind the pack. Those were the eyes of a man so beaten down by life that he merely wished to become one with the pavement–a man who no longer even had the spirit to shrink from fortune’s blows. In other words, what Derek saw–painted in hellish, hyper-realistic color on the blue-black glass of this Boston landmark–was the portrait of a degenerate. A defeatist. An addict. A gambler. If there had been a rock to hand at that moment, Derek would have hurled it.

  The vision in the Hancock glass was Derek’s wake up call–his moment of clarity–his rock bottom. He had understood in that instant that there could be no more peaceful co-existence, neither with the Curse or the town colluding with it. The Curse was not satisfied having taken his job. It was not satisfied having driven him from his home, the only sane city in the world. And it would never be satisfied, it would never stop: not until it had taken his soul. It was the Curse or Derek–there was no third option.

  In that moment a plan had dropped, full-formed, into Derek’s mind, like a plop of snow from a concrete ledge–an insane, inadvisable plan with little except desperation to recommend it, but still: a plan.

  Derek’s first thought was to tell Dr. Gibbs all about the plan–to get the psychiatrist’s take, his encouragement, perhaps his suggestions for refinement. Derek was so excited by the prospect that he could not even wait the half hour until their appointment started–he had to call Dr. Gibbs right then. But as Derek, already having dialed, waited for Dr. Gibbs to pick up, he saw how telling Dr. Gibbs anything would be impossible–because if the plan did not succeed in breaking the Curse, Derek would only have the heart for one remaining option: the dark, ultimate option that no psychiatrist could ever allow any patient to consider. Dr. Gibbs could not be involved in such an enterprise, for his own sake as much as for Derek’s. So when the psychiatrist answered, Derek doctored his voice to sound as sick as he was able and–the lie sitting bitter and heavy in his stomach–reported that he was having a difference of opinion with one of last night’s oysters and would have to miss their appointment that week.

  That same day he had begun liquidating everything: investments, property, art. In just under 48 largely sleepless hours he had sold his apartments in Boston and New York, as they were–furniture, clothes, paintings, cookware, bedding, and all other contents included–at an insane loss, for cash. He sold the BMW for 5,000 dollars–again, in cash. The contents of his storage unit went for “best offer” on Craigslist, which turned out to be: one dollar, cash. He closed his bank accounts, dissolved the equity interest in his former employer, and sold off his baseball card collection at a struggling comic book shop for a figure that kept the owner suspended for half an hour between greed and suspicion. Cash, cash, and cash. As of today, all Derek owned were the clothes on his back, a six pack–now four pack–of Dutch beer, and the two duffel bags in the back seat, stuffed with bundles of hundred dollar bills–which, when he had stacked them all together, had reached a height of almost 300 inches.

  At 0.0043 inches thickness per bill, that meant that Derek was carrying roughly seven million dollars cash money in the back of the rented car that he was now piloting–at inadvisable speeds and with an already inadvisable and still rising blood alcohol content–away from the city he hated and towards the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut.

  * * *

  The other patient that Dr. Gibbs had considered calling was still awake as well, but Maxwell Blank would also have let his voice mail pick up, since his boss disliked it when staff took calls on the job, and Maxwell was still at work.

  Maxwell worked the door at Demonologie on Stuart St. in Bo
ston, and on paper his job was simple: when a hot woman approached the club, he would unlatch the silken rope and let her in; when a plain woman approached, the rope stayed down. For men the calculus was only slightly more complicated: was the man accompanying at least one hot woman? Or was he at least dressed well enough that he might attract one? If so, up went the rope. If not: nope.

  Anyone capable of applying these mindless rules could have been a passable doorman–perhaps even a good doorman–but Maxwell was a great doorman, and not only because his condition actually helped him endure the physical rigors of the job. Maxwell was a great doorman because he had the gift of making those he allowed into the club feel exclusive, while those who were denied experienced him as sympathetic but closed to appeal. He made visitors feel that the club itself, not the doorman, had decided to admit or reject them, and that–according to Maxwell’s boss, who had developed his theory of “The Nightclub qua Nightclub” sufficiently that he often threatened to publish a book on the subject–was the secret to generating an aura of true exclusivity, and the highest expression of the doorman’s art.

  In his personal life as well Maxwell had a talent for remaining on good terms with individuals he did not admit. For example, if Maxwell were writing in his diary or speaking to Dr. Gibbs (whom by this point he treated as a kind of diary which expressed an occasional opinion on his entries) he would have asserted that he had no friends–news which would have come as a shock to the dozens of people who, in an anonymous survey, would have counted themselves as such.

  Which was not to say Maxwell was a recluse. He was a social and sociable young man, rarely turning down any of the numerous invitations he received, mingling and conversing smoothly with acquaintances and strangers alike, from all walks of life, and especially with women.

  He had a reputation as a boyish and earnest charmer–the kind of guy who could keep a pretty blonde giggling and tossing her hair all evening–and those who would have described themselves as Maxwell’s friends assumed as a matter of course that he must be taking some percentage of these pretty blondes home. Yes, his self-described friends would have conceded, perhaps Maxwell was friendlier than he was sexual–perhaps there was something about his attitude towards clothes that suggested he could be shy about taking them off–perhaps he was not fully “comfortable in his body”–and so maybe he was not closing every deal he might have. But not a single of those self-described friends would have believed the truth: that Maxwell Blank, at 35 years of age, was still a virgin.