Other Copenhagens

by Edmund Jorgensen

  “What if you checked the list again?”

  “I’m sorry sir, if you don’t have a reservation, you won’t be on the list.”

  “What if you checked the list again and I gave you 1,000 dollars?” said Derek.

  “If you could just pull … what?”

  “Never mind, you had your chance. Hold on.”

  Derek picked up his phone from the passenger seat.

  “Sir,” said the guard, “there’s a guest waiting behind you, I’d appreciate it if …”

  “I said hold on,” said Derek to the guard. Then into his phone: “Uncasville, Connecticut. Mohegan Sun. The front desk number is fine. Oh yes, by all means connect me for an additional fee. Hello, I’d like to make a reservation. Derek Field. As in ‘Field of Dreams.’ Tonight. No, tonight as in technically yesterday. Yup. What’s the suite situation this evening? Anything presidential left? That’s the best you have? A junior suite it is then. Now. I’m right outside. I’m going to pass you to the guy in the booth, I want you to tell him I have a reservation and qualify for valet parking.”

  The guard tried to wave the phone off, but Derek insisted.

  “Got it,” said the guard into the phone. “Yeah, you said it.”

  He handed the phone back to Derek.

  “Valet parking is around to the right,” he said as the gate lifted. “Enjoy your stay at Mohegan Sun, Mr. Field, and good luck.”

  The “good luck” part irked Derek even more than the rest of his experience, and for a moment he wished he hadn’t sold the BMW so he could have revved the engine and peeled through the gate. Instead he drove through slowly, and even resisted the urge to comment a moment later when the valet’s eyes widened with disapproval at the six empty cans in the passenger seat.

  Better to get even than mad. So if things went terribly wrong tonight, he would use the winnings to buy this whole beautiful casino. He would fire everyone who worked there, one by one–starting with the idiot in the booth and this judgy valet–and then he’d burn the whole place to the ground and roast marshmallows over the cinders. And then and only then would he put the bullet in his brain.

  * * *

  “It’s a simple question,” Shannon said. She wrapped her hands around the cardboard cup in the hopes that some warmth still remained from her long-finished coffee, and then gave up, tossing it into the can at Maxwell’s side and thrusting her hands in the pockets of her green coat.

  “Are you cold?” asked Maxwell.

  “Of course I’m cold. Answer the question.”

  “Do you want my coat?”

  “I don’t want your coat, I want an answer to the question.”

  “A robot could definitely lift the rope,” said Maxwell. “Here, take the coat.”

  “Yeah, not interested in that part of your job–I want to know if a robot could decide who to let in. And for the last time, I don’t want your damn coat.”

  “I don’t really know anything about robots.”

  “But you’re the world expert on deciding who to let into Demonologie. Robots have to work on some kind of rules or formula, right? So is there a simple formula you could program into a robot?”

  “It’s stopped snowing,” said Maxwell, “I really don’t need my coat.”

  “Stop changing the subject, if I cared about the snow and cold I wouldn’t be standing out here. I want to know whether or not you think a robot could decide who to let in to Demonologie.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Because you think I’ll be offended by what you say, since you didn’t let me in?”

  “Because I let in ‘hot’ women, just like my boss told me to. It’s that simple, and it’s not that interesting.”

  “But you have to decide if a woman is hot, and there’s nothing simple about that,” said Shannon. “I studied art, and it’s incredibly hard to define any aesthetic–let alone an aesthetique like Demonologie’s. Take this fine specimen who’s walking up right now. What’s going on in your mind? Is it like” (she made her voice flat and robotic) “loading brunette program … detecting cosmetically enhanced, haunted eyes … check … detecting dress size less than or equal to eight … check … detecting evidence of recent salon trip … check … hotness confirmed. Have a great time in there tonight,” she said in answer to the passing woman’s look, keeping the voice of a cheerful robot greeter.

  Maxwell smiled in apology as he lifted the rope for the brunette, glaring at Shannon over her shoulder as she passed.

  “You’re going to get me fired,” he said. “So where did you study art?”

  “And you’re a slow learner–you’re not getting out of this by changing the subject. Was I right with the robot thing? You have like, a checklist of measurements and features, and if she meets some minimum score she’s hot and you let her in?”

  “No, I don’t have a checklist.”

  “Then it’s subjective?”

  “Those are my choices–checklist or subjective?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I guess it’s subjective, because I definitely don’t have a checklist.”

  “So what you’re really saying is that you let in the women you’re attracted to, and keep out the ones you’re not attracted to.”

  “Hold on just a second,” said Maxwell. “Judging whether a woman is ‘hot’ doesn’t mean just asking myself whether or not I’m attracted to her. I’m deciding on behalf of the club.”

  “The ‘club’ is a building, or maybe a business, but either way it doesn’t find anyone attractive. Watch this.”

  Shannon sidled up to the building, doing her best to toss her short hair, and reached out to touch the concrete wall.

  “Hey baby,” she said, and waited. “You see? Nothing. Just cold stone.”

  “OK, then I’m deciding in the best interests of the club as a business–which means, I guess, that I’m trying to judge whether the majority of our clientele–specifically our male clientele, which buys the drinks in there–would find a woman attractive. It has nothing to do with my own tastes: there are plenty of women I let in who I’m not personally attracted to, and there are plenty of women I can’t let in who I find very attractive and would totally go out with.”

  “Maxwell,” said Shannon sweetly, as he unlatched the rope to admit a six foot Amazon whose cold-weather outerwear could have graced the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, “are you asking me out on a date?”

  * * *

  Even calling this horrific violation of basic human rights an ‘experiment’ is an insult to the scientific method. An experiment isolates a single variable and tests its effect on another variable. An experiment does not permit multiple interpretations. An experiment can be replicated. So by the generally agreed definition of ‘experiment,’ even the crackpot notion of quantum suicide could never fit the bill, or be worthy of scientific notice, let alone quantum execution.

  “And that’s just one commenter on CNN.com who happens to know the tiniest bit about science,” said Clarissa-in-his-head. “Imagine what the real scientists will have to say.”

  The second and third scotches had gone down very nicely, and Dr. Gibbs decided to answer her, as he almost never did. He even spoke out loud.

  “You take such pleasure seeing holes poked in my theory, just because it’s my theory. What about Derek and Maxwell? Don’t you have any sympathy for them?”

  “Don’t pretend you’re motivated by Maxwell and Derek’s well being.”

  “Pretend? I’ll have you know that every morning for almost forty years, before my first session of the day, I would look at myself in the mirror and remind my reflection ‘We are here to end human suffering.’ I’d say it over and over–some mornings 50 times–until I could see that the reflection understood me–that I really felt the enormity of what I was saying. At a cocktail party Oliver Sacks once called me …”

  “A humanist of Renaissance proportions, yes I remember. You excused yourself to the bathroom where you got all choke
d up.”

  “How did you know that? I never told anyone that part.”

  “I’m in your head, remember? You got into psychiatry with noble intentions, I believe that, I always have. But you lost them somewhere along the way–somewhere between your book and your obsession with Maxwell and Derek. How exactly are you helping those two? Maxwell manages his condition just fine. Derek has farther to go, but at least he’s still in the ring, wrestling with his demons. They’re the ones with the problems, Russell, but you’re the one who’s drowning. You’ve lost your practice, your wife, and now you’ve lost your battle with the bottle. Are you saying this helped them somehow? That you lost all this for them? That you’re investigating this insane ‘experiment’ for them?”

  Dr. Gibbs poured himself another scotch and sat for a few minutes, nursing it.

  “Yes. No. I can’t tell any more,” he said finally. “When Maxwell came to me, I was okay. You remember that. I was mystified, but it was just one case. It was like that one story that everyone has on tap for a cocktail party, the one thing they’ve seen in their life that’s impossible to explain. Lights in the sky or footsteps in an empty house. Spice of life stuff. These are the weird exceptions that prove the rule of normalcy, right? And he seemed to take it in such stride himself. He was never looking for answers about his condition–he just wanted to learn how to live his life despite it.

  “But then Derek arrived, and I could feel something about him from the beginning. What he was saying was crazy, but he didn’t sound crazy when he said it. That was unsettling. Right away he wanted to demonstrate the Curse to me, to prove it was real, and I was afraid to let him. I should have listened to those fears–because once he showed me, it wasn’t just a cocktail story, and neither was Maxwell. Derek was like the plane hitting the second tower. I understood that this was no accident–it was an attack. My trust in a rational universe was under attack.”

  Dr. Gibbs stopped to pour another finger’s worth of scotch.

  “I never told you this story, but at one point I started to wonder if all psychiatrists had such cases, and it was just a point of professional honor not to talk about them–some concession to public mental health. Maybe I just hadn’t gotten the memo. So at a convention in Denver, sitting at the bar–I was only drinking ginger ale–after a long conversation with one Dr. Sutherland, I finally worked up the courage to ask. Did he have any special patients? What did I mean by that, he asked? Well, patients that you wouldn’t really talk about at all, even anonymized, even in papers. Patients you thought it was better people didn’t even know about. He became extremely awkward and left the bar, claiming an upset stomach.

  “Six months later he sent me a letter. It wasn’t on letterhead. He didn’t know how I’d known about the patient he was sleeping with, but he thanked me for challenging him about it so tactfully. After our chat he had done some real soul searching, which had led to his terminating the relationship and closing his practice. He’d lost his livelihood but regained his integrity. His wife had decided to stand by him. Things weren’t easy but they were working it out. He was opening a restaurant and hoped to ‘do some good through food.’ He had never for a moment understood what I was really talking about. So I knew: these things weren’t happening to everyone. Just to me.”

  Dr. Gibbs stopped speaking and closed his eyes. He could almost hear his wife breathing near him.

  “It feels good to talk to you about these things. I’m not a bad man, you know, Clarissa. I’m just … what am I?”

  “Do you remember the night you brought me up to the roof of your dorm, and had beers and Indian food waiting?” asked Clarissa-in-his-head.

  “Of course I do. It was our third date.”

  “I made you a promise that night. Do you remember it?”

  “You promised me that you would always tell me the truth, even if it was uncomfortable to say or to hear. And then you told me you hated Indian food.”

  “With a passion …”

  “As hot as a Vindaloo curry.”

  “I kept that promise over our years together. And I’ll keep it now. You’re not a bad man, Russell. You’re just in over your head. You thought that all it took to be a good man was to think no evil, not of others or of yourself. Then life pulled the rug out from under you. I understand–you weren’t equipped for that, and I didn’t know how to help you. But you have a good heart. You said a minute ago that you didn’t even know any more whose interests you were acting in by investigating the Hsiao Experiment–Derek and Maxwell’s or your own. You’ve tangled yourself up with them, and them with each other, so that if one of you goes under, you all drown. On the other hand, you think that if somehow you manage to keep all three of you afloat, you’ll have vindicated the sacrifice of everything else in your life: your other patients, your own health. Me.”

  “You,” he said out loud.

  The radiator hissed and clanged. Dr. Gibbs opened his eyes. His laptop had gone to sleep. He shook the mouse to wake it up, took off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose, and, as Clarissa-in-his-head fell quiet again, began to re-read the Wikipedia article on quantum suicide.

  * * *

  “Yes, you can help me with something,” said Derek into the hotel phone, meanwhile shaking his finger to prevent the bellhop from leaving. “You’ve given me a non-smoking room. I need a smoking room. No, I don’t want to smoke on the gaming floor, or outside–I need a smoking room. Yeah, try that and call me back.”

  Derek hung up.

  “Want to bet whether she’s going to call back or not?”

  “If there’s nothing else, Mr. Field,” said the valet.

  “Yeah, one more thing. How do I disable the smoke detector in the bathroom?”

  “Tampering with the smoke detectors is a violation of Connecticut law. Many of our bars and gaming areas welcome smokers, or you are always welcome to step outside the building.” The valet recited these words–identical to the ones the woman at the front desk had just used–like a hostage reading from cue cards held by his captors. He had a thin face and prominent forehead and chin, and a caricaturist might have rendered him as a freckled banana, or a crescent moon with marijuana eyes. He looked to be about college age.

  “Saving for school?” said Derek.

  “What?”

  Derek threw one of the duffel bags on the bed and pulled out ten $100 bills from a rubber-banded stack. The bills were so crisp that he had to rub them between his finger and thumb to unstick them from each other.

  “I don’t want to tamper with the smoke detector, I want to turn it off. Help me out,” he said, and slapped the bills against his palm with a practiced motion–the bellhop jumped at the sharpness of the crack.

  “You can totally disable the smoke detector,” said the bellhop, in his normal, non-hostage voice. “Actually, I can do it for you.”

  “I certainly would appreciate that,” said Derek.

  As the bellhop climbed up on the sink, Derek took a look around the “junior suite,” opening the curtains and peering out into the blackness that was supposed to be the river view. He stopped in front of the mini-bar and picked up a couple nips, reading the labels before replacing them.

  “Oh, man, you don’t want to do that,” said the valet, wiping his hands on his pants as he emerged from the bathroom. “They’ve got weight sensors on the mini-bar, they’ll totally charge you for anything you pick up, even if you don’t drink it. I can take care of that for you downstairs, though, no problem.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Derek, picking up a tiny bottle of tequila and opening it. “Thanks for your help with the smoke detector.”

  He folded the bills once and handed them over.

  “Yeah, no problem,” said the valet. “We smokers got to hang together, right? Fight the power? Hey,” he added when he was already out the door, “do you think I could bum a cig?”

  “Sorry,” said Derek, “I don’t smoke.”

  He closed the door and engaged the bolt.
>
  Once he was alone, Derek sat down on the bed. He stretched over, hauled the second duffel bag up, and unzipped it. Tenderly, almost reverently, he removed the one object in the bag that was not money–a well-loved copy of The Suffering Decision, by Dr. Russell Gibbs–and, standing and pulling a lighter from his pocket, walked towards the bathroom.

  * * *

  Maxwell tried the door of the club to make sure it was locked.

  “So where do you want to go?” Shannon asked.

  “We don’t have a ton of options. There’s a 24 hour diner where I get pancakes sometimes after work. You like pancakes?”

  “Who doesn’t like pancakes?”

  “It’s going to be hard to get a cab, with all the clubs closing. We can walk–it’s just a few blocks–or if you’re too cold, you can wait in the club while I get a cab.”

  “I’ve been standing outside with you for hours, Maxwell. I think I can handle walking a few blocks. Although it might be nice to finally get a peek inside Demonologie.”

  She spoke this last sentence with obvious good humor, but Maxwell still found himself looking at his shoes.

  “Shall we?” she said.

  They set off, leaving their footprints in the layer of fresh snow.

  It was strange, Maxwell thought, how quickly they fell into an awkward silence after so many hours of banter. It was as if a man and woman walking to dine together represented an unusual happening, so novel that no conventions had yet accrued around it–while a woman who had been denied entrance to a club milling around for hours with the very man who had denied her entrance had seemed the most natural situation in the world, and an occasion for easy conversation.

  As they stepped over a frozen puddle half a block from the diner–the lighted windows were already visible–Shannon took Maxwell’s arm.