Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  Bluett reaches for the red Gyldendal Danish-English dictionary on the wall shelf above his desk and gets to work.

  He translates in pen on a yellow pad first, doing a literal translation, which he then keys in on his laptop, turning the sentences away from the Danish idioms into purer English equivalents, studying each phrase carefully to be certain he has not semiconsciously gotten snagged in a Danish structure, in a faux ami, closing his eyes to wait alertly for the correct English phrase to float up into his mind, the mot juste. Funny, those expressions are all in French—from the time French was the lingua franca.

  From time to time he rises from the desk, stretches, does a few push-ups, brews a cup of Nescafé, trying always to have some little translation puzzle in his mind before he does so in order to keep himself rooted in the work.

  When he has completed the third page of the article, he glances at the clock and is surprised to see he has worked through lunch time. It is already past one. He eats a ham and cheese and lettuce sandwich standing up in the kitchen, watching the gray sheepdog pace the concrete yard below. Bluett taps on the window, but the dog does not look up. Snubbed by a dog. Then he drinks a glass of water, brushes his teeth, and goes back to his desk.

  For a moment before he starts back to work, the thought of the box flitters across his mind. He ignores it, plunges back into the text.

  He compels himself to do six pages, to prove to himself that he is in control, and when he is done, well into the second article, it is just past four. He stacks the pages he has worked on and corrected in red ink. Tomorrow he will key in the corrections, do another five pages. He has nothing to complain about. He thinks about taking a drink before going down to the basement, stands before the shelf of bottles in the kitchen, considering.

  There is a knock at the door. The sound startles him, jerks him into a near crouch there in the kitchen as he considers not answering, pretending he is not home. Should install a peep hole. Another tap.

  Nonsense.

  He opens the door and sees his daughter’s smiling face.

  “Raffaella!”

  Unalloyed pleasure sweeps his heart as he hugs her, touches her cheek with his lips, cool and fresh with winter, looks at her again, tall and bright-faced, long auburn hair draping the shoulders of a long camel coat. He hears distant music, notes she is wearing earphones—the Discman he gave her for Christmas.

  “What are you listening to?”

  She plucks one bud from her ear and puts it to his. He hears a low voice burbling words in a slurred growl, hears the words disease . . . infect me . . . reject me . . . don’t want to exist. He frowns amicably.

  “Bad Religion,” she says. “They’re really tough. You could borrow it if you want. Could I get my Arab on Radar back?”

  “Noise Rock,” he says and steps back to let her in, watching with pleasure how she acts as if it is her own place, hanging her coat on the wall hooks in the little foyer, going to the kitchen for a Coke from the refrigerator that she knows he stocks for her. “Got any potato chips?”

  “On the counter there.”

  She glances out the back window. “Oh, look, Dad! That dog is so cute! Aw, look, he’s all lonely and sad out there alone by himself. Look, he’s so lonely he wants to go in! How can they do that to him?”

  Bluett slips the CD she’d left him into her coat pocket, puts on Coltrane, selects “Central Park West,” pours himself a vodka while she turns on the television, surfs to MTV, and he comes back and douses Coltrane while some big black dude wearing an unbuttoned vest and no shirt raps.

  She looks at him as if she has just remembered something, although he can see it has been at the front of her mind all along and knows right away what it is, cautions himself not to make an issue of it as he once foolishly did with his son, causing embarrassment and pain over nothing, over peanuts.

  “Oh, Dad, uh, before I forget, do you think you could lend me a little bit till next week?”

  He nods, averting his eyes. Somehow that she also asks for money makes him less concerned that his son had, too. Of course they ask for money. They need help. Kids need help. “How much you need?”

  Her expression is braced for a reaction. “Two hundred?”

  He takes out his wallet, lifts out two hundred-kroner bills, then peels off a third, same as he gave Tim, no favorites here, feels relieved it wasn’t more. “I just got some money,” he lies. “So it’s no problem.” He remembers how his mother, after his father died, used to give him money without complaint. Still it makes him feel insecure. Would they come and visit anyway? His mother always used to say, I don’t want any duty visits. He chides himself for his thoughts, looks with pleasure at the girl. He is so proud to be her father, to be the father of two fine, smart, good-looking kids. They are the only worthwhile product of his ungodly life.

  “Boy, are you good-lookin’, El!”

  She beams; her cheekbones glow. High school turned out to be a good thing for her, and he is so grateful for that, that her life has gotten so much better. She hadn’t so many friends in grade school and the teachers didn’t recognize her. Either she was invisible or she was teased, perceived as being overweight, but she wasn’t overweight, she was just a big girl. At a parent-teacher meeting once, one of the teachers, explaining to Bluett and his wife why she hadn’t given Raffaella a higher grade, had said, “Well, I think we can all agree, Raffaella is, well, heavy.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Yes, you know, heavy and . . . slow.”

  “She’s not in the least slow. Have you ever seen her on horseback? She’s quick and intelligent, and physically she’s agile and strong.” He had looked at the teacher’s face, a scrawny, wrinkled face with protruding eyes, and a little smile on her thin lips and in her eyes that said, Nothing enters here.

  But the summer after grade school, Raffaella grew several inches, and then in high school, the kids sought her out, even her grades improved. Now she was at the university studying philosophy.

  “So what’s new, honey? How’s life? Still riding?”

  “I couldn’t get the hour I wanted so I’m skipping this season.”

  He nods, hiding his relief, his fear of her being flipped, hurt, paralyzed. She has been riding since she was eight, had plagued them for permission to since she was five.

  “How about your piano lessons?”

  She drinks from her Coke glass, puts it down on the table, nodding. “It’s combined with song now. I really love it.”

  “That’s great, El.” He thinks about his own high school and college years. They were happy, too, on the surface at least, except when his father died. He used to hide his grief. He wonders if she is hiding hers. He wants to ask if she’s happy, but the question sounds so ridiculous, is ridiculous. What would you answer yourself if she asked you that? I get by. We get by.

  “Little El,” he says.

  “Dad.” Her tone warns him not to be sentimental, even though he can see she likes it a little, likes to have it and protest both.

  “How’s Jens-Martin? He treating you right?”

  “He’s okay.”

  Bluett thinks of the boy, whom he has met only twice, briefly, thinks of his little girl living with him. That’s how it is now. The two of them in a little two-room walk-up. No bath. They have to wash at the kitchen sink. Still. Must be nice for them. Better than the hysteria of his generation, constantly hunting, lonely and hoping, hunting, yearning for the touch of another human being.

  “Why don’t the two of you come over here sometime? Say hi. I’ll take you out to dinner, around the corner at that good Eyetalian joint.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Just say the word.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Jens-Martin.”

  “How’s he doing at school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Halfway through, isn’t he?”

  She nods, lifts her glass again. “Two years left.”

  Bluett sips his vodka, thinks about Jens-Martin, w
ho doesn’t speak much when they meet, who thinks he is a writer. Bluett feels skepticism rise inside himself, vetoes it. Maybe he really is a writer. Maybe he’s good. He wishes he could get more information from his daughter, wishes the words, the emotions would just flow out, that he could know how she is doing. He thinks of Sam’s boy, wonders if El would like him.

  “Remember Sam?” he says. “Across the hall? My friend? He died.”

  Her gray eyes grow large. “What happened?”

  A pause. Then he decides. “Cancer.”

  How distant death must seem to a kid, he thinks. Her life has not yet been touched by it. He fills his mouth with chill vodka, swallows. “How was your party last week, your homecoming party there at the school?”

  Her smile vanishes. “It was lousy. A bunch of bums showed up, and they ruined everything. Remember Hanne Louise? I was in the hall, going out with her to the toilets, and these four guys were there blocking the stairs, and they said I could pass ’cause I was tough, but this ugly kid with pimple scars all over his face said to Hanne, ‘But you’re ugly, bitch, you should die,’ and he shoved her down the stairs. Just like that.”

  “My God, what happened, what did you do? Where was Jens-Martin? You should have got the principal to call the cops.”

  “Jens-Martin didn’t come.” She laughs a little at herself. “I went crazy. I started yelling at them, scolding them . . .”

  “Ella, Ella, you have to be careful . . .”

  “They didn’t know what to do. They just left.”

  He laughs then, thinks about how gutsy she’s always been, how when she was just a little tiny kid she would crawl up onto the back of a horse that stood higher than Bluett’s head. But he thinks of those guys at Christiania, of what might have happened to her. “You were lucky,” he says. “Don’t try that number again, your luck might run out. How about Hanne Louise? She come over it okay?”

  El’s face clouds again. “She sprained her ankle a little and had a couple of bruises, but it’s not just that. How would it make a person feel to be told they’re ugly and get shoved down the stairs for it, that you should die for it? There was another kid there who threatened one of the boys with a knife. And Mr. Jensen, the principal? He didn’t do a thing. He wouldn’t even call the police. He said it would be bad for the school’s reputation and would ruin the party for the others.”

  “That ass! That pompous ass! I should have known better than to send you to a Catholic school. Notorious goddamn cowards.” He takes a breath, waits for his anger to pass. “I’m proud of you, Ella, but please don’t take a chance like that again. Please. You were lucky, but the kids today, some of them are nasty. Everything is so crazy. Please take care of yourself, honey. You’re the best I have. You and Timothy. You’re my treasures. You got to make it through.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” she drawls. “Yeah, yeah.”

  Through to what?, he’s thinking afterward, after she has rinsed out her Coke glass and turned off the TV, repositioned her earphones, put the three hundred-crown notes in her wallet, slipped on her coat, and hugged him, the smell of winter in her camel coat, and he watches her descend the stairs, then goes to the window and opens it and calls good-bye, and she turns and waves, and he watches the back of her coat disappear along the street. His little girl.

  He cools his forehead against the white window frame, hears himself think, Please God, protect her and Tim, watches himself there, praying, feels the skepticism rise up, but at the same time recognizes there is a point at which there is nothing else but to beg the mercy of some power and order beyond one’s ken. He wonders if there are people who never get to that, if it is simply his background, the Catholic childhood, that brings him back to it when there is nothing else. But there must be something. Otherwise there is nothing. And how could these intricate organisms have developed from nothing? There has to be something. Far far beyond his ken, but still . . .

  He remembers how his father used to say to him, You’ve got to have faith in the old man upstairs, son.

  “The old man.” PC would come and get you for that today, Dad. Or is god or God still a man? He considers the fact that the foundations of his own life seem so insubstantial compared to those of his parents—or what he had imagined, assumed to be, those of his parents. Why had they not managed to extend that foundation to him? Or why had he not managed to receive it? What had they given him at all?

  They did teach him some things, some good things. They tried to teach him to be kind, the value of caring about others’ feelings. They taught him to think, to value books. They wanted him to believe in God the way they did, in religion, but somehow it all broke down, and when he moved away from it, they didn’t question his decision. It seemed to him they had come from such a sound background, the sea of faith still at its full, and had delivered him to the time of the melancholy long withdrawing roar, had sent him off into such a broken future, over which of course they had no control. None of it held up, not God, not country, not family. There was more here for him, in Denmark, where at least people felt responsible to build a social system that provided for everybody—health care, education, basic needs. If that doesn’t go broke and collapse.

  Still he missed his own country, his own people. He had to stay here now, for his health care, his pension. His children were here; what did he have other than his children? And really he loves it here. He could not live in the U.S. again.

  He does not feel bitter or disappointed, really. Life has its compensations. It is a joy merely to drink the air and feel the sun. To walk on human legs and look at the sky and the lake and the young healthy bodies of one’s children. Their faces cracking open in a smile, their jokes and laughter, their requests for money, anything. He only wishes he had something more to give them, a real legacy, something to build a life on that had a past and a present and a future that were one. Maybe it is up to them to make that future. And he wonders then what future he himself had made for himself.

  He remembers once, years earlier, reading in an interview with some poet—Jack Gilbert—who said something like, “I’m happy. You have to be happy. God requires it.” And the interviewer had said, “So you believe in God,” and the poet had said, “No. But I feel so grateful.”

  12. Equinox

  What then?

  Another day, another five pages, another evening, another vodka. Coltrane. Chair at the window watching the blue hour descend like a mist. McCoy Tyner’s quiet piano chords lead into Coltrane’s moody tenor, addressing the equinox. Ought to get some skates, glide like a shadow over the blue ice, hearing music recorded nearly forty years earlier; himself just a tiny lad, his parents young and good-looking. He has “Equinox” on repeat, vodka on his tongue; the tenor enters his ears like a sweet promise, orders his mind with sound that is a credible reality.

  He sets down his drink, closes his eyes, sways in his chair, moving to echoes cut into wax a handful of decades earlier. Sweet Jesus, he murmurs, smiling, this is the sound for a lonely hour. If the pope had any sense at all he would canonize this man who works miracles of illumination in the souls of the dead.

  Bluett drinks again, studies Steve Davis’s bass, Elvin Jones’s stick work, as the tenor stays cool, moving out to the last notes of Tyner’s ivory.

  Then it is over and he cannot bear to hear it again, reaches to poke the stop key and sits in the silence, the lake now steeped in dusk.

  He misses Sam at this moment. How many days since he departed? He will be departed forever now. For whatever of forever remains for him. How good it might be to smoke some weed with him, hear some sides, talk. He thinks of Sam alone across the hall the night he did it, drinking half a bottle of booze, swallowing pills, putting the bag over his head, the tie around his wrists. Bluett had checked the stereo but it was empty. He went off without music. Down so low he didn’t even care to have any sounds lead him out. Or maybe afraid music would break his resolve to go through with it. Down to Black Dam Lake. A man who yearns for music has a reason to go
on.

  He peers out into the dark over the frozen lake and sees or thinks he sees a shape there, a smoke-black, man-sized pillar of cloud upright on the ice, and at the same moment an acrid smell rises up his throat into his nose. He shudders. It is as if the cloud pillar addresses him, standing majestically, demanding.

  Bluett coughs and the acrid stench now fills his nose and throat with burning. He coughs, swallows more vodka. There is nothing. Nothing on the ice. Nothing in his nose. But a thought in his mind.

  The box.

  He has been putting it off all week. Afraid of what he might find. Or not find.

  After many moments he rises, fixes the door so it won’t lock and descends the stairs into the basement, feeling along the damp wall for a light switch.

  The concrete floor is wet; the lake seeps up through breaks in the concrete and gathers until the pump sucks it up and spits it down the drain. A puddle splashes against the sole of his shoe. He mutters, opens the door to his storage space and waves in the air for the string switch, stands scanning all his cartons of junk there. Old financial records. Family photos. Letters. Books. Old clothing he could not quite bring himself to throw out. Junk. He ought to burn the lot so his kids never have to confront this gloomy pile of trash, hoping perhaps to discover some clue, some answer, and rooting through to find nothing but worthless junk.

  Shoved back beneath a splintery raw-wood shelf, on top of one of his large packing crates, is a brown cardboard carton the size of a large cake box, sealed with heavy duct tape. Printed in marking ink on top are the letters sf, and c/o p. bluett. The box is light in his hands, and he stands there wondering again what his instructions were from Sam. He cannot quite recall the conversation. He could take this right now and shove it into the trash barrel outside. The garbage men would come on Monday and cart it away, burn it, and that would be the end of it. He knows he will find nothing of consequence here, no answers, he feels sure of that. Let a man’s secrets die with him.