Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Read Free Book Online

his own hand away, suddenly shy. In the silence that follows he lights another Sumatra, shadows rippling through his consciousness as he reviews all the things that can be discovered in one snap of the fingers. How you can step through a door to a home and find it empty, everyone gone. As all stories end.
    Her eyes are upon him, and she asks, “What was your subject?”
    â€œLiterature,” he says, grateful to be drawn back from the shadows. “Specifically, verisimilitude. Want to know more?”
    â€œI think you’re going to tell me.”
    â€œNo. Only if you want.”
    â€œPlease.”
    â€œHow writers of fiction seem to create reality.
Veris similis
in Latin.
Vrai semblance
in French. The appearance of reality. The way a writer creates a credible illusion to get the reader to suspend disbelief long enough to listen and experience what the writer wants to transmit. Beneath the illusion, if the writer is serious, lies the stuff of truth, of a deeper reality, that probably has little to do with the trappings of everyday life that were used to build the illusion—unless those actual trappings are what he’s writing about. But the reality beneath that illusioncan help us understand something about human existence. The illusion of literature, at its best, relies on a deeper wisdom. Fiction, even the most realistic-seeming fiction, is not existence, but
about
existence. For example, Kafka uses sensory images to make us believe, or at least accept, the preposterous notion that Gregor Samsa has turned into a cockroach, and because we believe that for a little while, we experience some deep mystery of existence. But sometimes writing something defines the essence of the author and changes him. So in that sense fiction, all writing, can be truer than raw life.” He thinks of Hamsun then—the building he saw this morning, where over a hundred years ago Hamsun wrote
Hunger
. “You know Knut Hamsun? The Norwegian writer?
Hunger?
In that, he abandoned many realistic devices of fiction—plot, narrative arc, story even—to portray the consciousness of a man starving to express itself …” Abruptly, he becomes aware of himself lecturing her, trails off.
    â€œWhat is the word again?” she asks.
    â€œVerisimilitude. It took me half a year just to learn to pronounce it right.”
    Her cigar has gone out, and she relights it with a Bic, trims it on the edge of the ashtray. “And now you are writing a book about bars.”
    â€œPlease,” he corrects. “Serving houses. So much more elegant in Danish. And what could be more existentially essential? Reason is an unreasonable faculty. It will strangle us if we take it too seriously. It needs damping, and that is why we come to these places,
n’est-ce pas
?”
    She smiles wanly and they sit in silence for a time, listening to music from a CD player behind the bar. Bob Dylan is singing “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Then he sings, “I Threw It All Away,” and Kerrigan finds himself thinking of his life. Looking back upon himself, he sees a man who was young and brash and full of himself and threw all his greatest potential out the window. Or maybe he had no choice. Maybe in his own way he was programmed to do precisely what he did—avoiding love, then falling hard for a woman who was hardly more than a child.
    How he wishes he could go back and adjust himself somehow, do itover, do it better, but in what way, adjust to what? He has spent nearly three years trying to adjust to the deprivation of a life he had been fleeing for decades—then couldn’t embrace it fast enough. Was it just because he feared age? They married when he was forty-nine. And she was twenty-nine. Maybe she feared turning thirty also. His beautiful wife. His beautiful little girl. As every story ends. In the recognition of illusion.
    He tips his stout bottle over the edge of his empty glass, but not a