Kerrigan in Copenhagen by Thomas E. Kennedy Page B

publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and forty-five years before his meeting with the dazzling blonde Licia.
    In 1831 Darwin sailed on the
Beagle
, 168 years before five states in the U.S. would eradicate his discoveries from the teaching curricula of their schools (along with the Big Bang Theory) and 133 years before Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh discovered, and lost, the so-called Higgs boson (the “God particle”)—an elusive particle that is believed to be capable of explaining why things in the universe have mass and, thus, why life exists. In 1821 John Keats died at the age of twenty-four, the same year Dostoyevsky and Flaubert were born, two years after the birth of Melville and Whitman in 1819, which was six years after the birth of Kierkegaard in 1813, the year the Danish State went bankrupt, six years after the Duke of Wellington bombarded Copenhagen, killing nearly 2 percent of its civilian population, thirty years before Kierkegaard would write
The Seducer’s Diary
in 1843 while Darwin was writing
The Origin of the Species
, one hundred years before Kerrigan was born, 145 years before Licia seduced Kerrigan in 1988, before his forty-fifth birthday—selected, seduced, bore fruit with, and abandoned him eight years later (while he was in Edinburgh, thirty-two years after Higgs made his initial discovery there), cleaned out his heart and half of his life’s savings, bombarded him with tender attention until the top of his head was blown off as surely as Wellington blew the roof off the White Lamb , and scientists have not yet found again the Higgs boson, the God particle.
    Darwin’s study would later be translated into Danish by J. P. Jacobsen, whom James Joyce in 1901 would call “a great innovator” in the techniques of fiction, and in 1843 Kierkegaard’s fictional Johannes was stalking the innocent young fictional Cordelia along the banks of this lake where Kerrigan sits in 1999, painfully aware that he was Licia’s bitch, forcing himself to savor the taste of dust, glimpsing the beautifulwillowy apron-wrapped hips of the waitress who brings him yet another large draft and another lovely, elfin smile, and just like that, he is dazzled and yearns to dance in the woods with her.
    He wonders what would happen if he kissed her. Just like that—jumped up and stole a kiss from those lips, too quick for her to get away. Instead he chances to speak to her as she gathers his soiled dishes and uneaten crusts, to quote the conclusion of the Danish Steen Steensen Blicher’s
Diary of a Parish Clerk
, written in 1824, when Keats was three years dead, a fictional depiction of the famous tragic love affair between a beautiful young Jutland aristocratic woman, Marie Grubbe (1643–1718), and her game warden, which ends in squalor and poverty in Copenhagen and is, still later, depicted by J. P. Jacobsen in a full-length novel:
    â€œAs for man,” quoth Kerrigan from Blicher, himself quoting scripture, to the waitress, “his days are as grass … For the wind passeth over it and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”
    The girl’s smile is wise as Buddha’s: “Can I get you something else, sir?” she asks.
    Moved by another hunger now, less specific than the hunger for food or drink, he strolls up Østerbrogade , East Bridge Street, crosses Trianglen , the triangular joining of three avenues, pausing to look at the goddamn 7-Eleven shop where once stood a guest house and restaurant in which two hundred years before, Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, slept.
    He passes Det Røde Lygte , on the west of the three angles, the Red Light Café, whose red door lamps are innocent of prurience—a soccer bar that opened in 1886, the year after the birth of Ezra Pound in the U.S. and François Mauriac in France, seven years before