gives her free liver if it's split. In her bathroom I pour half a bottle of Halcion pills into my pocket. Her doctor prescribed them for her recently. She sells them. Halcion is marketable among junkies. She uses the money to buy her own medicine, the kind that customs officers charge duty on.
In Rink's collection there is a story from West Greenland about a bogeyman who can't fall asleep but must keep watch for all eternity. But that's because he hasn't tried Halcion. When you take it for the first time, half a tablet can put you into a deep coma.
Juliane lets me forage: She has given up on almost everything, including asking me questions.
"You've forgotten me!" she shouts after me.
I take a taxi back to Kalkbrænderi Road. The cab starts to smell like fish.
Standing beneath the streetlight under the viaduct facing the Free Harbor, I crush the pills into the liver. Now I smell like fish, too.
This time I don't have to call the dog. He's standing there waiting, hoping that I would come back. I toss the liver over the fence. You hear so much about dogs' keen sense of smell, I'm afraid he might smell the pills. My worries are for naught. The dog sucks up the liver like a vacuum cleaner.
Then we wait, the dog and I. The dog is waiting for more liver. I am waiting to see what the pharmaceutical industry can do for sleepless animals.
A car pulls up. A station wagon from Danish Watchdogs. There's no place to make yourself invisible or even discreet on Kalkbrænderi Road. So I just stand there. A man wearing a uniform gets out of the car. He looks me over but can't come up with a satisfactory explanation. Solitary woman wearing a fur coat at one in the morning on the outskirts of the Østerbro district? He unlocks the gate and puts the dog on a leash. He brings him out to the sidewalk. The dog growls nastily at me. Suddenly his legs turn to rubber and he's about to fall over. The man stares at the dog anxiously. The dog looks at him mournfully.
The man opens the back of the wagon. The dog manages to get his front paws in, but the man has to shove him the rest of the way. He's mystified. Then he drives off. Leaving me to my own thoughts about the way Danish Watchdogs works. I come to the conclusion that they put the dogs out as a kind of random sampling, every once in a while, and for only a short time at each place. Now the dog's on his way to the next place. I hope there's something soft for him to sleep on.
Then I stick the key in the lock. But it doesn't open the gate. I can just picture it. Elsa Lübing has always arrived at work at a time when a guard opened the gate. That's why she didn't know that the entrances on the outer periphery are on a different key system.
I'll have to go over the fence. It takes a long time. I end up throwing my boots over first. A piece of sealskin gets caught in the process.
I only have to look at a map once and the landscape rises up from the paper. It's not something that I learned. Although, of course, I had to acquire a nomenclature, a system of symbols. The ridged elevation peaks on the topographical maps of the Geodesic Institute. The red and green parabolas on the military maps of the ice pack. The discus-shaped, grayish-white photographs of X-band radar. The multi-spectrum scans of LANDSAT 3. The candy-colored sediment maps of the geologists. The red-and-blue thermal photographs. But in the truest sense it has been like learning a new alphabet. Which you then forget about as soon as you start reading. The text about ice.
There was a map of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark in the book at the Geological Institute. A cadastral map, an aerial photograph, and a floor plan. Now, standing on the grounds, I know how it all once looked.
It's a demolition site now. Dark as a cave, with white spots where the snow has been blown into drifts.
I've entered the grounds where the rear of the raw cryolite building once stood. The foundation is still there.
An abandoned soccer field of
In Rink's collection there is a story from West Greenland about a bogeyman who can't fall asleep but must keep watch for all eternity. But that's because he hasn't tried Halcion. When you take it for the first time, half a tablet can put you into a deep coma.
Juliane lets me forage: She has given up on almost everything, including asking me questions.
"You've forgotten me!" she shouts after me.
I take a taxi back to Kalkbrænderi Road. The cab starts to smell like fish.
Standing beneath the streetlight under the viaduct facing the Free Harbor, I crush the pills into the liver. Now I smell like fish, too.
This time I don't have to call the dog. He's standing there waiting, hoping that I would come back. I toss the liver over the fence. You hear so much about dogs' keen sense of smell, I'm afraid he might smell the pills. My worries are for naught. The dog sucks up the liver like a vacuum cleaner.
Then we wait, the dog and I. The dog is waiting for more liver. I am waiting to see what the pharmaceutical industry can do for sleepless animals.
A car pulls up. A station wagon from Danish Watchdogs. There's no place to make yourself invisible or even discreet on Kalkbrænderi Road. So I just stand there. A man wearing a uniform gets out of the car. He looks me over but can't come up with a satisfactory explanation. Solitary woman wearing a fur coat at one in the morning on the outskirts of the Østerbro district? He unlocks the gate and puts the dog on a leash. He brings him out to the sidewalk. The dog growls nastily at me. Suddenly his legs turn to rubber and he's about to fall over. The man stares at the dog anxiously. The dog looks at him mournfully.
The man opens the back of the wagon. The dog manages to get his front paws in, but the man has to shove him the rest of the way. He's mystified. Then he drives off. Leaving me to my own thoughts about the way Danish Watchdogs works. I come to the conclusion that they put the dogs out as a kind of random sampling, every once in a while, and for only a short time at each place. Now the dog's on his way to the next place. I hope there's something soft for him to sleep on.
Then I stick the key in the lock. But it doesn't open the gate. I can just picture it. Elsa Lübing has always arrived at work at a time when a guard opened the gate. That's why she didn't know that the entrances on the outer periphery are on a different key system.
I'll have to go over the fence. It takes a long time. I end up throwing my boots over first. A piece of sealskin gets caught in the process.
I only have to look at a map once and the landscape rises up from the paper. It's not something that I learned. Although, of course, I had to acquire a nomenclature, a system of symbols. The ridged elevation peaks on the topographical maps of the Geodesic Institute. The red and green parabolas on the military maps of the ice pack. The discus-shaped, grayish-white photographs of X-band radar. The multi-spectrum scans of LANDSAT 3. The candy-colored sediment maps of the geologists. The red-and-blue thermal photographs. But in the truest sense it has been like learning a new alphabet. Which you then forget about as soon as you start reading. The text about ice.
There was a map of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark in the book at the Geological Institute. A cadastral map, an aerial photograph, and a floor plan. Now, standing on the grounds, I know how it all once looked.
It's a demolition site now. Dark as a cave, with white spots where the snow has been blown into drifts.
I've entered the grounds where the rear of the raw cryolite building once stood. The foundation is still there.
An abandoned soccer field of
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