I’ve just come out onto Reventlowsgade when a bald man asks me if I want to
share a joint, if I’ll have a hit, where I’m going, if he can have my
number. I feel flattered, and I’m tired of the uneasiness in my body. My spine
feels stiff as a long broomstick holding together all the soft accessories of arms
and legs. My blood bubbles through my body and prickles under the skin like newly
poured club soda on the tongue.
He sits easily on a front stoop, smoking, and has a dark brown beard, but I’m
certain he’s an addict. It has something to do with the way he moves. Gliding,
slowly lurching, perfect movements rounded off with a little upward twitch of one
corner of his mouth. And the thinness that has settled in his arms, so the elbows
are broad and bony.
It occurs to me his lips are dirty, and sickness almost streams out of him with
the smoke that doesn’t flow out into the air. I take the joint when he offers
it, and I close my eyes as if we were kissing. That’s a reflex where mechanical
movements long ago were overshadowed by sensuality.
A mother with a baby carriage comes bursting out of the central station even if
it is so late. The child cries right into my face with an open drooling mouth and
shameless eyes. We smoke the joint and walk down Istedgade. He says he wants to
walk me home, although he never asks where home is. We see three delicious hookers,
standing and laughing. One of them is doubled over. The two others stand behind
her in short, dark skirts and bare legs. They giggle with their chins pressed against
their chests. My new friend takes my arm, and even if he is shorter than me, it’s
okay. The veins in his eyes stand out. The red lines snake through all the white
and crawl around like elastic corkscrews, like rats around warm porridge. His pupils
are still and dilate a bit when he sucks on the joint and slowly close until they
become small pinheads again.
We see a homeless man walking with long steps, his shoulders drawn back. He’s
wearing a smart cK sweatshirt.
“Look at him,” I say to my new friend, but he just laughs overbearingly
without a glance.
We see a man standing completely still with his two large dogs. The leashes are
pulled tight. The dogs just stand there, their tongues hanging down over their small
sharp teeth. When they breathe, they bob heavily up and down. Their tongues look
like perfect pieces of ham, thin-sliced and pink and fat-free that could easily
be laid over a lightly toasted piece of white bread and eaten with pleasure.
“Kiss the joint,” my friend says.
I blush when I take the last drag. Our steps are high until we again walk past a
group of voices. In the middle of the pedestrian crossing is nothing but the newly
painted white stripes. A blue box plays a signal for the blind. Slow and quick.
Easy and excited. I play Für Elise for my friend. I hop from the white
paint to the black, flat stripe. He stands leaning against a lamppost with one leg
crossed behind the other. I hurry down to the other end of the crossing and close
to the blue rhythm box, I find my tone on a white-painted stripe and then back again.
He applauds low and slowly but with enthusiasm. Flashes and squints his eyes against
the strong light. Behind him on the lamppost hangs a job announcement, and I note
that there is someone who wants to be somebody’s arms and legs.
The sun is about to come up, and my friend looks different now. He still looks like
an addict but in another way. Like someone who has tried everything and wants to
try everything. I think about how he would look with glasses, if he could wear glasses.
That’s something you don’t see on addicts but he is one who would look
all right in them.
A little old man buzzes around out in the road. Touching his head and mumbling to
himself. He looks like someone who is manic. Like someone who runs alongside of
cars and thinks he can pass them, thinks he can do anything. And he looks like someone
who is depressive. Someone who invites you to dinner when he doesn’t have
food and stands without his pants on because he couldn’t pull himself together.
And he looks like someone I read about who killed his dog without feeling anything.
He strangled it with the leash. It whimpered, and he pulled tighter. It made me
sad. Not overwhelmingly, but pretty sad. I cried. Not so much. It wasn’t my
dog, and it was a dog, an animal, not a human being.
The little old man still says Negro. He says it because he thinks it sounds friendly
and sometimes he switches from Danish to English. He says, “Hey, nigger,”
to my friend and “How’s it going, nigger,” and “How are
you doing, nigger?” Even though he has grey hair and an ebony pipe and everything.
My friend only smiles at him and goes over to English himself when it seems appropriate,
saying, “It’s not easy” and “Have a nice day,” and
“Later,” and he has taken my arm again. He’s a real gentleman
who is constantly attentive, leading me around puddles and steaming newly-dropped
dog turds and wet brown yellow leaves. He doesn’t follow me home, and he never
gets my number, but his smile is now completely twisted when he stands there and
suddenly it’s light, and the other people begin to appear on the street.
was born in 1982, is half Swedish and half Danish, and lives in Copenhagen. Her debut book
appeared in 2009, from the prestigious Copenhagen publisher, Rosinante; Rat King
(Rottekong) is a collection of short-short stories about a variety of psychologically
surreal encounters.
“Doll” has appeared in The Literary Review, and “Kiss the Joint”
is published for the first time here. Other translations of her stories have been published in
The Southern Review, Serving House Journal, and Absinthe: New European Writing.
A photograph of her lying in the grass on the bank of the lake at Versailles moved
Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy to invite a score of prose writers and poets
to write something inspired by the photo, which resulted in the book The Girl with
Red Hair: Musings on a Theme (Serving House Books, 2011).
Ms. Lång has just completed a novel.
LineMaria.dk/english
has published thirty books (novels, story and essay collections, and literary criticism)
and translated many Danish writers into American, including Dan Turèll, Henrik Nordbrandt,
Pia Tafdrup, Susanne Jorn, Kristian Bang Foss, Martin Glaz Serup, Line-Maria Lång,
and others.
More about Kennedy on SHJ’s About page...