Free Beneath the Neon Egg by Thomas E. Kennedy Page B

heart of the club. The lights are even dimmer than before, and most of the guests are gone, and Bluett wonders what was in that dope and can’t quite recall how many joints they smoked.
    The bartender with the Spanish accent produces a soprano sax from beneath the bar and starts blowing to a guitar backup. The soprano notes are like a fine fine grade of sturdy sculpted tin in the dim light. Lucia sits on a bench and pats the space beside her for him to sit, which he does and then he hears himself asking, “Can I call you?”
    To which she replies. “As long as you realize it will never be more than friendship.”
    Bluett wonders how in the world he managed to fuck that up. He says, “Well, what’s wrong with friendship?” And then they are at the bar, and Bluett looks at his watch. Somehow the long day and night have melted into quarter to two in the a.m. Lucia is talking to the owner, and now Bluett is no longer getting drunk. He is drunk. Maybe that was how he fucked it up. He sees two bartenders blowing two sopranos. At first it’s, like, double your pleasure. But then it’s, like, time to go home.
    The front doors are locked so he threads through the back rooms and hallways until he discovers an unlocked door and steps out into the dark, freezing morning. He walks the dirt street toward the Free State exit and sees the familiar raw wood sign over it into which is carved, on this side, you are now entering the european Union . He steps through the gate, under the sign, and is out on the street just in time to flag a Mercedes taxi.
    As the cab rolls over Knippels Bridge, black water gleaming on either side, the green copper towers of Copenhagen up ahead cloaked in darkness, he says to the Iranian driver, “All in all, as Ivan Denisovich put it in nineteen sixty-two, it has been a good day.”
    The driver chuckles, and Bluett knows he has no idea what Bluett is talking about.

5. Aura
    Sunday. Already light when he wakes so he knows it is at least nine thirty or ten, reaches for his watch: 10:20. In the kitchen he spoons coffee into the electric maker for a whole pot and waits, leaden-eyed, until it drips its last into the glass pot, pours a mug of black and wanders into the living room. He sees the CD jacket of Miles Davis’s Aura and remembers how he had been waylaid the previous day, or was it the day before that, from listening all the way through.
    Slowly the scraps of memory of Saturday reassemble in his mind: walking through the Botanical Garden, the Booktrader, Café Halfway . . . Halfway through my life I found myself on a dark path  . . .
    Unspecified sandwiches, more walking, lamb curry, the JazzKlub, the drinks, the dope . . . Lucia. His brain is post-dope hazy but not disagreeably so.
    He pours coffee down his neck, fumbles through his pockets for the card she gave him, finds it, sees and remembers that she is a cemetery guide, thinks you couldn’t ever make this shit up. He tears up the card and drops it in the garbage along with the wet coffee grounds.
    Another mug and he puts on Aura , thinking, the day yesterday was a mere, albeit a pleasant, interruption. Lucia’s aura did not admit you. You did not have the chemistry that perked her percolator. What is chemistry anyway? Mystery. But undeniable.
    Something makes him think of a woman named Johanna who wanted him to spank her, and he did it, but she said, Not that way! And taught him how she wanted to be spanked, starting with a gentle caress and building up . . . He felt like a dunce for not knowing that. But now he knows how, should he be called upon to administer what the Danes call an “end-full.” So many things a man is called upon to know.
    In his one good armchair he sits with the hot mug balanced on his knee and listens, eyes closed, to Miles, playing the symphony Palle Mikkelborg wrote for him two years before Miles died, six years earlier. He hears John McLaughlin’s guitar opening the piece, and Miles’s unmistakable