The early flight from Dublin on Scandinavian is nearly empty in Business Class. Handful of suits scurrying home after doing business with the green tiger. Early, but not too early for a chill champagne with warm scrambled eggs and a single sausage, fried cherry tomato and a cantarelle mushroom. Which an impressive-looking young man in a black-tee shirt, Kerrigan notes, is also amenable to four rows up on the aisle. How the stewardess smiles in this section. Smile fades when they go aft, through the curtain to the Economy Class where they dole out raw fish from a wicker basket.
     'You know what Churchill said about champagne,' he says as the flight attendant beams and cracks the seal of the little bottle of Lanson's bubbly for him. She tilts her head obligingly, as if to say, No, what?
     'Three prerequisites: It must be dry, it must be chill, it must be free.'
     Oh you kid! She smiles and touches his arm. Maybe she genuinely likes me. God is a cunt. Can't you take a joke? You're as sane as I.
     He uses the tiny red plastic clothes-pin provided to attach his napkin to the lapel of his shirt and digs in. The eggs are runny, the champagne lukewarm. Luxurious problems. Mosquitoes in paradise.
     It occurs to Kerrigan to consider how many eggs he has consumed in his life in how many different forms – boiled, fried, scrambled, poached, raw, as eggs benedict – in how many different settings, at how many different times of day, in the optimism of morning fresh from sleep, in the sad dregs of crashing night…
     But the past is not a dimension it is wise to enter so he is grateful for the fact that some manner of hard thing irritating his hip brings him back to the here and now. He digs into his pocket to find a kind of dusty stone there which he drags out precariously, careful not to upset his fold-down table. He finds himself staring at a large brown lump resembling a petrified turd. Then, just as recognition finds its way to his consciousness and he remembers having picked this from the floor in the Hairy Lemon where the lad who had dropped it was too frightened to claim it for his own, Kerrigan senses a figure standing over him, looks to see the shining stewardess whose smile indicates she is fully aware, beneath her respectful gaze, of the nature of the thing in his fingers.
     'Would you like to buy some duty-free goods, sir?' she asks, indicating the many sleek and shiny cellophaned packages in her trolly, but her smile says something quite else. And now a businessman in the seat across the aisle is also looking at the brown lump, though not smiling at all, and Kerrigan feels the blush ignite his face. He wonders what the fellow in the black tee-shirt would say.
     'Hairy lemon,' blurts Kerrigan. 'Soap.'
     'We do not have soap, sir. Just liquid soap in the lavatory.'
     'No, no. This. Hairy lemon soap. Bought it at Sweney's Chemist. Featured in Ulysses. Joyce. You know, Leopold Bloom bought a bar for Molly on 16 June 1904. Poldy Bloom. Give us a touch, Poldy, Molly said. I'm dying for it. And he kissed her under the Moorish wall.'
     Now she looks frightened, escapes with a wilted mouth as Kerrigan stuffs the lump back into his pocket. How to get rid of it? Cram it in the obsolete armrest ashtray. But they would know. Too large anyway. Already alerted perhaps. Witnessed. Their records show who sat here. Seat 7C, left two-seat aisle. Kerrigan, T E. Too old for this. Could go to jail. Smuggling. Mule. Alert the captain to have a S W A T team waiting at Kastrup. Swat him like a fly. Journalists, too. Unknown Expatriate Writer Apprehended at Kastrup. Hash coup. Held in isolation for thirteen days.
     He sips bubbly with his predicament. Could bury it in the remains of his runny scrambled eggs. Not deep enough.
     The businessman across the aisle is sneering openly at him. Kerrigan says, "Tyv tror, hver mand stjæler." Old Danish proverb: Thieves think everyone steals. You have the leer of the sensualist about you. I am the proverbial l'homme moyen sensuel.
     The man removes his gaze slowly. Very un-Danish to strike an attitude over another's vices. Must be a Swede. Or Norwegian. You're as sane as I. Aren't wolves dangerous? So are violins. Luvlie man.
     Kerrigan thinks of the sniffing dogs that patrol American airports, trained to nose out the goods, tries to remember if he has ever seen such a beast in Kastrup. See here, I hold an SAS Star Alliance Gold Card. Many, many air miles to my name. Entrée to the gold lounge where they serve complimentary champagne and Christian of Denmark cigarillos. Disposable toothbrushes in the loo and gratis newspapers in five languages. Bright row of bottles of strong spirit at your free disposal along with an ice bucket, tongs, sturdy drink glasses (no plastic cups there) and savory snacks. They even distribute free volumes of Scandinavian literature in the original Scandinavian with English translation, including Strindberg's Alone, Brandes' Thoughts on the Turn of the Century, Hamsun's Hunger, A Fragment, Munch's Notes of a Genius, and Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, which James Joyce reviewed at the age of seventeen, his very first published piece of writing.
          
          'We only see what we have missed
           When we dead awaken.
           And what do we see?
           We see that we have never lived.'

     I know these things. I am the man and I was there and I will be there again, puffing a Christian, tippling bubbly in the company of great Nordic writing, and I may cause the lips of those who are asleep to speak. And I have a Press Card issued by the Danish Association of Magisters Joint Committee for Danish Press Organizations that entitles me to cross police lines, though subject to the provisions of the Ministry of Justice Circular No 211 of 20 December 1995. Freedom of the Press. I instruct you to let me pass. But it stipulates on the card that one is subject to obey instructions from the police at the site of the crime. Such as: Please empty your pockets, sir, and assume the position. Maybe one of those policewomen. Hurt me, please, so I at least get something out of this inconvenience.
     Now you're fucked, Kerrigan. All these years of surfing only to wipe out over a stupid bit of greed. Robbing a frightened backpacker of his stash.
     Unknown writer with tragic past held for questioning in Kastrup hash case.
     Hashish (Arabic), n. (1598), the concentrated resin from the flowering tops of the female hemp plant (cannabis sativa) that is smoked, chewed or drunk for its intoxicating effect -- also called charas.
     Female hemp. Hash is a cunt.
     Can't you take a joke?
     Kerrigan thinks, Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive thy great big one on me. Old Robert Frost had a thought or two all right.
     Everything will be all right. Optimism, said Voltaire, is a mania for insisting all is well when things are going badly. Candide. Fine novel that, published more than 300 years ago, and Voltaire had to run for it. Police after him for every manner of sin in print, against God, sexual propriety, king and country. To protect himself he had the book published simultaneously on the same day in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and London, and ran his bloody arse off to the little town of Ferney, just across the border from Geneva, where he built a chateau, convenient for a Swiss getaway, planted poplars along the entryway, and the town became known as Ferney-Voltaire and the townfolk called him 'Le Patron'.
     French cabdriver once when I insisted on being allowed to sit in the front seat bellowed at me, 'C'est moi qui est le patron, monsieur!' Unlike the sweet waitress to whom I once said, "Merci, madame," and she replied, "C'est moi qui dit merci, monsieur," and slapped her ample rump as she passed me. Another missed opportunity that one remembers on the very lip of extinction.
     Centuries after Voltaire, Bernie Cornfeld would flee from Geneva to Ferney-Voltaire when the Swiss kicked his investment firm out for questionable practices. He ran phone lines across the border in dead of night for there were at the time, in the late 1960s, no telephones there yet. Cornfeld was greatly beloved of the Ferney townfolk. Kerrigan had lived there for a time in the mid-70s and the town was awash in lovely young Swedish girls. Kerrigan remembers once eating too much foi gras and drinking too many cognacs and vomitting into the bidet in his little hotel on the Grand Rue. Grand rue it is, all right.
     Cornfeld, also known as Le Patron, was arrested nonetheless in the early 70s, and one of Nixon's friends, Robert Vesco, was called in to take care of the 180 million dollars remaining in the company till. People's pensions. Dirty business. Vesco invested the remaining money in a private gunship and absconded to the waters of Panama. No doubt ended in jail himself, or dead, one or both of which will also be your fate, you fool.

Kerrigan clicks the telephone out from beneath the armrest, swipes in his plastic and dials her number. He wants just to hear her voice once before they lock him up. Ironic to be able to reach her like this, so near yet so far, years about to separate them. Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Long lonely nights.
     She answers on the first ring. 'This is Annelise,' she says in the Danish manner. He only listens, the rush of the jet in his ears, as she says, 'Hello?' and he can think of nothing to say to her.
     Then the pilot requests the passengers to fasten their seatbelts and place their seatbacks in an upright position, so Kerrigan feeling less than upright sits strapped in and upright, looking out the window at the shadow of the plane over the blue sea (not wine but sky), the green sea (not snot but jade), moving landward, alongside a sailboat, over the fields of Amager, over a bunch of cows in a field, a herd of horses, over miniature scale-model cars and roads and houses, finally larger, much larger than before, over the airfield where the great wheels bang down and roll along the tarmac.

He knows he must easily be subject to suspicion, a man without luggage, not even a cabin bag, in rumpled clothes, who has been sighted by a cabin attendant with a double thumb-sized lump of hashish - word assassin originally was hashishin, thugs who smoked hash and went out on a rampage of killing - in his hand yet he does not dare discard it for fear he is being watched. He recognizes that this is unreasonable yet his mind is awash with fleet fish-like thoughts of scientific methods by which they can test the fingers and pocket lining for hash residue and the fear that his fate will be harsher if he tries to escape it. At least he was honest. Owned up to his sins. So lock him up but keep the key handy.
     He can think of no more horrific fate than jail, and he does not believe any angels will appear to give him a respite in the country. Supposedly the Danish penal system is much more humane than the American where, in the year of 1999, 1.8 million people are incarcerated, more than half for nonviolent offenses under the new, tough, mandatory minimum no-parole drug sentences (even when we know that Clinton blew pot and suspect that young Bush snorted coke and you can't snort without inhaling either), but Kerrigan doubts the Danish jails are all that humane, set up not to correct but to punish. Even the Danish Minister of Justice has been quoted as saying that no one ever became a better person by doing time. You are locked in a room, terrorized by brutal types who belong to secret societies and no escaping their rule unless you are like the Hells Angel assassin who writes books about his philosophy of life, has a fax in his cell, and an arrangement whereby he is let out on leave to tour the lecture circuit. In fact, this same convicted murderer was once referred to in print by a journalist as a psychopath and he took her to court for offending his honor and won a penalty from her of 5,000 crowns for defamation of character – which in Denmark is known as 'an offense to honor'.. Perhaps, he argued, he was a murderer and had cold-bloodedly assassinated the leader of the rival gang, the Bullshitters, but where was the medico-scientific evidence to support her claim that he was a psychopath? He had murdered not psychopathically, but with full reason and purpose. Therefore, whether or not he was evil, he was not mad, not psychopathic, he argued and was supported by the courts in his argument to the tune of 5,000 crowns.
     Kerrigan knows that he will not do well in prison. If only he had his pistol with him, he could retire to a restroom and plug his brain. Keep his reason from stifling forever, unless of course he would end in hell or purgatory for such an act or, as the Buddhists were said to believe, would be immediately recycled as an insect: Oh, no you don't buddy! No exit for you. Go immediately to worse shit, do not pass go and collect nothing but more misery. Is there no way to end it all forever.
     His pistol! If they apprehend him, search his premises, they will find it. Last exit closed. No excape, as his Dublin cab driver said. He remembers the expate Brit he knows in Copenhagen who was held for half a year in isolation, charged with a drug coup about which he knew nothing, but because he was in possession of two joints when they nabbed him, he had no recourse. Same story here. They could pin whatever they want on him. Yet isolation would be preferable to the society of criminals. God knows if the stories are true of what they do to each other, what they do to the weak, anal rape the classic method by which victorious soldiers demonstrate their power over the vanquished, even as James Dickie indicated in the climactic scene of his novel Deliverance as standard practice. There are even jokes about this on tv sitcoms, and it is not funny. It would hurt. Very much. Not even masochistically pleasing, just goddamn downright ugly brutal pain, tearing of the rectum. Humiliation and pain. Miserable society that allows such practices. Some people even applaud it.
     Your honor, this man completely forgot he had hashish in his pocket. Therefore, I call for immediate dismissal, I think they call it.
     On the other hand he knows another British fellow who was one of the hostages in Iran and who used his imaginative faculties to ward off ill-treatment - he fed his captors 'secrets' gleaned from the pages of a Tom Clancey novel. Perhaps the imagination can serve even there. Perhaps I could start a writers workshop, thus becoming a valued colleague of the other cons who would then refrain from bestial practices, come to me as a senior, request my guidance.
     Kerrigan, in terror, confesses to himself that he is a physical coward.
     The uniformed man at the passport control booth glances at Kerrigan's identity card and says in Danish, 'Ah, here's an American who has had to learn to master this horrible Danish language.'
     'I try anyway,' says Kerrigan in Danish, and they both laugh.
     'Welcome home,' says the Dane in Danish with a smile, and Kerrigan smiles, too, though he is wise to him: It's a test; they speak Danish to you cheerfully, but if you don't understand you reveal yourself as a possible thief of a national identity card for purposes of illegal entry into this social democratic kingdom.
     No dogs on leashes are sniffing about the baggage area, and with a distinct sense of watching eyes all about him, his legs stiff and heavy, he strategically positions himself behind a black man and walks through customs unmolested while the black man in front of him is stopped and questioned.
     Saved by Nordic racism!
     The tall young professional fellow in the black tee-shirt comes out behind him, and as they pass through the automatic doors to freedom, he gives a side-wise smile and a wink. 'Hash and eggs, ey?' he says and is gone.