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something about her decorations, a whole square out in front of the black monolith-shaped financial center that she was in the process of designing.
    I circulated and saw that my video was impacting the senses. The evening wore on, people were leaving. By that point I’d joined a cluster of people who were all complaining about the same thing, and Vita’s brows had acquired their furrow, perhaps because she knew I had no immediate plans to leave. Then I suggested that we go.
    â€œAre you sure you want to?” she asked.
    â€œYes, yes, come on,” I said and headed toward the exit.
    And there stood the rest of the group. One of them, Johannes, was a wild-eyed, good-looking Swedish guy I’d talked to earlier. The group bemoaned us leaving, they wanted us to head into the city with them. Vita was like a person who’d expected to conquer a mountain, only to be confronted by yet another peak, and so she climbed into a taxi.
    I sent Vita away with Johannes’s eyes burning a hole in my neck, and it didn’t take too many negotiations before we were standing in a gateway. He took me with huge, scallop-shaped hands, pressed my flesh, marked my skin, supported me with his stalk, and pumped so hard my head grated the rough wall. He came in cascades, filled me with his tenderness, made canine sounds. Afterward, his soft parts withdrew and he became gentle. The eyes, the look, the beast with the gash of a mouth and saliva beneath the chin, he made me want to howl.
    â€œI’m not sure I completely understand all that with the fish,” Johannes said later when we were sitting at the bar. “But who gives a fuck. The film is awesome.”
    â€œDo you want to know? Do you really want to know?” I mumbled.
    â€œOf course I do, man. Tell me.”
    â€œThey stink. That’s why they’re there.”
    Johannes was an artist from the academy of arts in Stockholm, but he didn’t understand what I meant.
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” I said.
    Maybe the fish weren’t such a good idea after all. Maybe they were actually there in Vita’s honor. They were glossier than steel, they were far steelier than steel. I could tell that she hated them, even if she didn’t say it. I had Johannes’s full attention. Until I became too drunk to talk and took a taxi home to Sønderhaven.

W hen I returned home like that at night or early in the morning, she was a coldness, a distance. Her body said: Tell me, woman, what actual power do you think you have over me? Her work occupied more time than it usually did, even though she didn’t have any particular projects she was supposed to be finishing. She took off to Jutland for the weekend without telling me, maybe she had a friend with her, maybe a colleague. They were going to see a burial mound, she said when I asked. I pictured her walking beneath the winter sky with a red nose and mittens together with Harriet, another sculptor, who’d also developed a sudden interest in antiquity’s monuments.
    All I could do was lay there at home alone and think about things, twist and turn them, look at them from various angles. I was certain she knew everything. Or did she? Vita said nothing. She was just distracted and distant, if not downright departed.
    One time she called me from the central station and asked if I wanted to travel with her to Odense. She was going to an opening at a sculpture park where some of her sculptor friends had fashioned two new bridges, but the trains had been delayed, and then it occurred to her that maybe I’d like to come too. I only needed to pack a couple pairs of underwear and some clothes, she said, and we’d stay at a hotel. Some clothes, some underwear, and some water from the kiosk. No word about that which also has a name: infidelity. Ooh. Ahh. I’ll fuck you up. How could you do that? You’ll fuck me up. I don’t ever want to see you again until I actually want to see you