The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  Desire?

  We offer the modalities to perform an act of ritual negation. One is able, on one’s own terms, to say no.

  I told him it sounded like he was talking about suicide.

  Ah, but there is external agency. Underscored by the transaction, the exchange of cash.

  Euthanasia then.

  Well, that would certainly be closer. Be we are not discussing in this instance individuals in their apparent final extremities. And we are discussing symbols.

  How exactly did Mr. Kindt help you?

  He was the first victim. The first beneficiary, albeit of a primitive version of the system.

  I don’t follow you.

  Ah, but someday perhaps—he had reached the door and buzzed—you will.

  I stood alone on the street for a few minutes. External agency, I thought. Primitive version. The air smelled of lentils and saffron. My friend Fish rode by.

  Incidentally, I like hunting capes. In fact, I decided I would like to have one. I told Mr. Kindt the next day how much I liked them, and he told me that he, too, liked hunting capes very much and that the namesake of his namesake had, in fact, once attempted to steal one from someone and had paid quite heavily.

  You have two namesakes?

  Don’t we all?

  Maybe technically. If you’re a king or something.

  Mr. Kindt said he liked this idea of kings and went on about it for some time. When he was done, I asked him how heavily the namesake of his namesake, or whatever, had paid.

  Think of lead and other troublingly dense elements and how authoritatively, once released, they fall, Mr. Kindt said, laughing, and adding a “dear young man,” and the conversation ended there, except that one of the next times I went over to Mr. Kindt’s he had a hunting cape to give me. Just like Cornelius’s. That’s the kind of friend he was. Anything, he loved to say, for a friend.

  Or for a fish, I once joked as we sat late one night over brandy.

  They like oxygen, Mr. Kindt, who was quite drunk, said, but of course are not fond of air. Still. They are like. But more graceful. Absolute and graceful. Imagine great silver flocks. Underwater birds with sharp, powerful wings.

  I had a dream about fish once during this period. In it, I was both fish and viewer of fish, and Mr. Kindt was a fish too. He swam up to me and said, you are not just any sort of fish, my dear boy, you are a herring. Then I was a herring on a laboratory table. The experiment was to see why it was that herring might die immediately upon leaving the water, a characteristic that, though long and widely believed to aict them, was never proved. Tulip—and this gave the dream a vaguely visionary quality—was presiding. She had a scalpel and was describing and making incisions. I could simultaneously see up into the room and down into the laboratory table. The interior of the table was shot through with dark red veins and shafts of blue minerals. Mr. Kindt was in there. He was a fish, probably like me a herring, in a black hat and hunting cape. I understood, in the way you do in dreams, that he was hiding. From Tulip. From all of us. He was trying to make one of his fins stretch up to his mouth so that he could indicate to me that I should shut up.

  I did. To no avail. Suddenly he was lying on the laboratory table, and Tulip was working on him and, like in the Rembrandt print he had up on his wall, people had gathered around. There was the murderer and there was Anthony, only in the dream he was Job again, and there was someone you don’t know because I haven’t mentioned him and there was the knockout, with a jagged red line around her neck. She was fully clothed in the dream. She was smiling and was very interested in the proceedings, as we all were, including Mr. Kindt. He was trying to look at what Tulip was doing but couldn’t, because he had something very wrong with his neck. I therefore took it upon myself to describe to him what was going on.

  Tulip, I told him, has now opened up your arm and is explaining to the audience, with the help of a diagram in an anatomy book, everything there is to know about it. Your arm is both hideous and beautiful, now that its interior is being seen, considered, set into categories, accorded its right and proper context. Tulip is not looking at you any longer. She is looking at the audience. The audience is looking at the anatomy book. She has produced some kind of a clamp and is holding up your hand. Falsification, Tulip now says, sits at the center of everything.

  Just as it did in the awful East Village kitchen, with its cracked, moldy baseboards, its smell of rancid lard and, possibly, leaking gas. The knockout was on the floor, supposedly unconscious. The two friends were moving like enormous crabs around me. Before long, they began to blur into bands of pale light. I stood there, hardly even breathing, for what seemed like ages, as if time, the part of it that corresponded to me, had stopped or slowed way down, while the part of it that corresponded to the rest of the room, including the contortionists and the knockout, had sped up, like in that episode of the original Star Trek where some crew members appear to be frozen and others are moving too quickly to be seen. Anyway, this strange, messy movement I had trouble fully grasping was happening around me and there I stood like a scorpion stuck in Lucite. Then time, the real murderer, started up again, and I could clearly see them and didn’t like what I saw, and I felt obliged to do something, so I said, good-bye, knockout! Good-bye, contortionists! Fuck all of you! I walked out the door, went back downstairs, and punched elegant or inelegant Cornelius in the mouth.

  No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. What I did was turn and lock the door behind me, pull my gloves on tighter, then say, so you want me to open the kitchen drawer and get out the knife?

  TWELVE

  Mr. Kindt loved a good cigar, and he would always, with impeccable courtesy, offer me one. Dutch Masters was the brand he preferred, and he didn’t mind if I chuckled about it like it was a joke. In fact, as we have seen, not only did he like for me to laugh about things, he insisted I do so. You have such a very pleasant laugh, it’s so rich and hearty, I find it invigorating, he would say. He was just about as quick with a compliment as he was with a cigar. Apparently I had nice manners and nice features and “fine, strong shoulders” and a nice way of holding a plastic-tipped Premium. Generally, if I was smoking alone, I smoked Merits, but in Mr. Kindt’s company it was cigars. Mr. Kindt thought very little indeed of cigarettes, “those miniature albino cigars,” “those blatant disease-carrying delivery systems for brand names.” There was no reason whatsoever, he said, to suck smoke all the way down into the lungs, which was the custom with cigarettes. The mouth, which held the tongue and the mechanisms of taste, was the appropriate receptacle. Its highly permeable membranes eagerly invited tobacco’s active compounds to enter the “inward-leading complex” of blood vessels they played host to. And of course, he added, cigars tasted much better. I wasn’t at all sure about this last point, especially when it came to Dutch Masters, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t argue either when Mr. Kindt would talk, with a funny little smile on his lips, about how pleasant it would be to die, if one had to, by having one’s throat annihilated by cancer, or lungs filled with fragrant tar. When one is in the early, enthusiastic throes of a friendship, one lets a great deal slide.

  Out in the hospital’s so-called garden, the air was either too warm or too cold, depending, often, on how we were feeling and, in my case, how recently I had been given meds. Always there were the sirens coming or going and the sound of sledgehammers and saws and earthmovers in the distance where they were removing rubble. Consequently, it was only in the late evening that you could hear birds or the occasional windblown tree. The temperature or noise level notwithstanding, there from time to time we would sit on one of the low concrete benches and puff and watch the sickly pigeons and Mr. Kindt would grin with his bad teeth, rub his forehead, and discourse. It was during one of these speeches that I learned that the herring population in the North Sea had more than once become quite devastated due to overfishing, and that one clear day many years before his misadventures with Fish Lines, before we had watched our program together, when he had rea
d about this devastation over a cup of coffee in his favorite Amsterdam haunt, he had burst into tears.

  Sadness builds like sediment with the kind of predictability that still manages to astonish, the kind that often ends by masking its original cause, he said. Years before that cup of coffee, I stood heartbroken in front of a fishmonger’s and watched his knife, guided as much by physical memory as by his blinking green eyes ringed with flecks of blood, destroy the animate integrity of his dead or merely dying charges.

  But you like to eat fish, I said. I haven’t seen you cry when you do that.

  Oh, I love to eat fish, of course, herring in particular. It is practically a sickness with me. It is perhaps because of this love, which I have had since childhood, that the whole question became so acute. You know the old adage, my boy: touch one part of the web and the whole thing quivers. I can clearly remember as a boy biting the stomach out of a tiny pickled sardine and thinking, but something large and awful will soon do the same to me. Most of us get over these little waking nightmares, but not I. At least not that one.

  It was in the garden, likewise, that I learned how to say “you fucking ball-bag” in Dutch, along with other little bits of terminology. It was pretty pleasant, really. When he wasn’t discoursing, Mr. Kindt was endlessly curious about me, and I found myself saying all sorts of things. I talked about my time on the street under the scaffolding on Great Jones and about my two cats that had become one and then none. A lot of what I talked about, of course, was Dr. Tulp. About the short row of silver pens she kept in her breast pocket. And about how her long cold fingers, in the process of going about their ministrations, would occasionally, I imagined, make unexplained movements across my chest. These movements would, later, when the ward had gone quiet and she had returned for a follow-up “consultation,” occasionally be accomplished with the help of one of her pens. The pen she would use would be dry but the marks it left would be wet. She would dig with her pen until there were neat rows of red trenches then she would lean very close and clean me up with large alcohol-soaked swabs.

  I don’t know why I imagine that last part, I told Mr. Kindt.

  I’m sure I don’t either, Henry, Mr. Kindt said. But we all have our little fantasies, our little gropings in the dark. Who knows what we find there? Who can say? I have groped in the dark and found my fingers around people’s throats and theirs, in turn, around mine. Who knows where it all leads?

  Also, I would tell him about my girlfriend, Carine. And about the French poets she loved so much and about her handsome vintage clothing.

  Carine was nothing like Dr. Tulp. For one thing she was not tall, for another she was French-ish. I once asked her about this “ish” thing when I was feeling grouchy, and she said she was French by descent and that she had studied French language and literature in school and had lived in France and was a Francophile and was completely and legitimately French-identified. I said that seemed a little stretched and a tad fake, and she, quite legitimately, kicked me hard under the table with her pointy vintage shoe.

  I did not study French in school. I did not study much at all in school. A few classics, a little mimicry, a little attitude, that’s about it. This was a sore point, at times, in our relationship.

  No, I have not read that, I would say.

  Well, do you want to read it? she would say.

  I’m not sure, I don’t know what it’s about, I would say.

  I just got done telling you, mon amour, I’ve been telling you about it for the past twenty minutes, she would say.

  Can you recap? I would say.

  No, she would say.

  Please, I would say.

  It’s about disgust and misogyny and the sexual ramifications of the 1968 student uprisings in France and the current impotence of the contemporary French novel, she would say.

  You’re just bragging, I would say.

  And she would say, you’re cute, but don’t be a dickhead.

  I would like to note again that during our sessions and when she came to see me in the ward, I became very fond of Dr. Tulp. I even took to affecting, both in Dr. Tulp’s presence and out of it, a slight Dutch accent. Even though Dr. Tulp, who had been in the States for some time, did not really have one. Actually, Dr. Tulp’s accent was Boston if it was anything. It wasn’t Boston enough to be comical, if Boston makes you, as it does me, laugh to hear in quantity; but there was something there that made you, when you heard it, think of lips being pulled back to expose a lot of white teeth. I have already mentioned my fantasy about Dr. Tulp carving my chest with her pen so I might as well note that there were moments when it occurred to me to imagine waking up one night with Dr. Tulp’s white teeth sunk deeply but not uncomfortably into my throat. I haven’t told you about my teeth yet. For now, let’s just say they could use a little servicing. As could, as I have said, Mr. Kindt’s. Mr. Kindt wasn’t big on the oral hygiene. Frankly, he was not big on much hygiene at all, but he did love a hot shower. Every day he would have one. I don’t say any soap was involved in the shower, or, rather, that I can confirm that there was soap involved, but it was hot. Once or twice when I was visiting him in his room, he asked me to hand him a towel. Once, he asked me to hand him a towel then sit down outside the shower. When I asked him why he wanted me to do this, he said he just wanted, at that moment, to know that I was near.

  I have not felt, he said, entirely myself today. Or rather it would perhaps be more accurate to say that today I have felt too much like myself, that my carefully acquired external layers have sloughed off, leaving my interior exposed.

  What does it feel like? I asked.

  Not at all good.

  Not at all good how?

  Quite terrible, you know.

  You mean like the big thing eating you.

  Well, yes. But also it is as if I had retracted, horribly, as if everything around me had begun to blur.

  I didn’t say anything.

  It has happened before. It can make me scream.

  He was standing, a small yellow form behind the semi-transparent shower curtain.

  Do you feel like screaming now? I said.

  It is never a question of feeling like it, he said. I just scream.

  In the meantime though, Mr. Kindt did not scream—he cried and breathed too heavily and said odd, occasionally corny things—and life in the hospital continued much as it had. I met twice a week with Dr. Tulp, who did not sink her teeth into my throat or carve my chest with her pen, but instead asked me questions about patterns of redundancy and potential or actual seams of discontent within, and the location of, my family, and I received nightly and sometimes daily meds and continued to steal items that I passed on to Job. I also read books suggested by Mr. Kindt, like part of a fat history of the Dutch East India company—basically a chronicle of brilliant greed and unvarnished corruption—which he left on my night table one morning, magazines that Job brought in for me, and things I put my hands on as I made my way around the hospital. Nothing I read though seemed as interesting as The Rings of Saturn, and I often pulled it out of my drawer and flipped through it. After I had read a page or two, I would lie back on my bed or go and lie down if I hadn’t been lying down already and look up at the ceiling and think vague, melodramatic, mostly borrowed thoughts about playing some key part in the Taiping Rebellion in China or helping to end the early-twentieth-century Congolese rubber trade or carrying on a doomed but sort of elegant love affair with the daughter of a vicar. If I was dozy, which I often was, these rarefied thoughts would shift ground, so that before long, instead of carrying the banner for the failing Chinese rebels or riding across the heath to deliver a bundle of roses under cover of dark, or landing at night to join the Irish separatists, I would be patrolling the ramparts of some besieged fortress culled from the fantasy novels of my childhood, brandishing an unbreakable blade, setting my jaw, and waiting for some hideous onslaught. Well, that’s stupid, but the reason I bring it up is that one afternoon just as the huge black arrows had begun to
fly, just as the screams and battle cries had begun to take over my skull, I opened my eyes and—in one of the developments that has slowly helped lead me to a better, though still imperfect, understanding of my position here—found myself looking at my aunt.

  THIRTEEN

  The morning after my first murder, Mr. Mancini, the manager of The Fidelity, where I had been staying since I left the hospital, knocked on my door and told me I had a phone call.

  Who is it? I said.

  Yeah, yeah, let me check with my secretary, shitface, he said, smiling.

  Since my arrival at his establishment, Mr. Mancini had called me shitface six times that I knew of, and once when I asked him if I could have an extra key to my room he had taken a baseball bat out from under his desk and smacked it against the wall. He also smiled constantly and really unpleasantly, and, even though I wanted to try very badly, he was too big to even imagine beating the shit out of.

  Actually, I had imagined beating the shit out of him several times. Each time, as I threw the last, devastating punch, aiming for his throat after I had worked over his midsection and face, I thought of previous imagined triumphs and said, who’s the shitface now?

  Anyway, after I had put some clothes on, I went down to the lobby, attempted to ignore Mr. Mancini, who had taken up position behind his desk, and picked up the greasy yellow phone that sat on a stack of old coin-collector magazines in the corner. Then I walked over to the Odessa Café on Tompkins Square and took a seat at the back and waited for the knockout to walk in.

  It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to break bread with someone you’ve murdered the night before, and while it had all been, to borrow and permute Anthony’s vocabulary, unpleasantly messy (basically I had fucked it up), continuing the acquaintance appealed greatly to me, not least because as I left, one of the contortionists had stuck two hundred dollars in my pocket with her foot.