The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  You have caught glimpses at other times. Once was in a puddle on the asphalt one clear night after a long rain. You were walking along First Avenue, right above Forty-second, and had just gotten smacked by the flower truck, and you were on your hands and knees leaning over and there it was, or there you were, in those vast lands of the other city, the other New York, pale and scary, but not for long. Another time, earlier, you got a better look. This is how you know how big it is. This was when you still lived on the Lower East Side, not too far from the apartment you were about to lose, and you were getting the shit beaten out of you for having impolitely refused someone with bulging arm muscles and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth a sip of your Coke. Beaten so bad you had broken bones in your face and suffered partial memory loss and could only suppose what had happened after you had said, fuck no. So suppose you did. He had left you there with a screwdriver (fortunately only its butt was used) lying by your face—this became, in your imaginings: shot you up with a gat; chopped your shit with an ax; curbed you; stuck a grenade in your mouth; propped you up against a wall and smashed the back of a Buick into you; carried you up on top of one of the tenements and dropped you; cut your throat; poured gas on you and lit it; dragged you behind a lowrider; did something with a corkscrew; did something with a bat. You actually—and here your memory is unimpaired—spoke to yourself this time. You said to yourself, O.K., fine, all right, that’s it, good-bye now, time to vanish, let’s cruise. And you did. You left and wandered both alone and in company, walked arm in arm with yourself and with a couple million others, up and down the windy, gleaming streets of the necropolis, New York number two.

  Little windows that opened onto this New York number two were of course omnipresent in the ward. Some days, when I didn’t have a job to pull and I had gotten tired of reading or watching TV or waiting to see whether Dr. Tulp would stop by, I would grab Mr. Kindt and we would go take a look at people who, so it seemed, were dying. Mr. Kindt, who in this way was still the same old Mr. Kindt, despite the shift in our relationship, very much liked my theory of the two New Yorks, which he calculated became a dizzying sixteen million New Yorks if there was one of each for each New Yorker. I told him I wasn’t sure if there was, in fact, a complementary New York for each of its inhabitants, or if it was just the pair of them, one size fits all and everyone on fucking top of each other in both. He said that either way, because he had no desire to leave New York under any circumstances, he found the concept of being ravished from one New York into another extremely comforting and it was never any trouble to get him to come along to look at people preparing to make the move. Sometimes, he was the one who suggested we go down and talk to the terminal cases on the second floor or prowl around in the critical wards, where, though this didn’t matter when Mr. Kindt was with me, we weren’t supposed to be. In fact, the duty nurses just looked at us without much interest and let us pass.

  Certain arrangements have been made, Henry, not to worry, he said once when I wondered aloud about this.

  So have certain arrangements been made for when I go closet shopping for resaleable items? I asked.

  No, Henry, only so many arrangements of this sort are possible. On those occasions you will be on your own.

  After we had returned—from talking, say, to a ninety-seven-year-old woman with a remarkably malignant skin cancer who had laughed out loud at the prospect of, as she put it, moving along, or from standing in the doorway of the burn unit and listening to the rise and fall of the respirators—we would sit together in one of our rooms and smoke and I would talk about the other New York and he would talk about the other Leiden and the other Amsterdam and the other Delft.

  The one contains the other, I said.

  The larger the smaller, or is it the other way around?

  I don’t know.

  It is nevertheless a lovely notion, he said. All cities must be wrapped in a similar doubling embrace.

  And all people, I said.

  Yes, Henry, of course, we are all of us wrapped in the darkened shadows of our afterselves.

  Which is where I would sit after Mr. Kindt left and I was alone again—with my shadow wrapped tightly around me, my robe and hands stinking of cigar smoke. I would sit and think about what we had both said and what we had seen earlier as we walked around. I would think about the other New York, with its long pulsing tunnels and skyscrapers made of helium and rods of light, or about the other Amsterdam, with its silver canals and velvet walls and tiny diamond bells.

  One night after I had spent some time thinking I tried to pay a permanent visit to New York number two, but it didn’t work. Despite what I thought was a pretty good effort. I didn’t go anywhere.

  I explained afterward to Dr. Tulp about the shadow surrounding me and also, for that matter, her.

  You’re Dutch, I said. You could probably go to some Dutch town. Eat good cheese. Paddle down the canals.

  I’m not Dutch, Henry, Dr. Tulp said. And this idea of yours is stupid.

  She ordered another adjustment to my meds and gave instructions that I wasn’t to receive any visitors, instructions that, at least in the case of Mr. Kindt, weren’t followed. He came the very first night carrying a cracker with a little bit of herring on it and said, eat, Henry, eat something and you will feel better.

  It’s the blue devil, I said.

  It’s too much talk and thinking about the great black yonder, Mr. Kindt said.

  I meant you, you’re the blue devil, I said.

  Ah, yes.

  The blue devil and the fish. Did I ever tell you about my dream where you were a fish, a herring in a black hat and hunting cape?

  Mr. Kindt looked at me. He smiled. That’s a funny dream, Henry, he said. When did you dream that?

  When did you swim the length of Lake Otsego?

  I don’t follow.

  Don’t you?

  I’m your friend, Henry. Your best friend. It’s me. Aris.

  That’s a nice name, very nice. How did you come by it?

  Mr. Kindt’s smile, which had been holding steady, became its reverse.

  I’m afraid of a sudden I find you a touch disagreeable, my boy, he said.

  Well, you can bet you’re not the first person to feel that way. Usually it’s more than a touch. Can you even swim?

  You should get back on your feet, Henry, he said, get some exercise, stop thinking so much, do that job.

  I asked a question. How about an answer? I repeat, can you swim?

  No. I can’t. I never learned. Why are you asking me these questions?

  I told him the truth, which was that I didn’t know. They had just come to me. Had seemed important. Especially in the context of the shift that had occurred in our relationship.

  Well, no doubt they are important. But now how about that job?

  “That job” was related to some ampoules of pharmaceutical speed that Mr. Kindt had arranged for me to acquire. They were six hallways, two elevators, and a picked lock away.

  I don’t think I want to do it this time, Mr. Kindt, I said.

  Ah, but you must, Henry. We must. After all, the window of opportunity is fast closing. And there are individuals involved who might turn their attention elsewhere if the desired items are not expeditiously secured.

  Why can’t you do it, you were a thief once, right?

  A very long time ago I was a very bad thief.

  So?

  Mr. Kindt, who had been pacing back and forth, stopped and pointed his cracker at me.

  In addition to being disagreeable, you seem, Henry, if perhaps you won’t mind my saying so, somewhat less than grateful at the opportunity, the very bright conduit of possibility, that’s been presented to you. I don’t know what all this is about my name and swimming, but I am speaking of business, of transaction, and, more important, of obligation.

  I didn’t say anything. The unpleasant look I had seen in the hallway when he had broached the subject of stepping in for Job was back with a vengeance, and I didn�
��t like the look of it at all. But I felt tired and my head hurt. And I was sad that things, which I thought had gone back to the way they were, definitely seemed to have transformed.

  Please go away, I said.

  Mr. Kindt stood there, indecisive, as if he wanted to keep haranguing me or maybe cut my throat, but then, although the hard look that had come into his eyes didn’t entirely leave, it did soften, and his jaw relaxed, and he said, all right, my boy, yes, I can see you are tired, we’ll talk later.

  He came toward me with his herring-laden cracker, but I shook my head. He shrugged, put it into his mouth, and turned toward the door.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was Tulip who told me who my next victim would be. It was near the end of a long night that started with a pleasant dinner at Mr. Kindt’s apartment. There were no special guests that evening—just me and Tulip—and I had already, so to speak, killed (the accountant I had chloroformed and relieved of his documents) and talked about it, meaning I had nothing better to do after dinner than go back to The Fidelity and mutter to myself, the way my aunt used to do, and/or chew on the walls. So when Mr. Kindt, who for some time, under the guise of telling us about one of his early jobs in Cooperstown, had been holding forth on the subject of weaving and about the melancholy from which, as it is well-known, weavers have a tendency to suffer, all of a sudden said, wouldn’t it be lovely if the two of you spent some time together, perhaps this very night, after dinner, I very quickly said, yes.

  Not that, under any circumstances, I would have said no.

  What do you think, Tulip? said Mr. Kindt.

  Why not? Tulip said.

  Then it’s settled. Straight after dinner. Or after dinner and a game. Actually, let’s start the game right now, while we finish. That way the two of you can depart all the more quickly.

  The sooner the better as far as I was concerned, and Tulip was agreeable, so I went to get the game board. There wasn’t any reason to ask which game Mr. Kindt wanted to play. There was only one in the apartment—Operation—and we played it frequently. Tulip had brought it home with her one evening early in the fall and when Mr. Kindt had seen what it was he had clapped his hands and squealed with delight. Operation, for those of you who missed out, is a game where the playing board is a man’s body. The point is to remove the bones and organs without hurting the guy too much. You can tell you are hurting him when, in trying to remove one of the bones or organs from its narrow metal receptacle with a pair of metal tweezers, you touch the side and a buzzer goes off and the guy’s big red nose lights up. The bones and organs have names like bread basket, broken heart, etc. It’s fairly asinine. When we would play and the buzzer would go off, Mr. Kindt would giggle. The more the buzzer went off and the guy’s nose lit up, the more Mr. Kindt would giggle. Tulip, with those long deft fingers, was the best at it and usually ended up with most of the organs. Mr. Kindt was easily the worst.

  It was clear, in fact, that the whole thing for him was about the buzzer and the nose and making himself giggle.

  Anyway, asinine or not, we started playing and pretty soon were all laughing in between bites of boiled vegetables and beef. I tried and failed three times to get the bread basket and Tulip tried and, surprisingly, failed to get the broken heart. Mr. Kindt said Tulip should keep trying to get the heart, and when she did on the next turn he clapped, whistled, pushed his chair back from the table, and did a little dance that concluded with the removal of his shirt.

  Wow, I said.

  Impressive, isn’t it, Tulip said.

  Mr. Kindt’s chest, bare apart from the wires attached to it the last time I had seen it, was now speckled with tattoos.

  At his suggestion, I inspected them and while I did so he pointed at the game board and then at his own chest, stomach, and lungs, and I concluded that, yes, they had been very skillfully (or, as Mr. Kindt put it, “very charmingly”) done.

  Tulip’s work, said Mr. Kindt.

  I gathered, I said.

  All the body parts along with their receptacles from the board had been tattooed onto Mr. Kindt’s torso.

  My legs too, said Mr. Kindt. He said he had a bright red nose he could put on if I wanted to get the whole picture, the entire ensemble, but I said I thought I had the whole picture and that it was pretty cool.

  Do you truly think it is cool? said Mr. Kindt.

  Yes, I do, I said.

  I am glad, my boy, I am very glad. Perhaps one of these evenings the two of you could use me as the board.

  Mr. Kindt giggled.

  I’d like to get a tattoo, I said.

  I’ll give you one tonight, Tulip said.

  We ate and played a little more and talked about this and that. Mr. Kindt, who had calmed down, though he hadn’t put his shirt back on, said he still felt like talking and asked if we wouldn’t, after all, mind postponing our departure a touch longer. We said that we wouldn’t, of course, and that he should talk as much as he wanted to, so he did. He started with combustion, positing it as the hidden principle behind nearly all human endeavor, which led to a discussion of furnaces and iron factories and forest fires. He then related an interesting anecdote about a certain saint, Sebold, who was ascribed the extravagance of having made icicles burn, citing this as an example of the extremes to which we, as a species, will go to separate ourselves from cold and from things lurking and from dark.

  Incidentally, when it is my own time, he said, I should like to be cremated, not buried. The prospect of slowly dissolving beneath the cold, so to speak, clay strikes me as more than mildly alarming. Cremation is very nearly as ancient a farewell ritual as burial and is infinitely brighter. If you think of it, you might throw some cedar wood or other aromatic onto the pyre.

  Mr. Kindt then spoke a little about Cornelius and about the success of his business and about the important role I had played in ensuring that success. My excellent work that very evening with the accountant—its extraordinary authenticity—was a prime example.

  I must confess that I have been very lucky in my business dealings, perhaps because I tend to endorse interesting projects like this one, he said. I do not know how much longer the market for a service like Cornelius’s will be there, but it has already paid, and handsomely, for itself. Mr. Kindt then noted the positive impact the service had had on my life. Not least because I had been presented with an opportunity and had grabbed it. The opportunity had come out of the blue and I had at first gotten involved out of friendship, but in his opinion that in no way undercut the significance of the gesture.

  It is simply a matter of stepping forward, he said. A moment arrives and we step forward. Of course there is circumstance but the circumstance is ultimately unimportant. It is the stepping-forward that matters. Just a step and we are there. Don’t you think this is so, Henry?

  I nodded slowly to show that I wasn’t quite with him.

  I’m simply speaking, dear boy, of assertion in its most elemental form. The organism, engaged in drifting, alters its course. It steps forward. What happens afterward is necessarily adjusted. I stepped forward on the shore of Lake Otsego one night many years ago.

  You mean you swam forward.

  Mr. Kindt laughed. Of course, he said. There was a moment and I slipped into it. The years, which were to unfurl otherwise, perhaps much less fruitfully, were obliged by my action that night to alter their trajectory.

  And Cornelius’s?

  Yes, Cornelius’s too. Cornelius was very helpful, in fact, in facilitating the execution of my move forward.

  You mean he paid up after you won the bet?

  Is that what you mean, Aris? said Tulip, who had been sitting quietly with her legs pulled up to her chest.

  Mr. Kindt shook his head.

  But he was there, I said.

  Oh yes, he was there.

  I asked Cornelius about it the other day and he said something about how nice your name was.

  Ah? Well, it is a nice name, isn’t it. Rich in consonants and the nimblest, most crystalline
vowel. I have often wondered what my namesake thought of it.

  Tell us about the first Aris Kindt, Tulip said.

  There isn’t terribly much to tell. He has been killed and is lying in the middle of his own misery.