The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  Contact, he said.

  I took a bite of cracker and paste.

  I’m not really much of a thief, I said.

  Well, it was very nice of you to return that book, but I did really mean for you to keep it. By that of course I mean do what you wished with it. There is an excellent market in New York for such things.

  So I heard.

  I had brought it in with me and set it back in its place beside a tall cranberry-colored glass on a cluttered desk in a corner of the room. I do not in any way pride myself on maintaining standards of social decorum, but it did seem like pushing it a little to take someone’s property, sell it, then go to his house for dinner. And over the course of the day, dinner with Mr. Kindt and, possibly, you see, with Tulip, had grown to seem quite appealing.

  Where’s Tulip?

  Oh, she’s around. She likes to wander, or nibble at things in the kitchen, or to lie down in the bedroom. She’s a great one for lying down.

  Mr. Kindt smiled.

  I smiled.

  Mr. Kindt took a bite of his own cracker and looked at me with his pretty little eyes.

  She tells me you recently got out of the hospital.

  I got hit by a truck. Broke a couple ribs and got banged up pretty nicely. I wasn’t in very good shape to start with. I’m better now.

  Tulip tells me you have some stitches.

  On my head, you want to see them?

  I started to lean forward and part my hair, but Mr. Kindt waved his hand and laughed.

  Oh, but that’s depressing, he said. Let’s not look at your scar. I feel like talking. Ask me a question to get me going, ask me a question about history.

  From the start, the idea of getting Mr. Kindt going struck me as vaguely alarming, but I try not to be, as a general principle, against alarming things. So with bits of cold paste coating the outer enamel of my teeth, I asked Mr. Kindt how he felt about, say, the purchase by the English of Manhattan from the Indians.

  Excellent, Henry, that’s an excellent question. It will allow me to speak about love and fish and history.

  He rubbed his hands together, closed his eyes, opened them, and said, first of all, it was not a purchase, it was a loving exchange. Loving, why? you will say. What sort of word is loving in this context? It is all wrong—couldn’t be more awful, or at the very, very least incorrect. But you see loving has many meanings. Loving is both the intricacy and the expanse. Loving is the tool that moves accurately through the flesh. Loving is the net that is moving forward and the sea that is contracting, the North Sea. Secondly, he said, leaning toward then away from me, it was the Dutch, not the English, who fucked over in such emphatically loving fashion the Manhattan Indians. It was the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam, who sailed their ships up and down the Noort Rivier, who traded in guilders, who swept patterns into the sand that covered their floors, who pined privately during the long hard winters for their land so far away across and below the sea.

  When he finished, we ate some more paste. Tulip had returned. She sat there, legs crossed, the lamplight loving away at her cheekbones.

  Now, you ask me a question, Tulip, Mr. Kindt said.

  Tulip blinked slowly, looked at me, then at Mr. Kindt.

  Not just yet, she said.

  Any old question, said Mr. Kindt.

  We’re still digesting your last answer, Aris, Tulip said.

  Is that right, my boy? said Mr. Kindt, looking at me.

  I nodded.

  It was intricate, I said.

  Ah yes, which part?

  The part about loving.

  Well of course love is intricate, is the most intricate, is practically a synonym for intricacy. Of course intricacy—and as he said this he looked at Tulip out of the corner of his eye—has other synonyms.

  Tulip leaned forward and took a cracker between two long white fingers.

  O.K., she said. What do you mean by intricacy?

  Ah, said Mr. Kindt. He grinned. He began to talk. He discussed the patterns followed by weavers, the “sinister” labyrinths of electricity and silicon that compose the microchips our culture “gobbles like salted peanuts.” While he talked he moved around a great deal in his seat and waved his white hands through the air. Tulip looked very steadily in his direction the whole time he was talking, but I couldn’t tell if she was listening or not. I knew I wasn’t listening, at least not for part of it. And not because I didn’t want to: I sort of did, I sort of liked it. It’s just that for a couple of minutes, in between Mr. Kindt’s discussing herring tissue and composite fibers and the putative chemical structure of evil acts, it all started to seem uncomfortably surreal—the paste, the broken-looking little guy who I’d seen naked the night before and who clearly liked to talk too much, the gorgeous woman sitting cross-legged on the couch in front of me, my presence there, possibly the codeine-enhanced painkillers I was still taking for my ribs—in a way that transcended the merely bizarre and actually started a couple of tiny alarm bells going off, and I had to fight back an urge to stand up and walk out of the room.

  Which is what I should have done, of course, right then, and might have done, except that for some reason they both laughed and I found myself laughing, even though I wasn’t sure what it was I was laughing about, and the tiny alarm bells stopped.

  My dear boy, what would you be prepared to do under the aegis of love? said Mr. Kindt.

  You mean in the same vein as what the Dutch so lovingly did to the Indians?

  I mean it, of course, however you wish to take it.

  I shrugged. I picked up something and put it in my mouth. I would do, you know, pretty much anything.

  Give us an example of this “anything” you speak of.

  You sure? I mean, there are a few different things that come to mind but they’re all pretty elaborate.

  We love elaborate, don’t we, Tulip?

  Tulip nodded.

  O.K., I said. I told them about a scenario I had often entertained as a kid, involving a Jules Verne–type submarine that would take me to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where I would disembark, in a special suit, and enter a grotto then a tunnel down which I would spelunk for miles, overcoming, as I went, multiple traps and numerous multilimbed ferocious-toothed guards, then pick or force the lock on the small iron door behind which my father was supposed to be kept, only he wouldn’t be there. This would mean I would have to find my father’s captor, force him, through awful means, including chopping one of his legs off, to tell me where my father was. He would tell me that my father was now being held on an off-world colony whose location was the highest secret. He would die laughing in my face. I would spend the next several years conducting an investigation that would take me all over the world in search of the secret to my father’s whereabouts. I would finally get the answer in a bar made out of a shipping container on one of Jupiter’s nastier moons. When I found my father, in a detention tower near the Sea of Tranquility, on Earth’s moon, he would put his hand on my cheek and say, I knew you would find me, boy. I would pick him up in my arms. At that moment, my father’s captor, mysteriously resurrected, would spring the trap he had been waiting to spring for years, locking both my father and me up together in the tower’s chamber. There we would sit together and wait with no hope of rescue for certain death. Some dark, end-of-the-galaxy sci-fi music would play in the background. We would be happy though. Together, with our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders or playing some game like Scrabble.

  There was a silence after I had finished speaking. Mr. Kindt handed me another cracker and momentarily placed one of his unsettlingly soft hands on my knee.

  My father died when I was ten, I said. He worked construction. Mostly housing, on Staten Island. I was raised by my aunt. It was a long time ago. He liked Scrabble.

  Of course, Mr. Kindt said.

  That wasn’t the happiest “anything” scenario I could have come up with.

  Happy, said Mr. Kindt. He made an exaggeratedly dismissive face and shrug
ged.

  What would you do, Tulip? I asked.

  I would do the same, of course, with the appropriate adjustments, she said. I might, for instance, go after my loved one, fight my way through the meanies, in a yellow submarine.

  Mr. Kindt smiled. And I would set off in a purple diving bell, he said. One should do anything, yes, my dears.

  The three of us sat quietly for a while then. It occurred to me that maybe this talk and cracker eating was all the dinner I was going to get, which was just fine with me. After all it isn’t every night you get to talk about love and intricacy and herring, much less substances and oceans and swept floors. The truth is, once I had stopped feeling for those few moments like I had to immediately vacate the premises, had stopped wondering what the fuck I was doing there and the alarm bells had fallen silent, it all started to seem kind of cozy—the crackers, the anything scenarios, Tulip, Mr. Kindt, me.

  At some point a bottle of brandy was brought out. Glasses were poured. Refilled.

  Mr. Kindt spoke some more—about smoke and history. Looking in my direction, he said nice things about those we have lost, those who have vanished like so much dew on the oak leaves or something. At this I started to feel guilty and told him that in fact my father, as far as I knew, was still very much alive, that he had been and probably still was a construction worker, but that he had not died when I was ten. Until he had left for good he had come home most nights smelling of sweat and concrete and, after arguing with his sister, my aunt, who had taken over when my mother left not too long after I was born, had watched with me.

  Ah well, the truth, Mr. Kindt said, in much the same way he had said “happy.”

  It was a good story, Tulip said.

  Involving meanies, I said.

  The best kind, my dear boy, Mr. Kindt said.

  We settled into our chairs. The brandy took hold and the lights seemed to dim. Several weeks went by.

  SIX

  In my room there was one large window and across the window was what I took to be a bird net, but the whole time I was there I never saw a bird go by. Once in a while I saw balloons though. Floating up past the window, up past the black net. It wasn’t hard to imagine where they came from, those metallic pink, blue, and yellow, I think, balloons: a small man next to a helium tank. He would have dozens of balloons, and it was far from inconceivable that occasionally after handing one to a child or a friend of a patient, even very carefully, it would slip free. The small man would look up at the sky then at his client then reach for another balloon. On the house, of course. That night, when he got home, his wife, dressed in worn high heels and holding a plastic tumbler, would ask him how he had done. It would take him a while, maybe a swallow or two of his wife’s drink, before he admitted that he had been “forced” to do another two-for-one, which had cut into the day’s profits. She would scold him halfheartedly, then fix him a drink, ask him to describe the child in question, and tell him she would have done the same. This balloon salesman scenario, which was a little different each time it came to me, was the explanation I settled on, although I was never able to confirm it. At any rate, the sight of the balloons put me in mind of my earlier days, specifically the fact that it used to please me greatly as a child, as I suppose it pleased many others, to ingest the helium of balloons and to talk. It used to please me, as it might have those many others, to say, fuck you, Mississippi. Try it and you will see why. I remember several times being disappointed that ingesting helium did not, in addition to making my voice sound so interesting, render me buoyant. Helium did, I suppose you could argue, provide me with a cast for my left arm that several of my fellow fifth graders signed and drew on with brightly colored markers. One of these illustrations was of what its artist, one Eva Grace Cotrero, explained was a moon lamp, a device she was working on that was supposed to promote healing by harnessing moonbeams. There was also a stick-figure drawing of Conan waving his Cimmerian steel sword, but it was much more difficult, because of its placement, to see. My friends wanted to know what it was like to jump off a shed roof. I told them what the doctor had told me: that it was like being a coconut and cracking your shell.

  I saw a guy really crack his shell once. West Twenty-second Street. Ninth floor. Guy just looked both ways and jumped. No yelling. Didn’t even kick his feet. Just fell. Big coconut. I told Job, the night nurse, that I had heard him hit the ground.

  Job said, yeah?

  Yeah, I said.

  Only this wasn’t Job. This was the doctor.

  Hello, Doctor, I said.

  How are you feeling today? asked the doctor.

  Just fucking fine, I said.

  The doctor was young and Dutch and didn’t mind if I swore. At least up to a point and depending on the context. From Amsterdam she was. Apparently she had a green card and was just months away from getting naturalized.

  You know, a professional degree and connections, she said.

  That still works even in this climate of international mistrust and general unproductive uncertainty? I said.

  Apparently, she said.

  She also said things like, no, your case does not trouble me at all, and, yes, I have had experience with similar cases, and, don’t worry, you are progressing very, very nicely.

  I don’t want to progress, I said.

  It’s not productive to speak that way, Henry, she said.

  She was tall and skinny and had blond hair pulled back up over her ears. They were nice ears. I used to mainly focus on them when she would come in. They were very small and looked like little curled-up hands, like what you see sometimes in reproductions of those in utero sonograms. Sometimes I was just lying there and wasn’t in any state to do much of anything, and sometimes the doctor would lean over me to do something and then I could see her ears up close. Once I tried to reach up and touch one. Or thought I did. It danced and spun just out of reach of the hand I thought I was holding up to it. She had excellent teeth, too. I told Job this. Job concurred. He said that yes the doctor did have nice fresh-looking choppers, and nice pink gums for that matter. She was one healthy-looking customer. Looked like she could take apart a couple of nice raw steaks without burping. Like she could really rip them up. It was little wonder they were letting her stay.

  We then talked for a time about teeth and gums. Mainly his and mine.

  I won’t show you mine, I said.

  I’ll pull back your lips and look after you’ve had your meds and you’re asleep, he said. Do you want to sleep now?

  Are you going to pull my lips back and look?

  Yes.

  I thought about the morphine hitting my system, about following it off down into the orange-colored depths, about going deliciously, temporarily blank.

  O.K., hit me, I said.

  Job hit me. Nice and hard.

  I’m not sure how long I was initially scheduled to spend in the hospital, but I am now in a position to affirm that anything approximating a reasonable interval has long since elapsed. It is possible that relevant information was provided to me at some point and that I may well have it somewhere, maybe over on the shelf in the little armoire they’ve given me, but if it’s there I don’t know what it says. I do know, as I’ve mentioned, that time has passed and that I often, after receiving an injection, after the appealing aforementioned heat and blankness, dream. Many dreams—most dull, some not, a few of which recur. In one of them, which sometimes follows the nasty dream involving the cabdriver, I suddenly wake and the room, which is my room, is filled with wind and the wind is talking and what it is saying is not nice. The wind is not nice, and it howls around me, and talks and whispers, and I am on my bed awake and can’t move. Or I am standing, say, in the center of the kitchen, and I can’t move and there is no wind, but there is something there, something that doesn’t like me. But mainly I am flat on my back in my bed, and I am awake and can’t move, and there is the wind. There is the wind, and it talks and I can’t move and I am flat on my back in bed. It is cold, and I am frighten
ed. Sick.

  In the meantime, anyway, when I wasn’t dozing deep in my fine hospital pillows, which I did a lot, or being injected by Job or one of his colleagues, I watched, perused back issues of National Geographic and Scientific American, and picked through some of the books that floated around the waiting rooms. Most of them were standard mystery/thriller/romance fare that left me pretty cold. One, though, was a book of stories about a character with an unpronounceable name who gets up to all kinds of fascinating adventures in the far reaches of the galaxy or on the earth before dinosaurs had set up their shop or on the moon when it was still supposedly possible to make a day trip there. These stories reminded me of my interest, when I was a child, in telescopes, and of peering through them—even when they were broken, for example in old junk shops, or had their caps still on in the fancy stores—at whatever night sky full of dazzling lights and shimmering creatures that I could conjure up in my mind. Another book that I did more than pick through was a sad, strangely appealing narrative written by an author of the Germanic persuasion. My interest in this one can likely be attributed to the narrator’s bizarre interests and the highly tenuous quality of the causalities he implied. On one half page, for example, a piece of silk would be torn and on the next a whole forest would be knocked down. Also, the narrator was always being hospitalized or talking about other people who were and things were just generally going to pieces. My favorite section of the book was about beautiful gold and ruby Chinese dragons, how when they rolled over, deep within the earth, seas went dry and mountains crumbled. I told Job about this part, then read it to him, and he said, yeah, and looked out the window, and said, I get that.

  Once or twice, in the early days, they brought injured fire- and policemen into the hospital for treatment and cheers went up. I did not see these people being brought in, just extrapolated them from the cheering once I had been told, the first time, what the cheering was about. Everyone of course cheered fire- and policemen in those early days, even if their injuries were not directly related to the events downtown. I cheered them too, from my bed, even deep within the windy vagaries of my evening morphine, probably even, several times, when there were none of them around. But mainly, in the hospital, it was TV and magazines and books and consultations and medications. I.e., routine. It was this routine, and my growing familiarity with the staff and their patterns of movement, and the fact that one of the cabinets down the hall had a faulty lock on it for a short period of time, that eventually allowed me to steal a few things that I was able, through Job, to sell.