by Laird Hunt
He says, Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments. In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation and obscurity their protection: If they dyed by violent hands, and were thrust into their Urnes, these bones become considerable, and some old Philosophers would honour them, whose souls they conceived most pure, which were thus snatched from their bodies; and to retain a stranger propension unto them whereas they weariedly left a languishing corps, and with fain desires of re-union. If they fell by long and aged decay, yet wrapt up in the bundle of time, they fall into indistinction, and make but one blot with Infants.
While the murderer is talking, Mr. Kindt nods, and says, lovely, and closes his eyes, and you find yourself thinking of someone you once knew, and how she listened to poetry. This person, whom you once knew very well it seemed, listened with her eyes half shut and her small, dark hands curled around a drink at a table lost in the smoke of the bar. You shake your head. You look at Tulip. She is tall, exquisite. Her fingers are long. You think of the knockout. You think, I should have taken a number. You stop thinking. The murderer keeps talking, and your own eyes close, and the room revolves around you, and the murderer says, If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death; our life is a sad composition, and you open your eyes and the murderer is still looking at you, and you think, the composition is sad, it is very sad, yes, it is sad, says Mr. Kindt, from somewhere far away, and the murderer, in the most tender voice, continues speaking to you.
TEN
A polar bear can smell a rotting carcass from ten miles away. Not being a polar bear or anything else with the intuitive equivalent of an exceptional olfactory apparatus, it stands to reason that I can’t. So I shouldn’t feel bad. About not getting it. Right.
I know something about polar bears because once Mr. Kindt, who came often in his white slippers and light-blue gown after that first night to visit, and who proved at first to be very kind, very sweet, and more than a little amusing, watched a program on them with me. He came into my room, as he usually did, after dark, and slipped under my covers, and on the television set that hangs so firmly suspended above my bed by its mechanical arm, we watched polar bears swim and hunt and fight. We watched polar bears ride walruses, trying to kill them, hurting them terribly and being hurt terribly in return, and we watched polar bears carefully lick their tiny cubs. We watched polar bears bark impressively at Arctic foxes that came too close, and we watched them, presumably starving, wander with who knows what in their minds far out over the ice. We also watched them swimming both from above the surface of the water and from below. From below you could see the handsome reflection of the white bears on the water’s surface, so that it seemed they were swimming, simultaneously, in two places—one as lovely and as ghostly as the other. We watched and watched, wishing, we agreed, that the program would never end. At one point, Mr. Kindt made some sort of a high-pitched growling sound. I did the same. Neither of us sounded remotely bearlike. We sounded more like the plump young seals that polar bears love so much to eat. We laughed a great deal at this and nudged at each other with our elbows. Mr. Kindt flipped over on all fours and cut capers on the bed. I’m a polar bear hunting its prey, he said. I laughed. He did the growl and bit my ankle through the covers. He bit so hard it made my eyes water and left marks. I didn’t want to say anything to spoil our fun so I did a little writhing and groaning and laughed with him when he let go. In short, it was the sort of program we enjoyed. Nature or history. We also liked programs about economic and cultural issues, although such programs sometimes proved to be too much for Mr. Kindt. After we watched a documentary about the difficulties of the North Sea fishing industries, which largely focused on the age-old trials and tribulations of herring fishermen and the shiny little herring itself, for example, I asked Job to bring me a box of tissues to keep by my bed.
Get a fucking box of tissues yourself, Job said.
Mr. Kindt was very delicate with his tissues, dabbing carefully at his eyes and softly blowing his nose, always folding the tissue at least twice after he had used it before throwing it away. I am not sure why it appealed to me to lie or sit next to this fastidious old gentleman who was capable at one moment of biting my ankle and the next of breaking down into tears, most energetically, as it occurred, about fish, most pronouncedly when they were filmed lying on the docks in great, rotting piles. Maybe it was because he cried and blew his nose without making a sound, or because he seemed to weigh nothing as he lay there beside me, or because he was so short and awkwardly built and made his remarks in overlong sentences, or because, let’s face it, he was so funny-looking, like two of those inflatable punch dolls glued together at the bottom so that instead of springing back up when they’re hit they just roll around on the floor.
During his early days in the city, he told me when I asked him about his breakdown during the herring program, he had been adversely affected by a stint as a driver for a company called Fish Lines Quality Frozen Products, which had involved both loading and unloading “the endless boxes of mangled, frozen, breaded fish corpses,” all of them destined for undistinguished fates on the more or less miserable shelves of second-tier outer-borough grocery stores. I giggled a little when he said the last part. He patted my hand and said that while he hadn’t meant his comment to be humorous, he could understand how it might seem so. Especially when morphine was involved. In truth, he said, when he cast his mind back to those unpleasant days, the image that came to him—of his sweaty, dirty, scowling face crowned by an oversized, moldy Fish Lines delivery driver hat and of his hands completely lost in an enormous pair of vile-smelling Fish Lines insulated gloves—made him smile. When I asked him what had prompted him to take the job in the first place, he said he had accepted the position, which he had kept for far too long, (1) because Fish Lines, as everyone in those days knew, had once stood for quality and freshness in aquatic comestibles and (2) in order to put something in the purse that was growing only fitfully larger through his efforts as a thief.
What kind of things did you steal? I asked him.
Oh, this and that, he said.
Any capes? Any copper coins?
Mr. Kindt raised an eyebrow and smiled.
So you were listening to me that night.
You still haven’t gotten me that reproduction.
That’s very true, Henry. But at any rate, that sort of thing, capes and cows and whatnot, was much, much earlier.
All right, I said.
(3), he said, one of his personal eccentricities was a life-long love of presenting himself in different guises. He had, and the thought now instilled in him both amusement and disgust, admired from afar the look of the Fish Lines drivers as they shepherded their frozen charges around the outer boroughs in their long-since-vanished silver trucks.
Little did I know, he said, that slipping into that uniform would turn me into such a caricature, such a clown. Or that dealing every day in frozen, rumpled boxes of mashed fish products would fill me with such horror.
I used to steal wallets at work, I said.
And? he said.
And I got caught. I’m better at it now.
I’m sure you are. He tapped my knee once or twice then pulled what looked like a cracker out of the pocket of his robe and put it into his mouth. He chewed a little, swallowed, then looked out the window.
There is some sort of netting out there, he said.
I know.
He looked back at me and shrugged.
I once stole a box of the foul product I was meant to deliver to a family restaurant called Knudsen’s on Staten Island, he said. I took it home, opened it, gazed for a time at the half-thawed oily mess, tried to imagine the wads of white flesh I held in my hand back into the sleek bodies they had come from, failed, and flushed the contents down the toilet.
Back into the water, I said.
A mockery of water.
Knudsen’s called and I was asked to leave Fish Lines the next day. I sent the president of the company a letter reminding him that Fish Lines had once dealt only in the freshest of fish and scolding him for trucking in such shoddy, indeed degrading, merchandise. He wrote me back that he was a businessman and that business was good and that I was just “a bowl of sour soup some old lady stuck her foot in,” end of story. Imagine! And, yes, go ahead and laugh.
Mr. Kindt’s other eccentricities included a love of country-and-western music. In particular, he liked what he called “the darkly crackling voice of Hank Williams and the gravelly ballads of Johnny Cash.” Often, when he came to visit me, he would bring a little tape deck along with him. If there was nothing we cared to watch on TV, he would set the tape deck by my bed and we would listen. Sometimes, when I wasn’t feeling too well, he would leave the tape deck behind, and it is true that listening to Johnny Cash singing through the rags and dust and years in his throat about falling into rings of fire and Hank Williams telling stories about steam engines and lonely miles of track was somehow comforting.
Well, maybe not comforting. Or anyway not always comforting. Recently when Mr. Kindt has lent me his tape deck, there has been precious little comfort in these tapes for me. One Hank Williams song in particular makes for difficult listening. In it, he asks if you think that when your time comes you will be ready to go, and if you think that once you are dead and are under the cold clay you will be satisfied with what you have done and who you have been. And, such unpleasant questions aside, he calls shadows “shadders,” and the “shadders” creep, and if you sit there listening to the song alone, which is what I’ve been doing these last few nights, even right this second, and there are strange lights flashing around you, there are bars on the windows and strangers passing in the corridors, there are wires, a rotting carcass you couldn’t smell before it really started to stink, an oily box filled with mashed fish, you are thinking too much, you always think too much, if all that, well then, basically, shit.
ELEVEN
Let’s take a walk, kid, says the murderer whose name, he tells me as we’re leaving Mr. Kindt’s building, is Cornelius.
Nice to meet you, Cornelius, I say.
Yeah, sure, kid, sure, this way.
“This way” is up Avenue B for a while, past the curving lanes of the park, past the restaurants and shops and brightly lit tenements, past Tenth and Eleventh, with their relatively quaint buildings and spindly trees, then over to Avenue A. Cornelius walks fast. Cornelius is dressed a little shabbily, and he’s a little hunched over and fat. On some nights in the East Village everyone is fat. We passed this fat guy. We passed this fat gal. We passed a pickle shop window and I caught a piece of our reflection and, yes, no question, I’m a little fat too.
I was fatter than the average as a kid. My aunt, who was a very nice woman, my God, she was nice—especially when she would smack me with the spoon—used to refer to me as husky. Boy, you’re husky, she would say. Then she would smack me. I later gathered that she had gotten hold of husky from a commercial for young boys’ jeans. Young boys with slow metabolisms, who had indulged too frequently on Big Macs and double cheeseburgers and Twinkies and Mars Bars and large vanilla Tyrols were husky. To tell the truth, husky’s probably not a bad way to describe me now.
So there we are, husky Henry and fat Cornelius walking up Avenue, past the local denizens, with their somber eye shadow and faux fur and polyester pants and nonprescription nerd glasses and cell phones and gas masks.
Where are we going, Mr. Murderer? I say.
Nowhere, shut up, Henry, we’re here, don’t be a motormouth, he says.
A motormouth? I say.
He turns into a doorway next to an unlit faded dry cleaner’s, buzzes, tells me to wait, and goes in.
A couple of cabs hum by, then a Mustang painted up to look like the Mexican flag and a cyclist wearing a black helmet and goggles and dark-green socks. It takes me a second to realize that this cyclist is my old friend Fish. I don’t call out to him. He probably wouldn’t stop anyway. I owed him money for too long and obliged him to bang on my door until I came out and, in lieu of payment, let him stagger off with my TV. Fish used to work as a copy editor at a short-lived golf magazine based in midtown. We both lost our jobs around the same time, both slid around the same time, the difference being that Fish slid voluntarily and now lives, by choice, in an unusual squat situation and rides around the East Village in his goggles.
I do a little near-silent whistling. I register that I’m whistling ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” and stop. I don’t really, I think, want anyone to do any such thing. An old man in one of those colorless zip-up jackets and a beat-up porkpie takes a long time to walk by me. I nod at him. He does not look at me, does not, in fact, seem to see me. A dollop of street light falls onto his face. I can smell lentils, saffron, burnt plastic. My mind follows him home, where I imagine him unlocking a door, pulling it open, stepping in, clearing his throat, and calling out an unreciprocated greeting into the darkness. Time is not our friend, I think. I start whistling again. ABBA again. After about five minutes, Cornelius is back.
All right, good to go, he says, handing me a key.
Good to go in what way exactly?
You’ll see, just get up there, it’s on the fourth floor.
I look at him.
He frowns at me.
You’re Mr. Kindt’s buddy, right?
Right.
So why are we still standing here talking?
He wants me to do this? This specifically?
Let’s just say he thought you might enjoy doing, yes, this.
O.K., but enjoy doing what? I’m supposed to go up there and murder someone?
Apartment 4A, lock sticks a little, you got gloves? Put them on and go the fuck up.
It was one of those East Village buildings that hadn’t been fixed up and would likely see a wrecking ball before long. The stairwell was steep and dirty and narrow and badly lit and poorly painted and there were deep cracks at the base of its walls. High-pitched, unhappy sounds came out of a couple of the graffiti-covered doors. As Cornelius had said, the lock did stick but not too badly. I took a deep breath, bit down on my tongue, exhaled, and went in. And while in the wake of my conversation with Anthony I was expecting to come face-to-face with something strange, possibly exciting, more probably unpleasant, it certainly wasn’t that. That was the knockout, who was apparently, literally, knocked out. Lying on the kitchen linoleum wearing nothing but a sign on her stomach that read, when I got close enough to kind-of inspect her and read it, KILL ME.
Yeah right, hah, hah, KILL ME, I thought.
But just then a door opened and the fraternal twins from dinner came out. I can’t even describe what it was they were doing and how it was they were moving. Maybe you’ve seen contortionists in action before. Or at least photos thereof. Basically, something is seriously wrong with their spines. And with other things: their sockets, their primary joints and articulations. They had shucked the loose-fitting gear they had been wearing at Mr. Kindt’s in favor of pale-blue sequined leotards. They made circles around the room—hideous, freaky, fascinating circles—each time stepping over the knockout lying on the linoleum. Once one of them misstepped, or, maybe, didn’t misstep, and joggled one of the knockout’s patently artificial, definitely torpedo-class breasts. Then they rushed me and before I could move I had two grimy feet in my face. Each of the feet was holding a piece of folded paper pinched between the first and second toes. I took one of them, then the other, then the feet went away and the two of them went back to doing their contorted dance around the room. All of this was happening in your basic, crappy, old-school East Village kitchen. There was one long window with the inevitable bars and a couple of bedraggled sun-starved plants. Blech paint job, birdcage with a stuffed parrot in it, some oil-grimed hot-pepper Christmas lights, a sink out of something by Hieronymus Bosch, a view of an air shaft, and all the standard low-budget, largely defective kitch
en implements. I unfolded the first piece of paper. It read, “In the drawer next to the stove.” I unfolded the second piece. It read, “Get the knife.”
I should probably clarify, if it means anything, that on this occasion at least, Cornelius, the murderer, wasn’t really all that much like I have most lately described him. He was more like I described him at dinner—sort of distant and mysterious, given to pronouncing what Mr. Kindt later described as the “sonorous conundrums” of seventeenth-century surgeon-philosophers. He certainly wasn’t overweight. Just like I’m not. He was, if not emaciated, then quite slender, and he wore, with his own floppy black hat, an elegant black hunting cape, and we walked a good deal farther before arriving at our destination than I made it sound like above, and we talked.
How do you know Mr. Kindt? I asked him.
Isn’t he wonderful? the murderer said.
Yes, he’s my dear friend now, I said. How do you know him?
We are old colleagues.
Colleagues?
Yes, in fact, it was Aris who set me out on my current path. And I him on his.
I see.
Yes.
Are you from upstate?
Near Cooperstown.
Did you see him swim the lake?
I lost money on it. Lots and lots of money. More money than I like to think of, even now.
I’m sorry to hear that.
We were young. There was drink involved. I miscalculated.
Mr. Kindt helped you to get started on murdering?
Indeed.
How so?
He both gave me the idea and helped with its early implementation.
And you’ve been successful?
Terrifically.
No shortage of work?
None.
Pays well?
Very fairly. Even with the sliding scale we have recently implemented. There is a real need, it would seem, a deep-seated impulse following the horror downtown. An impulse that manifests as desire.
