The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  Excellent, he said, wincing a little. I asked him what was wrong. He said Tulip had been “drawing” on him. That the drawings—there were more than one of them—were rather large. That I could see them when they were finished, that they didn’t look like much just now.

  Do you think it’s going to be the knockout again? Because I’d love to take another crack at killing her.

  The knockout? he said. That’s actually quite funny and rather appropriate, isn’t it, my boy? he said. I am told that she very much enjoys applying the odd blunt object to people’s nerve endings when she invites them into unconsciousness at the end of her sessions.

  That’s a different kind of knockout than the one I was talking about, I said.

  Of course, Henry, he said.

  He then said that, even in the case of trial runs, of little tests, as mine had been, Cornelius observed a strict one-murder-per-victim rule. Cornelius was not interested in fetishists. They tended to be somewhat too public about their pastimes.

  He told me he murdered you.

  I suppose that in a manner of speaking that is true. One could also argue that it was a collaborative effort, a joint exertion. That we both sped me into the other world. But no matter.

  How long has he been doing this?

  In its current incarnation, it’s a fairly recent development, at least as these things go. My murder, however, the one that planted the seed, occurred a very long time ago.

  When you were still living in Cooperstown?

  Yes. It must have been.

  Mr. Kindt’s voice drifted off a little at the end of this and we sat in a silence that lasted until Mr. Kindt let out a soft belch then said excuse me.

  Certainly, I said. Then I asked if Cornelius ever got up to anything besides show murders.

  Mr. Kindt laughed, then stopped laughing, then let his thin little lips resolve into the position they had held earlier.

  Because Anthony said last night he was just supposed to deliver a warning, but that it turned into a murder.

  Mr. Kindt’s lips didn’t move.

  What kind of murder was it—the kind I’m getting involved with and just had done to me, or the other kind? I asked.

  Ask me something else, dear boy, he said.

  It didn’t have anything to do with those guys we bumped into at the Indian restaurant that time, did it?

  Mr. Kindt looked confused for a moment, then burst out laughing and said, really, Henry! What sort of a person do you take me for?

  I told him, in so many words, that I took him for a friend.

  That’s absolutely right. I am your friend. Now enough of such silliness. We’ve already established that, with my help, Cornelius murdered me long ago and, as you can see, I’m still very much here.

  He bent his arm, held it up, and gestured for me to feel it. I did. It was surprisingly firm and definitely there.

  Wow, I said.

  Mr. Kindt said that although his general state of health was catastrophic and needed constant surveillance, there had been some slight holdover from his younger days.

  When you were a champion swimmer.

  I used to slice the water like a serrated spoon.

  Is there anything else?

  I’m not following you, dear boy.

  I don’t know. Friends tell each other things.

  Like what?

  Like who they are.

  But you already know.

  I’d love to hear it again.

  I am Aris Kindt. I am a businessman. I am Dutch though it has been many years since I have visited those flat lands. I have lived in the city almost longer than I can remember. I keep interesting company. I am old and have health issues. My passions vary. I love art. I love a good bit of fish. I am not against meat. And I am not against helping young ne’er-do-wells who have lost their way and might otherwise end up in the proverbial ditch.

  He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.

  I’m sorry for that last bit—that was unnecessary, he said.

  I deserved it, I said. You’ve been very generous. I think it’s just this headache. And all this talk about murder.

  Drink some more tea. I’m sure the aspirin will begin doing its job any minute. Aspirin is a wonderful drug. We tend to forget just how effective it is.

  I took another drink.

  Mr. Kindt apologized again for his comment. I told him again that it was all right, that the tone of my voice had risen without my being aware of it and that I had probably sounded shrill. Mr. Kindt said that I hadn’t sounded shrill, only a touch insistent, and he had always had a hard time with insistence, although he both appreciated and respected it and possessed more than a drop of it himself. It was only natural that I would have questions.

  In fact, ask me another question, he said. I shouldn’t have cut you off.

  You’re sure?

  He nodded.

  On the same subject?

  Of course.

  I thought for a minute.

  O.K., why is Cornelius doing this?

  Because there is a market for it, certainly, and because he is a businessman. One who knows an opportunity when he sees it and has learned through the rigors of experience to leap when he does.

  Like you.

  Oh, yes, in many ways. Except perhaps that I never had to learn that particular lesson—that one I knew from the start.

  I poured myself some more tea and, while I asked him more questions and he gave me more answers, thought about that one for a while. I decided that, despite the fact that Cornelius wore a hunting cape and said mildly strange stuff and ran a mock and maybe also not-mock murder service, he probably wasn’t really all that much like Mr. Kindt. To use the knockout’s term, it was a question of degree. Mr. Kindt had his own category. I didn’t quite know what that category was, but then I didn’t really know much of anything.

  Tulip around today? I asked.

  She was earlier. I think she has gone out. I’m sure she’ll be along.

  He was right. About five minutes later she walked through the door, went straight across the living room without saying a word to either of us, and disappeared into Mr. Kindt’s bedroom.

  Nap time, I said.

  Mr. Kindt smiled.

  She does so love to sleep, he said.

  He then leaned forward and asked me if I wouldn’t mind returning to the subject of murder, that once one was on it, and had gotten over one’s misplaced touchiness, it was hard to stop. Mock murder, he said, could be quite instructive, could help to prepare me, to lend an air of authenticity that would spill over into all aspects of my life, that authenticity even in mock matters was very important, etc.

  What about mock authenticity in real matters? I asked him.

  That is an interesting question, but perhaps one for another time, he said.

  He then asked what the previous night’s murder weapon had been. I told him. He asked me where I had inflicted the fatal wound. I told him that the fatal wound, a poorly executed zigzag pattern, had involved the throat.

  And was there any element of torture involved?

  No, I said, in theory it was a clean killing.

  Ah, said Mr. Kindt, his voice suddenly dreamy, as was mine.

  You mean in Cooperstown? With Cornelius?

  Mr. Kindt didn’t answer.

  Instead he said, yes, a good clean killing involving the neck and the windpipe, hung in the morning and delivered in the afternoon, and harrowed that night.

  Harrowed?

  In front of an audience, a learned audience, a group of wealthy spectators, led by a most famous doctor, one who with scalpel and illustrative anatomic manual devoured me. Then it was no longer clean. Then it became, in its combination of spectacle and fervid speculation, quite blurred.

  Are you talking about your namesake or the namesake of your namesake? I said.

  Finish your tea, my young mock murderer, he said. I feel like talking now, not conversing, perhaps there will be some sense in what I say, p
lease listen to me.

  How do you picture death? he asked. Is it a bullet released, perhaps at random, from a mile away, or a bright missile or a balloon out of which a bomb is dropped, or a knife onto which your name has been carved, or a fuel-filled airliner, or an avalanche of lava pouring through the heart of a city, or a bear’s embrace, or a great flood, or a devastating cyclone? Is it a heart that has begun, after many years, to leak, or that has never worked properly, that has been replaced, perhaps, by a simulacrum, or arteries, those dark, sweeping corridors that have begun to clog? Is it a fall from a high and perhaps burning building or from a fence onto your neck or is it a fall within a funicular and you are surrounded by screams? Is disease present, has a virus, have beautifully breeding bacteria, has cellular decay, taken hold? Are you alone? Are you in a dark room alone? Is it late at night and have you drunk bleach and is it spilling out of your mouth, eating away at the soft tissue of your throat and lips? Did it happen today or long ago? Were you, along with what you had hoped was an appropriately padded barrel, swept over the edge of Niagara Falls, or did you, one fine morning in the Middle Ages, accidentally ride your horse into a tree? The Lady of Shalott died of despair. In fact, many, very many, have died of despair, and it is important to point out that although it is poetic to think so, it is not the heart but the brain that gives out. And what of the tiny blood vessels, the small bearers of blood? You are young, you are surrounded by your fellows, you are on your way into Nazareth for the market and some great spectacle two thousand years ago, and such a vessel explodes in your brain. And there are other ways.

  One can be hung, he said, beheaded, disemboweled, racked, flogged, broken on the wheel. One could fill a tome with descriptions of all the different shapes and sharpnesses of blades that have been applied in direct or indirect anger, but also accidentally, to the flesh. One can be electrocuted, injected with chemicals, hammered to death. In Japan there was the death of a thousand cuts and in China, until quite recently, one could be killed quite slowly, in a fog of opium, by dismemberment. And then, too, it is possible to kill people while they remain alive.

  I asked him what he meant by this.

  He spoke then of slaves, of Samos and the tunnel of Pisistratus, of Athens and the silver mines, of Egypt and the pyramids, of the Yucatecan monuments and bone-filled cenotes, of the American South and its plantations, of Estaban Gomez, the black Portuguese pilot, who between the brief visit of Verrazano and the arrival of the Dutch took his boat many miles up what he called the Deer and would soon be called the Noort and was now called the Hudson, who brought back fifty-seven native inhabitants for the slave markets in Lisbon. He spoke to me of the Pygmy, taken from the former Belgian colony in Africa and kept for many months, at times with an orangutan that held him tenderly in its arms, in a cage at the Bronx zoo, and of the Sioux warriors, once at home on the endless plains of Nebraska, being paid a pittance to act like “Indians” on a modified dog track in Buffalo Bill’s heralded Wild West Show. I, myself, he said, have felt at times the world becoming very far away and quite reduced and very cold, and while the doctors may have a word for it, I know it is the other thing.

  He went on. On and on, talking to me as I sat there watching him and as Tulip slept in the other room, about death and destruction, which words, he said, were simply abstractions of all of these things and the final quieting of the heart, and that these things, these emphatic messengers, were endless, and that our representations of them had fueled rite and ritual since before our ancestors had stopped using their teeth to hold animal hide, and that, while many had sung of the great variety of life, of its rich and fulsome plenitude, if asked to stand and take his turn at the great song of being, he would sing of death and its agents, bright and dark, alone or in company, mock or real, on the earth or in the air or below the seas.

  SIXTEEN

  My dentist has a very nice office near Washington Square, and my dentist is very nice. I better say this in the past tense—obviously, my dentist is no longer my dentist. She did, or rather would do, my teeth. She had a lovely by-the-reclining-chair manner and lovely calming eyes and her hands were tiny with fingers that could fit easily into your mouth. Her articulations were extraordinarily sensitive; even with latex covering her fingertips she could feel slight roughnesses on rear molars or gauge the severity of abrasions aicting the gums. Also, she had a very relaxed payment plan, so relaxed that I was actually able to have a tremendous amount of work done without ever paying much for it. Every now and again, before I lost my apartment, I would receive a blue envelope with a request, from her office, for some money. Never all of the money, just some. I would ignore these requests, though not the envelopes—those I kept in an ever-growing pile in a little wooden box under a pile of miscellaneous domestic accumulation by the bedroom door. Carine did some sorting one day, found the box, and got suspicious. And proceeded to let me know it. With such eventual insistence that I eventually, in her presence, threw all the little blue envelopes away, then, still in her presence, carried out the trash and threw it into the can outside. This of course didn’t stop me, a little later, from retrieving them, from carrying them over to a bar, having a few Cape Cods, and going through them again. Or from following my dentist home once.

  She walked very slowly, going in and out of small stores, acquiring an ever-increasing number of plastic bags. And there I went behind her, encountering an impressive array of stores and shops I had previously been unfamiliar with, some of which I visited the following day. They were establishments in which, I discovered, one could make quality purchases, if one was so inclined and had the wherewithal. I myself purchased, so to speak, a bottle of coriander-scented hand lotion, which, out of a general sense of guilt for indulging in pointless obsessive behavior, I took home for Carine. This offering, incidentally, did nothing to assuage my guilty feelings, not least because Carine reminded me that the hand lotion I had chosen was both the brand and scent she had wrinkled her elegant nose at when we had gone out shopping the previous week.

  When we arrived at my dentist’s building, I watched her disappear through handsome smoked-glass double doors as I leaned—both nervous and contented—against a lamppost. There is a curious, unquantifiable pleasure to be had in following someone home to a skyscraper, even a relatively short one. It was difficult, pleasantly so, to correlate that building, which I could only have seen all of from a considerable distance, with my dentist, whose hands and surrounding body were so small. As I leaned against my lamppost, I imagined her inhabiting whole floors of the building, palatial spaces through which she would move languorously, accomplishing tiny, mysterious tasks, looking around her as she went with wonder, satisfaction, awe.

  In retrospect, as I have lain here listening to Hank Williams or to Mr. Kindt or to Dr. Tulp, i.e., while my present bleeds all over my past, this image has changed for me. Or rather another image has presented itself and vies for my attention as I think of leaning against the lamppost, looking up at the face of her building. In this competing image, my dentist, far from inhabiting whole floors, lives in an apartment the size of a closet. She has mounted hooks on the walls and on them hang all of her possessions, including the contents of the plastic bags she has most lately brought home. She cannot quite stand up in this closet-sized apartment. She has to take deep breaths to get any good out of the stale air. She sits very still on a chair in the center of all the hooks and hanging objects. Every now and again her hand goes out and brings something back to put in her mouth. Sometimes it is just the hand itself. The hand goes out then enters her mouth. Eventually, she falls asleep.

  Still, what it is about the dentist I wanted to relate does not primarily concern the blue envelopes or following her home or the claustrophobic variants thereon that my memory has lately been offering up. It’s this—once it wasn’t she who worked on me. It was an associate, some guy. Now, unlike hers, this associate’s hands were very large, and his fingers were sort of spatulate, and he wasn’t too convincing with the tool
s. And his own teeth, on top of that, weren’t, let’s say, so nifty. In fact, more than a few of said teeth were dark brown. I think you’ll agree that nobody wants that kind of dentist. And as a matter of fact I told him so. He asked me, as a counter, if I had read the Odyssey, and after looking at him with eyebrow raised for a minute I said that I had. He asked me which translation and I told him I couldn’t call it to mind.

  Ah, he said.

  What are you talking about? I said.

  Nobody. You said Nobody wants that kind of dentist. I thought you were making a literary reference.

  Well, I wasn’t.

  We had a little more back-and-forth and then he said, suit yourself. But at this point we were still midtreatment and my tooth was killing me. So I let him pull it, which he didn’t do too tenderly, and I left.

  That evening I saw my friend Fish, a character, at the bar, and he said, how are you? and I said shitty, and he said why? and I pointed at my mouth and said, dentist. A drink or two later Fish told me a story.

  He said, I had a creepy dentist once. Kind of like yours, only his teeth weren’t brown, they were fake. Supposedly he had abused his teeth pretty badly in his youth and after he lost them he saw the light and became a dentist. Kind of an oral-fixation born-again thing. Anyway, my creepy dentist, after he had done some shit to me without any pain-suppressing substance having been applied, put a needle-tipped jackhammer in my mouth and told me this anecdote: Once he had a dream. In the dream an angel with excellent choppers informed him that if he only dug deep enough he would find the answer to all his questions inside one of his future client’s teeth.

  I don’t like this story, Fish, I said.

  Fine, said Fish.

  And we talked about something else. Since this something else was pretty interesting, and because it bolsters my contention that Fish was a character, I will include it here. What we talked about was where Fish was currently living. Or squatting.