by Laird Hunt
Fish was a big squatter. Until fairly recently, Fish, who had once held down a boring but remuneratively satisfactory job as a copy editor that allowed him to inhabit a dingy one-bedroom in Chinatown, had proudly lived in a squat on East Sixth. The owners of the building, unable to get the squatters to leave, had decided to tear the building down. Fish had been the last to leave. He had been, as they say, forcibly removed. But not before making a minor celebrity of himself in the squatter and friends-of-squatters communities by standing completely naked on the fire escape, sort of dancing around and singing what I heard from other sources was a pretty decent operatic tenor version first of “Imagine,” then of “Rhinestone Cowboy.”
He had a new squat now. A big two-bedroom on Fourth between B and C. Or actually, as he explained, it was more of a share. When he moved in, it had been a squat, because the owner, according to the tip he had received, was supposedly dead and there was no next of kin and the city had no immediate plans. A key had been under the mat and there was some furniture (including a sinkful of unwashed but perfectly usable dishes) and the electricity hadn’t been cut off: paradise. He thought about letting a couple of his colleagues from the demolished squat in on his find but decided to keep a low profile for a while. Which was a good thing. Because the owner wasn’t dead. He came in the second evening as Fish was flossing his teeth on the couch: an old guy in a beat-up porkpie. Fish stopped stock-still with the piece of floss between a pair of molars. The old guy, however, did not appear to see Fish, who was sitting very much in plain sight. This was because, as Fish quickly gathered, the old guy was blind. He was also, apparently, extremely hard of hearing. Fish had spotted a monstrous pair of hearing aids by the bed in the room he had not chosen to sleep in and the old guy’s ears were currently unencumbered. Fish stood up, very slowly, and went and leaned against the wall farthest away from the door. The old guy, who had not removed his beat-up porkpie, immediately started puttering around in the kitchen and singing to himself. He did the dishes, which Fish had added to, and he put away everything that was on the counter. Fish thought about getting his stuff and making his getaway while the old guy did his thing around the kitchen, but instead he kept leaning against the wall, and when he finally moved after the old man had gone into the bathroom and started a shower, it was just to go into the little room he had chosen and to go to sleep.
He still doesn’t know I’m there, said Fish.
I don’t believe you, I said. I don’t believe a word.
I’m pretty discreet and if I see he’s got his hearing aids in I don’t move.
What, he can’t smell either?
The guy’s ancient. Plus he’s always cooking. He likes spicy food.
You’re full of shit.
I keep my stuff under the bed.
You’re squatting in a guy’s place and the guy still lives there.
Like I said, it’s more of a share. Anyway, there’s weirder shit going on.
Which of course is true, and you don’t have to look very far to come up with examples. As a matter of fact I immediately thought, as Fish said this, of the story I had read that week about a woman who had kept the remains of her dead child in a box in a closet for twenty years. The extra-creepy part was that she had two other kids and they had grown up in the apartment with the remains of their sibling in a box in their mother’s room. Then there was the guy in the Bronx who kept a tiger as a pet. When the tiger started to get surly the owner moved out, returning daily to toss meat in to it. The neighbors heard roaring along with “odd thumping noises” but didn’t, they said, give it too much thought.
Anyway, not long after my experience with the unpleasant substitute dentist and subsequent conversation with Fish, my regular dentist informed me in a rather lengthy and unfortunately detailed phone message, which Carine listened to before I returned home, that I could no longer come to her office, that I could no longer set foot on her premises, that if I came back or followed her again she would call the police.
The blue envelopes became white envelopes from a collection agency. Then they became collection agents, joining the other collection agents, not to mention some of my former friends, including Fish, in pounding on my door.
One afternoon shortly after Aunt Lulu’s visit, I told Mr. Kindt some of what I have just related, including the anecdote regarding teeth, and he said, what did the dentist do? I said I didn’t know, because I hadn’t let Fish finish his story.
What kind of name is Fish? asked Mr. Kindt. Is it short for something? Fischbach or Fischstein or Fischman, perhaps?
I don’t know, I said.
It’s a very nice name, he said.
I thought you would like it.
I would like to be called Fish, said Mr. Kindt. Perhaps under other circumstances I would ask you to call me that.
He smiled. I thought about Fish and about calling Mr. Kindt, who cried when he thought of fish but not when he ate them, Fish, and smiled too.
But it is a shame that you didn’t permit him to finish his story, it is a promising beginning.
Is it?
It is. In the Leiden of my earlier days there was just such a dentist who had just such a dream.
There were dentists in those days?
After a fashion.
And how did his story end?
I don’t know, when I was told it the teller was called away before he could continue past the point where the soon crazed dentist takes a mallet to a young woman’s tooth.
Maybe it’s the same story, I said.
Likely, said Mr. Kindt. Many stories without clear endings are the same.
This remark made me think of Aunt Lulu and of a series of unpleasant afternoons many years before. It also made me think of Dr. Tulp, who that morning had told me I might soon be moving on and that the nature of our relationship would consequently change.
Change how? I had said.
Dr. Tulp hadn’t answered.
Do you mean that things between us might become more amicable?
Don’t you think they are quite amicable now?
I mean more amicable.
Dr. Tulp had smirked and shaken her head.
So am I better?
I’m not sure it’s useful at this juncture to think in terms of better or not better.
This is because of my aunt, right?
Do you feel like discussing your aunt now?
No, thanks.
Then we won’t.
So what will we discuss?
Dr. Tulp had looked at me, long and hard. She had crossed her legs and uncrossed them. She had lifted her clipboard and written something on it. She had stopped looking at me and looked at the clock over the whiteboard she sometimes used for drawing diagrams. She liked to use different colored markers for her diagrams. There were bits of violet, red, green, and blue ghosting the white surface. In one corner it was still possible to make out the remains of the adapted Greimas square she had used at a previous session to discuss opposites (life/death) and negatives (not-life/not-death) and the way these binaries interacted every time we said something. A reference to Gondola Bus Lines appeared to have figured into the discussion. I said “Gondola Bus Lines” aloud. For the second time. The first time having prompted her explanation of the diagram. This time she just nodded and tapped two long white fingers on the armrest of her chair.
I think we’re done for the day, Henry, she said.
I’m not sure I like this stories-without-endings thing, I told Mr. Kindt.
No, said Mr. Kindt, neither am I. Fortunately, many stories do have endings, even if they aren’t nice ones.
The last thing I have to say, in this connection, is that once as I was walking near the smoking rubble downtown I heard a guy say, with great depth and seriousness, my friends, it is my great delight to reveal to you that it is either a Ritz or it is a Saltine, and because I wasn’t in any big hurry, I stopped and asked him what “it” was.
The answer, he said.
That is the story
of my teeth. The story of my life is different, though, and even if it is not entirely coherent, even if some parts have been elided into others, it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The End.
I hope that is how simple it will be.
SEVENTEEN
At 3 a.m. I went to the address on St. Mark’s Place and, after climbing six flights of stairs this time, was greeted by Cornelius when I walked through the unlocked door. He was wearing his hat and hunting cape, but was otherwise not particularly elegant in speech or action that night.
Am I supposed to murder you? I asked, huffing a little.
No, Henry, he said, lifting a gloved hand and pointing over his shoulder with it, the victim is in the next room.
Are the contortionists here?
We’re all here, he said.
What does that mean?
Ça veut dire qu’on est tous ensemble.
You speak French?
He shrugged.
I used to date someone who spoke French. I mean, she was practically French. Have you been over there? She liked this place called Chartres. For the light pouring through its rose windows and the maze painted on its floor. She had a long story about how she liked to sit outside in the evening light and watch the swallows swoop around its flying buttresses, hunting insects. We were supposed to go over there together. Paris. Marseilles. Chartres. All that.
Cornelius didn’t respond. I looked around. I didn’t see anyone else. It was a tiny front room, barely big enough for a coffee table and the little yellow couch Cornelius was now sitting on. Behind him on the wall was an interesting picture in a brushed-silver frame. Concentric rings drew the eye into a cloud of intersecting lines in the center. To get there you had to go through a number of color combinations: yellow gave way to green-yellow gave way to salmon then to salmon-gray then gray-silver then gray-yellow, etc., to dizzying effect. The smooth-edged somewhat irregular outer rings looked to have been laid down by hand with colored pencil, while the mesh-textured inner rings looked a little like they had been created with Spirographs, those grooved plastic drawing rings that were in vogue in my childhood, and that I used a few times at a friend’s house, though it goes without saying that the results were nothing like this.
Do you know who that’s by? I said.
Cornelius clicked his tongue, looked over his shoulder, then back at me.
I don’t live here, Henry, he said.
That’s a shame, because it’s pretty great.
Cornelius turned and looked at it again, this time a little more closely.
I would say it’s by Emma Kunz. It’s a reproduction.
Who lives here?
Some people, they cleared out for a couple of hours.
Do they have any more of these?
They have some stuff.
Cornelius said this with just enough edge to indicate that he wasn’t interested in discussing art with me any further. I couldn’t quite tell though if the implied request for me to stop speaking was a general one, and because I hadn’t yet been told what I was supposed to do, I tried changing the subject.
So you’ve known Mr. Kindt for a long time? I said.
Yes, Henry. Like I said, we go way back.
All the way back to Cooperstown.
Cornelius had been examining his fingernails. He looked up at me.
It must have been something, that swim he took.
Cornelius nodded. It was quite a swim. You could say that swim took him all the way to New York. All the way to where he is now.
He told me this afternoon that he’d done it with his arms tied behind his back.
Did he now?
He was kidding.
Cornelius shrugged, then said, Aris Kindt. Nice name, isn’t it? Not the average. Has some splash to it. Kind of name you’d like to try on and take for a spin around the block. Fits him doesn’t it? To a T. You’d look at him and say, now that is a guy who has got the right fucking name. Has a ring.
I said I agreed but that I liked the name Cornelius too, and Cornelius said, I’m happy for you, now, please, Henry, there is work to do, shut the fuck up.
I started to speak, but Cornelius shook his head, put his finger to his lips, pointed to a slip of paper on the coffee table, then pointed to the door leading into the next room.
Can we talk afterward? I said.
Shhh, Cornelius said. I’m not kidding.
I picked up the piece of paper, opened the door, and went into a surprisingly long hallway lit by a series of night-lights plugged into sockets placed at regular intervals near the floor along each wall. When I was about halfway down the hallway, the door I had just come through opened again. Expecting Cornelius, I turned and found myself looking at the contortionists. I began to greet them, but they came up quickly and, smiling, began poking and tickling and prodding me forward. When we got to the end of the hallway one of them slipped past me, pushed open the other door, and swept her hand out as if to say, here it is. The other gave my shoulders a few rubs, shoved me forward through the doorway, then jumped past me and stood next to her colleague. They both put mock serious looks on their faces, did a little shadowboxing, gave me the thumbs-up, then flipped themselves over and scuttled back down the hallway and out the door.
The room I entered was larger and more elaborately furnished than I had expected given the street, the general condition of the building, and the Spartan aesthetic that presided in the front room and hallway. There was plush wall-to-wall, deep-shag burgundy carpeting, a long black couch, a good-looking leather cigar chair, a zinc bar with a couple of mahogany stools, a large retro refrigerator and a backlit row of top-shelf bottles, floor lamps that gave off red and gold highlights, and, though there weren’t any more Emma Kunz—or whoever it was—reproductions, at least not in this room, there were two or three expensively framed posters. One of these was a blown-up extra-handsome comic strip featuring a mustachioed heavyset older man with a camera around his neck. Another was a famous black-and-white aerial shot of the Flatiron building taken in the thirties or forties. It wasn’t difficult, looking at the scene from beyond even the photographer’s elevated vantage point, which had reduced all the human beings present to the size and relative significance of dust motes, to feel myself shrinking too. I liked this feeling. New York is interesting in that even at the bottom of the skyscrapers’ deepest trenches a good portion of its inhabitants tend to feel a little bigger, a little more consequential, than they are. In fact, there are days and nights when it feels like everyone (and maybe this is what I meant before about East Villagers looking fat) is holding out oversize thumbs in hopes that history, like some gargantuan stretch limo, will slam on its brakes for them. Not (my comments about being overweight myself to the contrary) me. I’ve always been plenty happy to believe that history would just blow on past if it saw me standing there with my suitcase. On one of our first outings, Mr. Kindt referred to history as “that vast dark entity ravaged by loss and erasure.” Exactly. Not the kind of thing you want stopping for you. It was while I was standing in front of this poster, thinking it was just fine that buildings and trees and cars are the only things that can be seen with any clarity from a distance, that Tulip walked into the room.
She was wearing a long dark-blue silk robe and sequined house slippers and more makeup than I’d ever seen on her, dark around the mouth and eyes. The script Cornelius had handed me read “Keep your mouth shut, watch and improvise,” so I didn’t say anything, just kind of took her in as she sauntered toward me holding what looked a lot like a hatchet.
Later, she told me it was an eighteenth-century embalming tool she had borrowed from Mr. Kindt. This was after Tulip had woken up and we had all walked out together—Cornelius, the contortionists, the knockout, me, and Tulip; after Cornelius had said, good, but I have nothing to say to you about speaking French or art or our mutual friend, and the knockout had said, who would’ve thought? and the contortionists had said nothing, though they had both given me anothe
r thumbs-up and one had kissed and kind of nibbled at the other’s arm. The two of us had repaired to a nearby after-hours establishment at Tulip’s suggestion, an invitation that prompted me to register, with more than moderate trepidation, that I had begun my very long day by being summoned to the Odessa by the knockout, my first victim, and that I was ending it with my second.
You’re not going to give me some advice then ruin my shirt and hurt my eardrums are you? I said after we’d left the others.
No more advice necessary, she said. You heard Cornelius.
Not only had I heard Cornelius, Cornelius had given me two hundred more smackeroos.
I’ll buy, I said.
I was expecting you to.
We took a seat in the back of the comfortably shabby place, with its wooden floors, hammered metal ceiling, and soft Nordic jazz, and Tulip said, that was impressive, very direct, very to the point, how did you come up with it?
I don’t know, I said. I improvised.
Which was true.
I also said, after a minute, and there was this drawing in the lobby. Cornelius and I were checking it out before things got started. All these rings and lines leading into the middle. I guess that made me think I should try something interesting but, as you put it, direct. Plus there were the two, you know, contortionist friends, pushing me forward and rubbing my shoulders and knocking a few shadow punches around, like I was heading into the ring. There was also a poster of the Flatiron building that got me going a little on how history doesn’t so much hate us as blindly devour us, like a growing whale eating plankton, so I must have thought a little, maybe just in the back of my mind, of devouring you.
Which was all also true and, I thought, interesting. But Tulip just said, yeah? The “yeah?” she used when she hadn’t listened to what you had just said.
We drank in silence for a little while, then I tried some flattery.
