by Laird Hunt
I could barely hear myself say this. His hands were gripping the arms of the rocker like he wanted to splinter them.
Hey, I said, starting to move toward him.
His eyes widened and he began rocking violently back and forth and stomping his legs on the floor.
All right, I said, moving away. I’ll come back later.
I left. I walked around the park. I did not feel good. Not awful, but not good.
About an hour later I went back. Before I had a chance to say anything, Mr. Kindt smiled, and said, I know, my dear boy, I’m sorry, and I may start screaming again at any moment, but what came in the door speaking about herring wasn’t you, although for the first time in a very long while I was me.
I looked at him.
I suppose that’s not going to be very easy to understand, is it? he said.
He definitely seemed calmer. He had put his hat on and left the rocker, which was lying on its side in a tangle with the heart monitor.
You were screaming pretty loud there, I said.
I know, Henry, it came over me, and as I say it may well come over me again. Incidentally, you know, I very much like it when you call me buddy. Even in the state I was in I found that very calming.
Well sure, buddy, I’m glad you do.
Yes, I like it very much, he said.
I’ll call you that whenever you like. I’ll spread the word.
Call me buddy now.
O.K., buddy, I said.
I called him buddy a couple more times, then he said that that was enough for the time being and I agreed and changed the subject.
What did you mean a minute ago when you said “I was me?”
Well, it might be too hard to explain that just at the moment, Henry.
Can you try?
No, I don’t think I can. I think it might precipitate another, you know, my boy, screaming episode.
From the mist?
Yes, he said. I suppose it is.
While we were talking, he had opened a plastic container, one of several spread across the coffee table, and had begun putting generous amounts of creamed herring and onion onto crackers.
The herring you mentioned, he said. It was a lovely idea.
I’m glad, I said, taking a cracker and putting it in my mouth. Delicious. A little warm maybe, but good.
Listen, I said, I’d like to ask you something.
Mr. Kindt put a cracker in his mouth and looked at me.
Well, Henry, as I say, I may not be able to answer or talk about certain questions.
O.K., how about I ask the question and you decide whether or not you want to answer?
That sounds reasonable.
All right, buddy, what I’m wondering, and what I asked Cornelius and he wouldn’t answer …
Mr. Kindt raised a finger. Perhaps no more buddy now in this context, he said.
Fine, no problem, I said. Anyway, what I asked Cornelius was whether or not this whole murder gig thing I’ve been doing was just a lead-up to this—to, you know, bumping you off. If, you know, the whole thing was to prepare me, to lend authenticity, as you put it, to the big job, which was you.
Mr. Kindt put another cracker in his mouth.
Why do you want to know this, Henry? he said after he had swallowed.
I’m feeling kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing, I said.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I had kind of an ultimately pretty sour meeting with a guy called Mel the Hat.
Now there is a name.
He said you were tough. And tricky.
Oh well, I suppose I am. Or was.
He said he knew about you from the old days. Said you had a reputation. That you took care of people, had even taken care of someone recently. I was wondering if, maybe, you know, you were planning on taking care of or tricking me in some way.
Mr. Kindt picked up the last cracker and handed it to me.
That’s for you, buddy, he said, smiling.
I took it, told myself that that was his way of answering, smiled back, and pushed the conversation off in another direction.
Tulip and I got together, I said. Two nights ago.
Oh, did you really? he said.
Yes.
And? Was it lovely?
It was.
Excellent.
Yes, excellent. Absolutely. But …
Yes?
What I’m wondering is, what I can’t stop asking myself is, why did Tulip sleep with me?
I would have thought she or Cornelius would have told you. It’s part of your motivation. She has now, to paraphrase the script, seduced you and told you that there is a portfolio of valuable documents under the floorboard along that wall.
Cornelius told me.
Good. The board is loose. When you leave, after the job has been completed, take the portfolio with you. Then go and see Tulip.
Right, I said. But, I mean, she really did sleep with me. Not fake. Not, you know, mock. Not part of the scenario. We, ahem, tussled.
Oh well, said Mr. Kindt, I have always entertained hopes that the two of you would become better acquainted. If the fulfillment of my little scenario has helped move you in that direction, that is wonderful, that is really just fine. All my blessings, as it were.
Really?
Mr. Kindt said, yes, my boy, really, then suggested that it was time for me to take my leave.
I’ll be going then, I said.
Yes, until tomorrow night, he said.
So, I’m going to murder you.
I’m counting the seconds.
It’s not going to be pretty.
I certainly hope not.
Beautiful maybe, but not pretty.
That sounds perfect, Henry.
I’m going to hit you hard.
Oh yes, good. Don’t hold back. It must both look and feel authentic. The feeling is what is essential. The feeling is what I am after. I woke up last week and thought, I just have to be killed. That will do it. It won’t undo it, of course. But it will help.
Help what?
Never mind, Henry. I’m just thinking aloud.
Do you want to run through it now?
No, I don’t think that will be necessary. You know where everything is? The ashtray? The bag of my blood to splatter around?
I nodded. He smiled. We stood there looking at each other.
As I walked down the stairs, out the door, and over to the park, I thought of him, screaming and rocking and stuffing crackers in his mouth and calling me dear boy and limping slightly and paying my way into museums. As these images played before me, and as I registered how very differently I felt now than I had after leaving Stingy Lulu’s and walking across the park earlier, my mind turned simultaneously to the aforementioned films my old girlfriend and I had once taken in at the Pioneer, next to Two Boots. They had consisted almost entirely of light playing off water, and water playing off people, as they themselves played at running through bars of light. Children had run past the camera and thrown shadows onto attic walls, or swung sticks back and forth through blue-tinted air, and we had left the theater with the sensation that projector light was gushing out of our eyes. For a moment, this remembered light poured onto Mr. Kindt, the one my mind held out before me, making him almost completely translucent, a kind of ghost of photons and dust motes and bands of fine shadow. It was just as this image was about to dissolve into glittering nothingness that Mr. Kindt himself, ever full of surprises, came up beside me, said, hello again, buddy, wiped a little oil from the corner of his mouth, and took my arm.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Nothing ever happens the way you say it does—we can agree on that, right? I mean something happens to you and then you tell it and you’ve just told something different from the something that happened and that’s what people hear and they say, oh, that “monstrous, miscomprehending, appearance-believing” creep. Or that’s what you hear. You tell it to yourself. You go to the store and you buy a pound of flour and some crackers and
then you say to yourself, even if only casually, I went to the store and I bought a pound of flour and some cookies, I’m hungry, maybe I’ll have one, despite the fact that I’m a “monstrous, miscomprehending, appearance-believing” creep. So a cracker is not a cookie, even if for some people it might be an adequate substitute. However, I am not one of those people and I don’t particularly like crackers, I have no idea why I would buy them. And the flour, that’s also a mystery. Why a pound of flour? To make cookies? My favorites are peanut butter and peanut butter chocolate chip. My god I used to love the way Carine would put on her French accent and say chocolate: “cho co let.” But I don’t have any peanut butter. Not here. And I don’t like crackers except with herring. So I went out to buy herring and instead I bought flour. I succeeded in getting the crackers, even in getting a good brand of crackers, Carr’s, I believe, so there you have it.
Have what, Henry?
I’ll give you a better example. Take the vanishing of Mr. Kindt. When I said that the last time I saw him he had let go of my hands and vanished, I meant something very different. I meant something more like diminishing.
So Mr. Kindt did not vanish?
No, Mr. Kindt diminished.
Explain.
I mean he was still there—not immediately, I grant you, he did do the thin-air thing then went away for a few days, or whatever you would call them, to make himself available to his swimmer, but soon enough he was back. He was back, but his eyes were no longer such a pretty blue and his neck seemed to have straightened and he didn’t talk to me anymore about stealing and withholding meds. Even when I brought these subjects up, he acted like he hadn’t heard me.
In what way was he there?
He’s still there. You want to go see him? Maybe we can catch him conversing with his wet friend.
Later. In what way is he there?
He comes to my room, like before, only he doesn’t get in my bed and watch TV with me anymore, and he doesn’t show any interest in cigars or Hank Williams or in eating herring.
What does he do?
He talks. He stands by the window and looks out through the black netting and talks about the same old things. The things he used to talk about. Before.
Like what?
Like himself. Like mist. Drifting out over everything. Blurring all the borders. Or like annihilation. About having annihilated someone and through that annihilation having been himself annihilated in the exact center point of his meaning, like herring that are annihilated as they are rising.
But he is no longer interested in eating the fish?
That’s what I said.
But you are?
I’ve picked up the habit. It’s almost like an addiction.
What is Mr. Kindt doing here, Henry?
It wasn’t me.
Then you persist.
Of course I persist.
Inadvisable, but that’s not what we’re discussing here.
What are we discussing here?
Your ongoing relationship with Mr. Kindt. Since his murder. His great interest in you.
Well what about the wet guy’s interest in him?
Again, that is not the conversation we are having.
You’re right. I’m sorry. Still, I don’t know why he’s bothering me. If anything, I ought to be bothering him.
Why do you say that?
I don’t quite know, it’s just a sense that whatever happened was part of an exchange. But I can’t quite get there. Just like Mr. Kindt can’t quite figure out the swimmer yet. I was thinking maybe I would ask my aunt, if she ever comes back. Maybe she could help. Maybe she’s figured out how it all works.
I’m not sure she has, Henry.
I’m not sure either, but anyway, as you said, we were discussing Aris Kindt. My Aris Kindt. In all his diminished splendor. Would you like to hear more about him? Would that help further our discussion, push us forward, get us somewhere? Shall I play the part, try on the mask, do my dear dead friend, do Aris, as over and over again Aris does himself?
All right.
I was born in seventeenth-century Leiden, where I grew up in solitude, left, by my family, to my own devices, except for the many beatings my father administered. We drank milk in great quantities when it was to be had, and I can still hear the sound of butter being made and smell the churn. My father was a quiver maker, which I became after him although I was not so deeply blessed in this capacity with skill. My mother was a darling woman. My father beat her once too often and she left a scarlet trail across the snow. Then I left Leiden forever because I had to. It was not a lovely life and I used to poach ducks from the canals and for a time lived in an abandoned windmill. That isn’t true. For a time I lived in the most miserable of hovels. My dream was to go to Amsterdam. It was difficult to go to Amsterdam. I kept getting caught. Once I beat a man. Too much. Once also there was an incident involving a young woman. Many incidents. I disliked death. Too much mist. Some nights I would dream about my father and young sister. Also I would dream of New Amsterdam. It was truly new then and every boy had seen the great triple-masters in their dreams. Once I stole a potion from a very old man in Maastricht. I drank the potion and fell into a dream. In the dream I saw a man much like myself lying in a ditch at the edge of a green field covered with frost. I went up to the man and kicked him and he awoke. It was me.
Who do you mean by “me”?
Mr. Kindt. The centuries-old version.
All right, continue.
It’s you, the sleeping man said. I was just dreaming about you. In my dream you were lying in a field just like this one. Oh, I said. Actually, there was never any potion. There was a theft, but it was brandy I stole. I woke up in the field. Cold. I was freezing. I returned to town and tried to steal a man’s cape. The man was a magistrate. I seemed to be in Amsterdam. Then I was hung. A thick mist swirled around me. Then I was harrowed. In a great hall with high dark ceilings and candles and glass jars and an audience in attendance. I was on a stage, on a slab, and a painter had been commissioned to paint me, to paint them.
Rembrandt.
Yes, Rembrandt. The painting is called The Anatomy Lesson. My German author gives much thought to the matter, conjectures that Rembrandt secretly sympathized with Mr. Kindt, saw the violence that had been done to him.
To you.
No. Not to me. Well, yes, to me with this mask on. It’s a little convoluted. Let me take it off for a second. Consider it taken off. O.K., there was a historical Mr. Kindt. A petty thief named Aris Kindt who was hung then dissected then painted by Rembrandt.
With whom you identify.
I’m just Henry again.
With whom Mr. Kindt identified. They shared a name.
Yes. Mr. Kindt, my Mr. Kindt, had borrowed the name from a certain Mr. Kindt who had only used it for some weeks.
Borrowed it?
Let’s just say that the temporary user of the name didn’t need it anymore.
How many Mr. Kindts are there?
At least three, only one of whom, to the best of our knowledge, could swim, but now it’s only the first one that matters.
Why?
Ask Mr. Kindt.
He’s dead, Henry.
Who isn’t?
Dr. Tulp made a note in her book then looked at me.
Anything else?
Lots. Descartes was there, they say, as was, possibly, Sir Thomas Browne. Did you know that in those days we still believed that after death one could feel pain? I certainly could. Most excruciating were the extremities. The first thing he did was to open up my arm.
Or at least, Dr. Tulp said, in the painting the first thing that has been opened is the arm.
Yes, in the painting. Of course a real dissection, as my German writer points out, would begin with the intestines—those areas most given to decomposition. Regardless, there was vigorous applause. I understood the larger part of the audience had been expecting a lesson in female rather than male anatomy—it is female rather than male anatomy t
hat excites in this context, but then what is the gender of the dead? During the lesson, I learned the verb extirpate. Do you know it?
Yes, Henry, I know it.
What I had tried to do was steal the man’s cape.
I think it is time to stop now with this, Henry—you said yourself the mask is off. We’ve done enough for now.
Dr. Tulp was there.
I am Dr. Tulp, Henry.
Dr. Nicolas Tulp of the Royal Dutch Academy, who regularly performed such dissections for the benefit of Amsterdam’s intelligentsia, so that light would replace shadow and their minds would be freed of mist. Little matter that in the center of this, so to speak, sweeping-away of the cobwebs lay a small, recently breathing body.
We have no indication, outside of Rembrandt’s painting, that Aris Kindt was a particularly small man.
I’m small.
No, Henry, you are not. You are quite average.
Well then never mind.
Where is Mr. Kindt right now, Henry?
Oh, he’s around.
But diminished.
Somewhat. Dr. Tulp?
Yes, Henry.
Should I expect you to begin diminishing, so you can take care of your own business, or will you stick around for the odd chat and to perform the occasional minor or major surgery? I guess what I am wondering is, why, Dr. Tulp, are you here? How did you get here?
Dr. Tulp smiled, a little coldly, and didn’t answer.
I looked around the brightly lit office, with its rows and rows of folders and dull, worn office furniture, and shuddered.
I’d like to go home, I said. To Carine and the cats.
This is where you live now, Henry.
Can it, fairly, be called living?
What would you like to call it?
Have you scheduled any more surgeries? Any more scouring and filing and cleaning?
A few. There is more scraping to be done. We must be sure that all the lead is gone.
Am I still going to be moving on?
Eventually, Henry, but not just yet. I feel you’ve made a breakthrough, and it must be encouraged. I have filed for a postponement.
A reprieve.
If you like.
Until they hook me up to a machine and put me behind bars, boil my head, tear me asunder, chop off my hands.
