The Exquisite (20 page)

A line, I said.

A very straight line. Be sure to break the skin.

Cornelius smiled. I looked over my shoulder. The knockout was also smiling, as were the contortionists.

What was with the punch in the face?

It’s time, Henry, Cornelius said. Mr. Kindt is waiting for you.

He was sitting cross-legged on his bed wearing black silk pajamas and a black silk sheet draped over his head.

What are you doing here so late, Henry? he said.

You know what I’m doing here, I said.

Mr. Kindt raised an eyebrow.

Fuck all this, I said.

What do you mean, dear boy?

I mean I’m tired of all this shit. You with your slop in bowls and heart monitors and beat-up books and being a crybaby because you killed someone a million years ago and took his name.

Mr. Kindt looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face.

I know about Lenny, I said.

Who is Lenny, Henry?

Your accountant.

I was eavesdropping in the rain. I heard about it. I know you took care of him. I know some fucking way or another I’m getting set up here to take a fall, and that the one doing the setting up is you.

He told me again that he didn’t know what I was talking about so I yanked him out of bed and dragged him into the living room, sat him down on the floor beneath the window next to a purple orchid, and hit him with the ashtray. I went to the fridge and retrieved the bag of Mr. Kindt’s blood, cut it open, and leaned over him with it and the serrated silver knife Cornelius had given me. Then I lifted the floorboard, retrieved the portfolio, and left him there. Lying in a heap in his black silk pajamas. Blue eyes open, rolled slightly back.

I very casually left the building and headed down Avenue B. Breathing hard but also whistling a little. Across and along Houston. Past Essex. Car lights shattering the rain. Impressed by the state Cornelius and Co. had managed to put me into. To Orchard. Along Orchard. The authenticity their little late-in-the-game revelation about setups and so forth must have leant my performance. My exquisite performance. The one I didn’t yet know had been videotaped. Mr. Kindt’s killer. Because of course he
was
killed. The authenticity was magnificent. Cut across the throat with the knife, the one I had brandished then left sitting on the floor by Mr. Kindt’s head. I stopped. The little tattoo parlor was closed. Dark. No Tulip. Padlocked shut. I started thinking, and turned around.

Mr. Kindt lay beneath the window exactly as I had, I swear, left him, except that his throat was open. And there was no empty blood bag in the garbage under the sink. And no cheerful little note written by me as a flourish, saying that I would call tomorrow so that we could have lunch.

I leaned close to the window. I put my bloody hand on the cold, rain-splattered glass, pulled it away, and looked out at the park.

Then Tulip was there.

I didn’t do this, I said. I mean, not
this
.

Save it, Henry, she said.

He’s my friend, I said. My dear friend. I’m complicit. I know the story. I know Mr. Kindt isn’t Mr. Kindt, or didn’t used to be. I know he was trying to set me up, that he has set me up, hasn’t he? Is that why he told me about Cooperstown—so that I’d have something else to think about? What’s in this portfolio? Should I look?

I held up the small leather case and took a half step forward. I could see Mr. Kindt’s hat and cape hanging by the door, his heart monitor dangling wires off the edges of the coffee table. I could see that Tulip, not smiling, was holding a gun.

I don’t care what you did or didn’t do, or know and don’t know, you shouldn’t have come back here, Henry, she said.

I could see her lift the gun and point it at me. I could see mist rising from Mr. Kindt, my dear dead friend dressed in black silk and lying with his throat open at my feet.

That’s what I’ve most recently thought about it all, but probably now that I’ve discussed events with Mr. Kindt, who even much-diminished as he is likes a good talk, and who has been talking lately about how accuracy too often undoes us and precision too often blurs, I’m not so sure. The trouble is, despite the progress I’m supposed to be making, part of me isn’t sure about anything these days. Things, as I’ve already let on, are a little confused, a little nebulous—to use one of the words that comes up when Mr. Kindt discusses the unavoidable tendency of past and present “to infect each other” here. They are growing more nebulous, not less. This increasing confusion stems in part, I suspect, from the fact that I have had to pay more and more frequent visits to Dr. Tulp’s office. Not a great deal has changed about our meetings, except that the call button on her desk is no longer functioning and when she steps out into the hallway to yell for assistance no one comes.

Further complicating things is that several versions of what transpired during those last few hours were presented (by myself, by others) at my trial, some of which definitely have their appeal for me. In one, Mr. Kindt dies alone in his room. In another, he dies in company in his room. In one version of that version, I am there. It is just the two of us. It is dark. Mr. Kindt has called and I have come. He says there will be no need for any murdering, that it has been taken care of already, he can feel it coming on, so to speak. Mr. Kindt whispers something. One of the words he whispers is “false.” Another is “wrong.” Mr. Kindt dies happy, or at least smiling, unafraid in my arms.

Nevertheless, and Dr. Tulp, despite the adjustment in our relationship, has been quite firm on several occasions in getting me to admit this, it is the version I describe above—or anyway, the prosecutor’s version of that version, which was, as I said, captured at its climactic moment on videotape by a camera hidden in Mr. Kindt’s closet, one that is supposed to have been turned on by Mr. Kindt (he says he can’t remember doing so and that, because he was unconscious, he has no idea, “only a very strong suspicion, Henry, since after all I am
here
with
you,
” about who actually finished him off), which is described and discussed and made a mockery of during the trial—that burns the most brightly for me. It is in this version that I am sentenced in a courtroom resembling the murky interior of a water tower by a judge I could never quite see and sent here, or someplace very much like here, it is not heaven and I’m not leaving, so you can perhaps understand why such details now mean considerably less to me than, say, my next little talk with Dr. Tulp or next visit from my dear old aunt or next awful, windswept dream.

It means little to me that, in this version, a prosecutor describes Mr. Kindt’s last moments as horrific, the vanished Tulip as blameless, and myself as a guileless, lovesick fool (in this context, they point out that I have had a yellow tulip tattooed over my heart). “We have here an individual so depraved that even in the face of overwhelming evidence, he continues to maintain his story that the murdered man, who the perpetrator has told us took him in and showed him great kindness, paid to be subjected to this deadly procedure, and that mysterious colleagues took part in helping the victim set him up. An individual, I add in conclusion, who has put forward an outlandish and irrelevant story about identity theft and an improbable, unverifiable murder that occurred half a century ago in upstate New York in order to muddy the waters and falsely cast suspicion upon others.”

I maintain my innocence in the face of what is again referred to as overwhelming evidence that the so-called murders arranged by Cornelius and the contortionists and the knockout were arranged by me and by me alone. Which is to say that everyone the police talked to, whom I told them to talk to, deny, in this version, having ever dealt with anyone but me. The fact that the alleged crime was committed in the context of so much trauma and suffering throughout the great city of New York, by a known stalker and incompetent hustler, one who “cooked up” a “fortunately short-lived, morally repugnant” service, which served as a cover for acts of significant robbery, and at least one additional act of real murder—of an accountant, documents belonging to whom were found, along with documents belonging to Mr. Kindt, in a portfolio on my person—is also, with a shocking lack of eloquence, touched upon by the prosecutor in this version, and also means little to me.

That I say these things mean little to me is not meant to imply that I consider my comportment, in this version, as being in any way defensible. It is just that I am aware—and my own much-diminished Mr. Kindt, now that we have begun discussing it all, has confirmed the likelihood of this for me—that this is only one version among several, and that no matter how many people believe it, it does not command primacy.

In another version, you see, Mr. Kindt dies with a smile on his lips, holding each of our hands, grateful that his “tedious suffering,” as he puts it, has been abridged. And in another, just as valid, Mr. Kindt doesn’t die at all, he continues living, we all continue living, though I don’t say we’re happy about it.

While many books informed and inspired this one, W. G. Sebald’s
The Rings of Saturn,
translated from the German by Michael Hulse, provided key thematic and linguistic irritants throughout the writing of
The Exquisite,
e.g., falsification, death, long-standing vectors of destruction, herring, silk, the historical perspective, elective affinities, and, by no means least, Aris Kindt himself, the half-hidden centerpiece of Rembrandt’s
The Anatomy Lesson.
Realizing when the project began to take shape that I was far from alone in my enthusiasm for Sebald’s narratives and in my desire to manifest that enthusiasm in a work of my own, I decided not to try, as it seemed to me so many were trying, to “do a Sebald,” i.e., true pages with visual images, eschew novelistic sleight of hand in favor of quietly patterned and heavily mediated observation, and inject the whole with a steady drip of melancholia. Ezra Pound called the results of this sort of homage dilution and I was not interested in diluting. The approach then was to write a book unlike one Sebald would have written, while taking up and recasting his favorite themes and obsessions. An improbable ghost noir set in New York’s East Village involving portentous nightmares, a mock-murder service, and great quantities of pickled herring seemed to fit the bill.

I should also mention: Sir Thomas Browne’s
Hydriotaphia,
that great treatise on modes of burial, which is not coincidentally discussed in
The Rings of Saturn,
is channeled at length by Cornelius the night our hero first meets him, and briefly by Tulip on the platform of Grand Central Station. The imaginary texts, etc. on page 137 are taken from Browne’s
Musaeum Clausum.
Bits and lovely pieces of Ben Katchor’s marvelous
Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
(moon lamps, aluminum paperweights, water stations, Roman Street, Optaline eye salve, etc.), bubble up here and there throughout the pages of
The Exquisite,
helping, it is hoped, to make no bones about the partially dreamt quality of Henry’s New York (not to mention his experiences therein). All of our New Yorks, after all, are partially dreamt. Many, like Henry’s, are shaped by the brilliant dreamers who have been there before us.

The image on page 131 is a detail from
Hans Holbein the Younger’s
The Dance of Death.

The Exquisite
was designed at Coffee House Press,
in the historic warehouse district
of downtown Minneapolis.
Fonts include Village and Copperplate Gothic.

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