The Exquisite

TWENTY

There are two New Yorks. One of them is the one you go out into every day and every day it smacks you in the face and maybe you laugh a little and the people walk down the street and trucks blow their horns and you are happy or you are not, but your heart is beating. Your heart is beating as you walk, say, through a steady drizzle, your beat-up umbrella bumping other beat-up umbrellas, muttering excuse me, skirting small, dirty puddles and drifts of dark sediment, stepping out of the way of the young woman or young man on a cell phone who didn’t see you coming, didn’t notice you had stepped out of the way, didn’t give a shit, didn’t hear you say, because of this, fuck you, saying fuck you with your heart beating faster, feeling pretty good about saying fuck you, suddenly maybe feeling good about the drizzle, about the brilliant beads of water on the cabs going too fast down Prince, on the delicate ends of the oak branches as you cross Elizabeth, on the chain-link mesh as you move along the street. Your heart beats fast then slow then fast again as you cross Lafayette, the rainy vista extending all the way to Astor Place, then move across the shiny remnants of cobbles as you negotiate Crosby, the old, converted factory buildings surrounding you until you hit Broadway, where you can see up and down the shop-infested lower spine of New York, and you stop for a time and think about verticality, then compromised verticality, then rubble, about steaming ruins, about vanished buildings, and wonder where you’re going, though not why. With money in your pocket and no place to be, why is not a question you are obliged to ask yourself as you start up again, a location in mind now, up Broadway past Houston then across Third, back to the East Village — home. There isn’t any why as you wait at the light to cross Bowery, as you flip off a bike messenger who takes a puddle hard and sprays you with it, as you walk fast, in familiar territory again, as you stop in a bar and have a Cape Cod, as you smile a little but talk to no one, as you light a cigarette and close your eyes and lean back in your booth. For a short time then you subtract yourself from the proceedings, leave the cabs and chain link and cell phones outside, and, thinking of steam and rubble, drift. Down dark, windswept hallways, across empty public spaces, past vanished water-tasting stations and stopped-up springs, along oily waterways littered with rusting barges and sleeping gulls, down abandoned subway tunnels and the sparking guts of disused power stations: into the second New York. The one in which a heartbeat is at best a temporary anomaly, a troubling aftershock, an instance of unanswerable déjà vu. Which is much bigger than the first, and is for the most part, in your current condition, inaccessible to you, you think, although sometimes, like sitting in the bar drifting, or lying on your bed surrounded by lights and strangers, you can catch a glimpse.

You have caught glimpses at other times. Once was in a puddle on the asphalt one clear night after a long rain. You were walking along First Avenue, right above Forty-second, and had just gotten smacked by the flower truck, and you were on your hands and knees leaning over and there it was, or there you were, in those vast lands of the other city, the other New York, pale and scary, but not for long. Another time, earlier, you got a better look. This is how you know how big it is. This was when you still lived on the Lower East Side, not too far from the apartment you were about to lose, and you were getting the shit beaten out of you for having impolitely refused someone with bulging arm muscles and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth a sip of your Coke. Beaten so bad you had broken bones in your face and suffered partial memory loss and could only suppose what had happened after you had said, fuck no. So suppose you did. He had left you there with a screwdriver (fortunately only its butt was used) lying by your face — this became, in your imaginings: shot you up with a gat; chopped your shit with an ax; curbed you; stuck a grenade in your mouth; propped you up against a wall and smashed the back of a Buick into you; carried you up on top of one of the tenements and dropped you; cut your throat; poured gas on you and lit it; dragged you behind a lowrider; did something with a corkscrew; did something with a bat. You actually — and here your memory is unimpaired — spoke to yourself this time. You said to yourself, O.K., fine, all right, that’s it, good-bye now, time to vanish, let’s cruise. And you did. You left and wandered both alone and in company, walked arm in arm with yourself and with a couple million others, up and down the windy, gleaming streets of the necropolis, New York number two.

Little windows that opened onto this New York number two were of course omnipresent in the ward. Some days, when I didn’t have a job to pull and I had gotten tired of reading or watching TV or waiting to see whether Dr. Tulp would stop by, I would grab Mr. Kindt and we would go take a look at people who, so it seemed, were dying. Mr. Kindt, who in this way was still the same old Mr. Kindt, despite the shift in our relationship, very much liked my theory of the two New Yorks, which he calculated became a dizzying sixteen million New Yorks if there was one of each for each New Yorker. I told him I wasn’t sure if there was, in fact, a complementary New York for each of its inhabitants, or if it was just the pair of them, one size fits all and everyone on fucking top of each other in both. He said that either way, because he had no desire to leave New York under any circumstances, he found the concept of being ravished from one New York into another extremely comforting and it was never any trouble to get him to come along to look at people preparing to make the move. Sometimes, he was the one who suggested we go down and talk to the terminal cases on the second floor or prowl around in the critical wards, where, though this didn’t matter when Mr. Kindt was with me, we weren’t supposed to be. In fact, the duty nurses just looked at us without much interest and let us pass.

Certain arrangements have been made, Henry, not to worry, he said once when I wondered aloud about this.

So have certain arrangements been made for when I go closet shopping for resaleable items? I asked.

No, Henry, only so many arrangements of this sort are possible. On those occasions you will be on your own.

After we had returned — from talking, say, to a ninety-seven-year-old woman with a remarkably malignant skin cancer who had laughed out loud at the prospect of, as she put it, moving along, or from standing in the doorway of the burn unit and listening to the rise and fall of the respirators — we would sit together in one of our rooms and smoke and I would talk about the other New York and he would talk about the other Leiden and the other Amsterdam and the other Delft.

The one contains the other, I said.

The larger the smaller, or is it the other way around?

I don’t know.

It is nevertheless a lovely notion, he said. All cities must be wrapped in a similar doubling embrace.

And all people, I said.

Yes, Henry, of course, we are all of us wrapped in the darkened shadows of our afterselves.

Which is where I would sit after Mr. Kindt left and I was alone again — with my shadow wrapped tightly around me, my robe and hands stinking of cigar smoke. I would sit and think about what we had both said and what we had seen earlier as we walked around. I would think about the other New York, with its long pulsing tunnels and skyscrapers made of helium and rods of light, or about the other Amsterdam, with its silver canals and velvet walls and tiny diamond bells.

One night after I had spent some time thinking I tried to pay a permanent visit to New York number two, but it didn’t work. Despite what I thought was a pretty good effort. I didn’t go anywhere.

I explained afterward to Dr. Tulp about the shadow surrounding me and also, for that matter, her.

You’re Dutch, I said. You could probably go to some Dutch town. Eat good cheese. Paddle down the canals.

I’m not Dutch, Henry, Dr. Tulp said. And this idea of yours is stupid.

She ordered another adjustment to my meds and gave instructions that I wasn’t to receive any visitors, instructions that, at least in the case of Mr. Kindt, weren’t followed. He came the very first night carrying a cracker with a little bit of herring on it and said, eat, Henry, eat something and you will feel better.

It’s the blue devil, I said.

It’s too much talk and thinking about the great black yonder, Mr. Kindt said.

I meant you, you’re the blue devil, I said.

Ah, yes.

The blue devil and the fish. Did I ever tell you about my dream where you were a fish, a herring in a black hat and hunting cape?

Mr. Kindt looked at me. He smiled. That’s a funny dream, Henry, he said. When did you dream that?

When did you swim the length of Lake Otsego?

I don’t follow.

Don’t you?

I’m your friend, Henry. Your best friend. It’s me. Aris.

That’s a nice name, very nice. How did you come by it?

Mr. Kindt’s smile, which had been holding steady, became its reverse.

I’m afraid of a sudden I find you a touch disagreeable, my boy, he said.

Well, you can bet you’re not the first person to feel that way. Usually it’s more than a touch. Can you even swim?

You should get back on your feet, Henry, he said, get some exercise, stop thinking so much, do that job.

I asked a question. How about an answer? I repeat, can you swim?

No. I can’t. I never learned. Why are you asking me these questions?

I told him the truth, which was that I didn’t know. They had just come to me. Had seemed important. Especially in the context of the shift that had occurred in our relationship.

Well, no doubt they are important. But now how about that job?

“That job” was related to some ampoules of pharmaceutical speed that Mr. Kindt had arranged for me to acquire. They were six hallways, two elevators, and a picked lock away.

I don’t think I want to do it this time, Mr. Kindt, I said.

Ah, but you must, Henry. We must. After all, the window of opportunity is fast closing. And there are individuals involved who might turn their attention elsewhere if the desired items are not expeditiously secured.

Why can’t you do it, you were a thief once, right?

A very long time ago I was a very bad thief.

So?

Mr. Kindt, who had been pacing back and forth, stopped and pointed his cracker at me.

In addition to being disagreeable, you seem, Henry, if perhaps you won’t mind my saying so, somewhat less than grateful at the opportunity, the very bright conduit of possibility, that’s been presented to you. I don’t know what all this is about my name and swimming, but I am speaking of business, of transaction, and, more important, of obligation.

I didn’t say anything. The unpleasant look I had seen in the hallway when he had broached the subject of stepping in for Job was back with a vengeance, and I didn’t like the look of it at all. But I felt tired and my head hurt. And I was sad that things, which I thought had gone back to the way they were, definitely seemed to have transformed.

Please go away, I said.

Mr. Kindt stood there, indecisive, as if he wanted to keep haranguing me or maybe cut my throat, but then, although the hard look that had come into his eyes didn’t entirely leave, it did soften, and his jaw relaxed, and he said, all right, my boy, yes, I can see you are tired, we’ll talk later.

He came toward me with his herring-laden cracker, but I shook my head. He shrugged, put it into his mouth, and turned toward the door.