The Exquisite

EIGHT

The early, the innocent, the unambiguous days and nights in the hospital gave way to an indeterminate period during which I thought I had received my discharge orders and returned to the world of cars and bricks and clogged gutters — where things went well then badly then worse — but then I was back or had never left, I had never left, there I was, and in the deep and dark hours of the night I woke from the dream of wind and voices and met an old man.

May I call you Henry? he said.

Yes, of course, I said.

My name is Aris Kindt.

I saw you today when they were looking at your throat are you sick they tell me I’m not well but I’m better what’s wrong with you? I said.

I know, he said.

What do you mean, you know?

His upper lip curled a little. He shrugged.

Well, Mr. Kindt, may I call you Mr. Kindt, then you also know that I’m a thief — that I’m thieving in this establishment, that I’m making a fucking killing. And speaking of fucking, I wouldn’t mind, that is, with my doctor, she’s a peach, a pale yellow one with funny ears, do you know her?

My throat is fine, he said. It’s much better. Thank you for asking.

Your throat?

His lip curled again.

Dr. Tulp, I said. Best thing about this place, very bright, an incandescent bulb, a light-emitting diode. She’s getting a green card. She likes me a lot, takes my case very seriously. I’m in her office all the time. My humble room here is her second home. Peaches. I grew up on Long Island. Well, Staten Island too. That’s my story. My father was in construction. Do you know Job? We’re in business. We’re practically fucking partners.

Shhh, he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. That’s the morphine talking. It often talks much louder than is necessary about things not everybody need hear. I haven’t even properly introduced myself yet — we can allow a greater measure of detail into our discussions after I have done so. Does that sound like a good idea?

It does, I said.

I went quiet. I closed my eyes. When I woke again he was gone.

He reappeared the next night and sat very still for a long time. We stared at each other and then he went away. He came back minutes or hours later with a large red balloon and asked me if I wanted a bite.

I nodded and he brought the balloon close to my mouth. It bobbed in front of my face. I shook my head.

There is less morphine in you now than there was earlier, certainly less than there was last night, he said. He ate his balloon, very slowly, very neatly. It didn’t pop, just grew smaller, bite by careful bite. When he was finished, he said, we have things in common, young thief, then he went away.

He came back near dawn.

What do you want? I said.

Listen, dear Henry, and I’ll tell you. May I?

I nodded. He crossed his legs and wrapped his hands around his knee. He cracked his neck loudly then began speaking.

Once upon a time, he said, there was a man who lived in a large Dutch town in the center of drab, flat farmland, where he had been obliged to do day labor as a child and to eat all manner of foul things, which were advertised as fresh and healthy and were neither. The man had grown up to become a maker of inexpensive quivers and had been bad at it and had married unsuccessfully because that was the sort of luck he had so he became a thief. He stole scrap iron from a blacksmith to sell to a cooper and flour from a baker to sell to local housewives. He stole three copper coins from an apothecary and a bolt of blue silk off the back of a milliner’s cart. He stole eggs and whole cheeses and bundles of hops and once the corpse of a foal, which he attempted to sell for its hooves. For a long time he was unable to rid his mind of the smell of the rotting foal, even though he had tied a rope to it and dragged it well behind him. Then he got run out of town. He was not hurt badly, but was badly scared and was nervous around open fire for the brief remainder of his days. For a time he wandered. Autumn gave way to brutal winter. After knocking about at loose ends for some weeks he ended up in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, his luck went from poor to very bad. A woman he groped at one night took his purse and left blood dripping from his right eye. The next day he attempted to knock someone down and to steal this someone’s cape. He had been drinking. A kind of potato spirit. Very potent. He had procured a large knife, a jagged, rusty job with a bad handle. What he attempted to do was not what he did. His efforts were approximate. The someone he attempted to knock down and whom he had slightly wounded with the knife, the handle of which had crumbled during the attack, was a magistrate. Not a great magistrate. Not the magistrate behind door number one or two, the magistrate behind door number four or five, but still, a magistrate, and a vigorous, broad-shouldered one at that, who got up, flung down our drunken thief, and promised, through clenched teeth, to deliver him to justice. He was duly arrested, beaten, tried, hung. Within hours, perhaps as an extension of his punishment, his corpse was taken to the Waaggebouw, a medical amphitheater, where, before an audience of Amsterdam’s finest citizens and foreign guests, possibly including such luminaries as René Descartes and Sir Thomas Browne, it was opened and sectioned with a scalpel and a number of fine saws. Rembrandt, who was also in attendance that day and made sketches, later immortalized the event in one of his most famous paintings, The Anatomy Lesson. Are you familiar with that painting?

I think so, I said.

I’m sure you know it. I’ll have to see if I can put my hands on a reproduction, there are some very faithful ones available. Of course these widely available reproductions lack texture and ruin the colors, but they will give you the idea, put across the gist.

I’d like that, but …

But why, my dear Henry, am I telling you this?

I nodded.

You should sleep now, he said. You are not well and I’ve troubled you enough.

No trouble at all, I said.

That’s very nice of you to say, but still, I should go.

Before you do, why don’t you tell me what it is you think we have in common?

Mr. Kindt looked at me with his pale blue eyes. He licked his lips and leaned closer.

What we have in common is that we’re both thieves, Henry. Not terribly successful ones.