We walked for a time in a silence broken only by Mr. Kindt’s breathing and the soft thud of our feet. When we did fall into conversation, it was only so he could tell me about a book he had once owned and read obsessively. This fascinating work contained a list of books, artworks, and objects that in a better world would have been written, painted, crafted, or found but in this poor world of ours probably hadn’t been. He had loved this list so much that he had memorized many of the descriptions, which included A Sub Marine Herbal, describing the several vegetables found on the rocks, hills, valleys, and meadows at the bottom of the sea; A Tragedy of Thyestes, and another of Medea, writ by Diogenes the Cy-nick; The Prophecy of the Cathay Quail, being the veritable and exquisite chronic of that epic questor whose exemplary fate it was never to be less than twain, by Anonymous, with engravings by Winfried Georg; A Snow Piece, of Land and Trees covered with snow and ice, and mountains of ice floating in the sea, with bears, seals, foxes, and variety of rare fowls upon them; and An Etiudros Alberti or Stone that is apt to be always moist: useful unto drie tempers, and to be held in the hand in Fevers instead of Crystal, Eggs, Limmons, Cucumbers. He gave the titles and descriptions in a kind of dreamy half-whispered cadence, which helped them to lodge more firmly in my own head, and I suspect that if he hadn’t eventually pressed my arm, raised his voice, and switched the subject, being with him would have done me some good beyond getting me out of my rut.
As it was though, he said, well, Henry, you are quite low, quite low indeed it seems.
I looked at him and nodded.
It is the blue devil of melancholy, he said.
Must be, I said.
It is a vanquisher of kings, a destroyer of great minds, a ruiner of artists, so what can such as we hope for?
Very little, I said.
That’s right. He squeezed my arm and laughed.
I asked him what he thought was funny.
We are, he said. Walking round and round a hospital ward in these awful robes.
I looked at his robe. It was covered in strange splotches and was wet in places. I tried to look at mine.
There’s a documentary on tonight, he said.
On what?
North American fur traders. On the system’s ever-shifting economic model, the breakthrough that was made possible when the mechanism of wampum was understood, on the types of traps they used, on the extraordinary amount of pain experienced by the beavers, gnawing away at their bloodied feet and hands.
Hands? I said.
I speak figuratively.
Have you already seen it?
Twice before.
Sounds depressing.
One blue devil for another.
I suppose.
We had entered a long, cold stretch of empty hallway, the locked doors giving onto storerooms, spare showers with handicap bars, and visitor toilets. There was a distant rattling sound somewhere in the walls and, occasionally, what sounded like a distant scream. Otherwise it was silent. Mr. Kindt paused here.
We continue, he said.
What? I said.
Just like before, except that now you get your tips directly from me.
I looked at him.
He smiled.
What do you mean now I get my tips directly from you? Where did they come from before?
Certainly not from Job.
Mr. Kindt smiled. It was a hard smile, hard and cold like a thin piece of frozen fruit pie. Looking at it I shivered involuntarily and thought of its owner crying about herring and standing in the shower talking about screaming. I thought about his obsession with seventeenth-century Dutch exploits, including his own, which were the product, he said, of that “vortex of Dutch-made misery whose razor edges extended to the far corners of the world,” and I thought of his giggle and how he would go outside in freezing weather in his robe. I looked at his hard, cold smile and thought of these things and of other things and I shook my head and started to walk away.
Where are you going, Henry?
I’m sorry but you’re — I mean this literally but in the best possible sense — crazy, Mr. Kindt. Which is fine in general, especially here, but not for business.
We’re both literally crazy, Henry.
I’m not, I said over my shoulder. I got hit by a truck — I’m just traumatized. I have some dreams. Some communication issues. Pretty soon I’m getting out of here.
Hit by a truck, Henry?
Yes. A flower truck. It was my fault.
It was your fault, he said. It certainly was. But that was quite some time ago. It’s true that you went to the hospital, a hospital for the injuries you describe, but that’s not why you’re here now. Oh, my, heavens no — that’s most certainly not why.
I didn’t answer. I started walking faster.
Come back here, Henry, Mr. Kindt shouted.
But I didn’t. I went back to my room and looked out the window through the black netting or whatever it was and wondered if I would see — I did not, I did not see anything — a balloon heliuming its way up into the ether. I wondered, also, if I would ever tell Dr. Tulp the truth about Aunt Lulu, that I had stood by, without lifting a finger, when I could have helped her. But it was all too long ago to matter anyway. Wasn’t it? So much else had happened. Was happening. I wondered about what I had said about being traumatized, about the possibly erroneous nature of the causal relationship of my trauma with the truck, which had been full, I suddenly remembered, though I wasn’t sure why, of the pinkest lilies. I wondered also about Mr. Kindt’s smile and the strange look, not entirely pleasant, that had taken over his eyes. When I thought about it, it was a little like the one that had come into them just before he had bitten my ankle so hard that, later, when he had left, I had had to ask Job for some antiseptic cream.
After a few minutes he came in. He was holding a package under his arm and a piece of paper in his hand.
Look, come on, I’ve had enough, stop already, I said.
Here is a hospital robe, plus fake, and a time frame plus parameters for the next score.
The next score? Listen to how you’re talking. Who are you? I can’t believe this. What next score?
The authorities needed someone, as they always do — they came and got someone. They’ve taken him away. He won’t return. That is the way of things. This does not stop us, in any way, from continuing. Do you want a cigar? I’m dying for one.
We can’t smoke in here.
We can do anything we want in here, Henry, that’s the way it works, said Mr. Kindt, unwrapping one of his Dutch Masters, rolling it between his fingers, sniffing it, then lighting a match.
The way what works?
He winked. I looked at his eyes. Whatever had been in them had gone.
All right, my boy?
I looked out the window. No balloon came. No bird flew by. The sounds of the street seemed very distant. I seemed very distant. Empty circles within circles. Inertia clearly had the upper hand. I shrugged then nodded. Then looked at him. Then at the floor. It needed cleaning.
One blue devil for another, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.
NINETEEN
It was a good job, great even. Despite my skepticism, there were customers aplenty — so many that once or twice I had to turn requests down. The pay, as I’ve noted, was more than fair, and it quickly became clear that I could supplement it by lifting the odd item or two after I had, so to speak, put the subject away. This didn’t always work out, of course. Sometimes they didn’t want to stay dead. One guy, who I’d done in good with an aluminum-handled garrote, woke right up and wanted me to have a beer and maybe watch the game. In spite of myself, I found this a little strange, a touch supernatural, as if, while we were sitting there watching his plasma screen, I could see through him a little, and I didn’t stay long. Another, a chipper woman who told me her friends had gotten her a murder for her thirtieth birthday, started plugging me with questions before I’d even gotten started, like about what I did in real life, what kind of music I listened to, whether I thought the murder thing was stupid, distasteful, “and/or kind of cool” (and/or kind of cool, I said), if, maybe, when we were done I’d like to take some X and “see what happens.” Fortunately, the scenario I’d been given, imparted to Cornelius by her friends, had called for me to drop a good dose of her own Halcion in her drink and, in the meantime, “humor her.” Which I did, and eventually her head started lolling and she shut up just before her friends were due to get there and paint her living room. Not that I minded, incidentally, at least as a concept, the x-and-possibly-getting-friendly part — it’s just that, as with one or two other jobs, I had started to get the feeling I was dressed up in a Santa Claus suit and some wiseass kid was tugging on my beard.