How do you know Mr. Kindt? I asked him.

Isn’t he wonderful? the murderer said.

Yes, he’s my dear friend now, I said. How do you know him?

We are old colleagues.

Colleagues?

Yes, in fact, it was Aris who set me out on my current path. And I him on his.

I see.

Yes.

Are you from upstate?

Near Cooperstown.

Did you see him swim the lake?

I lost money on it. Lots and lots of money. More money than I like to think of, even now.

I’m sorry to hear that.

We were young. There was drink involved. I miscalculated.

Mr. Kindt helped you to get started on murdering?

Indeed.

How so?

He both gave me the idea and helped with its early implementation.

And you’ve been successful?

Terrifically.

No shortage of work?

None.

Pays well?

Very fairly. Even with the sliding scale we have recently implemented. There is a real need, it would seem, a deep-seated impulse following the horror downtown. An impulse that manifests as desire.

Desire?

We offer the modalities to perform an act of ritual negation. One is able, on one’s own terms, to say no.

I told him it sounded like he was talking about suicide.

Ah, but there is external agency. Underscored by the transaction, the exchange of cash.

Euthanasia then.

Well, that would certainly be closer. Be we are not discussing in this instance individuals in their apparent final extremities. And we are discussing symbols.

How exactly did Mr. Kindt help you?

He was the first victim. The first beneficiary, albeit of a primitive version of the system.

I don’t follow you.

Ah, but someday perhaps — he had reached the door and buzzed — you will.

I stood alone on the street for a few minutes. External agency, I thought. Primitive version. The air smelled of lentils and saffron. My friend Fish rode by.

Incidentally, I like hunting capes. In fact, I decided I would like to have one. I told Mr. Kindt the next day how much I liked them, and he told me that he, too, liked hunting capes very much and that the namesake of his namesake had, in fact, once attempted to steal one from someone and had paid quite heavily.

You have two namesakes?

Don’t we all?

Maybe technically. If you’re a king or something.

Mr. Kindt said he liked this idea of kings and went on about it for some time. When he was done, I asked him how heavily the namesake of his namesake, or whatever, had paid.

Think of lead and other troublingly dense elements and how authoritatively, once released, they fall, Mr. Kindt said, laughing, and adding a “dear young man,” and the conversation ended there, except that one of the next times I went over to Mr. Kindt’s he had a hunting cape to give me. Just like Cornelius’s. That’s the kind of friend he was. Anything, he loved to say, for a friend.

Or for a fish, I once joked as we sat late one night over brandy.

They like oxygen, Mr. Kindt, who was quite drunk, said, but of course are not fond of air. Still. They are like. But more graceful. Absolute and graceful. Imagine great silver flocks. Underwater birds with sharp, powerful wings.

I had a dream about fish once during this period. In it, I was both fish and viewer of fish, and Mr. Kindt was a fish too. He swam up to me and said, you are not just any sort of fish, my dear boy, you are a herring. Then I was a herring on a laboratory table. The experiment was to see why it was that herring might die immediately upon leaving the water, a characteristic that, though long and widely believed to aict them, was never proved. Tulip — and this gave the dream a vaguely visionary quality — was presiding. She had a scalpel and was describing and making incisions. I could simultaneously see up into the room and down into the laboratory table. The interior of the table was shot through with dark red veins and shafts of blue minerals. Mr. Kindt was in there. He was a fish, probably like me a herring, in a black hat and hunting cape. I understood, in the way you do in dreams, that he was hiding. From Tulip. From all of us. He was trying to make one of his fins stretch up to his mouth so that he could indicate to me that I should shut up.

I did. To no avail. Suddenly he was lying on the laboratory table, and Tulip was working on him and, like in the Rembrandt print he had up on his wall, people had gathered around. There was the murderer and there was Anthony, only in the dream he was Job again, and there was someone you don’t know because I haven’t mentioned him and there was the knockout, with a jagged red line around her neck. She was fully clothed in the dream. She was smiling and was very interested in the proceedings, as we all were, including Mr. Kindt. He was trying to look at what Tulip was doing but couldn’t, because he had something very wrong with his neck. I therefore took it upon myself to describe to him what was going on.

Tulip, I told him, has now opened up your arm and is explaining to the audience, with the help of a diagram in an anatomy book, everything there is to know about it. Your arm is both hideous and beautiful, now that its interior is being seen, considered, set into categories, accorded its right and proper context. Tulip is not looking at you any longer. She is looking at the audience. The audience is looking at the anatomy book. She has produced some kind of a clamp and is holding up your hand. Falsification, Tulip now says, sits at the center of everything.

Just as it did in the awful East Village kitchen, with its cracked, moldy baseboards, its smell of rancid lard and, possibly, leaking gas. The knockout was on the floor, supposedly unconscious. The two friends were moving like enormous crabs around me. Before long, they began to blur into bands of pale light. I stood there, hardly even breathing, for what seemed like ages, as if time, the part of it that corresponded to me, had stopped or slowed way down, while the part of it that corresponded to the rest of the room, including the contortionists and the knockout, had sped up, like in that episode of the original Star Trek where some crew members appear to be frozen and others are moving too quickly to be seen. Anyway, this strange, messy movement I had trouble fully grasping was happening around me and there I stood like a scorpion stuck in Lucite. Then time, the real murderer, started up again, and I could clearly see them and didn’t like what I saw, and I felt obliged to do something, so I said, good-bye, knockout! Good-bye, contortionists! Fuck all of you! I walked out the door, went back downstairs, and punched elegant or inelegant Cornelius in the mouth.

No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. What I did was turn and lock the door behind me, pull my gloves on tighter, then say, so you want me to open the kitchen drawer and get out the knife?

TWELVE

Mr. Kindt loved a good cigar, and he would always, with impeccable courtesy, offer me one. Dutch Masters was the brand he preferred, and he didn’t mind if I chuckled about it like it was a joke. In fact, as we have seen, not only did he like for me to laugh about things, he insisted I do so. You have such a very pleasant laugh, it’s so rich and hearty, I find it invigorating, he would say. He was just about as quick with a compliment as he was with a cigar. Apparently I had nice manners and nice features and “fine, strong shoulders” and a nice way of holding a plastic-tipped Premium. Generally, if I was smoking alone, I smoked Merits, but in Mr. Kindt’s company it was cigars. Mr. Kindt thought very little indeed of cigarettes, “those miniature albino cigars,” “those blatant disease-carrying delivery systems for brand names.” There was no reason whatsoever, he said, to suck smoke all the way down into the lungs, which was the custom with cigarettes. The mouth, which held the tongue and the mechanisms of taste, was the appropriate receptacle. Its highly permeable membranes eagerly invited tobacco’s active compounds to enter the “inward-leading complex” of blood vessels they played host to. And of course, he added, cigars tasted much better. I wasn’t at all sure about this last point, especially when it came to Dutch Masters, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t argue either when Mr. Kindt would talk, with a funny little smile on his lips, about how pleasant it would be to die, if one had to, by having one’s throat annihilated by cancer, or lungs filled with fragrant tar. When one is in the early, enthusiastic throes of a friendship, one lets a great deal slide.