Not that, under any circumstances, I would have said no.

What do you think, Tulip? said Mr. Kindt.

Why not? Tulip said.

Then it’s settled. Straight after dinner. Or after dinner and a game. Actually, let’s start the game right now, while we finish. That way the two of you can depart all the more quickly.

The sooner the better as far as I was concerned, and Tulip was agreeable, so I went to get the game board. There wasn’t any reason to ask which game Mr. Kindt wanted to play. There was only one in the apartment — Operation — and we played it frequently. Tulip had brought it home with her one evening early in the fall and when Mr. Kindt had seen what it was he had clapped his hands and squealed with delight. Operation, for those of you who missed out, is a game where the playing board is a man’s body. The point is to remove the bones and organs without hurting the guy too much. You can tell you are hurting him when, in trying to remove one of the bones or organs from its narrow metal receptacle with a pair of metal tweezers, you touch the side and a buzzer goes off and the guy’s big red nose lights up. The bones and organs have names like bread basket, broken heart, etc. It’s fairly asinine. When we would play and the buzzer would go off, Mr. Kindt would giggle. The more the buzzer went off and the guy’s nose lit up, the more Mr. Kindt would giggle. Tulip, with those long deft fingers, was the best at it and usually ended up with most of the organs. Mr. Kindt was easily the worst.

It was clear, in fact, that the whole thing for him was about the buzzer and the nose and making himself giggle.

Anyway, asinine or not, we started playing and pretty soon were all laughing in between bites of boiled vegetables and beef. I tried and failed three times to get the bread basket and Tulip tried and, surprisingly, failed to get the broken heart. Mr. Kindt said Tulip should keep trying to get the heart, and when she did on the next turn he clapped, whistled, pushed his chair back from the table, and did a little dance that concluded with the removal of his shirt.

Wow, I said.

Impressive, isn’t it, Tulip said.

Mr. Kindt’s chest, bare apart from the wires attached to it the last time I had seen it, was now speckled with tattoos.

At his suggestion, I inspected them and while I did so he pointed at the game board and then at his own chest, stomach, and lungs, and I concluded that, yes, they had been very skillfully (or, as Mr. Kindt put it, “very charmingly”) done.

Tulip’s work, said Mr. Kindt.

I gathered, I said.

All the body parts along with their receptacles from the board had been tattooed onto Mr. Kindt’s torso.

My legs too, said Mr. Kindt. He said he had a bright red nose he could put on if I wanted to get the whole picture, the entire ensemble, but I said I thought I had the whole picture and that it was pretty cool.

Do you truly think it is cool? said Mr. Kindt.

Yes, I do, I said.

I am glad, my boy, I am very glad. Perhaps one of these evenings the two of you could use me as the board.

Mr. Kindt giggled.

I’d like to get a tattoo, I said.

I’ll give you one tonight, Tulip said.

We ate and played a little more and talked about this and that. Mr. Kindt, who had calmed down, though he hadn’t put his shirt back on, said he still felt like talking and asked if we wouldn’t, after all, mind postponing our departure a touch longer. We said that we wouldn’t, of course, and that he should talk as much as he wanted to, so he did. He started with combustion, positing it as the hidden principle behind nearly all human endeavor, which led to a discussion of furnaces and iron factories and forest fires. He then related an interesting anecdote about a certain saint, Sebold, who was ascribed the extravagance of having made icicles burn, citing this as an example of the extremes to which we, as a species, will go to separate ourselves from cold and from things lurking and from dark.

Incidentally, when it is my own time, he said, I should like to be cremated, not buried. The prospect of slowly dissolving beneath the cold, so to speak, clay strikes me as more than mildly alarming. Cremation is very nearly as ancient a farewell ritual as burial and is infinitely brighter. If you think of it, you might throw some cedar wood or other aromatic onto the pyre.

Mr. Kindt then spoke a little about Cornelius and about the success of his business and about the important role I had played in ensuring that success. My excellent work that very evening with the accountant — its extraordinary authenticity — was a prime example.

I must confess that I have been very lucky in my business dealings, perhaps because I tend to endorse interesting projects like this one, he said. I do not know how much longer the market for a service like Cornelius’s will be there, but it has already paid, and handsomely, for itself. Mr. Kindt then noted the positive impact the service had had on my life. Not least because I had been presented with an opportunity and had grabbed it. The opportunity had come out of the blue and I had at first gotten involved out of friendship, but in his opinion that in no way undercut the significance of the gesture.

It is simply a matter of stepping forward, he said. A moment arrives and we step forward. Of course there is circumstance but the circumstance is ultimately unimportant. It is the stepping-forward that matters. Just a step and we are there. Don’t you think this is so, Henry?

I nodded slowly to show that I wasn’t quite with him.

I’m simply speaking, dear boy, of assertion in its most elemental form. The organism, engaged in drifting, alters its course. It steps forward. What happens afterward is necessarily adjusted. I stepped forward on the shore of Lake Otsego one night many years ago.

You mean you swam forward.

Mr. Kindt laughed. Of course, he said. There was a moment and I slipped into it. The years, which were to unfurl otherwise, perhaps much less fruitfully, were obliged by my action that night to alter their trajectory.

And Cornelius’s?

Yes, Cornelius’s too. Cornelius was very helpful, in fact, in facilitating the execution of my move forward.

You mean he paid up after you won the bet?

Is that what you mean, Aris? said Tulip, who had been sitting quietly with her legs pulled up to her chest.

Mr. Kindt shook his head.

But he was there, I said.

Oh yes, he was there.

I asked Cornelius about it the other day and he said something about how nice your name was.

Ah? Well, it is a nice name, isn’t it. Rich in consonants and the nimblest, most crystalline vowel. I have often wondered what my namesake thought of it.

Tell us about the first Aris Kindt, Tulip said.

There isn’t terribly much to tell. He has been killed and is lying in the middle of his own misery.

Tulip and I followed Mr. Kindt’s gaze across the room to the framed reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. The painting showed a dead guy being worked over by a doctor. A group of men looked on. There was light on the scene but the corpse’s face was in shadow. Mr. Kindt stood up, walked across the room, and put his finger on the dead guy’s chest.

That, he said, is the sad originator of my name. Well, officially he was named Adriaan Adriaanson. But his alias, his professional name, the one he was killed under, was Aris Kindt.

Your namesake is a dissection victim?

The namesake of my namesake, but yes.

What do you mean, “the namesake of my namesake”? You’ve said that before.

Yes, tell us, Aris, said Tulip.

Mr. Kindt did not tell us. Instead he raised an eyebrow, let it fall, and came back toward us.

I’ve had great occasion to think of him lately, of this unfortunate individual from whom I derive my name, this man who has been given a face by history, an anguished face cast into shadow, a false name that has blotted out the real one, a body whose tenure has been forcibly completed, a body that is being opened so that its interior functions, its revelatory organs, may be apprehended. Hence, I suppose, my interest in our little postprandial games.