Play crime boss?

I was kidding. Exaggerating for effect. It’s just that by now he doesn’t have to do anything. He’s like a consultant. He does some things for some people. Other people do things for him.

People like Cornelius.

Tulip nodded.

O.K., and while we’re at it, what about Cooperstown, where he made his big stake? What did he do besides supposedly weaving straw baskets before he took his famous swim? Before Cornelius helped him to “step forward,” whatever that means.

What do you think it means?

I think it means something besides a swim and a bet happened that night. Am I close?

What do I know?

Considerably more than I do, I thought. Or should have.

He likes you, Henry. He wants a turn. Forget the other stuff. Forget Cooperstown. They’ve got issues. They’ve known each other for, what, a million years? It’s their thing. Love and intricacy. Let’s leave it at that.

Tulip gave me a little shove. I gave her a little shove back. By this time we were standing out on the platform and the train was pulling away. It moved slowly into the dark tunnel that would take it across the Bronx, out of the city, and into the lamp- and moonlit suburbs, where mysteries of another order abounded and people drank cocktails out of cut glass and swam, etc., only after the sun had set behind beautiful trees. For a moment, I had the feeling that I was still on the train as it snaked its way through the dark. As it seemed to me I sat there, head bobbing while the lights went on and off, Tulip’s hand snaked down my arm, over my wrist, and her fingers curled tightly around my own. She squeezed, leaned close, bit my ear, and, reprising Cornelius’s speech from dinner the first night, said, “If they dyed by violent hands, and were thrust into their Urnes, these bones become considerable.”

I’m leading a strange fucking life here, I thought.

TWENTY-FOUR

After my surgery the ward seemed to grow enormous — so that when I left my room to stretch my legs the distances unfurling before me were dizzying — then tiny — so that the possibility of stretching my legs was rendered impossible by the robin-egg-sized dimensions that greeted me when I opened my door. This torquing of the space surrounding me, which I had no doubt whatsoever was self-imposed, fortunately ended almost as soon as it had begun, so that when, on my third try, I left my room to stretch my legs, everything had resumed its natural order. It had not, however, quite resumed its natural quality. By this I mean that while before the surgery everything my eyes had gazed upon had seemed relatively dull, dreary, lackluster, matte, etc., now as I walked around the corridors I encountered the kind of visual clarity that I had until then associated with the south of France or the Greek Islands, or the beach at Coney Island on one of those beautiful September days. Everything I looked at seemed to have been polished or resurfaced. When I looked at the microwave oven set into what had been a drab alcove in the drab visitor’s lounge, for example, I had the feeling I was standing in an open quarry with a brilliant afternoon light behind me and that what I had before me was some fresh shape made of metals and minerals pulled straight out of the ground and shot through a replicator then scoured by robots with high-speed buffers. Anyway, that’s the direction in which my thoughts tended as I took in the microwave, the marvelously vivid lime and mauve textures of the old couch by the window, the sharply delineated lines of the bits and pieces of detritus — fuzz, dirt, latex glove, a torn business card belonging to a real-estate photographer whose name and number were missing, etc. — scattered here and there across the floor.

Despite all this visual finery, and the exhilarating sensations I got by taking it in, however, I didn’t feel at all well. In fact, I was forced to hold my side and hunch over a little as I maneuvered around the visitor’s lounge to peer at this and that, so I was unprepared — and this unpreparedness gave me quite a shock, in fact forced me to fall over onto the gleaming couch — when Aunt Lulu, who had probably been there watching me all along, seemed to appear next to the refrigerator.

Aunt Lulu, I said.

My goodness and gracious, Henry, she said.

I just had surgery.

Well it certainly does look like you just had something. Surgery? How awful.

Aunt Lulu smiled. I couldn’t quite believe it. A row of fresh clean choppers beamed out of her face at me.

You’ve got teeth, Aunt Lulu, I said.

I beg your pardon?

Your mouth — it’s full of teeth.

Well of course it is. Listen to you. Why wouldn’t it be?

I didn’t answer, because I was taking in the rest of her. She had on a snug green polka-dot dress and green heels and was dangling a pocketbook with a gold-chain handle on her wrist. Her hair, which I had only ever seen more or less plastered to her head and dripping with grease, or in week-old worn-out curlers, was done up in a kind of bouffant, and her eyelashes were as long and curved and dark as some of the thoughts I’d been having.

You look different, Aunt Lulu, I said, hoping that the irony of the understatement would get through loud and clear. If it did, she didn’t give any sign of it.

I heard you wanted to see me again, she said.

Who said that?

A kind of horrifying little pouty expression appeared on her face then vanished.

Don’t you want to see me? she said.

No, I thought. Then I thought of standing up, started to, then decided I’d better wait until I had rested a little. Not least because I didn’t want Aunt fucking Lulu with her bouffant hair to see me groan and fail.

I’m always happy to see you, Aunt Lulu, I said. Have you met Dr. Tulp yet? She’s the one who just operated on me. They used a local anesthetic. It didn’t work very well, didn’t quite do the trick. I told them that. Told them I could feel the scraping. That it felt like they were using a rusty straightedge to shave my heart.

Is she in charge here, Henry?

I don’t know. You look different to me, Aunt Lulu. You’ve done something with your hair. You’ve got a clean dress on. You look like you’ve slimmed up. It’s bright in here. And hot. Don’t you think it’s hot? Do you want to speak in tongues?

I stuck my tongue out and tried to say a few things.

Henry, she said. She waved her hand back and forth a couple of times through the sparkling air then flipped it over, snapped her fingers to her palm, and inspected her long green nails. In the brilliant light, the tips of her fingers looked like emeralds under a halogen bulb. When, satisfied with the first hand, she switched to the other, my eyes moved with hers.

I was staring at her fingernails when she said, ah, there you are.

At first I assumed she had said this to me, that she had decided that the best way to remedy the not-promising interaction we had going was to pretend that, rather than sitting motionless on the couch, sort of hunching over my side and staring at her hands, I had just walked into the room. I was no more sure what to make of this than I was of how she looked and sounded, so I just kept staring at her hands. But she wasn’t talking to me at all.

Hello, Lulu, Mr. Kindt said.

Aris, I’ve just been chatting with Henry, she said.

Mr. Kindt came around the couch, patted me on the knee, then stood on tiptoe and kissed Aunt Lulu on both cheeks. They smiled at each other, then Mr. Kindt turned so that they both were facing me. He too was preternaturally lit, and even though I found myself being swept by a rising surge of nausea — which I had been told to expect following my surgery, but that I attributed to the sight of Mr. Kindt and Aunt Lulu standing together — it’s also true that the combination of her green nails and his blue eyes, which reminded me of the burning-blue, backlit orbs haunting the heads of the spice-eating desert dwellers in David Lynch’s film version of Dune, was mesmerizing.