There were other moments — sitting in Battery Park eating the remains of a shrink-wrapped giant cookie, great clouds of smoke wafting out over the harbor, the Statue of Liberty gray instead of green and somehow, at least the way I remember it, lacking a face; or lying on a bench near the Cloisters, the unseasonably hot sun smashing me into a stupor, a man very nearly as unpresentable as I was walking over and pinching my arm.

He had a plan, he said, a wonderful plan that lacked only a partner. If I was interested in being that partner he would let me in on it. I told him I was interested. He said that before he could let me in on the plan he had to test me. I asked him what the test was. He said I had to find someone who looked like me and pinch him on the arm. I then had to tell him I had a plan and ask him if he would like to be my partner and, if he agreed, test him in the same way.

Your plan is to make people who are already dizzy even dizzier, I said.

It’s not really my plan, he said.

All of this would no doubt have continued had I not, one night after I had swiped a bottle from a sleeping colleague and drunk half of it over a couple of Halcion, wandered out in front of a Gentle Fragrance Florists truck. This truck, even though it did little more than clip me, proved to be my ticket out. An ambulance arrived and strong arms put me on a stretcher and bore me away. I could see nothing out the ambulance windows — the world had been reduced to that bouncing over-lit interior and four small panes of dark glass. A man with a bored look on his face presided over my passage. I spoke at some length, but he either chose to ignore me or did not hear me or both.

In the hospital, I was bathed and fed and my dizziness receded. The food was served on flimsy pastel-colored trays and was pretty bland, but it was real and certainly more palatable than anything I had ingested in some time. In the hospital, I began to steal and to sell what I stole. In the hospital, I lay on a firm mattress and things happened.

FIVE

It was a little hard to figure out, once I became a regular at Mr. Kindt’s, why Tulip was spending so much time with him. I mean for starters consider the physical discrepancy: Tulip young, tall, beautiful, with a penchant for tank tops and tight jeans and with long, fresh muscles that seemed to be living their own bright life beneath her simple clothes and the exposed expanses of her skin; old Mr. Kindt was beautiful too, but in the way that exotic mushrooms or worn-out manatees or bacteria formations are beautiful: a focus on certain aspects and angles is required. Of course, given some baseline commonalities and even, at times, without them, New Yorkers have a surprisingly high tolerance for dissimilarity, and I have no doubt that were I to rip the front off any of the buildings in, say, Stuyvesant Town, I would uncover a jaw-dropping proliferation of physical mismatches. So it wasn’t so much that that confused me. It was something else, something about the way they were and weren’t together, the way Tulip seemed practically to live there but also not to be there at all, the way Mr. Kindt would stare fixedly at her while seeming simultaneously oblivious to her presence, the way a troubling cocktail of ambivalence and affection seemed to sit at the heart of their interactions. Tulip was almost completely silent on the nature of and motivation for her relationship with our mutual friend. For his part, if asked about Tulip, and even if not asked, Mr. Kindt would offer up bon mots along the lines of: she takes care of me, the darling, or, I would be lost without her, the dear. The second one I wasn’t so sure about, and the first one, despite my imaginings — which had started almost the moment she had told me she did “things” for Mr. Kindt — I quickly decided just wasn’t true. Though she was awfully nice to have breathing in your direction as she sat cross-legged and barefoot in one of Mr. Kindt’s overstuffed couches or armchairs, Tulip didn’t particularly take care of anyone. Just about all she did for Mr. Kindt — at least that I was aware of — was hang around and help out with ambience and, occasionally, down in the little parlor on Orchard where she did some freelance work, give Mr. Kindt a tattoo. He had several, as I was to learn. They were rather intriguing. And certainly fit his general mysteries-and-perishable-properties-of-the-flesh aesthetic. I eventually got one too.

He had tiny blue eyes. He had a small head and a neck that looked like there was something wrong with it. Thick through the midsection, solid or had been, with stubby, hairless legs. So it was the eyes mostly, and it was his hands.

I soak them, he explained. You might consider it.

This was soon after I arrived, that second night. Tulip was there. Mr. Kindt was fully clothed. The heart monitor was sitting in a tangle of wires on a small table in the corner.

Look, he said, and, by way of demonstration, dropped his hands into a silver bowl with some kind of poorly mixed substance in it.

One hour a day, he said. Minimum. That allows the substance to seep in.

What is the substance?

Never mind, it’s extraordinarily beneficial. Tulip, take the bowl away, please, he said.

It’s true that Tulip did sometimes take Mr. Kindt’s bowls away. It occurred to me after I saw her do this for the first time that regardless of whether or not I was witnessing one of the “things” she said she did, I was seeing something worth paying attention to. Believe me, it was far from unpleasing to watch — both as it was occurring and afterward — tall, lovely Tulip uncurl herself, come slowly forward, then walk across the room carrying a silver bowl.

He was a weirdo, basically. He was short and fat and was in the habit of wearing out everyone around him with his talk. He had been a quiver maker or something back in the old country and had had his tough times. A transformation of sorts had allowed him to break with his countrymen and, though it had not been easy, come to the United States. He had landed, still very young, in Cooperstown, upstate, where he had made certain acquaintances, who had helped him to acquire the stake that would transform his fortunes. This, he told me, had involved swimming the considerable length of Cooperstown’s Lake Otsego on a bet.

Just like a fish, he said. An aquatic creature. In the Netherlands, my boy, I could swim all day and, when the weather was fine, all night. The gentlemen who told me I couldn’t do it were afterward obliged to pull significant sums from both their literal and figurative wallets, prompting one of them to cry. They did not, of course, appreciate it when I handed them my handkerchief. It was really most remarkable.

Basically, he had done well and then better and had come to New York. Here, through hard work, luck, and a certain measure of ruthlessness, he had been able to acquire “many objects, many pretty things.” One of his favorites, which I had a hard time understanding, was a hand-painted ceramic male duck, the green of whose feathers, he assured me, was most convincing. Another favorite, which hung on the wall in the kitchen beside the stove, was a framed daguerreotype of a young nun. The nun was in full nun regalia and was smiling. There was a kind of smudge over her right shoulder, like a messy thumbprint, which had been ascribed certain supernatural qualities of the prophetic variety. The smudge had apparently manifested itself during the developing process. No one had thought anything about it until on the very day the daguerreotype was brought home the young nun had been struck fatally on the right shoulder by a loose ceiling beam. Mr. Kindt told me he had a very handsome certificate somewhere, itself a clever counterfeit, that testified both to the veracity of the story and the authenticity of the daguerreotype. What pleased him most about his nun, he told me, was not the supposed mystical aspect of the image, but rather the early documentary evidence it provided of humankind’s ongoing efforts to harness modern technology to aid and abet the most ancient variety of fraud.