It means little to me that, in this version, a prosecutor describes Mr. Kindt’s last moments as horrific, the vanished Tulip as blameless, and myself as a guileless, lovesick fool (in this context, they point out that I have had a yellow tulip tattooed over my heart). “We have here an individual so depraved that even in the face of overwhelming evidence, he continues to maintain his story that the murdered man, who the perpetrator has told us took him in and showed him great kindness, paid to be subjected to this deadly procedure, and that mysterious colleagues took part in helping the victim set him up. An individual, I add in conclusion, who has put forward an outlandish and irrelevant story about identity theft and an improbable, unverifiable murder that occurred half a century ago in upstate New York in order to muddy the waters and falsely cast suspicion upon others.”

I maintain my innocence in the face of what is again referred to as overwhelming evidence that the so-called murders arranged by Cornelius and the contortionists and the knockout were arranged by me and by me alone. Which is to say that everyone the police talked to, whom I told them to talk to, deny, in this version, having ever dealt with anyone but me. The fact that the alleged crime was committed in the context of so much trauma and suffering throughout the great city of New York, by a known stalker and incompetent hustler, one who “cooked up” a “fortunately short-lived, morally repugnant” service, which served as a cover for acts of significant robbery, and at least one additional act of real murder — of an accountant, documents belonging to whom were found, along with documents belonging to Mr. Kindt, in a portfolio on my person — is also, with a shocking lack of eloquence, touched upon by the prosecutor in this version, and also means little to me.

That I say these things mean little to me is not meant to imply that I consider my comportment, in this version, as being in any way defensible. It is just that I am aware — and my own much-diminished Mr. Kindt, now that we have begun discussing it all, has confirmed the likelihood of this for me — that this is only one version among several, and that no matter how many people believe it, it does not command primacy.

In another version, you see, Mr. Kindt dies with a smile on his lips, holding each of our hands, grateful that his “tedious suffering,” as he puts it, has been abridged. And in another, just as valid, Mr. Kindt doesn’t die at all, he continues living, we all continue living, though I don’t say we’re happy about it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While many books informed and inspired this one, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, translated from the German by Michael Hulse, provided key thematic and linguistic irritants throughout the writing of The Exquisite, e.g., falsification, death, long-standing vectors of destruction, herring, silk, the historical perspective, elective affinities, and, by no means least, Aris Kindt himself, the half-hidden centerpiece of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. Realizing when the project began to take shape that I was far from alone in my enthusiasm for Sebald’s narratives and in my desire to manifest that enthusiasm in a work of my own, I decided not to try, as it seemed to me so many were trying, to “do a Sebald,” i.e., true pages with visual images, eschew novelistic sleight of hand in favor of quietly patterned and heavily mediated observation, and inject the whole with a steady drip of melancholia. Ezra Pound called the results of this sort of homage dilution and I was not interested in diluting. The approach then was to write a book unlike one Sebald would have written, while taking up and recasting his favorite themes and obsessions. An improbable ghost noir set in New York’s East Village involving portentous nightmares, a mock-murder service, and great quantities of pickled herring seemed to fit the bill.

I should also mention: Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, that great treatise on modes of burial, which is not coincidentally discussed in The Rings of Saturn, is channeled at length by Cornelius the night our hero first meets him, and briefly by Tulip on the platform of Grand Central Station. The imaginary texts, etc. on page 137 are taken from Browne’s Musaeum Clausum. Bits and lovely pieces of Ben Katchor’s marvelous Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (moon lamps, aluminum paperweights, water stations, Roman Street, Optaline eye salve, etc.), bubble up here and there throughout the pages of The Exquisite, helping, it is hoped, to make no bones about the partially dreamt quality of Henry’s New York (not to mention his experiences therein). All of our New Yorks, after all, are partially dreamt. Many, like Henry’s, are shaped by the brilliant dreamers who have been there before us.

The image on page 131 is a detail from

Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dance of Death.