Unchecked, he said, our belief systems eventually overrun everything, blot out the world, at the very least rewrite the map. That these belief systems are most often built on the model of the Indian mound — layer after layer of oyster shells, animal bones, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac: everything plus dirt — which grew, more or less blindly, ever upward and outward, until the people standing on it were either swallowed up or rolled off, seems only to underscore their authority in the minds of the initiated. History, it has been said, Mr. Kindt noted, is but the analysis of the impact of our systems, all of which glow with varying brightness for a time then grow dim.

Mr. Kindt liked to talk about history in this way and more than once offered different models for understanding it. One of my favorites was that history was simply love and destruction intermingled, their twin strands reaching far into the past, where a man or a woman, long since forgotten, inferred only through faint echo, stood grieving over one who had been lost.

Often when we were together we would munch on something. That first evening we munched on crackers and some kind of cold fish paste.

It’s good, isn’t it? he said.

Hmmm, I said.

There is a fine salt-to-oil ratio, is there not?

I thought about it. I didn’t answer.

It is an acquired taste. You will acquire it.

I said I hoped so.

I am strange but you will get used to me, you know.

I looked at him.

Yes, you will get used to me.

I think, I said, I’m already starting to get used to you.

That’s wonderful, my boy. But don’t get used to me too quickly, otherwise you will get bored. So often, you see, they get bored.

They? I said.

A figure of speech, he said. He scooped a little paste out of the jar, daubed it onto a cracker, and handed it to me. My finger, in taking it, touched one of his. It seemed much softer than a finger should have been. When I had shoved his shoulder the previous night it had felt frail but normal. The substance, I thought. I shivered a little. His mouth made itself into a smile.

Contact, he said.

I took a bite of cracker and paste.

I’m not really much of a thief, I said.

Well, it was very nice of you to return that book, but I did really mean for you to keep it. By that of course I mean do what you wished with it. There is an excellent market in New York for such things.

So I heard.

I had brought it in with me and set it back in its place beside a tall cranberry-colored glass on a cluttered desk in a corner of the room. I do not in any way pride myself on maintaining standards of social decorum, but it did seem like pushing it a little to take someone’s property, sell it, then go to his house for dinner. And over the course of the day, dinner with Mr. Kindt and, possibly, you see, with Tulip, had grown to seem quite appealing.

Where’s Tulip?

Oh, she’s around. She likes to wander, or nibble at things in the kitchen, or to lie down in the bedroom. She’s a great one for lying down.

Mr. Kindt smiled.

I smiled.

Mr. Kindt took a bite of his own cracker and looked at me with his pretty little eyes.

She tells me you recently got out of the hospital.

I got hit by a truck. Broke a couple ribs and got banged up pretty nicely. I wasn’t in very good shape to start with. I’m better now.

Tulip tells me you have some stitches.

On my head, you want to see them?

I started to lean forward and part my hair, but Mr. Kindt waved his hand and laughed.

Oh, but that’s depressing, he said. Let’s not look at your scar. I feel like talking. Ask me a question to get me going, ask me a question about history.

From the start, the idea of getting Mr. Kindt going struck me as vaguely alarming, but I try not to be, as a general principle, against alarming things. So with bits of cold paste coating the outer enamel of my teeth, I asked Mr. Kindt how he felt about, say, the purchase by the English of Manhattan from the Indians.

Excellent, Henry, that’s an excellent question. It will allow me to speak about love and fish and history.

He rubbed his hands together, closed his eyes, opened them, and said, first of all, it was not a purchase, it was a loving exchange. Loving, why? you will say. What sort of word is loving in this context? It is all wrong—couldn’t be more awful, or at the very, very least incorrect. But you see loving has many meanings. Loving is both the intricacy and the expanse. Loving is the tool that moves accurately through the flesh. Loving is the net that is moving forward and the sea that is contracting, the North Sea. Secondly, he said, leaning toward then away from me, it was the Dutch, not the English, who fucked over in such emphatically loving fashion the Manhattan Indians. It was the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam, who sailed their ships up and down the Noort Rivier, who traded in guilders, who swept patterns into the sand that covered their floors, who pined privately during the long hard winters for their land so far away across and below the sea.

When he finished, we ate some more paste. Tulip had returned. She sat there, legs crossed, the lamplight loving away at her cheekbones.

Now, you ask me a question, Tulip, Mr. Kindt said.

Tulip blinked slowly, looked at me, then at Mr. Kindt.

Not just yet, she said.

Any old question, said Mr. Kindt.

We’re still digesting your last answer, Aris, Tulip said.

Is that right, my boy? said Mr. Kindt, looking at me.

I nodded.

It was intricate, I said.

Ah yes, which part?

The part about loving.

Well of course love is intricate, is the most intricate, is practically a synonym for intricacy. Of course intricacy—and as he said this he looked at Tulip out of the corner of his eye — has other synonyms.

Tulip leaned forward and took a cracker between two long white fingers.

O.K., she said. What do you mean by intricacy?

Ah, said Mr. Kindt. He grinned. He began to talk. He discussed the patterns followed by weavers, the “sinister” labyrinths of electricity and silicon that compose the microchips our culture “gobbles like salted peanuts.” While he talked he moved around a great deal in his seat and waved his white hands through the air. Tulip looked very steadily in his direction the whole time he was talking, but I couldn’t tell if she was listening or not. I knew I wasn’t listening, at least not for part of it. And not because I didn’t want to: I sort of did, I sort of liked it. It’s just that for a couple of minutes, in between Mr. Kindt’s discussing herring tissue and composite fibers and the putative chemical structure of evil acts, it all started to seem uncomfortably surreal — the paste, the broken-looking little guy who I’d seen naked the night before and who clearly liked to talk too much, the gorgeous woman sitting cross-legged on the couch in front of me, my presence there, possibly the codeine-enhanced painkillers I was still taking for my ribs — in a way that transcended the merely bizarre and actually started a couple of tiny alarm bells going off, and I had to fight back an urge to stand up and walk out of the room.

Which is what I should have done, of course, right then, and might have done, except that for some reason they both laughed and I found myself laughing, even though I wasn’t sure what it was I was laughing about, and the tiny alarm bells stopped.

My dear boy, what would you be prepared to do under the aegis of love? said Mr. Kindt.

You mean in the same vein as what the Dutch so lovingly did to the Indians?

I mean it, of course, however you wish to take it.