I shrugged. I picked up something and put it in my mouth. I would do, you know, pretty much anything.

Give us an example of this “anything” you speak of.

You sure? I mean, there are a few different things that come to mind but they’re all pretty elaborate.

We love elaborate, don’t we, Tulip?

Tulip nodded.

O.K., I said. I told them about a scenario I had often entertained as a kid, involving a Jules Verne — type submarine that would take me to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where I would disembark, in a special suit, and enter a grotto then a tunnel down which I would spelunk for miles, overcoming, as I went, multiple traps and numerous multilimbed ferocious-toothed guards, then pick or force the lock on the small iron door behind which my father was supposed to be kept, only he wouldn’t be there. This would mean I would have to find my father’s captor, force him, through awful means, including chopping one of his legs off, to tell me where my father was. He would tell me that my father was now being held on an off-world colony whose location was the highest secret. He would die laughing in my face. I would spend the next several years conducting an investigation that would take me all over the world in search of the secret to my father’s whereabouts. I would finally get the answer in a bar made out of a shipping container on one of Jupiter’s nastier moons. When I found my father, in a detention tower near the Sea of Tranquility, on Earth’s moon, he would put his hand on my cheek and say, I knew you would find me, boy. I would pick him up in my arms. At that moment, my father’s captor, mysteriously resurrected, would spring the trap he had been waiting to spring for years, locking both my father and me up together in the tower’s chamber. There we would sit together and wait with no hope of rescue for certain death. Some dark, end-of-the-galaxy sci-fi music would play in the background. We would be happy though. Together, with our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders or playing some game like Scrabble.

There was a silence after I had finished speaking. Mr. Kindt handed me another cracker and momentarily placed one of his unsettlingly soft hands on my knee.

My father died when I was ten, I said. He worked construction. Mostly housing, on Staten Island. I was raised by my aunt. It was a long time ago. He liked Scrabble.

Of course, Mr. Kindt said.

That wasn’t the happiest “anything” scenario I could have come up with.

Happy, said Mr. Kindt. He made an exaggeratedly dismissive face and shrugged.

What would you do, Tulip? I asked.

I would do the same, of course, with the appropriate adjustments, she said. I might, for instance, go after my loved one, fight my way through the meanies, in a yellow submarine.

Mr. Kindt smiled. And I would set off in a purple diving bell, he said. One should do anything, yes, my dears.

The three of us sat quietly for a while then. It occurred to me that maybe this talk and cracker eating was all the dinner I was going to get, which was just fine with me. After all it isn’t every night you get to talk about love and intricacy and herring, much less substances and oceans and swept floors. The truth is, once I had stopped feeling for those few moments like I had to immediately vacate the premises, had stopped wondering what the fuck I was doing there and the alarm bells had fallen silent, it all started to seem kind of cozy — the crackers, the anything scenarios, Tulip, Mr. Kindt, me.

At some point a bottle of brandy was brought out. Glasses were poured. Refilled.

Mr. Kindt spoke some more — about smoke and history. Looking in my direction, he said nice things about those we have lost, those who have vanished like so much dew on the oak leaves or something. At this I started to feel guilty and told him that in fact my father, as far as I knew, was still very much alive, that he had been and probably still was a construction worker, but that he had not died when I was ten. Until he had left for good he had come home most nights smelling of sweat and concrete and, after arguing with his sister, my aunt, who had taken over when my mother left not too long after I was born, had watched with me.

Ah well, the truth, Mr. Kindt said, in much the same way he had said “happy.”

It was a good story, Tulip said.

Involving meanies, I said.

The best kind, my dear boy, Mr. Kindt said.

We settled into our chairs. The brandy took hold and the lights seemed to dim. Several weeks went by.

SIX

In my room there was one large window and across the window was what I took to be a bird net, but the whole time I was there I never saw a bird go by. Once in a while I saw balloons though. Floating up past the window, up past the black net. It wasn’t hard to imagine where they came from, those metallic pink, blue, and yellow, I think, balloons: a small man next to a helium tank. He would have dozens of balloons, and it was far from inconceivable that occasionally after handing one to a child or a friend of a patient, even very carefully, it would slip free. The small man would look up at the sky then at his client then reach for another balloon. On the house, of course. That night, when he got home, his wife, dressed in worn high heels and holding a plastic tumbler, would ask him how he had done. It would take him a while, maybe a swallow or two of his wife’s drink, before he admitted that he had been “forced” to do another two-for-one, which had cut into the day’s profits. She would scold him halfheartedly, then fix him a drink, ask him to describe the child in question, and tell him she would have done the same. This balloon salesman scenario, which was a little different each time it came to me, was the explanation I settled on, although I was never able to confirm it. At any rate, the sight of the balloons put me in mind of my earlier days, specifically the fact that it used to please me greatly as a child, as I suppose it pleased many others, to ingest the helium of balloons and to talk. It used to please me, as it might have those many others, to say, fuck you, Mississippi. Try it and you will see why. I remember several times being disappointed that ingesting helium did not, in addition to making my voice sound so interesting, render me buoyant. Helium did, I suppose you could argue, provide me with a cast for my left arm that several of my fellow fifth graders signed and drew on with brightly colored markers. One of these illustrations was of what its artist, one Eva Grace Cotrero, explained was a moon lamp, a device she was working on that was supposed to promote healing by harnessing moonbeams. There was also a stick-figure drawing of Conan waving his Cimmerian steel sword, but it was much more difficult, because of its placement, to see. My friends wanted to know what it was like to jump off a shed roof. I told them what the doctor had told me: that it was like being a coconut and cracking your shell.

I saw a guy really crack his shell once. West Twenty-second Street. Ninth floor. Guy just looked both ways and jumped. No yelling. Didn’t even kick his feet. Just fell. Big coconut. I told Job, the night nurse, that I had heard him hit the ground.

Job said, yeah?

Yeah, I said.

Only this wasn’t Job. This was the doctor.

Hello, Doctor, I said.

How are you feeling today? asked the doctor.

Just fucking fine, I said.

The doctor was young and Dutch and didn’t mind if I swore. At least up to a point and depending on the context. From Amsterdam she was. Apparently she had a green card and was just months away from getting naturalized.

You know, a professional degree and connections, she said.

That still works even in this climate of international mistrust and general unproductive uncertainty? I said.