Sometimes, late at night, Job would sit by me as the evening meds nestled into the soft and secret areas of my brain and whisper strange little things or seem to whisper them as my eyes went shut. In this way, and in the ways I have just described, the early days and nights passed.

SEVEN

Mr. Kindt liked the museums. He liked the marble on the floor and the possibility of grand staircases and the displays so brightly and evenly spaced. He liked the statues with the arms snapped off and the small ivory carvings and the ancient bone-and-wood playing boards and the skeletons comparatively displayed. He liked the thick glass, with its “strange, dissipated reflections.” He liked the roped-off areas and the animals made of plastic and clay. He liked the displays with sounds and the possibility of narration. He had often wished, he said, he could play a substantive role in the creation of the text for these narratives and wondered how well his voice would be suited to high-quality recording. He liked the short explanatory notes by the exhibits, which he said were “like funereal inscriptions,” and he liked the proximity of dead languages, and the juxtapositions of artists and the guards and monitors and checkpoints. He liked the people moving slowly and silently, and the art holding its position, absolutely still.

Look at that, he liked to say in the museums. He liked to say, ah, yes, this one, or, compare this one to that one, or, just, ah … He liked to bend, carefully, and to straighten, slowly, and to hold out his hand and to take it away. Mr. Kindt always wore his hat in the museums. For that matter, with rare exceptions, he always wore his hat in the house. It was a black felt hat with a large floppy brim. He liked that kind of hat. He liked, in fact, for me to wear a similar hat, a black job with a slightly smaller brim, which he handed me one day when I walked through the door.

Uh? I said.

Would you, Henry, my boy?

It wasn’t so bad because Tulip also had a hat, floppy and black. Although it wasn’t quite as stylish as the aviator’s hat, the fringe of spun gold falling in sheets from the dark felt was, as Mr. Kindt put it one afternoon as we ate sliced hard sausage, pâté, and leftover meatloaf prior to going out, a truly noteworthy sight.

So the three of us would sit there at the table or would stand there in the museum. With meat in our mouths. Chewing in the yellow light. Or not chewing, no meat, at the American Museum of Natural History, in front of the Animals of the Plains exhibit — a life-sized diorama with stuffed grazing animals and a stuffed carnivorous animal and a painted background behind glass. Tulip especially liked the next diorama over — the Displaced Animals in Urban Environments exhibit — which showed a flock of cherry-head conures perched in a tree next to a wooden balcony where some long-ago shellacked seed had been spread. Painted on the curved wall behind them was a broad-stroke rendition of San Francisco, with the bay off in the distance. A pair of the conures had been frozen in what was supposed to be midflight, but this potentially dynamic touch hadn’t been carried off as successfully as it could have been. A number of the birds that weren’t focused on the seed had their heads cocked to the left and were peering skyward, presumably, we decided, at the tiny painted hawk circling far overhead. After we’d stood there a minute, Tulip spotted a conure with a blue head nestled in a spray of bright orange trumpet flowers. The explanatory note, which Mr. Kindt conjectured had been assembled in haste, made no mention of this handsome aberration. It spoke only of the redheaded variety that was “already several generations into its stay in the wilds of San Francisco.” Apparently the “wilds” of New York were also home to an unnamed variety of nondomesticated parrot, although they had not been quite as successful as their cousins by the bay. Seeing an opportunity to draw Tulip out, I made some light remarks about birds, flapped my arms a few times to demonstrate what it was I thought was off about the conures that were supposed to be caught in flight, then asked her why she liked this display so much. Instead of answering me directly, she took Mr. Kindt’s arm, dabbed at her upper lip with the pointed end of her tongue, and said to both or neither of us that after the events downtown she had seen a very large parrot with a yellow head vanish into the haze over the water near Battery Park.

Perhaps the most beautiful of the exhibits in the museum was the Hall of Planet Earth. Here there were sulfur chimneys from the floor of the ocean and zircon crystals from near the beginning of time. Mr. Kindt stopped and stood for a long while in front of the display on tectonic displacement and even longer in front of the garnets set in black granite pulled out of the heart of the Adirondacks, a range he was fond of because of its many streams and lakes. An illuminated globe on the ceiling demonstrated the effects of drastic climate change, and Mr. Kindt sat so long on the circular recessed benches under it, watching the clouds vanish and the continents go brown and the oceans evaporate and the reverse of this process, that Tulip and I fell asleep. I woke, I thought, to Mr. Kindt whispering in my ear: it was like that, it will be like that; and to Tulip, her eyes glinting in the reflected light of the barren continents, looking at me.

Or we would go to the movies. Mr. Kindt liked the old films. The black-and-white ones with all their “precise inaccuracies,” with all their instances of exaggeration for the purposes of evoking artifice and, for the same reason, settings that were not quite right.

It is the almost-world I have so often dreamed of, Mr. Kindt said one afternoon as the credits rolled on a film in which a man and a woman had walked for fictional hours through a fabric jungle. The world that all these so-called realist films we have today have banished from the screen. Imagine, my dears, if we could forever slip, or, more important, feel ourselves slipping, like the floodlit ghosts of those old actors and actresses, from one happily constructed world to another, rather than, as we flesh-based units are obliged, from inexplicable light to inexplicable gloom.

Sometimes, if the theater was crowded, we would take our hats off and fan ourselves with them. We would sit there, the three of us, or the two of us if Tulip hadn’t come, and the mouths on the walls of light would move and the sound would come out of the walls and our hats would move back and forth in front of us like instances of pure darkness that looked lost in the brightness that lit our faces in sporadic bursts.

Mr. Kindt liked to sit in the front row. He liked, in looking up at the screen, he said, to have to arch his neck, and he liked for his neck, as a reminder, he said, to have to hurt.

Reminder of what? I asked.

Of my namesake, he said.

Your namesake? I said.

But he didn’t answer.

Sometimes, as we watched, I would let my hand move behind Mr. Kindt’s pale white neck and I would allow my fingers to exert a certain amount of pressure that Mr. Kindt, his desire to have his neck hurt notwithstanding, loved.

It was this deep enjoyment of orchestrated experiences in which pain and pleasure lay tightly coiled that had prompted Mr. Kindt, I presumed, to take out a membership at the Eleventh Street Russian baths, a venerable mobster-frequented establishment where what I took to be blast furnaces filled with boiling, beet-red lumps of flesh coexisted with sinister massage cabinets and a deep icy pool. Because of a recent change in management policy, a coeducational sweat-extruding experience was available most days, meaning both Tulip and I could accompany Mr. Kindt and partake with him of his biweekly round of steams and saunas and lashings with oak leaves. It was Mr. Kindt’s rule, one that Tulip and I were both happy to comply with, that if we went with him we did all of it. So it was that, to my surprising delight, I had a huge guy sit on my back, soap me up, whack me with oak branches, and time and again pour near-frozen water on me. Also, of course, I got to witness Tulip, who was built even more extraordinarily than I have helped you to imagine, in a wickedly petite gold-and-green bikini, receiving the same. It was also pleasurable, though differently, less dramatically, to watch Mr. Kindt — in part for the blissful smile that would spread over his mottled features as he was being smushed and swatted, in part for the gleam, through the dim, burning air, of his little blue eyes. So it was, anyway, that after changing into bathing suits, over which, at the start of each session, we draped a sort of house-issue smock, we went down into the steamy gloom of the baths and moved together from one area to the next, a progression that always ended with a collective shriek in the pool of ice water and a race, well, a race between me and Tulip, back upstairs.