Sometimes we went out to eat. When Mr. Kindt wasn’t at home he liked variety in his dinners, which meant we split time between North African, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. Mr. Kindt’s preferred Indian establishment was a little spot on the corner of First and Sixth. The tiny dining room was festooned to the point of feeling overrun with garlands of flashing red lights that were reflected, in ever-receding depths, by panels of glossy plastic and hand-cut disks of wrinkled foil. Mr. Kindt, who was well liked by the staff for his generous tips, loved the minuscule tables and the jostling of the waiters and the 3-D wallpaper and the accelerant effect all this had on the complex combinations of tastes and smells. “Cardamom diffused throughout a blend of lamb and cream and good Bengal curry is magnificent, but cardamom diffused throughout a blend of lamb and cream and good Bengal curry under blinking Christmas lights is sublime” being the sort of remark he was apt to offer us or the waiter or even fellow diners.

Mind your fucking business, the larger and more aggressively postured of a pair of young men sitting at a table near us said one evening after Mr. Kindt had directed a like observation in their direction.

Pardon me, gentlemen, but you are my business, Mr. Kindt said.

Both young men slowly turned their heads toward Mr. Kindt.

Then both young men flinched.

Oh …, the smaller of the two said.

Not to worry, Mr. Kindt said. The two of you will leave now and when you leave I will put money on your table to pay for your abrogated dinner. How was your abrogated dinner? I hope that you had time to enjoy one or two bites before you addressed yourselves so unpleasantly, so gratuitously, to me.

We should have known better, the larger one said.

Yes, you should have known better, so good-night, boys. Good-night, boys, and don’t fucking come back, Mr. Kindt said.

When the two of them had left, Mr. Kindt reached over and put some money on their table. He also took a piece of their untouched chicken tikka and put it on Tulip’s plate.

Everywhere we went, Mr. Kindt paid. He always had a tremendous amount of cash with him and he was not averse to slipping a couple of twenties into my pocket at the end of an evening before I went home. After a while, I asked Tulip about this, and if she thought Mr. Kindt was expecting a little something in return.

He’s just generous, she said.

Right, I said.

She smiled.

Why don’t you ask him what he wants? I don’t know.

I did. It was evening, and he had just been showing me something about the lights in Tompkins Square Park from his window, how “lovely and scattered” they were, especially through the black netting, like some kind of “sparkling sea creature,” or maybe, I said to myself, not really getting what he was trying to show me, like a sparkling sea creature that has been blown to bits. We were still standing there, gazing, when I said, Mr. Kindt, is there anything you would like me to do for you?

He looked up at me.

How do you mean, Henry?

I mean you’ve been very generous.

Have you been enjoying yourself?

Sure. Yes — absolutely.

Well then that’s perfect.

So there’s nothing I can do for you?

You can get Tulip off my bed and tell her it’s time to eat.

I looked at Mr. Kindt.

I meant I could help you, if you needed it, with your business engagements, or with, you know, anything you want.

Mr. Kindt took my arm. He held it for a moment in one of his cold little hands then let go and gave it a few pats.

Don’t worry about my business affairs, they are quite well looked after, such as they are at this late stage in my career, my boy, he said. As far as anything else goes, I am an old man and like to talk and I do not like to talk alone. Tulip has been a wonderful companion to me, but it occurred to both of us that another friend might be even more wonderful, and now we are fortunate to have you. It is certainly true that, on occasion, friends do things for each other, but for now I’m not sure what it is exactly besides rousing that lovely wisp of a Tulip you can do.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

All right, sure, I said.

EIGHT

The early, the innocent, the unambiguous days and nights in the hospital gave way to an indeterminate period during which I thought I had received my discharge orders and returned to the world of cars and bricks and clogged gutters — where things went well then badly then worse — but then I was back or had never left, I had never left, there I was, and in the deep and dark hours of the night I woke from the dream of wind and voices and met an old man.

May I call you Henry? he said.

Yes, of course, I said.

My name is Aris Kindt.

I saw you today when they were looking at your throat are you sick they tell me I’m not well but I’m better what’s wrong with you? I said.

I know, he said.

What do you mean, you know?

His upper lip curled a little. He shrugged.

Well, Mr. Kindt, may I call you Mr. Kindt, then you also know that I’m a thief — that I’m thieving in this establishment, that I’m making a fucking killing. And speaking of fucking, I wouldn’t mind, that is, with my doctor, she’s a peach, a pale yellow one with funny ears, do you know her?

My throat is fine, he said. It’s much better. Thank you for asking.

Your throat?

His lip curled again.

Dr. Tulp, I said. Best thing about this place, very bright, an incandescent bulb, a light-emitting diode. She’s getting a green card. She likes me a lot, takes my case very seriously. I’m in her office all the time. My humble room here is her second home. Peaches. I grew up on Long Island. Well, Staten Island too. That’s my story. My father was in construction. Do you know Job? We’re in business. We’re practically fucking partners.

Shhh, he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. That’s the morphine talking. It often talks much louder than is necessary about things not everybody need hear. I haven’t even properly introduced myself yet — we can allow a greater measure of detail into our discussions after I have done so. Does that sound like a good idea?

It does, I said.

I went quiet. I closed my eyes. When I woke again he was gone.

He reappeared the next night and sat very still for a long time. We stared at each other and then he went away. He came back minutes or hours later with a large red balloon and asked me if I wanted a bite.

I nodded and he brought the balloon close to my mouth. It bobbed in front of my face. I shook my head.

There is less morphine in you now than there was earlier, certainly less than there was last night, he said. He ate his balloon, very slowly, very neatly. It didn’t pop, just grew smaller, bite by careful bite. When he was finished, he said, we have things in common, young thief, then he went away.

He came back near dawn.

What do you want? I said.

Listen, dear Henry, and I’ll tell you. May I?

I nodded. He crossed his legs and wrapped his hands around his knee. He cracked his neck loudly then began speaking.

Once upon a time, he said, there was a man who lived in a large Dutch town in the center of drab, flat farmland, where he had been obliged to do day labor as a child and to eat all manner of foul things, which were advertised as fresh and healthy and were neither. The man had grown up to become a maker of inexpensive quivers and had been bad at it and had married unsuccessfully because that was the sort of luck he had so he became a thief. He stole scrap iron from a blacksmith to sell to a cooper and flour from a baker to sell to local housewives. He stole three copper coins from an apothecary and a bolt of blue silk off the back of a milliner’s cart. He stole eggs and whole cheeses and bundles of hops and once the corpse of a foal, which he attempted to sell for its hooves. For a long time he was unable to rid his mind of the smell of the rotting foal, even though he had tied a rope to it and dragged it well behind him. Then he got run out of town. He was not hurt badly, but was badly scared and was nervous around open fire for the brief remainder of his days. For a time he wandered. Autumn gave way to brutal winter. After knocking about at loose ends for some weeks he ended up in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, his luck went from poor to very bad. A woman he groped at one night took his purse and left blood dripping from his right eye. The next day he attempted to knock someone down and to steal this someone’s cape. He had been drinking. A kind of potato spirit. Very potent. He had procured a large knife, a jagged, rusty job with a bad handle. What he attempted to do was not what he did. His efforts were approximate. The someone he attempted to knock down and whom he had slightly wounded with the knife, the handle of which had crumbled during the attack, was a magistrate. Not a great magistrate. Not the magistrate behind door number one or two, the magistrate behind door number four or five, but still, a magistrate, and a vigorous, broad-shouldered one at that, who got up, flung down our drunken thief, and promised, through clenched teeth, to deliver him to justice. He was duly arrested, beaten, tried, hung. Within hours, perhaps as an extension of his punishment, his corpse was taken to the Waaggebouw, a medical amphitheater, where, before an audience of Amsterdam’s finest citizens and foreign guests, possibly including such luminaries as René Descartes and Sir Thomas Browne, it was opened and sectioned with a scalpel and a number of fine saws. Rembrandt, who was also in attendance that day and made sketches, later immortalized the event in one of his most famous paintings, The Anatomy Lesson. Are you familiar with that painting?