The Exquisite

In fact, ask me another question, he said. I shouldn’t have cut you off.

You’re sure?

He nodded.

On the same subject?

Of course.

I thought for a minute.

O.K., why is Cornelius doing this?

Because there is a market for it, certainly, and because he is a businessman. One who knows an opportunity when he sees it and has learned through the rigors of experience to leap when he does.

Like you.

Oh, yes, in many ways. Except perhaps that I never had to learn that particular lesson — that one I knew from the start.

I poured myself some more tea and, while I asked him more questions and he gave me more answers, thought about that one for a while. I decided that, despite the fact that Cornelius wore a hunting cape and said mildly strange stuff and ran a mock and maybe also not-mock murder service, he probably wasn’t really all that much like Mr. Kindt. To use the knockout’s term, it was a question of degree. Mr. Kindt had his own category. I didn’t quite know what that category was, but then I didn’t really know much of anything.

Tulip around today? I asked.

She was earlier. I think she has gone out. I’m sure she’ll be along.

He was right. About five minutes later she walked through the door, went straight across the living room without saying a word to either of us, and disappeared into Mr. Kindt’s bedroom.

Nap time, I said.

Mr. Kindt smiled.

She does so love to sleep, he said.

He then leaned forward and asked me if I wouldn’t mind returning to the subject of murder, that once one was on it, and had gotten over one’s misplaced touchiness, it was hard to stop. Mock murder, he said, could be quite instructive, could help to prepare me, to lend an air of authenticity that would spill over into all aspects of my life, that authenticity even in mock matters was very important, etc.

What about mock authenticity in real matters? I asked him.

That is an interesting question, but perhaps one for another time, he said.

He then asked what the previous night’s murder weapon had been. I told him. He asked me where I had inflicted the fatal wound. I told him that the fatal wound, a poorly executed zigzag pattern, had involved the throat.

And was there any element of torture involved?

No, I said, in theory it was a clean killing.

Ah, said Mr. Kindt, his voice suddenly dreamy, as was mine.

You mean in Cooperstown? With Cornelius?

Mr. Kindt didn’t answer.

Instead he said, yes, a good clean killing involving the neck and the windpipe, hung in the morning and delivered in the afternoon, and harrowed that night.

Harrowed?

In front of an audience, a learned audience, a group of wealthy spectators, led by a most famous doctor, one who with scalpel and illustrative anatomic manual devoured me. Then it was no longer clean. Then it became, in its combination of spectacle and fervid speculation, quite blurred.

Are you talking about your namesake or the namesake of your namesake? I said.

Finish your tea, my young mock murderer, he said. I feel like talking now, not conversing, perhaps there will be some sense in what I say, please listen to me.

How do you picture death? he asked. Is it a bullet released, perhaps at random, from a mile away, or a bright missile or a balloon out of which a bomb is dropped, or a knife onto which your name has been carved, or a fuel-filled airliner, or an avalanche of lava pouring through the heart of a city, or a bear’s embrace, or a great flood, or a devastating cyclone? Is it a heart that has begun, after many years, to leak, or that has never worked properly, that has been replaced, perhaps, by a simulacrum, or arteries, those dark, sweeping corridors that have begun to clog? Is it a fall from a high and perhaps burning building or from a fence onto your neck or is it a fall within a funicular and you are surrounded by screams? Is disease present, has a virus, have beautifully breeding bacteria, has cellular decay, taken hold? Are you alone? Are you in a dark room alone? Is it late at night and have you drunk bleach and is it spilling out of your mouth, eating away at the soft tissue of your throat and lips? Did it happen today or long ago? Were you, along with what you had hoped was an appropriately padded barrel, swept over the edge of Niagara Falls, or did you, one fine morning in the Middle Ages, accidentally ride your horse into a tree? The Lady of Shalott died of despair. In fact, many, very many, have died of despair, and it is important to point out that although it is poetic to think so, it is not the heart but the brain that gives out. And what of the tiny blood vessels, the small bearers of blood? You are young, you are surrounded by your fellows, you are on your way into Nazareth for the market and some great spectacle two thousand years ago, and such a vessel explodes in your brain. And there are other ways.

One can be hung, he said, beheaded, disemboweled, racked, flogged, broken on the wheel. One could fill a tome with descriptions of all the different shapes and sharpnesses of blades that have been applied in direct or indirect anger, but also accidentally, to the flesh. One can be electrocuted, injected with chemicals, hammered to death. In Japan there was the death of a thousand cuts and in China, until quite recently, one could be killed quite slowly, in a fog of opium, by dismemberment. And then, too, it is possible to kill people while they remain alive.

I asked him what he meant by this.

He spoke then of slaves, of Samos and the tu

He went on. On and on, talking to me as I sat there watching him and as Tulip slept in the other room, about death and destruction, which words, he said, were simply abstractions of all of these things and the final quieting of the heart, and that these things, these emphatic messengers, were endless, and that our representations of them had fueled rite and ritual since before our ancestors had stopped using their teeth to hold animal hide, and that, while many had sung of the great variety of life, of its rich and fulsome plenitude, if asked to stand and take his turn at the great song of being, he would sing of death and its agents, bright and dark, alone or in company, mock or real, on the earth or in the air or below the seas.

SIXTEEN

My dentist has a very nice office near Washington Square, and my dentist is very nice. I better say this in the past tense — obviously, my dentist is no longer my dentist. She did, or rather would do, my teeth. She had a lovely by-the-reclining-chair ma