Free The Exquisite by Laird Hunt

song alone, which is what I’ve been doing these last few nights, even right this second, and there are strange lights flashing around you, there are bars on the windows and strangers passing in the corridors, there are wires, a rotting carcass you couldn’t smell before it really started to stink, an oily box filled with mashed fish, you are thinking too much, you always think too much, if all that, well then, basically, shit.

ELEVEN
    Let’s take a walk, kid, says the murderer whose name, he tells me as we’re leaving Mr. Kindt’s building, is Cornelius.
    Nice to meet you, Cornelius, I say.
    Yeah, sure, kid, sure, this way.
    “This way” is up Avenue B for a while, past the curving lanes of the park, past the restaurants and shops and brightly lit tenements, past Tenth and Eleventh, with their relatively quaint buildings and spindly trees, then over to Avenue A. Cornelius walks fast. Cornelius is dressed a little shabbily, and he’s a little hunched over and fat. On some nights in the East Village everyone is fat. We passed this fat guy. We passed this fat gal. We passed a pickle shop window and I caught a piece of our reflection and, yes, no question, I’m a little fat too.
    I was fatter than the average as a kid. My aunt, who was a very nice woman, my God, she was nice—especially when she would smack me with the spoon—used to refer to me as
husky
. Boy, you’re husky, she would say. Then she would smack me. I later gathered that she had gotten hold of
husky
from a commercial for young boys’ jeans. Young boys with slow metabolisms, who had indulged too frequently on Big Macs and double cheeseburgers and Twinkies and Mars Bars and large vanilla Tyrols were husky. To tell the truth,
husky
’s probably not a bad way to describe me now.
    So there we are, husky Henry and fat Cornelius walking up Avenue, past the local denizens, with their somber eye shadow and faux fur and polyester pants and nonprescription nerd glasses and cell phones and gas masks.
    Where are we going, Mr. Murderer? I say.
    Nowhere, shut up, Henry, we’re here, don’t be a motormouth, he says.
    A motormouth? I say.
    He turns into a doorway next to an unlit faded dry cleaner’s, buzzes, tells me to wait, and goes in.
    A couple of cabs hum by, then a Mustang painted up to look like the Mexican flag and a cyclist wearing a black helmet and goggles and dark-green socks. It takes me a second to realize that this cyclist is my old friend Fish. I don’t call out to him. He probably wouldn’t stop anyway. I owed him money for too long and obliged him to bang on my door until I came out and, in lieu of payment, let him stagger off with my TV. Fish used to work as a copy editor at a short-lived golf magazine based in midtown. We both lost our jobs around the same time, both slid around the same time, the difference being that Fish slid voluntarily and now lives, by choice, in an unusual squat situation and rides around the East Village in his goggles.
    I do a little near-silent whistling. I register that I’m whistling ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” and stop. I don’t really, I think, want anyone to do any such thing. An old man in one of those colorless zip-up jackets and a beat-up porkpie takes a long time to walk by me. I nod at him. He does not look at me, does not, in fact, seem to see me. A dollop of street light falls onto his face. I can smell lentils, saffron, burnt plastic. My mind follows him home, where I imagine him unlocking a door, pulling it open, stepping in, clearing his throat, and calling out an unreciprocated greeting into the darkness. Time is not our friend, I think. I start whistling again. ABBA again. After about five minutes, Cornelius is back.
    All right, good to go, he says, handing me a key.
    Good to go in what way exactly?
    You’ll see, just get up there, it’s on the fourth floor.
    I look at him.
    He frowns at me.
    You’re Mr. Kindt’s buddy, right?
    Right.
    So why are we still standing here