Free The Exquisite by Laird Hunt Page B

were young. There was drink involved. I miscalculated.
    Mr. Kindt helped you to get started on murdering?
    Indeed.
    How so?
    He both gave me the idea and helped with its early implementation.
    And you’ve been successful?
    Terrifically.
    No shortage of work?
    None.
    Pays well?
    Very fairly. Even with the sliding scale we have recently implemented. There is a real need, it would seem, a deep-seated impulse following the horror downtown. An impulse that manifests as desire.
    Desire?
    We offer the modalities to perform an act of ritual negation. One is able, on one’s own terms, to say no.
    I told him it sounded like he was talking about suicide.
    Ah, but there is external agency. Underscored by the transaction, the exchange of cash.
    Euthanasia then.
    Well, that would certainly be closer. Be we are not discussing in this instance individuals in their apparent final extremities. And we are discussing symbols.
    How exactly did Mr. Kindt help you?
    He was the first victim. The first beneficiary, albeit of a primitive version of the system.
    I don’t follow you.
    Ah, but someday perhaps—he had reached the door and buzzed—you will.
    I stood alone on the street for a few minutes. External agency, I thought. Primitive version. The air smelled of lentils and saffron. My friend Fish rode by.
    Incidentally, I like hunting capes. In fact, I decided I would like to have one. I told Mr. Kindt the next day how much I liked them, and he told me that he, too, liked hunting capes very much and that the namesake of his namesake had, in fact, once attempted to steal one from someone and had paid quite heavily.
    You have two namesakes?
    Don’t we all?
    Maybe technically. If you’re a king or something.
    Mr. Kindt said he liked this idea of kings and went on about it for some time. When he was done, I asked him how heavily the namesake of his namesake, or whatever, had paid.
    Think of lead and other troublingly dense elements and how authoritatively, once released, they fall, Mr. Kindt said, laughing, and adding a “dear young man,” and the conversation ended there, except that one of the next times I went over to Mr. Kindt’s he had a hunting cape to give me. Just like Cornelius’s. That’s the kind of friend he was. Anything, he loved to say, for a friend.
    Or for a fish, I once joked as we sat late one night over brandy.
    They like oxygen, Mr. Kindt, who was quite drunk, said, but of course are not fond of air. Still. They are like. But more graceful. Absolute and graceful. Imagine great silver flocks. Underwater birds with sharp, powerful wings.
    I had a dream about fish once during this period. In it, I was both fish and viewer of fish, and Mr. Kindt was a fish too. He swam up to me and said, you are not just any sort of fish, my dear boy, you are a herring. Then I was a herring on a laboratory table. The experiment was to see why it was that herring might die immediately upon leaving the water, a characteristic that, though long and widely believed to aict them, was never proved. Tulip—and this gave the dream a vaguely visionary quality—was presiding. She had a scalpel and was describing and making incisions. I could simultaneously see up into the room and down into the laboratory table. The interior of the table was shot through with dark red veins and shafts of blue minerals. Mr. Kindt was in there. He was a fish, probably like me a herring, in a black hat and hunting cape. I understood, in the way you do in dreams, that he was hiding. From Tulip. From all of us. He was trying to make one of his fins stretch up to his mouth so that he could indicate to me that I should shut up.
    I did. To no avail. Suddenly he was lying on the laboratory table, and Tulip was working on him and, like in the Rembrandt print he had up on his wall, people had gathered around. There was the murderer and there was Anthony, only in the dream he was Job again, and there was someone you don’t know because I haven’t mentioned him and there was