The Exquisite Read Online Free PDF Page A

entertained as a kid, involving a Jules Verne–type submarine that would take me to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where I would disembark, in a special suit, and enter a grotto then a tunnel down which I would spelunk for miles, overcoming, as I went, multiple traps and numerous multilimbed ferocious-toothed guards, then pick or force the lock on the small iron door behind which my father was supposed to be kept, only he wouldn’t be there. This would mean I would have to find my father’s captor, force him, through awful means, including chopping one of his legs off, to tell me where my father was. He would tell me that my father was now being held on an off-world colony whose location was the highest secret. He would die laughing in my face. I would spend the next several years conducting an investigation that would take me all over the world in search of the secret to my father’s whereabouts. I would finally get the answer in a bar made out of a shipping container on one of Jupiter’s nastier moons. When I found my father, in a detention tower near the Sea of Tranquility, on Earth’s moon, he would put his hand on my cheek and say, I knew you would find me, boy. I would pick him up in my arms. At that moment, my father’s captor, mysteriously resurrected, would spring the trap he had been waiting to spring for years, locking both my father and me up together in the tower’s chamber. There we would sit together and wait with no hope of rescue for certain death. Some dark, end-of-the-galaxy sci-fi music would play in the background. We would be happy though. Together, with our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders or playing some game like Scrabble.
    There was a silence after I had finished speaking. Mr. Kindt handed me another cracker and momentarily placed one of his unsettlingly soft hands on my knee.
    My father died when I was ten, I said. He worked construction. Mostly housing, on Staten Island. I was raised by my aunt. It was a long time ago. He liked Scrabble.
    Of course, Mr. Kindt said.
    That wasn’t the happiest “anything” scenario I could have come up with.
    Happy, said Mr. Kindt. He made an exaggeratedly dismissive face and shrugged.
    What would you do, Tulip? I asked.
    I would do the same, of course, with the appropriate adjustments, she said. I might, for instance, go after my loved one, fight my way through the meanies, in a yellow submarine.
    Mr. Kindt smiled. And I would set off in a purple diving bell, he said. One
should
do anything, yes, my dears.
    The three of us sat quietly for a while then. It occurred to me that maybe this talk and cracker eating was all the dinner I was going to get, which was just fine with me. After all it isn’t every night you get to talk about love and intricacy and herring, much less substances and oceans and swept floors. The truth is, once I had stopped feeling for those few moments like I had to immediately vacate the premises, had stopped wondering what the fuck I was doing there and the alarm bells had fallen silent, it all started to seem kind of cozy—the crackers, the anything scenarios, Tulip, Mr. Kindt, me.
    At some point a bottle of brandy was brought out. Glasses were poured. Refilled.
    Mr. Kindt spoke some more—about smoke and history. Looking in my direction, he said nice things about those we have lost, those who have vanished like so much dew on the oak leaves or something. At this I started to feel guilty and told him that in fact my father, as far as I knew, was still very much alive, that he had been and probably still was a construction worker, but that he had not died when I was ten. Until he had left for good he had come home most nights smelling of sweat and concrete and, after arguing with his sister, my aunt, who had taken over when my mother left not too long after I was born, had watched with me.
    Ah well, the truth, Mr. Kindt said, in much the same way he had said “happy.”
    It was a good story, Tulip said.
    Involving