Текст книги "The Exquisite"

Автор книги: Laird Hunt

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

EIGHTEEN

One gray morning, Job walked into my room and said, get rid of it.

I nodded, and Job walked out.

An hour or so later, after I had taken the little case of vials and the white robe with its badge to the incinerator chute – burning my hand on the chute’s handle in the process – he came back.

He said, we’ve got difficulties – they called the cops after that last one.

Yeah? I said.

So we stop. Call a temporary halt until things quiet down. It should be O.K., all good, you know, but keep cool. They talk to you, you don’t know anything, right?

I remember, I said.

Job went away. I never saw him again. The next day I heard from a new nurse that he had gotten himself picked up walking out of his apartment door with a suitcase and a fat wallet, had made some commentary, and had gotten smacked a couple of times, before being encouraged to kiss the pavement while he was cuffed.

I was sure I was next. In fact, I could practically hear them coming down the hall, a whole lot of them, probably more than was necessary. Since they were about to arrive at any second, I tried to get myself in the right frame of mind to be hauled off, imagining how I would act (tough, impervious) and what I would say (nothing) and what kind of look (devil-may-care, baby) I would give Dr. Tulp, standing in the door of the hospital as they shoved me into the car, and to Mr. Kindt, standing beside her (noble, resigned), and what I would do to Job (unmentionable) when I saw him, if I saw him.

For a couple of days (they didn’t come), I ran through a lot of permutations of this basic scenario, permutations that got pretty strange when I’d get my meds. I won’t get into all of them, because that would just be too boring, but, as an example, in one I hugged Mr. Kindt, who had very awful, very fishy breath, then kicked Dr. Tulp’s shin as the police were dragging me away.

Mr. Kindt, you’re my friend, Dr. Tulp, I hate you, I called as they stuffed me into the waiting patrol car.

It would probably be only fair to note, as a kind of corrective to the above-expressed sentiment, that most of the permutations in fact only involved Dr. Tulp. I mean there were no police and there was no Mr. Kindt and no hospital in them, and believe me, I wasn’t kicking shins. I was both elegant and gallant as I escorted Dr. Tulp to various local purveyors of handsome vintage apparel so that she could appropriately outfit herself for her upcoming green card proceedings and subsequent celebratory gatherings with her colleagues in the medical profession. At said gatherings, I would stand beside her in appropriate apparel of my own, holding a handsomely housed Cape Cod or Campari and soda, whose rich colors would add that subtle touch of depth to the convivial atmosphere. Occasionally, Dr. Tulp would flick her hand out and stab me with her pen, or lean close and sink her teeth into the soft flesh of my neck, but no one would take any notice and the smiles and soft chatter would go on and on. It is true that both Job and Mr. Kindt occasionally trespassed into these scenarios, but they invariably appeared in a service capacity, moving in and out of the crowd with trays of drinks and small, mysterious edibles encased in puffed pastry.

A few days went by like this, or maybe it was more than a few. In addition to the mental space taken up by my dismal flights of fancy, the subject of lost cats came into my mind and lodged there, unpleasantly, as did that of lost love. Thinking of this latter, I took to positioning myself on a bench by the ward’s main entrance in the hope that some remnant thereof would find its way through those tall metal doors. If Aunt Lulu – whom I had lost or let go or let sink forward toward her bowl of soup – had found me, I reasoned, why couldn’t Carine, whom I had lost in a different way but just as definitively? Dr. Tulp got concerned after I began to talk a lot about saliva in one of our sessions and upped my meds. I smacked the new nurse, an outrageously comely individual wearing a silver charm necklace with little devils on it, because the way she lifted her arm reminded me of Aunt Lulu, and passed a night in restraining straps with a slab of cold lead on my chest. Then I heard they weren’t going after anyone except Job, who was wanted for a couple of other, more complicated things.

This news calmed me down to some extent, but I did spend time obsessing over what Job’s other operations might have been. He’d talked one night about what had sounded at the time like a condominium deal in Florida, so I imagined him taking big, illicit bites of mob-related bogus property deals and eventually bilking the wrong guy. Because another time he had mentioned a predilection for indulging in a certain variety of late-night extracurricular activity and had remarked on its probable profitability, I pictured him running a ring of prostitutes, one catering exclusively to lower-middle-class East Village shop owners, maybe hiring someone to slip flyers under security grates at night. Job, as I imagined it, would sit at the center of this handsomely functioning mechanism with a green visor and violet glasses placing phone calls, delivering comportment lectures, and tallying receipts. When this line of thought began to lose its freshness, I decided that I needed to start getting some exercise and began jumping up and down and pumping my fists and doing other calisthenics in front of my mesh-covered window.

The new nurse came in then went out.

That is not acceptable behavior in a public facility, Henry, Dr. Tulp said.

But is it productive? I said.

It is neither productive nor acceptable, Henry. That bed you were jumping up and down on like it was your own personal property is the property of this facility and is not to be damaged. And jumping up and down without any clothes on anywhere in this facility besides your bathroom is out-of-bounds, period.

Well, fuck you.

That’s not very productive either, Henry.

No, I don’t suppose it fucking is, I said.

Dr. Tulp put one of her long, thin fingers on the intercom button and asked an attendant to come in. Two of them answered her call. They were small but persuasive.

That’s when I started talking about Aunt Lulu.

I talked and related and described, and after a while Dr. Tulp told the attendants it was all right for them to step back.

Ah, Aunt Lulu, I said. Aunt Lulu in her dirty housedress. Aunt Lulu with the protruding veins in her calves. Aunt Lulu and her cats before school. Big fat fucking huge and mean-as-hell Aunt Lulu.

Tell me about this meanness.

She used to kill her cats. After she had had them for a while, she would coax them into a double-ply plastic bag and seal it.

That is mean. But do you think it was inappropriate?

I thought so. I found some of them one day when I was building a fort at the back of the yard. My friend and I actually played with them for a while. The bags. We used them to build a dike.

And your father?

Long gone.

You used to own cats, didn’t you?

I shook my head.

Good, Henry, she said. That’s some progress, we’ve made some progress now.

I’m lying, I said.

What are you lying about, Henry?

About the fort. About Aunt Lulu. About everything.

Dr. Tulp’s long, thin finger flicked out, and the attendants came back in when I got out of my seat and started to shout.

Mr. Kindt helped me get out of this sorry rut. One day he came into my room, tapped me on the shoulder, and took me for a little walk around the ward. When I got back I felt different, better. Actually, betteris overstating it. Especially given the way things evolved. Maybe what I should give Mr. Kindt credit for is helping me get out of one rut and into another, and everyone knows that change, in the grand scheme of things, is rarely good.

Anyway, it was quiet time, when the doctors are off in their offices and the nurses and attendants sit quietly behind counters and the patients are in their beds, maybe thumbing through magazines or books or watching television or staring out the window, maybe mired in nightmares, awake or asleep.

We walked for a time in a silence broken only by Mr. Kindt’s breathing and the soft thud of our feet. When we did fall into conversation, it was only so he could tell me about a book he had once owned and read obsessively. This fascinating work contained a list of books, artworks, and objects that in a better world would have been written, painted, crafted, or found but in this poor world of ours probably hadn’t been. He had loved this list so much that he had memorized many of the descriptions, which included A Sub Marine Herbal,describing the several vegetables found on the rocks, hills, valleys, and meadows at the bottom of the sea; A Tragedy of Thyestes,and another of Medea,writ by Diogenes the Cy-nick; The Prophecy of the Cathay Quail,being the veritable and exquisite chronic of that epic questor whose exemplary fate it was never to be less than twain, by Anonymous, with engravings by Winfried Georg; A Snow Piece,of Land and Trees covered with snow and ice, and mountains of ice floating in the sea, with bears, seals, foxes, and variety of rare fowls upon them; and An Etiudros Albertior Stone that is apt to be always moist: useful unto drie tempers, and to be held in the hand in Fevers instead of Crystal, Eggs, Limmons, Cucumbers. He gave the titles and descriptions in a kind of dreamy half-whispered cadence, which helped them to lodge more firmly in my own head, and I suspect that if he hadn’t eventually pressed my arm, raised his voice, and switched the subject, being with him would havedone me some good beyond getting me out of my rut.

As it was though, he said, well, Henry, you are quite low, quite low indeed it seems.

I looked at him and nodded.

It is the blue devil of melancholy, he said.

Must be, I said.

It is a vanquisher of kings, a destroyer of great minds, a ruiner of artists, so what can such as we hope for?

Very little, I said.

That’s right. He squeezed my arm and laughed.

I asked him what he thought was funny.

We are, he said. Walking round and round a hospital ward in these awful robes.

I looked at his robe. It was covered in strange splotches and was wet in places. I tried to look at mine.

There’s a documentary on tonight, he said.

On what?

North American fur traders. On the system’s ever-shifting economic model, the breakthrough that was made possible when the mechanism of wampum was understood, on the types of traps they used, on the extraordinary amount of pain experienced by the beavers, gnawing away at their bloodied feet and hands.

Hands? I said.

I speak figuratively.

Have you already seen it?

Twice before.

Sounds depressing.

One blue devil for another.

I suppose.

We had entered a long, cold stretch of empty hallway, the locked doors giving onto storerooms, spare showers with handicap bars, and visitor toilets. There was a distant rattling sound somewhere in the walls and, occasionally, what sounded like a distant scream. Otherwise it was silent. Mr. Kindt paused here.

We continue, he said.

What? I said.

Just like before, except that now you get your tips directly from me.

I looked at him.

He smiled.

What do you mean now I get my tips directlyfrom you? Where did they come from before?

Certainly not from Job.

Mr. Kindt smiled. It was a hard smile, hard and cold like a thin piece of frozen fruit pie. Looking at it I shivered involuntarily and thought of its owner crying about herring and standing in the shower talking about screaming. I thought about his obsession with seventeenth-century Dutch exploits, including his own, which were the product, he said, of that “vortex of Dutch-made misery whose razor edges extended to the far corners of the world,” and I thought of his giggle and how he would go outside in freezing weather in his robe. I looked at his hard, cold smile and thought of these things and of other things and I shook my head and started to walk away.

Where are you going, Henry?

I’m sorry but you’re – I mean this literally but in the best possible sense – crazy, Mr. Kindt. Which is fine in general, especially here, but not for business.

We’re both literally crazy, Henry.

I’m not, I said over my shoulder. I got hit by a truck – I’m just traumatized. I have some dreams. Some communication issues. Pretty soon I’m getting out of here.

Hit by a truck, Henry?

Yes. A flower truck. It was my fault.

It wasyour fault, he said. It certainly was. But that was quite some time ago. It’s true that you went to the hospital, a hospital for the injuries you describe, but that’s not why you’re here now. Oh, my, heavens no – that’s most certainly not why.

I didn’t answer. I started walking faster.

Come back here, Henry, Mr. Kindt shouted.

But I didn’t. I went back to my room and looked out the window through the black netting or whatever it was and wondered if I would see – I did not, I did not see anything – a balloon heliuming its way up into the ether. I wondered, also, if I would ever tell Dr. Tulp the truth about Aunt Lulu, that I had stood by, without lifting a finger, when I could have helped her. But it was all too long ago to matter anyway. Wasn’t it? So much else had happened. Was happening. I wondered about what I had said about being traumatized, about the possibly erroneous nature of the causal relationship of my trauma with the truck, which had been full, I suddenly remembered, though I wasn’t sure why, of the pinkest lilies. I wondered also about Mr. Kindt’s smile and the strange look, not entirely pleasant, that had taken over his eyes. When I thought about it, it was a little like the one that had come into them just before he had bitten my ankle so hard that, later, when he had left, I had had to ask Job for some antiseptic cream.

After a few minutes he came in. He was holding a package under his arm and a piece of paper in his hand.

Look, come on, I’ve had enough, stop already, I said.

Here is a hospital robe, plus fake, and a time frame plus parameters for the next score.

The next score? Listen to how you’re talking. Who are you? I can’t believe this. What next score?

The authorities needed someone, as they always do – they came and got someone. They’ve taken him away. He won’t return. That is the way of things. This does not stop us, in any way, from continuing. Do you want a cigar? I’m dying for one.

We can’t smoke in here.

We can do anything we want in here, Henry, that’s the way it works, said Mr. Kindt, unwrapping one of his Dutch Masters, rolling it between his fingers, sniffing it, then lighting a match.

The way what works?

He winked. I looked at his eyes. Whatever had been in them had gone.

All right, my boy?

I looked out the window. No balloon came. No bird flew by. The sounds of the street seemed very distant. I seemed very distant. Empty circles within circles. Inertia clearly had the upper hand. I shrugged then nodded. Then looked at him. Then at the floor. It needed cleaning.

One blue devil for another, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.

NINETEEN

It was a good job, great even. Despite my skepticism, there were customers aplenty – so many that once or twice I had to turn requests down. The pay, as I’ve noted, was more than fair, and it quickly became clear that I could supplement it by lifting the odd item or two after I had, so to speak, put the subject away. This didn’t always work out, of course. Sometimes they didn’t want to stay dead. One guy, who I’d done in good with an aluminum-handled garrote, woke right up and wanted me to have a beer and maybe watch the game. In spite of myself, I found this a little strange, a touch supernatural, as if, while we were sitting there watching his plasma screen, I could see through him a little, and I didn’t stay long. Another, a chipper woman who told me her friends had gotten her a murder for her thirtieth birthday, started plugging me with questions before I’d even gotten started, like about what I did in real life, what kind of music I listened to, whether I thought the murder thing was stupid, distasteful, “and/or kind of cool” (and/or kind of cool, I said), if, maybe, when we were done I’d like to take some X and “see what happens.” Fortunately, the scenario I’d been given, imparted to Cornelius by her friends, had called for me to drop a good dose of her own Halcion in her drink and, in the meantime, “humor her.” Which I did, and eventually her head started lolling and she shut up just before her friends were due to get there and paint her living room. Not that I minded, incidentally, at least as a concept, the x-and-possibly-getting-friendly part – it’s just that, as with one or two other jobs, I had started to get the feeling I was dressed up in a Santa Claus suit and some wiseass kid was tugging on my beard.

Most of them didn’t get weird or friendly though, and didn’t seem to mind if I prowled around a little. A couple of times I was even supposedto prowl around and steal things. One woman, who told me she worked as a stockbroker in a medium-sized firm downtown as I taped her up, said I should smash what I didn’t want and take the rest: it was all insured. Unfortunately there was nothing there – the requisite knickknacks, etc. – excepted, so I knocked over a lacquer vase and a row of blue coffee mugs and took a pair of toy binoculars that, when I tried them the next day, proved not to be functional, and a book I subsequently read and liked a great deal by an Italian writer, which was about black holes and supernovas and the prospect of getting stuck forever on the moon. The other time I was supposed to steal something the verbal brief was explicit. I was to murder the subject (first by knocking him out with a strong dose of chloroform, then by taking a knife from the chest of drawers in his bedroom and “being especially brutal with it”) the moment he (a practicing accountant by the name of Leonard James Seligman, who worked out of his apartment by the looks of the beat-up diplomas on his wall, the big adding machine on his desk, the half-eaten sandwich, full ashtray, etc.) came home, steal his money, then bag up the entire contents of his desk’s file drawer (the key to which would be on his person) and (“in disgust because there is nothing there worth keeping”) toss the lot into the trash outside the building. I did this, not neglecting to “act disgusted” as I feigned going through the bag before I dropped it into the garbage. It occurred to me to wonder, as I did this, if he himself had requested the murder, or if someone else, perhaps a disgruntled client, had requested it, maybe without his knowledge, for him.

I had been under the impression that the jobs would be collaborative, that the contortionists would be involved, that the knockout would stop by once in a while to add a little spice to the business, that Cornelius would occasionally climb in through a window wearing his hunting cape, but after the test runs I was left to work alone.

We’re stretched too thin, Cornelius explained to me one night after I had asked him about it. Business is booming and everyone has to work.

Do you work?

I’m old, Henry. I organize – I oversee. I do other things.

Like speak French?

Cornelius raised an eyebrow.

Real murders?

No comment.

Tell me more about Mr. Kindt swimming the length of Lake Otsego on a bet.

Shut up, please.

Usually, I would get a scenario, delivered verbally – by Cornelius – a night or so before the murder, which gave me time to pick up props if they were called for and think things through a little. Sometimes, though, all I got beforehand was the time and address, with no on-site instructions waiting for me – those jobs, after I had gotten over my prework jitters, were probably my favorites, although the results could get a little messy, even painful.

Once, for example, the job involved a couple in a building over on Second Street, across from the old Marble Cemetery – a nice little lower-rung tenement with mosaic floors and freshly painted green stairs. I’d been buzzed in, so I figured they would open up when I knocked, but they didn’t, even when I leaned close to the door and said I could hear them in there and that the meter was running and they should let me in. After a few more minutes, I knocked again, louder this time. The door next to theirs opened and a heavy old lady with greasy hair in a dirty housedress looked out. From somewhere in the apartment behind her a man’s voice said, who is it, Lupe? But the old lady said nothing, just kept staring at me, with a premises-vacated-but-haunted look in her eyes. I had seen a lot of that look out in the streets and down in the subway in the eighties. Once I had woken up on one of the old plastic bucket seats in Penn Station and found someone with the look about six inches away, peering into my face.

I knocked on the couple’s door.

I asked the old woman, who was still standing in her doorway, if she had the time.

She blinked, her nostrils flared slightly, she scratched her right side.

I was getting ready to leave when the husband opened the door and invited me in.

Sorry, he said. We were just getting things together. Finishing up. Come on in.

Who’s the neighbor? I said.

Go back inside, Lupe, it’s all right, he said.

Get back in here now, Lupe, came the man’s voice from behind her.

Lupe didn’t move.

Don’t worry about it, she’s just got a short circuit somewhere, he said.

I’m not worried, I said.

He vanished back into his apartment and, after I had said good-bye to Lupe, who did not answer, I followed him in. He introduced me to his wife. We all shook hands. They had some dinner – chicken with wild rice, salad, and sweet potatoes – going and suggested I join them. I sat down. Not too long into dinner – which wasn’t bad, although the chicken was a little tough – we got to it. It was when the wife, who had just finished her glass of 2000 Long Island Blanc Fumé, said, so this is the guy that’s been writing me those letters, Billy. Here he is. I wanted you to see him face-to-face. See who your competition is.

What? the husband said.

Yeah, what? I said. I wondered what I was supposed to have written. Maybe the imagined letters had been vulgar, full of details about what I’d do to her if I got her alone, etc. Or maybe they had just been enthusiastic, full of exclamation points, exciting interrogations, curlicues of banal but nicely turned supposition. Who knows what the mind wants, what it needs to talk itself into waking up. She looked nice. Pretty in a quiet, self-contained way. Like a lamp turned on in the early evening, or a modest triangle of green space on a crowded street.

The husband, for his part, did not look all that nice, though he had been pleasant enough through dinner. A tattoo of a wildly burning pinecone on his forearm had figured in the conversation. He told me he had gotten it during a stint as a construction worker in Jersey City. While sometimes, now that he wasn’t working a jackhammer, he regretted having had it done, other times it filled him with a kind of pride. More than once, “on that day they got us,” when he was helping with the stretchers, he had looked at it through the smoke, gritted his teeth, and soldiered on. Also, his wife found it cute.

A pinecone, she had said, as if by way of confirmation.

Listen, asshole, he said, standing up.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that now a struggle would ensue, things would get out of hand. I would kill the husband, and maybe even the wife.

All right, I said. We got to it. The trouble was the husband was more into grappling than I was, and before I knew it I was getting slapped around pretty handsomely. After a while, in fact, it was either do something drastic or give them a refund. Fortunately, the guy stopped and pointed at the big wooden salad bowl on the table. I picked it up and broke it over his head.

Sweet Jesus, God in heaven, said the wife.

Yeah, I said, starting to move toward her.

You won’t hurt me or anything will you?

I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to take this, but after my tussle I was feeling a little fatigued, so I told her, albeit politely, to shut up, then put tape over her mouth, did my best to hog-tie her, and held my fingers over her nostrils long enough for her to lose consciousness. I took a look around the apartment. Nothing caught my eye until I was heading for the door. On a table in a corner was a box full of all shape and presumably variety of pinecones. I took one as a souvenir for Mr. Kindt.

Lupe appeared not to have moved from the open doorway, although she now seemed agitated and was even wringing her hands. After a moment, I could hear a soft snoring coming out of the room behind her. I must have been disoriented, because I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that all of New York, like some horrible dark spider, had crawled into the apartment behind Lupe to sleep and shouldn’t, at all costs, be woken.

Bye, Lupe, I whispered.

A couple of gray cats had appeared and were sitting pressed up against her light-blue slippers.

Oftentimes, after I’d completed a job, I would go over to Mr. Kindt’s and tell him about my evening. He liked hearing about what he called my escapades, and took particular interest in the ones that had a more openly theatrical aspect, like the job involving a rooftop terrace overlooking Tompkins Square, a black chair sitting on a red blanket, and poison dripped into an old guy’s ear. He also took considerable pleasure in hearing about the simpler ones, including the murder of an older woman by following her into her apartment and smashing an ax into her head. Maybe not surprisingly, a considerable number of people were interested in death by falling, or smoke inhalation or sudden impact, and Mr. Kindt was always very interested to hear about how they had been accommodated.

Sometimes during these conversations, Tulip was present, and I have to say I tended to lay things on a little thick when she was there. Since our conversation in the bar after her murder, I had had the impression that certain elemental operations in my body, like cell mitosis or proper oxygen conversion or general nutrient replacement and calorie conversion, got interrupted when those eyes of hers would light on me. I had the impression that she had undergone an attitudinal adjustment toward me since the night of the second trial run, and, though it’s a little embarrassing to admit, it was hard not to keep hearing her say, you’re pretty too. Of course it’s important not to overstate this perceived shift in circumstances. It’s not like Tulip was suddenly falling all over me – hardly. Where before, a disinterested “whatever” might have come close to describing her attitude toward me, there now emanated some glimmer of maybe, just maybe, more than moderate interest from her direction when I would show up at Mr. Kindt’s and start talking.

So of course I talked.

This talking, when it strayed from description of accomplished fake murder or of fake murder slated to be accomplished, was admittedly not much, but neither Mr. Kindt nor Tulip seemed greatly inclined to interrupt me. It was in this way that I came to discuss – with a level of bitterness that I only afterward and only vaguely wondered at – my unhappy early years in the city, the endless days spent working as a messenger in the basement at Forty-second and First, my dismissal, the brief and pleasant spell on severance and then unemployment, one or two incidents, my job shifting garbage and objects at the little antique shop on Second, my first attempted theft and its embarrassing result, a stint as a freelance writer for a weekly paper, the dismal try at a pulp novel, a Parisianesque girlfriend, several related episodes, including being dragged to poetry events at St. Mark’s Church and the KGB Bar, my general distrust of these events, where people either moved too much when they read or too little, the strange excitement of all the references to long-dead poets, the episode with my poor little cat, the Parisianesque girlfriend’s abrupt and not unviolent and indeed heartbreaking departure from my life, my inability to make rent, certain family problems to do with my aunt, renewed attempts at theft, sketchy business opportunities, life on the streets, time in the hospital, where I was treated for my injuries, forcibly detoxed, given an opportunity to fill my pockets with some saleable pharmaceuticals, then discharged – in short, the whole sad story until Tulip walked up to me at a party, etc. Both Tulip and Mr. Kindt seemed sympathetic during my ramblings on this and other not especially related subjects, and at one juncture, when I was having an especially hard time describing something unpleasant that had occurred one night not too far from my old apartment, they told me to come sit between them on the couch.

You’re past that and on to other things now, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.

Yes, Tulip said.

Anyway, generally speaking, they were both nice to me during these episodes. Mr. Kindt would say a few comforting words then gently steer me back to the subject of my escapades, and Tulip didn’t get up and walk out of the room whenever I started talking, like she would have before. So it was all pretty agreeable.

Incidentally, I offer (or let stand) the above-mentioned biographical details, merely pointed to as they are, only to provide further context for my subsequent actions – to acknowledge, in a sense, that I had started my sad-sack downward slide long before Mr. Kindt, Tulip, Cornelius, and his posse entered my life, and that what was to happen very soon afterward, had as much to do with my own shortcomings – by that I mean my own idiocy – as with any particular external forces. Sure, there were machinations being conducted around me, but the truth is I had plenty of warning. To take one instance, the day of what I called the pinecone murder, in fact, Anthony appeared out of nowhere as I was heading over to Mr. Kindt’s, grabbed my arm, and told me that he had been hearing things and that if I was smart I would put as much distance between myself and Mr. Kindt et al as I could. Instead of asking him why, what he’d been hearing, etc., what I did – and you will see that no matter how many questions I did actually ask I was to repeat the essence of this gesture several times in the days to come – was hold up the pinecone and say, Nice, huh?