Ray of the Star

by Laird Hunt

  “I’ve just tried acupuncture in an attempt to deal with it as well as other problems,”

  “And did you find it effective?”

  “I just went the once, yesterday,”

  “Ah,”

  “Then I bought a bell,”

  “A bell,”

  “The kind you ring at hotels and doctor’s offices if you need help,”

  “I see,”

  so that the upshot of Harry’s attempts at drawing out his companion was that he felt slightly worse than he had before he had spoken, but even when Ireneo at last held open a green carriage door that gave onto a cobblestone courtyard at the end of which Harry perceived a large, dimly lit window filled with unmoving people dressed in somber colors, standing with their backs to him, which Ireneo announced as their destination, so far was Harry from mounting any resistance that he momentarily took the lead as they crossed the courtyard and went in through a small door next to the large window and joined the crowd of, yes, very nearly unmoving people, who were dressed entirely in something akin to mourning, so that Harry, in looking at their backs and shoulders, felt his eyes falling into familiar chasms, black openings in the dim air, which felt to him chillingly consummated mere moments after Ireneo had shut the door behind them, when he heard a click and the room was plunged into a darkness that seemed to explode out of the black clothing and that remained unmitigated long after it seemed to Harry that his eyes should have adjusted to it.

  Harry was no stranger to lightless chambers, in fact for whole months he had spent his free time, i.e, the hours not passed in his gray bedroom or in his slowly decomposing cubicle at work, in a chair placed dead-center in a windowless room in the basement of his former house, where he had unscrewed the lightbulb and would sit, hoping that in the miasma of black he had created the conditions would be right—though right for what he wasn’t certain: some shift, some alteration, perhaps some new dispensation that would allow him to walk out of this world and into some other—but after a time he had begun to find himself troubled by the blackness, the mockery it made of his eyes, the sounds it seemed to heighten, small scratching noises, bits of breathing he couldn’t trace, tufts of cold air on his ear or toe, and he had begun avoiding the windowless room, indeed had long ago left the chair sitting there and locked it up, like he had now done with his entire house, forever, which is what he began to wish he could do here, even though he had only just arrived, and while he was thinking this and other things, an old woman wearing what appeared to be an illuminated lampshade on her head appeared in the depths of the room and began walking toward him, and it struck Harry that the crowd that had been there must have dispersed, because her path toward him was unimpeded, and before he could take a precautionary step backwards she was standing in front of him with her eyes shut, permanently or not he could not have said, as the light cast by the lampshade or whatever was in it was imperfect at best, but this didn’t matter because then the woman began humming, something vaguely incantatory, and as she did so her lampshade went off and lampshades began to flicker around the edges of the room, where the people had apparently positioned themselves, causing their faces to float for a moment like ruined petals, Harry thought, amidst the blackness, with the effect that he began to feel as if he were floating just a little along with them, so that when the old woman stopped humming and said, “Now I will tell you what it is you have come to hear,” Harry heard it from on high, as it were, and answered more loudly than perhaps the situation merited, although he understood quickly enough that this was not what caused the old woman to throw open her eyes, quickly look him over, then yell, “Lights out!” whereupon she vanished leaving a globular afterimage that danced before Harry’s eyes long after Ireneo had hustled him back out of the doors they had come in through and out onto the street, where, as the pale yellow thing still bobbed before him, Ireneo gesticulated and rolled his turquoise eyes and said, “It was her, I knew it, I should have known it, they told me to bring the one with the broken face, it was her,” and for a moment they both, Harry thought, looked into the yellow globe before them and saw the handsome woman from the café sitting cross-legged inside it, flecks of silver sparkling like tinfoil on her face, which didn’t stop him from saying to Ireneo, “Who, who was her?” and Ireneo from bowing, apologizing, turning on his heel, and walking away.

  Harry found so appealing the idea that his sparklingly clean but manifestly still-broken face had led Ireneo to mistakenly summon him instead of the silver woman to the ceremony of the lamps, as he called her and it as he lay in bed fighting his legs later that night and then the next morning over tea and miniature pastries, that, after trying and failing several times to find the mysterious house again, he began doubling up on his appearances at the café in hopes of encountering either her or Ireneo, but the world had swerved away from or swallowed that trajectory, and he saw neither of them, and no one he spoke to at the counter of the bar could call to mind the tall man with the turquoise eyes or the woman with the flecks of silver on her face, and by and by he again found himself beating hasty retreats to his bed, ringing his bell, dodging or not dodging Señora Rubinski, murmuring greetings to his neighbors and wandering the streets of the city or sitting on one of its wide beaches or stumbling around its often oddly shaped plazas, which were invariably constructed around statues and/or fountains: focal points for the eye that might otherwise have been pulled away into the shadows that held sway along the jagged periphery, thought Harry, one day when he was feeling particularly susceptible to what he called the loathsome generalities, abstractions like “everyone” and “everything,” that crushed whatever came in their way, whether it was the everyone associated with the office, the everyone who announced that the period for grieving had long since expired and that it was high time for one to get off one’s sorry ass and come back to the cubicle, as it were, or the everything associated with the stars and moon, the earth and oceans, the red sandstone yawing in monstrous slabs out of the calm green slopes, the snow that covered, froze, and quieted it all, the world, in short, that entered through your burning eyes and bludgeoned your sorry soul— So much that cuts our legs out from under us —“I couldn’t agree more,” said a man just after Harry had thought this, as he stood beneath a striped green awning that looked out through a bright drizzle over a fringe of evergreen bushes to a monument to some group or other of the once-honored dead, and although the man was speaking to the woman next to him and not to Harry, Harry looked in his direction and thought, You’re just saying that, and without missing the proverbial beat the man said, “Quite the contrary, I might have said the same thing myself and in just those words,”

  I have a recurring dream, thought Harry,

  “Oh really?” said the man,

  This awning is reminding me of it,

  “Go on,”

  A ship takes me to a distant city, we arrive at night, I am meant to disembark with a group for a tour of some sort, but I disembark alone and am quickly lost in winding streets,

  “A labyrinth,”

  Of sorts, only before long it resolves itself and I am in the very bazaar the group had been meant to visit: an agreeable affair next to a long canal, with stalls of blue and violet glassware mixed in with piles of bolts, bicycle chains, jewelry boxes, all backlit by lamps that set the glassware alight,

  “That must have made for a beautiful reflection in the water,”

  Yes, and in fact before long I am on the canal, shopping at the reflected stalls, which are tended by children,

  “Children?”

  Which is odd because there was no one tending the stalls above the surface,

  “That is odd,”

  I want to buy something, but can’t decide what to buy,

  “Too many choices?”

  Everything is too lovely, and all this loveliness, which emanates in equal part from the glowing wares and the children’s faces, short-circuits my ability to think, and I just stand there without being able to move,

&
nbsp; “You’ve lost something,”

  But in the dream I can’t think of what it is, all I can do is stand there, without moving, as the dark from the water slowly gains the upper hand on the light from the stalls, and all around me people are streaming back toward the harbor, where the ship is waiting to leave, but I don’t leave, I just stand there, which is what Harry did, for quite some time after the man and his companion had left, and the rain had stopped falling, and the pigeons and green parrots, which sometimes flew with them, had returned to preen and dry their feathers in the sun that was now coating the monument to the dead, dripping off all of its exposed surfaces, burning off the rainwater gathered there between the surrounding cobblestones.

  When Harry finally collected himself and left, he felt that by telling someone about his dream he had gotten something essential off his chest, something that had had to be removed, like the mineral scale that, unaddressed, builds up in small, water-reliant appliances like espresso machines and warm-air humidifiers, eventually choking them, and as he continued his explorations it seemed like the sprawling city, which nevertheless remained wrapped in a veil of mystery that he was certain his multiple incursions would do little to mitigate, was in some way opening to him, and that his knotted mind was at last untying itself, with the happy result that when one afternoon, upon visiting one of the city’s many spectacular museums, where bits of the distant past had been hammered up on the wall alongside multilingual explanatory notices, he had great difficulty deciphering what was being proposed about the glistening armor hanging before him, a fact he found more curious than troubling, and he was even encouraged, rather than perturbed, to note that this moment of ocular aphasia before the explanatory notice reminded him that in the old days he had often woken not so much not knowing where he was, but not knowing who it was he was lying next to, which had more than once made him leap up and grab for his pants, afraid that his then-wife, upon waking, would be horrified to find a total stranger lying nearly naked beside her, and that when that dynamic had ceased being possible, i.e. when the bed beside him had become empty, he had more than once woken with the sensation that the emptiness beside him would at any moment awake and, seeing him lying on the bed partially clad, scream, and that scream would destroy him, so he had started sleeping on the couch and had not stopped sleeping on the couch until he had arrived in this new city, where he had a single bed, a sequence of thought that had continued to attend but not disturb him as he left the museum and drifted back down to the city from the heights where it was located, to which layers—upon layers—of mental fog he attributed his inability to recognize the handsome woman from the café when, less than an hour after he had stood gazing without comprehension at the three-by-three-inch sign, he stood gazing without comprehension at her.

  Afterwards, Harry realized that he had more than once walked past her, that she had been hidden in plain sight, like the letter in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story, which mechanism had baffled all attempts to find it because it lay out in the open where everyone could see it and so, in the natural order of things, didn’t, a comparison he liked quite a good deal even though the two ends didn’t quite match up—she after all had neither been hidden nor was hiding—and which prompted him, some weeks later, when it was all over, to seek out the story in question and reread it over a plate of sliced quince and tuna wedges and a glass of sparkling water at a small specialty shop near the market, out of which he had emerged when he stepped onto the broad sloping central pedestrian boulevard that split the city and led down to the sea, and which he had walked along nearly every day, remarking, assuredly, upon the numerous “living statues” who had set up their more or less elaborate shop along the edges, to the general delight of tourists and to the more specific delight, as Harry was unfortunately to learn, of certain local connoisseurs, though never before having stopped in front of one, as he did shortly after starting down the street on this day, in front of this extraordinary silver angel, with her enormous silver wings and beautiful silver face, down one cheek of which coursed frozen, silver tears, upon which Harry gazed with wonder then sudden, spine-stiffening recognition that grabbed him up and shoved him through to the front of the small crowd surrounding her, whose members were snapping pictures and remarking on the elaborateness of her costume, really one of the best, so much more marvelous than the fairly predictable Che Guevara, or the chubby Julius Caesar, or the man with his own head on a plate, or the creaky, battling robots, or the lady dressed as a fruit stand: this was on a par with the golden centaur, or the two platinum men on bicycles, a real work of art, Yes, a work of art, thought Harry, who stood on the sidewalk no more than three feet away from the silver box the angel seemed bolted to and gazed up into her hardly blinking eyes, which did not move even when she very precisely arched her back, then lifted a shoulder, then twisted her arm, and after a few minutes he was asked by several of the onlookers to step aside, there were pictures to be taken, he was blocking the full view, in short, “What the fuck, man?” but Harry did not move, kept gazing up into her eyes, even as the murmuring around him grew louder, less relaxed, until suddenly it struck him that she was, perhaps because of him, on the verge of breaking her silence, that by standing there and somewhat impudently staring at her, he was committing a transgression, interfering with her act, possibly even making her nervous, which was exactly the opposite of his intent: he had thought long and hard on this, the two of them with their broken faces could eat together, share a drink, take a stroll, apply tape and glue to each other, but now he could see that the situation would require much more than a casual “Hi, they thought I was you,” and that his standing in front of her, in all her splendor, like a troll lying in ambush beneath a handsome bridge, was no way to get things started, so he bowed his head and, with the idea of in some way mitigating the disturbance he had caused, murmured an apology then backed away slowly, rather ridiculously, before turning and moving off down the boulevard, where eventually he passed Julius Caesar, then a rather good Atlas with golden dreadlocks, who had set down his globe and was sweeping the ground in front of his box, and then Che Guevara, who had a plastic cigar stuffed in his mouth and was engaged in lighting and throwing tiny firecrackers onto the ground.

  Cheeks burning as he hurried away, Harry reminded himself that, in his defense, he had stumbled upon the silver angel by accident, and that while it was true that this accident had occurred in the context of his attempts to locate her, it was still an accident, that could not be disputed, or could it? hmmm … : he had been looking for her and had found her, and hadn’t his method been more or less to stagger around the city until their paths crossed again? and hadn’t that been what had happened? it had, but, still, in what sense had he, actually, been looking for her? wasn’t he mistaking what had been reduced to rather a wan hope, one stripped of all but the most desultory agency, with active engagement? wouldn’t any outside, so-called impartial observer briefed on the situation exclaim, “but you weren’t looking for her, you were just flopping around, you may have been thinking about her in some abstract way as you went out, but that’s pretty far from constituting a search”? but what constitutes a search? Harry wondered, what is the cut-off point? the point beyond which the activity ceases to be what we have mistaken it for? once, over coffee, a well-meaning friend had put her hand on his shoulder and said, “what are you doing? that was years ago, years and years …” and he had taken a sip of his coffee and said, “I’m searching”—in much the same tone, he realized as he passed a pair of living tree statues, fairly nice ones, that he had used in making his comment to the pigeon about beginning his “assault on life” and his comment to the man under the awning about the number of hurdles life lines up before you—but what, exactly, had he meant by that? had he been describing an open-ended engagement, one that, perhaps, continued even now? this seemed plausible, and rather interesting, insofar as said search could be seen as an umbrella for the search he had or had not been conducting for the woman he had or had
not found, but which was it? had he, in this subsidiary instance, been searching or hadn’t he? could he, in other words, fairly attribute a portion of his boorish behavior in front of the angel to his astonishment at having found—rather than stumbled across—her? and what (the fuck, he thought) was the difference? it was hard to say, which was the way so many of his arguments with himself ended: in depressing stalemates, he far and away preferred losing to himself, as at least in those instances he achieved some approximation of clarity, and clarity, even the false variety, was inarguably something, etc., Harry thought, and as he did so, moving all the way down the long avenue and toward the water, the handsome woman, the woman with paint on her face, the silver angel—whose name, it is time for her to have one, was Solange—stood on her box, and thought not about Harry, whom she had barely noticed and had quickly forgotten, but about a path lit by star- and moonlight, one she had heard the dead were obliged to travel before leaving this sphere, and that for some was very long and for others very short, and she wanted to know which, in the case of her lost one, it was, and not knowing was troubling her and preventing her, and her lost one, she suspected, from moving on, which was why when, a week ago, after she had found the little salmon-colored slip of paper on the subway platform that guaranteed answers to “insoluble questions,” she had telephoned the number given and had been told to wait at the café where we first encountered her and where Ireneo made his mistake.