by Laird Hunt
Harry could not have said whether it was some trick of perception to do with the trend of his thoughts, or a pocket of unusual local phenomenon that he had stumbled into, but as he approached Alfonso’s coordinates, the streets of the city, described above as gray and violet, went black then blacker, and for a moment, even though he could see quite clearly, he felt himself compelled to hold his hands pressed against his thighs, flare his nostrils, and flick his eyes back and forth as if something—possibly the air itself and how the fuck could he fight the air—was about to spring and shove a blade down his throat, or otherwise finish the job on him, what a night, what a night, but presently a cheery row of lampposts cut a series of lovely cones in the darkness and, just beyond them, he began to hear bits and pieces of birdsong, which grew stronger as he moved forward, and before very long at all he had found the address he had been looking for, pressed the intercom buzzer, and been admitted into a kind of loft by Alfonso, who, scraped clean of his gold, looked small, distinctly plump and kind, so kind that Harry, a little discombobulated and, frankly, grateful to be suddenly bathed in light, warmly pressed Alfonso’s hand before accepting a large mug of coffee and a clap on the shoulder, and for a long moment he just stood there taking in the high ceiling, the crumbling paint, the wood stove in one distant corner, the black-and-white photographs of the city, interspersed with what looked like old maps of the continents and fanciful coastlines, hanging on the walls, the piles of scrap wood here and there and the large, clean-but-paint-spattered floor, drifting, as he did so, into the kind of stupor that abrupt changes in circumstance, especially those involving shifts in temperature or quality/quantity of light rarely fail to engender, and it was only when Alfonso, speaking over his own mug of coffee, said, “I have something to show you,” that Harry remembered what it was he had planned to say as soon as he arrived—“There are several things I’d like to ask you, Mr. Centaur,”—but instead he found himself murmuring, “It’s very dark out,” and following Alfonso to the far side of the room, and through a narrow blue door that gave onto what it took Harry a moment to realize was a garage of sorts, perhaps even—the stone seemed weathered enough—an old carriage house, in the center of which sat a large yellow submarine, more or less the one The Beatles had had their adventure in, the one that had been so useful in the struggle against the blue meanies, the one connected to the song, which he had never liked very much and which now raged very nearly out of control in his head before subsiding, slightly, then more fully, like someone had thrown a fade switch, “You can get inside it,” Alfonso said,
“It’s the Yellow Submarine,” Harry said,
“A model, made of chicken wire and papier mâché, but a good one,”
“The song …” Harry said,
“It goes away, I should know, I live with the thing,”
“Did you build it?”
“I inherited it, there’s a hatch, you can get inside, there’s more room in it than you might think,”
“It’s certainly nicely done,”
“I often climb inside it when I want a bit of quiet, after a hard day on the box, the bottom is padded, it’s very nice to lie down inside it and doze,”
“I see,” said Harry, taking a sip of his coffee and looking a little more carefully at Alfonso, who he suddenly understood was either drunk or medicated, but rather pleasantly so, indeed his comments about climbing into the yellow apparatus and lying down and dozing struck Harry in exactly the right way, as if he were drunk or medicated too—even though he had been neither in years—and he found himself drawing Alfonso out not on the subject of why he had invited him over at this insane hour and why, now that here he was, he was showing him this papier mâché model, but instead on the merits of lying inside the Yellow Submarine and having a snooze and feeling warm and cozy but also—that was the trick of it—vigilant, which was just as well because it turned out the answers to both sets of questions dovetailed nicely when, after a few minutes, Alfonso took his coffee mug, showed him how to open the side hatch, helped him to climb in, directed his attention to the viewing grill—hidden to the casual glance from the outside—and said, “You will be able to observe her through that, it’s a camouflaging technique, often used in the military, when you’ve had a chance to get a feel for the inside, climb back out and we will wheel it over to the boulevard—if we get out early enough you can have the spot opposite her, it’s nice isn’t it, when I was young I once pitched a tent in my grandfather’s attic and spent a week there, this reminds me of that,”
I’ve thrown away my Don Quixote costume and am in a yellow submarine, thought Harry,
“It has wheels,” said Alfonso, “It’s actually quite easy to push, the friend who left it here in payment of a debt pushed me around while I lay inside of it before he left, it’s very comfortable to ride in, and if we were closer to the boulevard, I would offer you this pleasant experience,”
“I don’t understand,” said Harry,
“Why I’m doing this,” said Alfonso,
“Yes,” said Harry, overcoming an urge to remain on his back in the warm yellow interior and opening the hatch,
“I would be lying if I told you it was because I was the bearer of bad tidings this afternoon,” said Alfonso, as the two of them began wheeling the submarine through what Harry observed with relief were the rapidly brightening streets of the city, “because I told you you weren’t welcome on the boulevard in your lousy Don Quixote costume, nor because I could see, even as I had barely crested the midpoint of the story of the silver angel, which I remind you I was retelling and did not invent, that you were being deeply, troublingly affected, no, I’m doing this because as you were striking your ridiculous, amateurish poses, as you stood gushing sweat and huffing and puffing on your box, I spent no small amount of time looking at you, and while I won’t go into the why of it, I thought to myself, there’s a story and a half there, a story that begins in the dark and ends in the even darker, and I would like to hear it,”
“Everyone has a story,” said Harry,
“There you trade in truisms, my friend,”
“Truisms are sort of a specialty with me,”
“I won’t dispute that, it may even be true, but I would still like to hear whatever it is that has you engaging in dress-up and meeting with off-duty centaurs in the wee hours,”
“You mean besides my interest in the silver angel,”
“I mean besides your interest in the silver angel, yes,”
“And you think lending me this thing, this submarine, is going to help you get it?”
They both paused and looked at the thing in question, which rolled between them with surprising delicacy, surprising to Harry, that is, of course,
“Don’t you?” said Alfonso,
“It’s a sad story,” said Harry, “so sad I don’t even tell it to myself anymore,”
“So it tells itself to you,” said Alfonso,
“Yes,” said Harry, after a long pause, “Even though I tried to bury it, it keeps clawing its way up through the dirt—all my efforts to erase it have failed,”
“It has its way with you,”
“Something like that, and then something like … but that’s a little silly …” said Harry, trailing off and wondering if, at any moment, whatever it was that was keeping him calm would be swept aside and he would howl,
“Like what?”
“I’ll spare you,”
“I appreciate silly, I dress up every day like a centaur, after all,” said Alfonso,
“You make a very fine centaur, I noticed you straight away,” said Harry,
“Flattery is good, it is very good,” said Alfonso,
“I was thinking of a syllogism, a very simple one, say, ‘All people are mortal, a man’s offspring were people, therefore the man’s offspring were mortal,’ and while, as I say, the syllogism is quite basic, more than just the middle element is missing from the conclusion, at the same time that said additional element remains not merely present,
but also essential to the conclusion,”
“A haunted conclusion,”
“Yes, exactly, a haunted conclusion, the conclusion is haunted, and now I have to stop talking about it because if I don’t you will see a man tear his hair out in front of your eyes,”
“Climb inside the submarine,” said Alfonso, “I’ll push you the rest of the way.”
Harry got inside the submarine without a word, and Alfonso began to push, and in the time it took them to reach the tree-lined boulevard where Alfonso left Harry, as he had promised, directly across from the silver angel’s accustomed spot, the angel in question, who was still, at this early hour, just Solange, finished encasing a crumb of ginger cookie in Lucite and sat a moment staring at her work, admiring the fearful clarity of the medium, as always a little bit in love with the turgent liquidity of its hardening, the elegant curve she could still alter with fingertip, or slip her tweezers into, or some part of herself, although it would be as well, if she planned to do some Lucite diving, even just figuratively, to finish her coffee first and perhaps have another bite of her bread and rose petal jam, a jar of which Che Guevara had left outside her door in the weeks following the murder of her young man, and which had sat untouched, attracting flecks of dust and cinder, until one evening, upon returning home from a day on her box, she had scooped it up and deposited it on one of her many bare shelves, where it had continued its unopened existence until that morning, when she had looked down at her stale but salvageable bread and thought of the pale pink jam, which seemed to explode out of the jar as she opened it, then tilted the jar and let a pink glob slide down her tongue into her mouth, where after it had settled a moment it made her gasp and grab for the table to steady herself, before she tilted the jar again and gasped again, then spread some on her bread, which made her think of coffee, of how marvelous it would be to have a cup of fresh coffee to go with her bread and jam, and it wasn’t until she had the coffee before her and had taken another bite, that she remembered that she had set herself the task that morning of encasing part of one of her young man’s favorite cookies in Lucite, to accompany the bit of cloth from one of his purple shirts, the red plastic tine from his comb, the knob of rubber from his shoe, the button from his canvas bag, a long curled eyelash the color of burned butter, a tiny golden cog from the watch he had been in the process of taking apart, a hardened dab of bolonaise sauce from his last meal on earth, and the second word of the title, clipped from the frontispiece of his favorite book, Paradise Lost, and it was only when she had pulled on her latex gloves and set herself up by the open window that the sadness that for months had been circling her like a shark swept past her and looked at her with a blank, unblinking eye, but when it bit this morning, it seemed at first like it had barely broken the skin, and even when she realized that she had been mistaken, that it had indeed broken the skin and done its customary damage, she licked a drop of rose petal jam from her lips, raised one eyebrow, looked at the crumb of ginger cookie, decided it was close to finished, thought, hmmm, and when she got dressed for work a few minutes later, she affixed one less tear to her cheek and walked away from her building a little more quickly and with her eyes open a little more widely than usual, with the result that when she arrived at her accustomed spot—in front of a handsome old pharmacy with a medieval theme and a bustling fried fish establishment—and saw the Yellow Submarine sitting opposite her, she stood staring at it for upwards of a minute, the way, it occurred to her as she set up her box, one waking from a bad dream stares into the face of a loved one who has unexpectedly arrived at her bedside and places a calming hand on her head, and will sit there unmoving, for exactly as long as the situation warrants, which was what —though of course Solange didn’t know this—Harry, looking out of the submarine through its false front grill, intended to do.
With Harry in position and now far closer, in fact almost absurdly close, as we shall see, to achieving his goal, the silver angel feeling ever-so-slightly better and already looking over, with interest, in Harry’s direction, Alfonso climbing onto his own box and leaning into his hind legs to begin the long day, a warm breeze beginning to blow up from the sea, tourists streaming in and out of the market, shop doors opening and closing and old men and women taking up their stations in shadowy doorways and windows, it is time for the connoisseurs to take their morning walk, an undertaking they execute with a measure of determined intimacy: shoulder to shoulder, though not arm in arm, matching watery gray eyes flicking this way and that like small birds in their cages leaping from bar to bar, which is to say they take it all in, these connoisseurs, and not just the shining breeze-blessed surfaces, which drive the eyes of the tourists mad with desire, but also the peripheral zones, where bits of old candy conspire with crushed soda cans and melting cubes of ice to haunt the secondary and tertiary corners of the mind, zones that the connoisseurs, who have been taking daily walks up and down the boulevard for much longer than Alfonso and his colleagues suspect, long ago learned to attend to and make use of: the corners of the mind and what makes its way into them being dynamic crossroads full of wounding vapors and fierce reflections and, as one of them once put it to the other during their endless walkings up and walkings down the boulevard and surrounding streets to check on their charges, certainly, but also, as we shall see later, to accomplish other, darker tasks, but on this morning they merely walk and observe and, occasionally, talk, as they do briefly to the silver angel—“She looks gorgeous today, don’t you think? She’s not crying as much as yesterday”—and, even more briefly, to the inhabitant of the Yellow Submarine—“Much fucking better, friend,”—and in between times they whistle atonal airs that infect the thought processes of more than one person they pass, including, on the edge of the small crowd gathered to watch the living trees sway, as they do twice each fifteen minutes on calm days and even more frequently on breezy ones like today, a young woman with hair the color of crushed pomegranate, who will spend the rest of the day, without knowing why, humming a tune that she’s never heard before and that, outside of dream, she will never hear again, not least because her time in the city and its environs has come almost to its end, and after weeks of popping in and out of museums, where more often than she cared for her thoughts turned to the surrealists and the Black Dahlia killing, with the effect that in the contemporary art museum, as she stood in front of Man Ray’s portrait of Miró, she began to believe that the gray-faced man standing next to her in an orange trench coat and blue ball cap was a murderer, and then, a moment later, that she was in the museum gathering inspiration for her own next killing, which she would accomplish by means of injecting fuchsia dye into the veins of the first old granny she could get her hands on and hogtie in an empty courtyard as the clock struck thirteen and the walls began to sprout cornflowers, etc.: it has been a strange time in the city for the young woman, whose jet-black roots, it must be said, are starting to show, a detail that Harry in his Yellow Submarine can’t help noticing, because the young woman, after giving the submarine a casual glance, bends over in front of the concealed grill to tie her shoe, and lets her hair cascade down over her face, causing Harry, looking away while she pauses in front of his hiding place, to smile in recognition, and to almost blurt out, “Hi, it’s me from the plane,” but after opening himself up, if one can put it that way, to Alfonso as they made their way to the boulevard, his self-censor put a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “don’t say a word, don’t even breathe, don’t let anyone else know you’re here,” and by the time he says, “fuck you,” to his self–censor, which feels good, the young woman has turned on her heel and walked off as if she has just remembered something, which she has: a butcher shop she hopes to reach before they have sold out of a particular cut of beef she is fond of, and while soon she will have left these pages forever, her unexpected appearance before the Yellow Submarine, coming so soon after that of the connoisseurs, sets up an important association in Harry’s mind, which goes through several stages of transformation in the c
oming hours, involving on the one hand the Black Dahlia, golf balls, fuselages, his own sorry story, knife blades, and the silver angel—who Harry is sure keeps looking over at him, or rather at his submarine—and on the other, the three old guys who pass him twice more before they vanish off to wherever it is they go to refuel, so that, eventually, as Harry lies there looking out at the world, which has been so pleasantly reduced to a tissue-covered oval grate, the phrase “death and the connoisseurs” plays over and over again in his head, though with different intonations, and after a while the repetitions start to feel almost like he is struggling to remember something that has gotten stuck and is simultaneously thumbing its nose at him and teetering on the tip of his tongue, while the repetitions occurring in the head of the young woman with hair the color of crushed pomegranates, of the atonal air effectively implanted there by the three old men, which she considers later, as she polishes off her favored cut of beef and the remains of a few string beans sautéed in salted butter, and begins to think of getting her suitcases in order, make her remember a brightly lit swimming pool she once plunged painfully into over and over again one summer night long ago, as she attempted with no success to teach herself how to perform a backflip.
