by Laird Hunt
“They make me shiver, those three, as I’m sure you noticed last night, even if you were too discreet to discuss it,” said Solange, her frame vibrating with such force this time that Harry immediately rejected his first impulse, which was to tell her that the three of them made him think of death, then failed to abstain from placing his hand on hers for a moment, a move that filled him with just enough trepidation to make him take it away almost as soon as he had touched her, but Solange, who had been gazing off into space for a moment, with her grin, which had naturally been subsiding anyway, now completely collapsed, came back from wherever—for she couldn’t have quite said herself—her shivering had taken her, looked Harry in the eye and said,
“Put that paw back over here,” and after he had covered her hand again and they had sat there a few minutes without speaking in the center of a cliché that would have struck them both as smashing had they discussed it, Solange said,
“We barely know each other, Harry,”
and Harry said, “That’s true,”
and Solange said, “Let’s address that.”
As Solange and Harry deepened their acquaintance—at the coffee stand, against the Yellow Submarine, along the boulevard and the beach and then on Harry’s bed—Alfonso excused himself from the connoisseurs, donned his regalia, leaned back into his hind legs and became a golden centaur, and although he was every bit as magnificent and clearly impressive to the heavy crowds on that day as he was on all the others, behind the gold paint and the shining plastic armor he was filled with more misgiving than his sanguine outlook would generally have indicated, not because, he thought, the connoisseurs had asked him to implicate himself any further in whatever scheme it was they were cooking up, besides relieving Harry of his Yellow-Submarine privileges, which in any case—they had said and he had concurred—Harry didn’t need anymore now that he had “gotten the girl,” but rather because he was no longer sure if it would be fair, in the context of the deception he, Alfonso, was clearly helping to perpetrate, to press Harry to tell him his story, which he really did very much want to hear and which, he knew, and here was the source, or so he thought, of his misgiving, he would absolutely press him to tell, regardless of this question of fairness, and the truth was it remained to be seen whether or not what he had done for Harry—rather, obviously, than to Harry—which had paved the way for an interview with Solange, and, he thought, probably much more, would retrospectively be seen as a favor: there was some bad business in store for the “poor schmuck”—the connoisseurs never exaggerated and they never lied—but just how bad wasn’t clear …, and now that we’ve had a taste of Alfonso’s not-altogether-admirable line of thought, which continued untainted by any genuine feeling of remorse for most of the afternoon, though not, as we will see, throughout the evening, it might be as well, while we allow Harry and Solange another few hours to exchange stories and hint at others, to tell each other about the ghosts of dead husbands and knife blades and broken faces and black dahlias and shivering fits, but also about other things, a nearby cliff covered in flowers, a favorite novel, the surprising pleasures of working with Lucite, a beach that glowed pale violet in the moonlight, to attend a bit to Ireneo, who as you will recall we left in the midst of an apparent argument with his disgruntled running shoes, which even before Ireneo had left his stand in the market to come and speak to Harry, had set aside their silence and launched into a tirade against both Doña Eulalia and Ireneo himself to do with their stunning incompetence and the shoes’ manifest perspicacity, a tirade that only grew in volume during Ireneo’s conversation with Harry next to the Yellow Submarine and that culminated in a string of epithets so palpably vile that Ireneo tore the shoes off and threw them against the flower stand only to, a moment later, pick them up again and put them back on his feet, whereupon they started cooing and pointing out that not all sinister pairs of shoes were alike no matter what Doña Eulalia had said, and that there were many other factoids that they could share with Ireneo, should he care to keep running and continue listening: they could tell him, for example, a few more things about his mother and her supposed illness, or about where she kept her savings bonds, or about Harry and about that golden centaur, not a bad sort really, but easily manipulated, and about who was manipulating him,
“I couldn’t care less about any of that,” said Ireneo,
“Well, you should,”
“Go on talking if it makes you happy,”
“It does,” said the shoes, “You’ve put your finger right on it, it makes us extremely happy to talk, we almost can’t stand not to,”
“You never spoke in the old days,”
“We spoke all the time, you just weren’t ready to hear us,”
“That sounds like tawdry psychodrama talk,”
“Which doesn’t make it invalid,”
“No, just insufferable,”
“You wound us,”
“I doubt it,”
“You are right to doubt, after all it is doubt that leads straight to the heart of error and out the other side—where are we going?”
“There is no ‘we’ here, it’s just me and my shoes, out for a run, heading for the beach, la, la, la,” and it was certainly true that Ireneo was making for the beach, but at the last minute, almost in spite of himself, he turned and climbed up one of the high streets that led, by way of wildly interlacing cobblestone streets, to a series of vista points of the bay, including the very cliff mentioned a moment ago, which during the springtime was covered with innumerable white and yellow daffodils, and that now was an immense emerald lawn bordered by a white gravel path and low slate wall, which the shoes said they admired and which Ireneo, almost sprinting, bore down on, as if he meant to leap off it and soar into space, and put an early end, as it were, to the day, and as he got closer and closer the shoes kept talking about the wall and masonry and the masons that had worked on this one and what a bunch of crooks they had been even if they had done nice work, and so when Ireneo swerved at the last minute and deftly sent, instead of himself, the shoes sailing over the wall and out into space, they were still going on about crooks and the corrupt, ancient art of wall building, though one may suppose that as they stopped climbing and started falling, out of this story and into some other, they switched topics, which was what Ireneo, heaving a little after his exertion but satisfied that he had performed his civic duty by disposing of the shoes where no one else could easily pick them up and put them on and more importantly where, should he become tempted, he would have a very hard, not to say impossible time finding them again, now hoped it would be possible for him to do, although the first order of business would be to acquire some replacement footwear, as the sidewalk and street beyond the green lawn sparkled with glass and streaks of oil against which his thin running socks and even thinner soles would be no defense at all.
After spending time on the bed, Harry and Solange spent time at Harry’s kitchen table, where, over a few bites of this and that pulled out of Harry’s small refrigerator, Harry asked Solange to say a little more about the Lucite, he hadn’t quite grasped her interest in deploying it, that substance in particular, and she said that while she hardly understood it any longer herself, the initial impulse had come from a story she had partially overheard as she had leaned one morning against a palm tree and looked out to sea and considered walking into it and contriving not to return, whereupon two old women with thick ankles came and plunked themselves down near her and one told the other a story that she had read in a romantic novel of some sort, and had not approved of, about a boat builder who had lost his beloved wife after a protracted illness and who, in his grief, thinking of the amber pendant she had always worn in which an ant, dead millions of years, had been marvelously preserved, had given such serious consideration to plunging first her remains and then himself in the Lucite solution he used to coat the hulls of his boats that he had gone so far as to set her body on his workbench and to look for a proper receptacle, but as he did this, it seemed to
him he felt a hand descend on his shoulder and a voice, her voice, whisper in his ear, that his grief was betraying him, and that he should stop and go and announce her death to the authorities and see to a proper burial, and that if he did this, she would come and visit him in his dreams, wearing his favorite dress, a promise Solange had not been able to hear if she had kept, and while all she had left of her young man were scraps, she had immediately gotten hold of some Lucite and begun encasing what she had, not in hopes of provoking an analogous response, she was too grief-stricken to hope for anything, but because—and it was this impulse that had driven her out to the beach in the first place—she had suddenly been overcome by an urge to devour the little pile of bits and pieces she had left of him—which had led her to wonder with horror what she would have done had his entire body been there—to pluck them up and drop them into her mouth, and while that unbidden impulse had remained as she set to work encasing the bits of knife metal in Lucite, it grew less acute over the coming weeks and before long seemed to have vanished altogether,
“Though of course nothing like that ever really vanishes,” Solange said,
“No it certainly doesn’t,” Harry said, and after they had sat silently gazing out over the sun-burnished rooftops around them, he added that while in this particular instance he was not in a position to empathize, he had heard of such cases, notably one involving a Buddhist monk, who had been unable to bear the thought of his dead lover’s body being given up to the flames or to the perceived ignominy of decomposition, and had consequently, presumably because no quieting hand had come down on his shoulder, eaten the body, an act that had, according to the story, cursed him, though Harry couldn’t say whether or not such an eventuality was merited,
“What happened to him?” Solange asked,
“He lived for many years as a madman in the ruins of his own monastery,”
“Then I’m glad that in the end I only nibbled on the end of one of my young man’s shoelaces.”
Solange and Harry emerged from the latter’s apart ment contentedly aware that their exchange of confidences, no matter how satisfyingly thorough, could reasonably be thought of as no more than an additional incipit in what—barring any unforeseen accelerant—would require a whole cascading series in order to move them toward that something they had not, during their discussion of the matter, been quite willing to articulate, though we might reasonably infer that the potential of an intense acquaintance bolstered by duration was under discussion, meaning that high spirits were the order of the evening as they set off for the boulevard to recuperate and stow away Solange’s silver costume and Harry’s Yellow Submarine before heading together, as they had agreed, to the café to have a light meal and a bottle or two of sparkling water ahead of the revelations to come, though when they passed the second floor door marked “Rubinski” their steps slowed and they exchanged glances, but a collective shrug seemed to take care of the matter for both of them and instead of further discussing ghosts as they walked they turned to the related but generally less noxious subject of dreams, for Solange had had a corker the previous night, a nacreous haze that had ended with a question, “What word do we use to indicate that tame lions are living among us?” while Harry had found himself in a landscape dotted with amalgamators on a walking tour led by a kind of magician whose face, the dream had proposed to him, was “shining like a wet sword,” and while neither Solange nor Harry was interested in digging around for submerged meaning in these dreams, they both found the inclusion of moments of language amidst the standard swarm of images strangely appealing, and no doubt would have found their way into an interesting conversation thereon as they gathered their things on the boulevard if Alfonso, still in full regalia, including his sword and hind legs, hadn’t been waiting, arms crossed over his armored chest, next to the submarine,
“Our gondoleer,” Harry said,
“He doesn’t look happy,” Solange said,
“You’re right, he’s not, he’s been standing here waiting for three quarters of an hour next to this abandoned, borrowed Yellow Submarine waiting to see if the person who borrowed it from him would turn up again,” Alfonso said sternly, while inwardly in fact he was quite pleased that Harry’s negligence in re the submarine had so conveniently handed him a straightforward justification for rescinding Harry’s occupational privileges, and he was preparing to broach this subject, and to extract an imminent date and time for Harry to fulfill his end of the bargain and tell him his story, which would no doubt intersect intriguingly with the connoisseurs planned attentions, when a curious thought, one that had not entered into his calculations about the source of his misgiving earlier, entered his mind—no doubt by some side door or other, the handle of which was Solange’s happily smudged silver face or Harry’s sweat-streaked wrists or the half-shredded sparkling water bottle splayed across the roots of the oak tree that rose and spread just behind them—and made him uncross his arms and recross them then look off to the side to study the thought again then once more before confirming that, yes, while of course as he well knew he had been the one who had told a certain handsome young man interested in taking up the living statue profession and who had come and stood in front of him, for the purpose of observation, for several days, that he might, since he was interested in golden things, just as well go and observe the technique of the angel near the top of the boulevard, and then of course a few days later the young man had become the golden angel’s young man and then, some weeks later, had died horribly and smashed her heart to smithereens, all this he knew, but it hadn’t occurred to him until just that very moment that it was the connoisseurs who had planted the suggestion in his mind, during one of their circuits, as they passed behind him, “Send that guy off to see Solange, that’s who he ought to see next, that would be good, don’t you think?” or had it been them? was he remembering something that had actually occurred or dropping depth charges from the present into the past? he didn’t think so, and because he didn’t, because there was doubt in his mind and maybe just a little more than doubt, especially given the expressions that had played over the connoisseurs’ faces when they had discussed Harry earlier, instead of telling Harry it was time for him and the submarine to part ways, he leaned over, opened the hatch, and said,
“Climb in,”
“We’re going somewhere,” Harry said,
“I’ll take you,” Alfonso said,
“You’re sure?” Solange said,
Alfonso patted the side of the submarine and said it would be good exercise,
“Are you going to take that stuff off or walk with it?” Harry said, pointing at Alfonso’s hind legs,
“They’re on rollers, they work even better than the submarine, every now and again I like to move around a little when I’m performing, it wouldn’t do to walk off without my legs,” Alfonso said, and before Harry could say something else, Solange took his arm and pulled him into the submarine and shut the hatch behind them, and after she had instructed Alfonso to grab her gear then told him where they were going, they were off, and as they moved off, Harry and Solange looked at each other and Solange said,
“I think he’s going to tell us something,”
“I think so too,” Harry said,
“The thing is I can’t,” Alfonso said, “Or at the very least I shouldn’t, it’s difficult, even tedious, extremely tedious, it’s just that a moment ago I had a thought and that thought, well, made me think,”
“I thought a thought but the thought I thought was not the thought that I thought I thought,” said Harry,
“If only,” said Alfonso,
“This is about the connoisseurs, something to do with them, isn’t it?” said Solange,
“It might and it might not be,” said Alfonso,
“We saw you at the market with them earlier,”
“We had breakfast,”
“After the long night,”
“It was a long night, wasn’t it, too long, maybe I’m just overtired,”
“Actually, I don’t feel particularly tired,” said Solange, “And when I saw you four this morning I got the feeling you were cooking something up, though I wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with us,”
