Ray of the Star

by Laird Hunt

  “Well, ha, ha,” said Alfonso,

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know, I really don’t, look, just whatever it is you’re going to do, don’t do it,”

  “You mean don’t have dinner?”

  “He means don’t go with Ireneo, that is what you mean isn’t it?”

  “Who’s Ireneo?”

  “Some guy,”

  “Some guy that was looking for you?”

  “Why?”

  “I forgot to mention it but he asked me about you,”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I sent him goose chasing,”

  “He got tired of chasing gooses and came to see me, but anyway, why shouldn’t we go with Ireneo?”

  “I didn’t say you shouldn’t go with anyone, I just said whatever it is you’re going to do, don’t do it,”

  “The café is just over there,” said Harry,

  “Fine,” said Alfonso, “I’ve warned you, which is a lot more than I should have done, though as a last thing I’ll just say that I really don’t have any idea if following my warning will help,”

  “Fabulous,” said Harry, “Thanks a billion,”

  “Yes, that’s not all that helpful, Alfonso,” said Solange,

  “Apologies, but that’s all I can offer, I’m not sure if I knew more I would tell you, in fact I think I wouldn’t, there may already be consequences, though I hope not, and now I’ll have to go, and if you don’t mind, Harry, I’ll take the submarine along with me, you won’t be needing it anymore will you?”

  “No,” said Harry,

  “Good,” said Alfonso, then he opened the hatch and Solange and Harry stepped out and went straight into the café and sat down at a table and ordered dinner and when dinner arrived, Harry said,

  “Do you still want to go?”

  “Yes, how about you?”

  “Yes,”

  “You have to admit that was a little odd,”

  “Yes,” Harry said, and shuddered, which made Solange shiver, about which they both laughed, then Ireneo arrived, bowed to Solange and apologized, in some detail, for the earlier misunderstanding that had kept her from her audience with Doña Eulalia, told Harry that he was feeling just fine and that he had taken care of the issue that had made it seem, when they had spoken, like there was a problem, to whit he had thrown his shoes off a cliff and purchased the relatively quiet espadrilles he was wearing and wouldn’t be doing any further running for the foreseeable future, then guided them off along what proved to be a fairly unproblematic set of twists and turns that ended in front of Doña Eulalia’s building, and although Harry couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t been able to find said building when he had gone looking, he had the feeling that if he mentioned this to Ireneo, Ireneo would come up with something as bizarre and unexplained/unexplainable as he had about his shoes, and Harry, feeling more than a little fatigued, thought he would leave any additional ellipses to Doña Eulalia and her lamps, though Solange, perhaps because she felt much less implicated than Harry in what was to come next, felt no need whatsoever to keep quiet, and, because she had had her interest piqued, as they approached the large green door, said, “I’m walking in between someone who saw a ghost this morning and someone else who felt he needed to throw his shoes off a cliff this afternoon—I know something about the ghost but nothing about the shoes, care to enlighten me?”

  “No,” Ireneo said, and if he spoke to solange a little sharply, all the better as far as he was concerned, for it had cost him enough just to bring it all up for the purpose of clarifying his earlier behavior—Harry must have thought he looked “completely crackers,” as his mother had liked to put it when he threw tantrums as a child—and even just the thought of the whole business was enough to make his throat go dry and the back of his neck tingle like someone had struck him sharply on one of the upper vertebrae with the sort of rubber mallets doctors used to test reflexes, or at least that was the way he had felt when, after leaving the little store wearing his new espadrilles, the feeling had presented itself and obliged him to turn around, climb the hill he had just made it back down, cross the emerald lawn once again and go and look out over the wall, first at the horror of gray clouds spreading across the far horizon, then at the disaster of blue below, then decide he’d better throw himself off it, whereupon he had placed both hands on the low wall and started to lift one of his feet and said to himself, “Good, it has all been tedious and baffling anyway,” lifted his other foot onto the wall, looked at his unkempt toes and thought, “Good god those need trimming,” and tensed to spring, only at that moment something stirred in his peripheral vision, something moving slowly toward him, something that was whistling an air so exasperating that it reminded him of stale coffee beans being put through a hand grinder, then of someone kicking in a glass display case, then of the taste of gasoline-soaked cardboard, then of where he was, teetering on the edge of a wall with a 500-foot drop, and then the something—three old men walking shoulder to shoulder along the gravel path—stopped whistling and one of these three old men said,

  “It’s just a pair of shoes,”

  and another of them said,

  “You don’t need those things, don’t be an idiot,”

  then the whistling had recommenced and the three old men passed behind him, and the other half of his peripheral vision was engaged and just as it clicked on he thought he heard, somewhere amid the whistling, one of them say,

  “Go and pick up Harry and take him where he’s supposed to go,”

  and then he had fallen over backwards off the wall and had lain on the path they had traversed and at first it seemed to him that the path was like a piece of ice and that it would be damaging to continue to lie there on it looking up at the clouds and the occasional bird slicing through the air, that his skin would stick to it and be torn off when he tried to stand, that he would find himself partially flayed, and as he thought this the whistling started up in his head as if he had put on earphones and hit play and this time it sounded to him like teeth breaking as they were directed by their owner to bite down on chunks of aggregate mineral, and in the meantime the feeling in the back of his neck returned and he wanted nothing more than to stand up and fling himself off the cliff, but he knew that if he did so he would tear off his skin and that as he fell through space he would fall in a great shower of blood, and he knew this long after he had realized that the ground was not cold in the slightest and that the whistling had stopped and that he was not going to throw himself off the cliff, and knowing it he stood and brushed the dust off of his back and smiled in what he was quite sure was not at all a reassuring manner at a woman who was standing on the green lawn petting an obese German shepherd and staring nervously at him, and then he had stopped knowing it in quite such a debilitating manner and had started off again down the hill and had not paused, except to buy a bottle of water and a large packet of paprika-spiced fried minnows from a vendor near the harbor, which he shoved by the handful into his mouth until the packet was empty and he had calmed down enough to find a public restroom and wash his face and run damp fingers through his hair, before proceeding to his rendezvous, where he had hoped to preempt any questions to do with the shoes, a strategy that had worked quite well with Harry, but not, alas, with Solange, who nevertheless, far from taking visible offense at his curt answer, reached out, put her hand on his forearm and held it there until it occurred to him not only that he had been shaking, but also that he had now stopped,

  “It has been a very long day,” he said, giving a little bow and turning away to cover the fact that he had gone quite crimson, and as he left them in the courtyard to go and let Doña Eulalia know, as she had asked him to, that they had arrived, his blush deepened and the tingling in the back of his neck returned, as did the shaking, and it was only with the greatest effort that he made it inside and up the short flight of stairs to Doña Eulalia’s room, where he leaned his head against the cool, reas
suring wood of the door and said,

  “I’ve brought them.”

  As they stood in the courtyard waiting for Ireneo to reappear, Harry had more than enough time to remark that the circumstances surrounding this current visit differed in more than one way from those surrounding the last, and he had to admit, he told Solange, that he was disappointed that they had not been immediately led into a room full of mysterious individuals dressed in black and so forth, but Solange gave no clear indication that she had heard him so Harry busied himself with kicking at the dirty cobblestones, counting the coins in his pockets, looking up at the square of dark sky that loomed above them and wondering if he had eaten his dinner—a pork cutlet and some mashed yams sprinkled with fish flakes—too quickly or drunk too much sparkling water and otherwise attempted to keep his mind off ghosts, possibly treacherous golden centaurs, old guys who made his companion shiver because, as she had told him that afternoon after they had exchanged stories, of the way she had caught them all smiling horribly as they stood behind her one recent afternoon whispering about how sorry they were about her loss, etc., his own tendency to shudder, as he put it to himself, rather than shiver, a distinction Solange had said she found very interesting and wanted to explore during their next tête-à-tête, and guides who threw their shoes off cliffs in the middle of the day then acted unpleasant about it afterwards … convinced that if he let his mind go in their direction he would find himself off on a journey whose futility would only be exceeded by its unpleasantness, a formula which, to his annoyance, got stuck in his mind and played over and over again like, he thought looking back up at the indigo sky, the perfect description not just of his life over the past decade, but of his entire being, this thing that he had once described in one of many terrible love poems as an incandescent bulb that had come on and would not go out, even if someone smashed it, so much for that, at least in the case of his former wife, who had left him long before it had happened and had not blamed him or at least not too harshly, but he had to admit that he was not unhappy to be reminded, as he cast a glance over at Solange, that it was still capable of illumination, that it wasn’t, after all, quite as irrevocably cold as the Neptunists had once contended the interior of the earth was, that it still, that he still, had some life left in him as the hackneyed expression went,

  “You know,” Solange said, breaking into his thoughts, “Ireneo looked more like he had seen a ghost than you did,” an assertion with which Harry found he wholeheartedly agreed and—because the gap between the previous apparently unflappable Ireneo of that first night and the one who had looked a moment ago like he might burst into tears seemed so enormous—was troubled by and thought to respond to, only at the moment he started to say, “He did, didn’t he,”

  the individual in question, immense turquoise eyes seeming to float in front of him, came back out through the door he had disappeared through looking even more crazed than he had previously, no doubt in part because his head and upper torso were now sopping wet, but he shed no more light on this change in disposition than he had on the business of the shoes, nor did he say anything when Harry asked if they were now going to go into the room with the people and the lamps, and a moment later they found themselves sitting in a conventionally lit parlor of sorts in comfortable purple velvet armchairs with a beaming old woman dressed in a powder-blue pantsuit and improbably high heels, who offered them tea, which they accepted, then lemon-filled ginger cookies, which they declined, at which juncture Ireneo, who had been dripping away next to a sort of curio cabinet filled with odds and ends of all shape and variety, frowned and left the room—to spend the rest of what was to prove a very long, cold night fighting the urge to go back up to the cliff and kill himself—and Doña Eulalia said,

  “Excellent, I am so glad you are both here,” a remark that was so far from being a mere nicety that she felt compelled to repeat it, this time laying the stress on the word “both,” for if she had been absolutely incapable of keeping this Harry and the unpleasantness that lay in store for him from her thoughts for more than a few seconds over the past several days, his companion, whose face Doña Eulalia could see had until recently been very broken indeed, had been more on her mind than she would have thought justified, given that, as best she could tell, anything that might until recently have required a candle and concomitant consideration had moved on, but as the specifics of the cases she was drawn to were, as we have seen, rarely her forte—so much so that it had dawned on her after she told Ireneo to go and ask the centaur where Harry was that she must have picked up the information from elsewhere, possibly Ireneo’s blasted shoes—she smiled at Solange, echoed Ireneo’s apology, and contented herself with saying that, as she, Solange, had clearly sensed herself, her loved one had moved on and was at peace, as she could now be, which, Doña Eulalia thought, was true, for now at any rate, and the limited parameters of “for now,” in Solange’s only mildly alarming case, struck her as sufficient, especially since contact had been reestablished in such a satisfactory way—in fact, she would have to ask them both to leave their cards or if they didn’t have cards, of course they probably didn’t, at least their phone numbers, so that any eventual follow-up protocols could be observed, which, who knew, might prove even more necessary in the case of Solange than Harry, though she doubted it, she highly doubted it—and with that in mind she reached for one of the ginger lemon cookies and put the whole thing into her mouth, crushing it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth in the way she was accustomed to and that always gave her great satisfaction, and she might have put another one in straight after the first if Harry, who until that moment had been sitting silently next to Solange, hadn’t looked around the room, made a sort of clicking sound then asked,

  “Why don’t you have a lamp on your head and aren’t you supposed to hum or something?”

  “Ah yes, well, different circumstances, different modes of transmission,” said Doña Eulalia, licking around in one of the gaps in her teeth for some remaining lemon crème and thinking, good god I must come off like a complete and utter charlatan,

  “Oh,” said Harry, sounding a little deflated, as if by his question he had hoped to elicit an indication that even though they weren’t in the big room downstairs with her nincompoop relations at any moment the lights above them would go off and the lamps would come out and the furniture would start shaking or something like that, a speculation that diverged only in the matter of the shaking furniture from the actual thought that had run not just through Harry’s mind, but Solange’s as well, causing her, Solange, to raise an eyebrow and fix Doña Eulalia with a quizzical gaze this latter found so noteworthy that when a moment later she left off looking around in her mouth for more lemon crème, leaned forward, tapped Harry’s knee twice, cleared her throat, and said, “They’re coming,” she almost couldn’t refrain from turning to Solange and adding, “For both of you.”

  After rather feebly, she thought, pointing her finger at the door and watching, through half-closed eyes, Harry and Solange make their way through it, Doña Eulalia took a deep breath, reached for the teapot, and, suddenly aware, in the way that these things came to her, that her night was not yet over, drank directly from its spout, then asked herself aloud what situation she would have the opportunity to mishandle next, and, still aloud, whether she ought not to go and get one of the lampshades from the reception hall downstairs, put it on her head, roll back her eyeballs and hum, though in the event she had so little time to wait that were she to have acted on this self-mocking impulse she would barely have made it halfway down the back stairs before the second round of visitors appeared, as it was, the chill that preceded them, as they stood waiting on the other side of the main door to her bedroom, after having gotten into the house she certainly didn’t know how, was such that she reached for one of her woolen throws and pulled it up to her chin before taking another deep voice and calling out that the door was open,

  “Of course it is,” said one of the three old men she
found standing in front of her a moment later,

  “It’s always open, your door, isn’t it?” said another,

  “It all just drifts right in, kind of like a walkie-talkie without an off switch, although maybe the reception isn’t so good,” said the third,

  “Won’t you gentlemen sit down,” said Doña Eulalia, folding her arms around herself and crossing her ankles, “You will forgive me if I don’t stand,”

  “Oh sure we’ll forgive you,”

  “We just love to forgive,”

  “But we won’t sit, standing seeming preferable,”

  “Keeping the blood flowing,”

  “Through our old bones,”

  “Are you cold, Doña Eulalia, you look cold if you don’t mind my saying so …”

  “You three brought a chill in with you,”

  “Which we don’t always do,”

  “Sometimes we bring in the opposite,”

  “Light up the night, heat up the party,”

  Doña Eulalia looked from one to the other of them and saw nothing except old men with watery eyes wearing sweaters and windbreakers,

  “Your powers fail you,”

  “You draw a blank,”

  “Gaze upon the void,”

  “It would not, gentlemen, be the first time,”

  “Or the last, right?”

  “How can I help the three of you?”

  “Oh you’ve already helped us,”

  “We’re grateful,”

  “Here to express our gratitude,”

  “We brought you a token,”

  “Some chocolate,”

  “Easily edible water fowl,”

  “Custom made,”

  “Just marvelous,”

  “It’s about Harry,” said Doña Eulalia, looking, without moving, at the ribbon-wrapped box one of her visitors was holding, “Or perhaps it’s about his friend,”

  “For someone so chilled you’re awfully warm,”