by Laird Hunt
“For her, certainly, but also for myself,” Señor Rubinski said, “because let’s be quite clear, being dead is infinitely less entertaining than even the quietest existence, for example the variety enjoyed by a midlevel supervisor in a paper plant whose greatest joy is the near silent dinners and walks and inconsequential domestic interludes he enjoys with his wife, the smell of sautéed minnows, the swirl of multicolored hats on the boulevard, the delicious clink of cranberry crystal being set down on a pewter tray, there is nothing to smell with down there, nothing to see with, nothing to hear, we simply feel and what we feel is not always so marvelous, and thus when they came to me, I said, so to speak, ‘yes, I will do it,’ and they took me to a large room lined, as I saw afterwards, with row upon row of hangers upon which hung the repaired remains of all those who they told me were there with me, and the number was so great that when they had me back in what one of them referred to inelegantly but not inaccurately as ‘my drippings,’ which looked not much the worse for wear, incidentally, for what they had been put through when I leaned too close to the shredder, I swooned a little to think of us all being stored in this way, with all of our remains kept on hand, a practicality which they explained after kicking me back to attention that greatly facilitated the sort of furlough that from time to time they granted so many of us, and then they kicked me again and without ceremony shoved me through a door that had been burned through the rough concrete wall and I found myself in the front room lying on the marvelous red velvet couch you must have walked past when my wife brought you in to join me and which I spent endless miraculous hours on before my ravishment, if you will permit a moment’s fancy, by the shredder, not an instant of which I felt at the time, by the way, but all of which I have felt every—I underscore every moment since—regardless, there I was on the red velvet couch and then a moment later there was my poor wife, who after letting out a screech that, alas, quite neatly shattered the aforementioned cranberry glass pitcher and two out of four hourglasses from my old collection, came and knelt beside me and asked me if I had had a nice rest and then what would I like for the lunch she would begin preparing the minute we had returned from our walk, a walk I was none too eager to embark upon, being unsure of the viability, you see, of my drippings, but I had returned, as I said, in the main, for her, and so I allowed her to attempt to set a hat on my head, to whimper a little when it fell through me and onto the floor, to chatter a great deal at me about what seemed very little, and then to lead me downstairs and out onto the street, which is when I had the happy fortune of encountering you—happy not merely because of your kindness to my wife, during what she had described to me as her recent moments of doubt, but also because, and here we come to the crux of it, between the time that I had been stuffed, with very little ceremony I might add, back into my drippings and the moment I swooned, I noticed that on the short rack in the sort of dressing room they had me in there were a number of other drippings at the ready just next to the bloody hanger on which, I presumed, my own had been taken from, which would have meant very little at all except that after I swooned and before I came fully to, under the shower, so to speak, of their blows, I had the distinct impression that one of them said your name, Harry, and that the other laughed after he had said it, and while of course there are untold thousands of Harrys in the world, there have never, to my knowledge, been any others in my building, and so I said to myself when my wife mentioned you and then when we saw you, I must find a way to speak to this Harry, and to tell him what I have just told you,”
“Drippings,” Harry said,
“Yes, well it’s rather unfortunate isn’t it,” Señor Rubinski said, “but when one has been on the other side, as it were, well, then it makes more sense, much more sense, I can’t tell you, my dear Harry, just exactly how much good sense it makes, especially when you have seen the hangers, all of them, and what covers the floors, they must reconstitute themselves, the drippings, because there is so much of them on the floors, it was quite slippery, but I’m wandering, this was happening earlier with my wife, I’m afraid I gave her quite a turn talking about those floors, but it’s a different matter once you’ve seen them, once you’ve been there, and know you must go back, I was lying here in my bath, greatly enjoying it when I fell asleep and was there again, and it was not a dream, no I don’t think so, and when I woke there you were, I must have dozed for some time if my wife thought to get you, but you don’t look well,”
“Don’t I?” said Harry, who now wished very much indeed that he had managed to keep his lips and mind pinched shut, that he had put them in a vice and cranked it as tightly as it would go, and that he had shut his eyes and hadn’t stared at Señor Rubinski, sitting there in his drippings, with one arm lolling over the side of the tub, “Drippings,” Harry said again and found it quite curious that he didn’t feel sick, that, unlike his reaction to Alfonso’s story about Solange, he felt no need to excuse himself and lean over the sink and retch, or run out of the Rubinski’s apartment, up to his own apartment and retch, to run out onto the street and retch, to run down the streets screaming and retching, to smash his head with a piece of brick and retch,
“Whose drippings were hanging on those hangers?” Harry said quietly, not needing to retch,
“I don’t know, I thought you might,” Señor Rubinski said,
“Well, I don’t,” said Harry, adding, “And I’m afraid that now, since I can see that you are all right, I’ll have to go,”
“All right,” said Señor Rubinski, “Yes, I suppose I am all right, yes, I suppose I am,” whereupon Harry stood, and as he did it appeared to him that all there was to Señor Rubinski was what could be seen above the surface of the water, that there was nothing below—his lower drippings had deserted him,
“Good-bye,” Harry said,
“I hope I’ve been helpful,” Señor Rubinski said,
“Yes, quite, thank you, best of luck,” Harry said, then stepped out of the bathroom, shut the door behind him, walked back down the long hallway and into the living room where he saw Señora Rubinski, asleep in an enormous green armchair pushed up close to the red couch, holding a damp, mauve handkerchief between two curled fingers, looking unnervingly like certain representations of martyred and jaundiced saints painted on one altarpiece after another during a particularly grim decade of the Northern Renaissance into which, during the early days of his despair, Harry had done no small amount of research, then, having decided not to attempt to disturb the image before him to make his report, that the drippings in the bathroom would find their way out to see the image if they wanted to, he went out the Rubinski’s door, down the stairs, and into the warm sunlight, which gave a pleasant glow to the cobbled street, despite the presence, everywhere Harry looked, of so much wind-strewn debris.
Significant weather events have the effect of accelerating the natural redistribution of the contents of cities, and even more so aseasonal events that play themselves out in population centers already so thoroughly given over to casually disseminating natural and artificial ephemera, so it was that first Solange and then Ireneo found themselves negotiating swirls and crescents of heavy sand and crushed palm frond blown half a mile inland, a suite of antique iron sconce lamps snapped off their rusting hinges, clouds of green glass, pieces of pastel-colored Styrofoam escaped, along with a packing order that ended up far out to sea, from a box swept off an oversized window ledge jutting from one of the many decrepit buildings perched in a crooked line along the city’s eastern border, and seemingly endless sheets of brightly colored newspaper, including several aged blue sheets of a commemorative sports edition of one of the larger dailies, printed twenty-five years ago, lying in a puddle of glass, perhaps torn from the wall of a café that had left its doors open, Ireneo thought as he stepped past and wished for the 100th time since he had thrown them over the cliff that he had his running shoes back or at the very least something sturdier than these cheap espadrilles, which were comfortable enough for an afternoon at th
e beach, but not for the sort of mileage he had put on them as he wandered the frigid streets in his damp shirt, dealing with what Doña Eulalia had told him would feel and had felt much like a withdrawal—she had experienced it herself and for a period of some hours while it was occurring had had her husband strap her to the bed so that she wouldn’t be tempted to attempt to retrieve her own treacherous shoes from the furnace or try to throw herself in after them, it was awful, she had said, noting that on top of his experience with the shoes, he had had another fright, had seen something, a speculation that Ireneo had neither contradicted nor affirmed, though he had let out a bit of a whistle that had made Doña Eulalia raise an eyebrow and say, “Ah,” which is exactly what Ireneo had said when those three, as he had spent the night referring to the connoisseurs, had a few minutes before offered to employ him, had told him that a certain guy had let them down and that they had need of someone who knew the city and had experience in what they called stuff, and that if he was interested in what would be a strictly part-time gig, one that wouldn’t conflict with his other obligations, he could start right this second by following the angel, who was at this very moment standing outside the building on the street thinking about making a getaway that would sooner or later take her and consequently Ireneo to Harry, and when he, Ireneo, had found Harry, he could tell him to come and see them in this building, second floor, door on the right, and he would have fulfilled his first task,
“Interested?” one of them said,
“Ah,” Ireneo said, but standing there with them was like standing, so the image came to him, in the center of one of those medieval maidens whose spiked doors would at any moment snap shut around him, and when one of them lifted his arm to scratch something on his face, Ireneo did something he hadn’t done very much of during his life, which is to say that he cringed, and they said,
“Good,”
and Ireneo,
“All right,” and he left the courtyard where they had been standing and without great enthusiasm began to follow the angel, who by the by seemed to him rather small and pretty as she hurried along, looking in the sudden waves of sunlight extraordinarily unbroken, thoroughly, even from his vantage point, unlike she had when he had first seen her sitting in the wake of her own melancholy at the café—an observation that caused him to reflect, salubriously, on human resilience—and as he looked at her he sped up, at very nearly the same time that, the sense of urgency surrounding her rapid forward propagation having diminished, she slowed down, so that before very long—a few paces after Ireneo had stepped over the blue sports pages in fact—he cleared his throat and came up alongside Solange, who jumped a little, then shrugged, then smiled, and so they found themselves walking next to each other, with neither one, in the instance, too terribly surprised,
“I’m supposed to follow you,” said Ireneo,
“I thought you worked for Doña Eulalia,” said Solange,
“I do,” said Ireneo, and as he said this it struck him that perhaps the “Ah” Doña Eulalia had uttered and that he had repeated, there before those three, had had some kind of prophylactic effect, after all it hadn’t taken him very long to disobey them,
“Where are you going?” he said,
“Who’s coming for him?” Solange said,
“I don’t know,”
“Is it those three?”
“I don’t know, I never know, just like I didn’t know who you called us about,”
“She doesn’t tell you?”
“She doesn’t know either, she says it’s like those images on radar, they more or less all look alike, she just has a sense of how close they are and where they’re heading,”
“Radar?”
“Yes,”
“I see,”
“That’s right,”
“Who is she?”
“Doña Eulalia? an old woman who sees things, the city is crawling with them, all cities probably are,”
“Can she help him?”
“It depends on what you mean by help, she’s something of a generalist, she’s mostly pretty indirect, but she can surprise you,”
“Have you ever worked with Lucite?”
Ireneo looked at her,
“It’s used to encase things, enclose them, you have to wear gloves,”
“No, I haven’t,”
“I lost someone very dear to me,”
“Yes, so I understand,”
“When my grief started leaving me, which it did far more quickly than I can see now that I was aware of, I started taking little bits and pieces of that person, of what was left of him, and burying them in clear plastic, there’s a whole story that goes with it,”
“Indeed,” Ireneo said,
“One that found its ending last night after I left Harry’s and went home, would you like to hear that ending?”
“Yes,”
“One of my tears, which is to say a shard of metal caught in Lucite, spoke to me at some length as I was crossing the kitchen to go to bed, what do you think of that?”
“These are strange times,”
“They seem to grow stranger and stranger,”
“What did it say?”
“It said, in essence, that it no longer wished to be a tear,”
“Who could blame it,”
“That’s more or less what I thought and how I responded and then it went quiet and I threw it and its fellows into the trash,”
“Which is where we all end up,”
“I think I’m going to go over to the boulevard and just stand there for a while,”
“Do you mind if I join you, I think I won’t go and find Harry just now,”
“You could find him later, in fact, later, I’ll probably go and see him and you can follow me then, if you still want to,”
“I’m not sure I will,”
“I like that Harry,”
“Yes,”
“I like him quite a bit, although it’s probably hopeless, my liking him, what isn’t?”
“Doña Eulalia had me light more than one candle for him,”
“Multiple blips on the radar screen?”
“Something like that,”
“You know those old bastards used to bring me candy,”
“Candy?”
“Boxes and boxes, like they were after my teeth, wanted them to rot and fall out,”
“Doña Eulalia said he, Harry, was like a well that had sprung a leak, and that it would likely be hard to find a way to plug it,”
“I feel a little like a well that’s sprung a leak,”
“I could tell you about my shoes,”
“Yes, and the cliff,”
“I’ll think about Harry later,”
“Come stand with me for a while,”
“They told me stories, my shoes did, talked to me all the time,”
“You don’t look so fabulous, you look like you’ve got a leak too,”
“I’m sorry I was short with you last night, I’d just gotten rid of the shoes, and they were there when I did it,”
“The connoisseurs?”
“They kept me from jumping,”
“What do you mean?”
“After the shoes, they walked by just as I was about to do it,”
“I’m confused,”
“Maybe because they knew that they’d want me today, that their other guy had let them down,”
“Other guy?”
“They didn’t say who it was,”
“Alfonso? The centaur?”
“They didn’t say, just that they needed someone else, part time, for the odd job, I shouldn’t have gone with them, I was enjoying my breakfast,”
“We have to go back there, Alfonso’s a friend,”
“I don’t know if it was this Alfonso,”
“He’s a friend,”
“I’m not going back there,”
“It won’t take a second,”
“Oh, I think it will take longer than a second,”
Solange smiled, winnin
gly, and grabbed Ireneo by his generously muscled forearm.
Not long after it happened, when the black wool he refused to take off even to sleep was still relatively fresh and the snow and ice covering the world was beginning to mix with mud and rain, Harry went for a walk that was remarkable only inasmuch as he was unable, even when he lost feeling in his extremities and every part of him began to ache and his lungs felt from one moment to the next as if they were being shot at with a nail puncher, either to reverse direction or stop until, thirteen hours after he had started, he staggered right, then left, then fell over into a large juniper bush, and although after his recovery he scoffed aloud when one of the counselors he had been assigned by his former company remarked that he had been “giving physical dimension to his grief,” since that time he had envisioned his so-called grief as a long, terrible line frayed a little at the ends, an image that might help us to understand not so much how but why it was, as we move toward our own ending, that just as Solange and Ireneo, after very little discussion, turned around to go and see about the golden centaur, Harry emerged from a small street on the other side of the boulevard and, after a moment’s pause brought on by his surprise at seeing them at all, let alone together, called out, but they had already turned and his voice was cut down by the poorly tuned chords of a sitar being struck with great vigor by a rather overdrawn bright-blue Hindu-swami sort of a statue, who had apparently rushed in to fill the void left by the Yellow Submarine, and in the seconds it took Harry to step through to the other side of the sound and the clearly skeptical fistful of people surrounding it, the two of them were disappearing around a thick, double-globed lamppost and striding off purposively, and although he had had it vaguely in mind to see if Alfonso (who was of course nowhere to be seen) would let him borrow back the submarine, or perhaps even give him one more ride in it for old time’s sake, catching up with Solange and Ireneo immediately swept any other considerations aside, and in hopes of quickly closing the gap between them, he pressed his still nifty (though otherwise unremarkable) shoes into a fairly satisfactory lope, one that on a day when his mind was less encumbered by thoughts of racks hung with drippings, memories of glittering calderas, and small, wet arms and calves in the moonlight, might have made him think of his time as a secondary school football player, when anything he couldn’t run past he could run through, unfortunately, immediately after successfully veering first past a chunky tourist sticking his fingers deep into a packet of candied oranges, then a bald man cradling the arm of a giant doll or mannequin no doubt shaken loose during the storm, then an ancient woman in dirty slippers slowly pushing a pram that held no less than five small, live, furred things, he was forced to stop by an enormous sparkling water truck that idled fully thirty seconds before pulling forward and clearing the way for Harry, who bolted forward so fast that he slipped on a pile of wet sand and twisted his knee and had to slow to a jog, which as it turned out was itself unsustainable, as, mere seconds after he had spotted Solange and Ireneo again, now off at a troubling remove, he began to feel faint, then remembered he had eaten and drunk nothing since the odd meal the evening before, and of course his sleep had been wretched, and he had just spent an hour in the company of Señor Rubinski’s drippings, and of course They were coming, and to make matters worse his voice was even less effective here in the face of a jackhammer that was smashing into the old stone ahead of him than it had been in proximity to the sitar, which is all to say that rather than closing the gap, as his initial burst had seemed to promise, said gap widened, with the result that the day’s third instance of tailing was an almost perfect inverse of the first two, and even if the chance intervention of the memory of himself, standing in his brown velvet jacket at the bar thinking of stealing church bells and lying not altogether chastely beside a glamorous co-star, momentarily kept his mind out of the Rubinski’s bathroom, Doña Eulalia’s parlour, and the long-ago motel room in that world covered with snow, the reprieve was short lived, and if he hadn’t chanced to look up just as the now-tiny figures he had almost forgotten he was following turned off the street into a building that seemed each time he looked at it as he drew nearer to have subtly changed not just its shape but its entire aspect, he might have taken one of the sharp turns his mind kept offering him and run into a wall or through a shop window or, as it had seemed to him the moment before he had fallen into the juniper bush, into a black lake ringed with snow, but in the event a few minutes later—having passed, without noticing him, Raimon in his Che Guevara costume emerging lost in thought from a side street—he stepped through the front door of the building into a courtyard lit even in the middle of the afternoon by globes of colored glass that rose along the undulating interior of the building, somehow deepening the smell of overripe citrus and damp stone wafting around him, not to mention the contrast between this enclosure and Doña Eulalia’s, which had smelled like nothing more than cinders and had been lit only by a single bare bulb hanging from a cornice that now put him in mind of a description he had once read in which a man, lost in a blackness of the sewers beneath a great city sees a single chink of light in the ceiling far above, then strode forward to the stairwell where, his eyes having inscribed an arc that took them all the way up one wavy bank of windows then slowly back down the other, he saw what his peripheral vision had initially told him were three more of the globes: the pale faces of the connoisseurs pressed against the glass of a second-floor window grinning down at him.
