Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

“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.