Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

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 coming 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.

The past, since it does not exist, is

hard to erase. Tears and the gnashing

of teeth.

This move, the difficult, perhaps impossible perfor mance of which many of us can commiserate with, in which the body leaps up and back, while time, of course, continues to move forward, might be diverting enough to stop a moment and consider — picture for example the long gorgeous lift of the Olympic athlete in the midst of a perfect floor exercise, or the delicate, deadly grace of the Shaolin Temple Kung Fu master flipping backwards, through a snow shower, above waving bamboo, or a determined teenaged girl crashing backwards over and over again into bright blue water — as having teetered for a moment at the midpoint of this story, the days again began to slip by, and while it might be interesting to consider in greater detail, for example, how Ireneo came to the conclusion that his mother was, if not faking her illness, then certainly exaggerating its extent, and that in consequence his presence at her bedside was no longer required, and that he might just as well slip out in the middle of the night and run most of the way back to the city, where, after paying a brief visit to Doña Eulalia, who had recovered from her own dubious illness and informed him that, as she sensed the situation regarding the first individual with the broken face had been greatly ameliorated and that communicating with her was now merely a matter of professional courtesy, finding Harry, for whom the situation was worsening, should be his priority, he made haste for the boulevard and an interview with the centaur, who, at the end of his shift, told him that the individual he was searching for could be found in such and such a part of the city, or how it was that one balmy evening, and not for the first time, Solange — whose curiosity and progressive warming had led her to remove her silver tears one by one and take concomitant, exploratory steps across the boulevard in the direction of the improbable, appealing yellow apparition — came to be leaning, with a slight smile gracing her never-smiling silver lips, against the side of the Yellow Submarine, while Harry, heart smashing up and down inside him, lay just a papier mâché wall away from her, whistling a sort of Beatles medley, we could just say that while time has moved forward, some not insignificant backflipping has occurred, and consequently, we are no longer quite where we last were, a statement that, if we accept the notion that complexity is derived from the intricate and unexpected arrangement of banalities, we can be content with, though perhaps not in the stomach-fluttering way that Harry was content to be lying where he was lying, more like in the understatedly pleased way that Ireneo was content to be running in the city again, even following a piste he was absolutely certain was an incorrect one, that Harry wouldn’t be anywhere near the arcaded renaissance courtyard the tricky-looking centaur had directed him to, that all he would find there would be the usual motley assortment of northern European group-tour participants, some wearing ball caps and/or T-shirts proclaiming their affiliations, as with unadulterated pleasure — convinced they were at last, after a series of false starts, in the midst of an authentic moment — they gobbled second-rate tidbits thawed and deep fried in filthy kitchens hiding behind ornate exteriors, which is exactly what Ireneo did find and had plenty of time to consider, and from multiple angles, as for good measure he ran several slow laps waiting to see if Harry would make an appearance on the terrace of the grand café under the arches, where Bavarians ate fried potatoes and bruschetta with such infectious gusto that eventually Ireneo plopped down at an empty table and ordered a large bottle of sparkling water and a plateful of potatoes, while his running shoes, no worse for wear after his long run down the coast, and certainly no more silent, burbled on, as they had been doing all morning, about trust, about placing one’s fate in the hands of strangers, about clandestine meetings under facades carved from stone in the desert and trysts carried out in rooms lit by low-grade electricity derived from enormous water wheels, a theme that had switched around by the time Ireneo began attacking his fried potatoes — which he dipped in crab mayonnaise — in earnest, to a discussion first of modes of conveyance in general and then of underwater modes of conveyance in particular, and as Ireneo lifted his glass of water and held it aloft so that the backlit tables full of Bavarians looked like the bits of shifting color in a kaleidoscope, he said, “Ah, for fuck’s sake,” put his glass down, ate his last fried potato, and ran back to the boulevard, though by the time he had reached it night had fallen and all the statues and the submarine had gone.