Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

It might be too much to request of the reader, already asked for a good deal of indulgence in the matter of the backflips, to imagine that while Ireneo was running his laps, eating his potatoes, and listening to his shoes, Harry stopped whistling, swallowed deeply, and started speaking, and that, after stressing that he was an acquaintance of the submarine’s owner, Alfonso, who of course was well known to Solange (a fact she confirmed), part of what Harry eventually said was, “There’s plenty of room, would you like to see what this is like on the inside,” and that Solange surprised no one more than herself by saying, “Yes,” and that, further, Alfonso, who each evening helped Harry return the submarine to its garage, appeared at a propitious moment, understood immediately, even though the interior of the submarine was dead silent, what had transpired and asked the two of them if they might be interested in a ride, the response to which was a muffled “All right,” from one voice, or the other, or both, Alfonso thought, as he disengaged the submarine and, with only slightly more trouble than he had had in pushing Harry by himself, rolled them first down the boulevard — the remnants of the day’s crowds parting before them with smiles and cameras cocked — and then along one gently curving street and quiet plaza after another, with here and there a splashing fountain, which transformed the sticky pavement beneath his feet, illuminated by shop windows and the occasional streetlamp, into the surface of an unnamed body of water, and that it crossed Harry’s mind, as he lay now just inches from Solange’s silver face, neither of them saying a word, their silence seeming like the first part of an understanding, that Alfonso was a kind of gondolier and the submarine a gondola and the streets watery thoroughfares, while Solange thought, we are in a submarine, protected from the terrible depths, and the lights we can see through the grill are the entrances to grottos, although of course they both thought many other things, especially when Alfonso paused for a moment before a pair of skeleton puppets, one playing a grand piano, the other a violin, the music being emitted from a gramophone standing between the two young women discretely working the marvelous puppets not anything either of them could have named, though we might as well note that it was Brahms, a jaunty piece that, being played as it was by the two little skeletons in their evening wear, seemed to color the air in the submarine an opalescent indigo that sent them both swimming off together into the depths Solange had imagined and Harry had intuited, and that, finally, Alfonso rolled the Yellow Submarine up to the gaily lit window of one of the grottos that both of them had looked upon with greatest interest and asked the two submariners if they might be interested in debarking, momentarily, in order to attend a small, convivial gathering of friends, with the understanding that he, Alfonso, would be prepared to set out again at a moment’s notice should a hasty departure seem indicated … but this is more or less what occurred, and Harry and Solange, who had begun their day on opposite sides of the boulevard, found themselves near the end of it in the company of Alfonso, enveloped in a cloud of growing familiarity that felt as freshly promising to both of them as a shower of melting snow falling against a backdrop of pure blue sky, stepping together through the doorway of a gallery opposite the city’s great cathedral — the very one where Ireneo, now on his way home to await Harry’s reappearance on the boulevard the following day, most frequently lit his candles — and into a small crowd of off-duty living statues that burst into spontaneous applause when they saw Solange, whom they hadn’t seen off the boulevard in ages, and for several minutes she was swept away into a collective embrace that gave Harry the opportunity to turn to Alfonso and thank him, and for Alfonso to bow and say, “You still owe me your story, and not just its outline,”

“It may have a new ending,”

“We can only hope,”

“Yes, yes we certainly can.”

Drinks at the event they were attending were procured by pushing one of two buttons set close together near the baseboard beneath the front window, which prompted a slender hand to appear out of a small hole cut into the floor, a hand that would, when given a modest amount of money, reemerge with an ice-cold bottle of sparkling water, or a glass of grenadine, or a chocolate malt, while donations to the gallery hosting the event could be made by holding a bill under a piece of nearby plastic tubing that snaked its way up to the ceiling where it curved around and around before plunging into a clear receptacle, already well supplied with bills that would dance madly when a button near the opening on the other side of the room was pushed and a fresh bill was sucked into it, a seductive spectacle that deprived both Harry, holding a chocolate malt, and Solange, a glass of grenadine, of several bills each, and if a line had not begun to form behind them they might well have allowed the contraption to suck up the entire collective contents of their wallets, which would have been a shame because, as they discovered, feeding additional bills into a slot in the floor caused a room that housed a griffon’s skeleton to light up under the oak planking, and furthermore there were tempting deep-fried items on offer at back tables that Alfonso convinced them to sample, and so it was that Harry drank a chocolate malt and ate a deep-fried clove cookie while silver-faced Solange interspersed bites of deep-fried almond butter squares with sips of grenadine and waves at Julius Caesar, Atlas, and Che Guevara, the latter who ran straight over, stuffed his unlit cigar in his mouth, and gave Solange a bear hug, lifting her straight off the floor and twirling her around, before turning to Harry, bowing, and suggesting that the two of them take the air, that it was a splendid night, there was a marvelous little garden attached to the store, etc.,

“Well,” Harry said,

“Go on, go on, Raimon is an old friend,” Solange said,

“And that’s really why I wanted to have a word,” said Raimon, once they had made their way through a back room and into what was indeed a thoroughly charming tree-filled garden, lit with strings of lights that were reflected in a handsome, merrily plashing pond surrounded by high walls, one of which, according to Raimon, who lit a red cigar and leaned against an ornamental quince, had been built by the Romans as part of the ancient city’s outer defenses, many relics of which Harry couldn’t have failed to notice were still standing amidst the modern edifices,

“Fascinating,” said Harry,

“Yes,” said Raimon, “Though of course every now and again some section of wall, uncared for by the municipal authorities, crumbles to the ground, leaving only its absence behind,”

“Its absence …”

“Its afterglow, in which some aspect of the former wall might be said to remain standing,”

“I like that,” Harry said,

“Are you familiar with negativity delirium?” Raimon asked,

“No,” Harry said,

“It’s the evil inverse of phantom limb syndrome, whereby, rather than missing limbs and organs maintaining their presence, present limbs and organs vanish,”

“That’s awful,”

“It’s diabolical,”

“I’ve often thought of chopping off my legs, because of the condition I suffer from, but now I can see that they might not be so easy to get rid of,”

“Not so easy at all, take for example, the case of my missing hands,” said Raimon, wedging his brightly burning cigar in the corner of his mouth and holding his hands up in the air,

“What are those things?” said Harry,

“You can see them too?”