Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

“Your hands, yes,”

“Not everyone can see them,”

“How extraordinary,”

“It’s the greatest mystery and speaks to the core of this whole business, which is to say that they’ve come back, but not quite the same and not quite in the right place,”

“Yikes,” said Harry,

“I’ve never heard of such a case and I’ve done a great amount of research,” said Raimon,

“Nor have I,” said Harry, for lack of anything terribly apropos to offer, while trying and failing to see in what way the hands were wrongly placed,

“If it were an instance of phantom limb syndrome, we might not be surprised to know that the limb in question had returned, in fact it is quite common for them to return to the wrong place, my own uncle lost his left ring finger to a ripsaw and had it return some months later in between the middle and index finger of his right hand — it was most distressing for him and all of us, but this is an instance of negativity delirium in which what has vanished returns and is visible, at least to some,”

Harry wasn’t quite sure what to say to this either so contented himself to raise an eyebrow and nod in an enabling manner,

“Shall we go back inside?” Raimon said, looking at his hands and shrugging, as if there was nothing further that could or should be said,

“Yes,” said Harry,

“I’m glad we had a chance to chat,”

“I am too,”

“That’s really all I wanted, was to chat,”

“I’m glad we could,”

“She’s had a very rough time of it,”

“So I gather,”

“You could say that the universe has conspired against her,”

“I’m in a position to empathize,”

“I’m so very sorry,”

“Thank you,”

“It is all much more difficult than it ought to be, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed,” Harry said.

The statues present were either in partial or complete costume, which gave the wonder-filled room, through the front window of which the Yellow Submarine was fully visible, the air of a carnival, or, when Cleopatra and the Willow Tree began dancing next to the deep-fryers, of a masked ball, so that for a time after his return from the garden, and his only very slightly unnerving conversation with Raimon, whom he had rather liked, Harry’s happiness knew, as they say, no bounds, and when the Oak Tree pulled him up off his feet to dance next to the deep-fryers he did not decline, and for a few minutes he shimmied and whirled with a gusto that probably, at his age, did him no credit, but he would have continued and perhaps even pulled Solange up off her feet had he not, in looking over at her, realized that she was sagging, that the moment, such as it had been, was passing, and that it was time to get back in the submarine and sail off into the night, a course of action that, upon his suggestion, appealed to her, and that was agreeable to Alfonso, and so after finishing their food and saying good-bye, Harry and Solange climbed back into the submarine, though not before catching sight of the connoisseurs, who were just that moment arriving at the gallery, and while they were already in the submarine and rolling when the connoisseurs passed them and bade them each, by name, good-night, Harry felt Solange shiver for a moment beside him, and, although he knew it was indiscreet, could not refrain from asking her what it was,

“Nothing, fatigue,” she said,

“I understand,” Harry said, registering, as he did so, that by responding in this way, he had completed a problematic circuit, across the poles of which a bright blue band of falsehood was now crackling — she had not shivered, he was sure, because of a chill, and he had not, strictly speaking, understood anything, even if the unwelcome phrase “death and the connoisseurs” appeared for a moment before vanishing — but Harry also registered that every incipient relationship is at least partially lit by the light of dubious complicity so he simply smiled in the blue light and they continued on their way in silence, Harry thankfully not thinking about the connoisseurs, but about negativity delirium, which just about summed it all up, then about different qualities and kinds of illumination, and the structures that best masked or presented them, and Solange about the cold efficiency with which the connoisseurs had told and retold her story — which she suspected Harry had heard, probably from Alfonso, a story addict if ever there was one, because of the gentle way he, Harry, had remarked earlier, before she had actually laid eyes on him, that the last of her tears was gone — but also about the way Harry had probed for a moment, but not pushed, had allowed her her lie of convenience without forcing her to enlarge it, or to ask him to leave well enough alone, the sort of direct statement that, uttered too early, can have unfortunate results, often because of misinterpretation, which, the thought occurred to her, had too often marred her interactions with her young man who, likely because of his youth, which if not extreme had nevertheless been considerable, had gotten it wrong, so to speak, with some frequency, which in the short term had seemed endearing, but over the long term … well there hadn’t been any long term, and whereof, she thought, we cannot speak, thereof we ought to keep our mental mouths shut and reach for the Lucite, or rose petal jam, another jar of which she had purchased that morning and had told Raimon about that night, just after he had told her that if what he thought was occurring with Harry was actually occurring then he approved: she licked her lips, which still had a few flecks of almond butter on them and thought,

But why don’t I feel more sad?

It’s this submarine, plain and simple, thought Harry, whose mind had been moving along a roughly parallel track, as it had been, or as it seemed to Harry to have been, with the man under the awning,

It’s like spending time in a hollowed-out Twinkie, thought Solange, who as a foreign exchange student in Lawrence, Kansas had eaten plenty of them,

The thing even smells good, thought Harry,

“What a beautiful night,” they both said,

and the coincidence, though startling after so long a silence, didn’t seem as extraordinary as it might have given that what they could suddenly see out of the front grill, the half-lit trunks of palms along the beach and ship lights sparkling here and there across the moonlit bay, was indeed beautiful,

“This is a fine spot, I’m going to leave you here,” Alfonso said,

“We can roll it back together,” Solange said, and though both of them were sorry to see Alfonso, who came around and put his smiling, still-golden face in the grill, go, it seemed somehow appropriate that they would now have some time even more alone, even if as it turned out it was just to lie there very close to each other and look out over the glittering bay before debarking and making their slow way home through a night that seemed to rise and fall, enormous, like the sea they had left behind them — the sea, as Solange had called it, of commas, each wave a phrase in a sentence that was never quite finished, that would never quite be finished, until of a dreadful sudden it was — to bask separately in the mystery of what was occurring, this gently promising something that felt like it was happening to them.

As Harry and Solange were drifting off into a short sleep, Ireneo, who had spent more than half the night running down the city’s glowing avenues, rose and took off his shoes, then showered and put his shoes back on and went to see Doña Eulalia, who had asked him, when he had phoned her the previous evening to report, to come and see her at sunrise, a request that she had promptly forgotten, with the result that when Ireneo let himself in and knocked on her bedroom door, she was still, and not for the last time during this account, deep asleep, and was not pleased to be woken, and called Ireneo “Imbecile,” which he did not like, nor, apparently, did his shoes, for they barked out a retaliatory “Smelly old bag” and one or two other epithets that Ireneo, operating under the impression that the shoes spoke to him and him alone, was inclined to thank them for, except that as soon as the epithets had been uttered Doña Eulalia switched on the bedside light, reached for her glasses, peered down at the shoes, then up at Ireneo, at whom she smiled and said, “I once had a pair like that, they are great fun and even useful until they lead you astray, I threw mine into a furnace after they suggested I cut off my index finger and feed it to the cat, but not before, mind you, getting out a kitchen knife and sharpening it, thank God my late husband, who had never liked the look of them, came in and made me take them off, what have yours been saying besides ‘smelly old bag’?”