Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

“No,” Ireneo said, and if he spoke to solange a little sharply, all the better as far as he was concerned, for it had cost him enough just to bring it all up for the purpose of clarifying his earlier behavior — Harry must have thought he looked “completely crackers,” as his mother had liked to put it when he threw tantrums as a child — and even just the thought of the whole business was enough to make his throat go dry and the back of his neck tingle like someone had struck him sharply on one of the upper vertebrae with the sort of rubber mallets doctors used to test reflexes, or at least that was the way he had felt when, after leaving the little store wearing his new espadrilles, the feeling had presented itself and obliged him to turn around, climb the hill he had just made it back down, cross the emerald lawn once again and go and look out over the wall, first at the horror of gray clouds spreading across the far horizon, then at the disaster of blue below, then decide he’d better throw himself off it, whereupon he had placed both hands on the low wall and started to lift one of his feet and said to himself, “Good, it has all been tedious and baffling anyway,” lifted his other foot onto the wall, looked at his unkempt toes and thought, “Good god those need trimming,” and tensed to spring, only at that moment something stirred in his peripheral vision, something moving slowly toward him, something that was whistling an air so exasperating that it reminded him of stale coffee beans being put through a hand grinder, then of someone kicking in a glass display case, then of the taste of gasoline-soaked cardboard, then of where he was, teetering on the edge of a wall with a 500-foot drop, and then the something — three old men walking shoulder to shoulder along the gravel path — stopped whistling and one of these three old men said,

“It’s just a pair of shoes,”

and another of them said,

“You don’t need those things, don’t be an idiot,”

then the whistling had recommenced and the three old men passed behind him, and the other half of his peripheral vision was engaged and just as it clicked on he thought he heard, somewhere amid the whistling, one of them say,

“Go and pick up Harry and take him where he’s supposed to go,”

and then he had fallen over backwards off the wall and had lain on the path they had traversed and at first it seemed to him that the path was like a piece of ice and that it would be damaging to continue to lie there on it looking up at the clouds and the occasional bird slicing through the air, that his skin would stick to it and be torn off when he tried to stand, that he would find himself partially flayed, and as he thought this the whistling started up in his head as if he had put on earphones and hit play and this time it sounded to him like teeth breaking as they were directed by their owner to bite down on chunks of aggregate mineral, and in the meantime the feeling in the back of his neck returned and he wanted nothing more than to stand up and fling himself off the cliff, but he knew that if he did so he would tear off his skin and that as he fell through space he would fall in a great shower of blood, and he knew this long after he had realized that the ground was not cold in the slightest and that the whistling had stopped and that he was not going to throw himself off the cliff, and knowing it he stood and brushed the dust off of his back and smiled in what he was quite sure was not at all a reassuring manner at a woman who was standing on the green lawn petting an obese German shepherd and staring nervously at him, and then he had stopped knowing it in quite such a debilitating manner and had started off again down the hill and had not paused, except to buy a bottle of water and a large packet of paprika-spiced fried minnows from a vendor near the harbor, which he shoved by the handful into his mouth until the packet was empty and he had calmed down enough to find a public restroom and wash his face and run damp fingers through his hair, before proceeding to his rendezvous, where he had hoped to preempt any questions to do with the shoes, a strategy that had worked quite well with Harry, but not, alas, with Solange, who nevertheless, far from taking visible offense at his curt answer, reached out, put her hand on his forearm and held it there until it occurred to him not only that he had been shaking, but also that he had now stopped,

“It has been a very long day,” he said, giving a little bow and turning away to cover the fact that he had gone quite crimson, and as he left them in the courtyard to go and let Doña Eulalia know, as she had asked him to, that they had arrived, his blush deepened and the tingling in the back of his neck returned, as did the shaking, and it was only with the greatest effort that he made it inside and up the short flight of stairs to Doña Eulalia’s room, where he leaned his head against the cool, reassuring wood of the door and said,

“I’ve brought them.”

As they stood in the courtyard waiting for Ireneo to reappear, Harry had more than enough time to remark that the circumstances surrounding this current visit differed in more than one way from those surrounding the last, and he had to admit, he told Solange, that he was disappointed that they had not been immediately led into a room full of mysterious individuals dressed in black and so forth, but Solange gave no clear indication that she had heard him so Harry busied himself with kicking at the dirty cobblestones, counting the coins in his pockets, looking up at the square of dark sky that loomed above them and wondering if he had eaten his dinner — a pork cutlet and some mashed yams sprinkled with fish flakes — too quickly or drunk too much sparkling water and otherwise attempted to keep his mind off ghosts, possibly treacherous golden centaurs, old guys who made his companion shiver because, as she had told him that afternoon after they had exchanged stories, of the way she had caught them all smiling horribly as they stood behind her one recent afternoon whispering about how sorry they were about her loss, etc., his own tendency to shudder, as he put it to himself, rather than shiver, a distinction Solange had said she found very interesting and wanted to explore during their next tête-à-tête, and guides who threw their shoes off cliffs in the middle of the day then acted unpleasant about it afterwards … convinced that if he let his mind go in their direction he would find himself off on a journey whose futility would only be exceeded by its unpleasantness, a formula which, to his annoyance, got stuck in his mind and played over and over again like, he thought looking back up at the indigo sky, the perfect description not just of his life over the past decade, but of his entire being, this thing that he had once described in one of many terrible love poems as an incandescent bulb that had come on and would not go out, even if someone smashed it, so much for that, at least in the case of his former wife, who had left him long before it had happened and had not blamed him or at least not too harshly, but he had to admit that he was not unhappy to be reminded, as he cast a glance over at Solange, that it was still capable of illumination, that it wasn’t, after all, quite as irrevocably cold as the Neptunists had once contended the interior of the earth was, that it still, that he still, had some life left in him as the hackneyed expression went,

“You know,” Solange said, breaking into his thoughts, “Ireneo looked more like he had seen a ghost than you did,” an assertion with which Harry found he wholeheartedly agreed and — because the gap between the previous apparently unflappable Ireneo of that first night and the one who had looked a moment ago like he might burst into tears seemed so enormous — was troubled by and thought to respond to, only at the moment he started to say, “He did, didn’t he,”