Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

Before we move forward, as we must — for there is a juniper bush waiting just ahead for us too — it is worth mentioning that after Harry left the Rubinski’s and stepped out onto his filthy, sunlit street, no longer, at least not in the short term, interested in sitting in his apartment and waiting for another, even less commodious knock on the door, or tap on his shoulder, the cold drippings of his darlings, he thought first of going to see Doña Eulalia again, of attempting to ring a little more out of her, but while he had no trouble at all this time in finding her building, the thick, exterior door was locked tight and his pounding on it managed only to attract the attention of a group of women in black housedresses and flowered aprons who had set chairs against the side of the next building and were sunning their heavy, mottled legs, and flicking at the air with black fans, and while of course if it were helpful we could enter the building and look in, as it were, on Doña Eulalia, it would only be to find her in the grips of a sleep so deep all supposition was simultaneously made possible and irretrievable in it, and while we might be justified in speculating that her exertions from the previous night had forced her into this slumber, we would do better to look closely at the unusual glaze coating the well-sampled chocolate ducklings brought the previous night by the manifestly persuasive connoisseurs, and hope that one of her relatives takes it upon her/himself to look in on her, oh well, we have already seen how her “Ah,” was of some use, or seemed to be, to Ireneo, and it would have probably been asking too much to have expected her to come up with much more, though something like an “Ah” for Harry would have been quite welcome, just a little help — would that we who lurk in darkness could offer it to him, take him aside,

“Hello Harry,”

“Run, Harry,”

but it’s possible the help he needs is already there, has already been offered and we have thus far missed it, at any rate, “They are coming,” Harry thought and shuddered — with such force as it occurred that it tore a hole open in the blue door before him and he immediately ran through it and climbed the short flight of steps and stood behind Doña Eulalia’s bed and put his face next to her lips and, although she was far away, she spoke, though it was only to repeat herself,

“They are coming,”

“I know, thanks a lot, thanks for nothing,” Harry said—

as he left Doña Eulalia’s and decided, as we have seen, to make his way to the boulevard, and by chance his route took him past Almundo’s Store for Living Statues, open for business despite the upended phone booth partially blocking its door and two gilt-edge panes from its front window that had been blown in and lay shattered in the midst of miniature cobalt skyscrapers surrounding an emerald Godzilla statue display, and before Harry quite knew what he was doing he had stepped in through the door and peeped around an immense pile of goblin masks and goblin finger puppets and saw, standing in the only clear space in the store — where he himself had been fitted for his own costume — the man with the fish-motif lapel pin who had spoken to him about golf on the plane, the man who had described the new ball that would allow him to prosecute such vigorous assaults, the man who had not been at all interested in Harry’s comments about Restless Leg Syndrome and experimental invisibility, and who likely would have been even less interested in Harry’s thoughts on the Black Dahlia, had he been able to articulate them, a subject, the Black Dahlia, which had slipped his mind since the apparition beside the Yellow Submarine of the young woman with hair mostly the color of crushed pomegranates, and did not seem at all auspicious in its resurfacing now, nor did the apparition of this, as Harry put it to himself, idiot, who, as he watched, suddenly let fall the golden golf club he had been holding frozen above his head, as if he were going to smash an invisible ball, and indeed when he more or less froze again, with the golden club now resting over his left shoulder, he had the satisfied air of someone who had sent an invisible ball roaring through an invisible landscape, and although the ball and its owner soon flew straight out of Harry’s overcrowded head, for a moment it seemed to him that he could see it, this ball, that he was following it as it flew, faster and faster, past invisible parks and buildings and out over an invisible sea, where, rather than slowing, it picked up speed, so that he could no longer keep up with it, and was left to watch, if watch is the word, with considerable regret, as it went where he could not follow and where, before very long, it could no longer be perceived, which might have been the way that Solange and Ireneo would have put it had they been asked when, after stepping through the door of the building, the one that Harry would step through minutes after them, and making their way into the courtyard, where they couldn’t help but stop to take in that space, simultaneously so awkward and elegant, with all its globes, which did not so much vanish a moment later when, recalling the urgency of their errand, they began to stride toward the stairwell — with Ireneo, who had found his courage, even if he would lose it again in a moment, leading the way — as reconfigure itself into the street they had just stepped off, though it took them a moment to determine this, as their orientation and position had shifted and they were now, rather than moving toward the stairwell, beside the jackhammer tearing up the street, and none the happier for the journey, in fact both of them nauseated by it, although Solange immediately turned back and, when she saw Harry now ahead of them entering the building, even began to run, and while Ireneo ran, as best he could in his espadrilles, alongside her, it was only to say that he was not interested in repeating the experience, that he did not think at that moment that he could, that his experience with the shoes had weakened him and he was sure that, if they returned to the courtyard, what had happened would happen again, that he thought that perhaps it was time he had a holiday, that perhaps he would leave the city and travel back up the coast to see his mother, whom he had not left in the best of health, even if she had not, in fact, been as sick as she had claimed to be, that he had had his running shoes on when he had stayed with her and had, as a result, perhaps not given her the benefit of the doubt when he should have, and a mother deserved that benefit,

“Undoubtedly,” Solange said,

“Perhaps you would like to accompany me,” Ireneo said,

“I’m going back there right now,” Solange said,

“Well then, good-bye,” Ireneo said, and he stopped and Solange continued, and, as she caught sight — though she couldn’t quite believe it at first — of Raimon waving his cigar at her from down the block, she thought, “I will run so fast they won’t see me coming,” though unfortunately, in the event, they did.

The stairs Harry climbed after leaving the globe-lit courtyard were made of fine marble and the banister with which he supported his sore knee was polished ebony and the walls were encrusted with gold leaf and mother of pearl and the door he decided corresponded with the connoisseurs, not least because it stood ajar, was a richly burnished slab of solid oak in the center of which had been sunk a peephole of cyclopean proportion, and if something like the smell of old fish hadn’t seemed to emanate from it, Harry likely would have been more than mildly surprised to step out of all that careful elegance into a small, badly lit and even more badly ventilated room, on the filthy floor of which lay scattered more than one delicate fish carcass, along with miscellaneous small bones, scraps of paper, soda bottles, portions of moldy fruit, and a half-eaten box of brandy-filled chocolates, which one of the connoisseurs, who were still standing by the room’s only window, picked up and held out to Harry, who looked at it for quite some time before shaking his head,