Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

At the café—which as it turned out was just around the corner from his apartment — Harry ordered a sparkling water and a packet of chips and stood at the counter and felt agreeably, in his deep blue scarf, red T-shirt, and brown velvet jacket, and with the evening paper he had picked up along the way, like the rather crisp echo of some supporting actor from a New Wave film that no one had ever seen because the studio had lost its funding and the film had been left to molder in a warehouse and the director had died and the producer had never liked the project, which had stolen too much from Godard and not enough from Truffaut, even as it thumbed its nose at Rohmer and embraced Varda, etc., and Harry kept going with this for quite some time, so long, in fact, that he had finished drink and chips both and was beginning to explore nuances of the general plot line — he had promoted himself to co-star status and had made himself the architect of a scheme to steal the bells of a provincial cathedral through machinations involving a secretary working in the mayor’s office who had a frog fetish and kept posters of endangered tree frogs around her workspace (in short, just the sort of somewhat moving, slightly somber, brilliantly stupid content out of which the New Wave engineered its complexities) — all the while looking from time to time at himself in the mirror behind the bar in a state of wonder at what he found himself calling “his inexplicable frivolity,” and while in the main he liked what he saw in the only very subtly warped glass, he had to admit that the overall impression, scarf and jacket and happy thoughts or not, was one of dilapidation, which he didn’t like to think of being set down on film for the consideration of anyone, especially when that anyone might mean viewers in the future, who would almost certainly find Harry and everyone around him horribly old-fashioned, unwashed, and half-diseased, in the way that one age naturally looks back in pity and horror, far more frequently than in admiration, at the paradigms of the other, particularly as preserved in celluloid and/or digital media, in other words, “putting myself down for the record would be a problematic venture at best,” Harry thought with a sigh, just as a tall, elegantly dressed man with extraordinary turquoise eyes and cheekbones that looked as if they could break razors came and stood beside him and ordered a sparkling water, then after a moment coughed and bowed and introduced himself as Ireneo.

“My name is Harry,” Harry said, then called for another sparkling water and a second packet of chips, while registering that Ireneo’s face was so striking and his eyes so unusually colored that it was going to be mildly difficult to look at him as they conversed, which is what he sensed was going to occur at any moment — Ireneo’s arrival and rather formal introduction, not to mention how politely but firmly he made it clear that he was going to have no reciprocal trouble looking at Harry, seeming to presage this — but minutes were elapsing, and sips of sparkling water were being taken both by him and by Ireneo, who had a pleasant way of holding his glass with one hand and more or less cupping it with the other, all the while fixing Harry with his turquoise eyes, something Harry might ordinarily by now have found unsettling, but despite his misgivings he was still half-inhabiting his cinematic adventure and imagining he was someone else, and although he knew the shoe that had hung suspended since he had stepped into the vintage clothing store would drop at any moment and he would experience the crushing sense of fatigue and hopelessness that would drive him back to his bed to begin a horrible night, in which, nifty new bell or no nifty new bell, his sleeplessness and exhaustion would do their grim tango and jab at him with their sharpened heels, for the moment he felt almost jaunty, and the café and Ireneo and an unusually handsome woman with flecks of silver paint on her face and wrists sitting alone in the window, not to mention the moment of relative lightness he was experiencing, seemed an agreeable matrix of potential and mystery, so he sipped his water and ate his chips and waited for the conversation to begin, but when Ireneo did speak it was not to begin a conversation, it was to say, “Please come with me.”

At that very moment, the ceiling opened up and the heavy shoe Harry had been waiting for fell, grazed his shoulder, and landed with a loud whamp beside him, and something all-too-familiar took up its station on his back and dipped its claws into his shoulders and the most tender parts of his kidneys, and his knees almost buckled, and he knew his bed and darkened room, and perhaps the new bell, were the only answer, but there he was standing in the bright light holding a packet of chips with Ireneo looking on, so he found his voice and said that he was indisposed and would have to offer his regrets — he actually used the word “regrets”—but perhaps another night, whereupon, with Ireneo still looking at him, he settled his bill, did his best to finish his water and, though he wasn’t sure why, gave the bright orange packet of chips a pat on its crinkly flank and walked out through the double glass doors into the dark, where the puddles of light leaking out of the half-lit shops made him think of a dream he had once had in which he was caught in a flooding aquarium, and as Harry wrapped himself in such thoughts and hurried home, Ireneo held his position, and slowly finished his water, although his eyes flicked across the room for a moment to the handsome, silver-flecked woman sitting alone at her table and as he did so his brow furrowed, and he took his hand off his glass, pressed his fingers into the bar and wondered whether he had gotten things right, and while the woman did not bring her eyes over quickly enough to meet his, she did feel his gaze and did look up at him, before returning to her newspaper and a story about a forensic entomologist who in her spare moments taught children to paint with maggots, which she was reading as the flimsiest of covers for her own melancholy.

By this time, Harry was more than halfway home and, to his surprise, was beginning to feel somewhat better, the thing on his back had retracted its claws, and his breathing had deepened and he was looking with actual relish — rather than grim resignation — upon the prospect of once again locking his door behind him and lying down to begin the night with a cool towel over his eyes and listening to the small array of sounds haunting his walls and floor and ceiling, adding to them with his new bell, while he mulled over his odd, abrogated interaction with Ireneo, which he registered was an indication, this “willing contemplation of potential interaction,” as a counselor had put it more than once, that the crisis he was currently undergoing was a minor one, and not, after all, the kind that so often left him incapacitated, his breath reduced to a sort of peripatetic bubbling associated with heavy porridge and cold bogs, when from a distance he saw Señora Rubinski, his downstairs neighbor, standing outside the door to their apartment building, waiting for her husband to appear and collect her for their evening stroll, even though this husband was long-dead, something she did frequently, unpredictably, and with the greatest sociability — Harry had twice already found himself trapped in conversation — so that it was clear to our hero, in no mood to interact, that he had no choice but to turn on his heel and hurry back the way he had come, a maneuver he executed with just a touch of theatricality, vaguely hoping that if Señora Rubinski had caught sight of him turning around she would imagine that he had forgotten something and had to go back, which happened all the time, etc., Ha ha! what a fool he was, he thought, and went striding back the way he had come, moving even faster than he had previously, since he was meant to be rushing back to recuperate some lost item or relate some important information, and hurrying was a relative phenomenon, so that before very long he found himself passing the café and the very window the paint-speckled woman was still sitting in, and although she did not notice him, he found himself struck by her again, in fact, more than struck: smacked, which was perhaps the most remarkable of the many fresh sensations he had experienced that evening, but he pressed on, did not break stride, even ducked his head, suddenly fearful that Ireneo might see him and become confused and perhaps offended, and he thought about this unfortunate possibility, of offending Ireneo, with such vigor that upon rounding the corner and beginning to put distance between himself and the violet glow of the café, and the light spilling out of the half-lit shops, he did not notice the elegant shadow languidly cutting the dark stretch of street before him, until he had come abreast of it, and Ireneo smiled and took his arm and said, “I’m glad you’ve changed your mind, Harry, yes, I’m very glad.”