Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

I have a recurring dream, thought Harry,

“Oh really?” said the man,

This awning is reminding me of it,

“Go on,”

A ship takes me to a distant city, we arrive at night, I am meant to disembark with a group for a tour of some sort, but I disembark alone and am quickly lost in winding streets,

“A labyrinth,”

Of sorts, only before long it resolves itself and I am in the very bazaar the group had been meant to visit: an agreeable affair next to a long canal, with stalls of blue and violet glassware mixed in with piles of bolts, bicycle chains, jewelry boxes, all backlit by lamps that set the glassware alight,

“That must have made for a beautiful reflection in the water,”

Yes, and in fact before long I am on the canal, shopping at the reflected stalls, which are tended by children,

“Children?”

Which is odd because there was no one tending the stalls above the surface,

“That is odd,”

I want to buy something, but can’t decide what to buy,

“Too many choices?”

Everything is too lovely, and all this loveliness, which emanates in equal part from the glowing wares and the children’s faces, short-circuits my ability to think, and I just stand there without being able to move,

“You’ve lost something,”

But in the dream I can’t think of what it is, all I can do is stand there, without moving, as the dark from the water slowly gains the upper hand on the light from the stalls, and all around me people are streaming back toward the harbor, where the ship is waiting to leave, but I don’t leave, I just stand there, which is what Harry did, for quite some time after the man and his companion had left, and the rain had stopped falling, and the pigeons and green parrots, which sometimes flew with them, had returned to preen and dry their feathers in the sun that was now coating the monument to the dead, dripping off all of its exposed surfaces, burning off the rainwater gathered there between the surrounding cobblestones.

When Harry finally collected himself and left, he felt that by telling someone about his dream he had gotten something essential off his chest, something that had had to be removed, like the mineral scale that, unaddressed, builds up in small, water-reliant appliances like espresso machines and warm-air humidifiers, eventually choking them, and as he continued his explorations it seemed like the sprawling city, which nevertheless remained wrapped in a veil of mystery that he was certain his multiple incursions would do little to mitigate, was in some way opening to him, and that his knotted mind was at last untying itself, with the happy result that when one afternoon, upon visiting one of the city’s many spectacular museums, where bits of the distant past had been hammered up on the wall alongside multilingual explanatory notices, he had great difficulty deciphering what was being proposed about the glistening armor hanging before him, a fact he found more curious than troubling, and he was even encouraged, rather than perturbed, to note that this moment of ocular aphasia before the explanatory notice reminded him that in the old days he had often woken not so much not knowing where he was, but not knowing who it was he was lying next to, which had more than once made him leap up and grab for his pants, afraid that his then-wife, upon waking, would be horrified to find a total stranger lying nearly naked beside her, and that when that dynamic had ceased being possible, i.e. when the bed beside him had become empty, he had more than once woken with the sensation that the emptiness beside him would at any moment awake and, seeing him lying on the bed partially clad, scream, and that scream would destroy him, so he had started sleeping on the couch and had not stopped sleeping on the couch until he had arrived in this new city, where he had a single bed, a sequence of thought that had continued to attend but not disturb him as he left the museum and drifted back down to the city from the heights where it was located, to which layers — upon layers — of mental fog he attributed his inability to recognize the handsome woman from the café when, less than an hour after he had stood gazing without comprehension at the three-by-three-inch sign, he stood gazing without comprehension at her.

Afterwards, Harry realized that he had more than once walked past her, that she had been hidden in plain sight, like the letter in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story, which mechanism had baffled all attempts to find it because it lay out in the open where everyone could see it and so, in the natural order of things, didn’t, a comparison he liked quite a good deal even though the two ends didn’t quite match up — she after all had neither been hidden nor was hiding — and which prompted him, some weeks later, when it was all over, to seek out the story in question and reread it over a plate of sliced quince and tuna wedges and a glass of sparkling water at a small specialty shop near the market, out of which he had emerged when he stepped onto the broad sloping central pedestrian boulevard that split the city and led down to the sea, and which he had walked along nearly every day, remarking, assuredly, upon the numerous “living statues” who had set up their more or less elaborate shop along the edges, to the general delight of tourists and to the more specific delight, as Harry was unfortunately to learn, of certain local connoisseurs, though never before having stopped in front of one, as he did shortly after starting down the street on this day, in front of this extraordinary silver angel, with her enormous silver wings and beautiful silver face, down one cheek of which coursed frozen, silver tears, upon which Harry gazed with wonder then sudden, spine-stiffening recognition that grabbed him up and shoved him through to the front of the small crowd surrounding her, whose members were snapping pictures and remarking on the elaborateness of her costume, really one of the best, so much more marvelous than the fairly predictable Che Guevara, or the chubby Julius Caesar, or the man with his own head on a plate, or the creaky, battling robots, or the lady dressed as a fruit stand: this was on a par with the golden centaur, or the two platinum men on bicycles, a real work of art, Yes, a work of art, thought Harry, who stood on the sidewalk no more than three feet away from the silver box the angel seemed bolted to and gazed up into her hardly blinking eyes, which did not move even when she very precisely arched her back, then lifted a shoulder, then twisted her arm, and after a few minutes he was asked by several of the onlookers to step aside, there were pictures to be taken, he was blocking the full view, in short, “What the fuck, man?” but Harry did not move, kept gazing up into her eyes, even as the murmuring around him grew louder, less relaxed, until suddenly it struck him that she was, perhaps because of him, on the verge of breaking her silence, that by standing there and somewhat impudently staring at her, he was committing a transgression, interfering with her act, possibly even making her nervous, which was exactly the opposite of his intent: he had thought long and hard on this, the two of them with their broken faces could eat together, share a drink, take a stroll, apply tape and glue to each other, but now he could see that the situation would require much more than a casual “Hi, they thought I was you,” and that his standing in front of her, in all her splendor, like a troll lying in ambush beneath a handsome bridge, was no way to get things started, so he bowed his head and, with the idea of in some way mitigating the disturbance he had caused, murmured an apology then backed away slowly, rather ridiculously, before turning and moving off down the boulevard, where eventually he passed Julius Caesar, then a rather good Atlas with golden dreadlocks, who had set down his globe and was sweeping the ground in front of his box, and then Che Guevara, who had a plastic cigar stuffed in his mouth and was engaged in lighting and throwing tiny firecrackers onto the ground.