Ray of the Star

I

Then one day the deadly ones did appear.

They stood in a smoking row and told Harry what they were going to do and Harry rose, trembling, and said that he would go, that they could take him, could please take him instead, but they just smiled, wisps of smoke escaping their already blood-soaked lips, then vanished, and Harry screamed and ran for the door, even though he was 500 miles from home and snow lay deep over the countryside and the world was a dead thing under the stars, so that later, as he stood in dark wool nodding at people who placed their hands on his arm and looked at him out of puffed eyes, he wondered why they weren’t looking at him through ice, why ice didn’t fall from their eyes and cover the floor and coat the walls, and end all warmth, and that later still it seemed to him that all warmth had ended and that the world around him had shrunk to the size of his fist and that the fist would never open again, upon which his wounded mind saw a fist bloom into a beautiful hand, and, with a crushed sob, he began to creep out of the sorry thing his life had become, but this was only after years had passed.

Leave, Harry thought so he locked the front door, threw the keys into the snarled forsythia, got into his car and drove past houses he had long ago stopped looking at and did not look at now, and knew he would never look at again, and then they were behind him and the country beside the highway opened up, when there weren’t any subdivisions or industrial parks, onto cow-peppered grassland above which hawks circled and balloons hung heavily and gliders scraped away at the sky, an endless, hopeless affair the color of a postcard he had been sent, unsigned, some years earlier from a great city where he had once spent a few happy months, some kind of blue with a few drops of bloody red in it, which called to mind a drink he had once had but couldn’t remember the composition of as he had sat in a bar in that great city and smashed himself to smithereens for no compelling reason, the way he had done many things in that particular part of his deep past, when he had worked hardly at all and slept a great deal and very little had mattered, much like, he thought as he took the exit for the airport, now, this moment, these last years, although the situations were not the same, oh no, even if very little now mattered and very little had mattered then there had been those intervening years when everything had mattered and that changed it, irrevocably, and as he walked away from his car, he thought again of the great city and that shade of blue, which had surely shifted over the years he had kept the postcard — part of a collection which even now, as he set his credit card down on the counter and said the name of the great city, was sitting, continuing to shift, in an Adidas box beside his desk in the house that years ago had stopped being his home.

On the plane that carried him over the Atlantic he sat next to a young woman with short hair the precise color, she informed him, of crushed pomegranate flesh, who was reading a coffee-table sized book called, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, which presented the argument, through neutral text and heavily inflected images, that the murderer in the famous unsolved case of Elizabeth Short was an amateur artist and physician named George Hodel, who was known to be a friend to and admirer of various surrealist artists, and it was certainly true, as the young woman explained to him over airline chicken, pasta, and peas, that the authors of the study made a credible case for their hypothesis, in part through the skillful juxtaposition of macabre crime scene photographs of the “black dahlia”—cut in half lying in high grass; cut in half lying on the autopsy table — with multiple famous surrealist canvases by Dali, De Chirico, Man Ray, etc. that showed women in various states of vivisection, all of which Harry found compelling and strangely moving, but not nearly as compelling and strangely moving as he found the young woman explaining all of this to him — this young woman with her deucedly bright hair and rather fat face and crooked teeth and pleasant voice and long earrings from the end of which dangled miniature blue skulls — and he said to himself, I hope she doesn’t stop talking, but of course in time the stewards and stewardesses came and took away their massacred trays, and the young woman stowed her book and brought out a pair of headphones, and Harry, left alone with himself, began to fear that he would have one of his episodes and would have to go and lock himself in the bathroom, but instead he grew sleepy and stared at his hands and, legs twitching, eventually dozed, his head lolling ever-so-slightly from side to side, and every now and then he would wake and wipe his mouth and look over at the young woman and hope she would bring out the book again and talk to him, but she didn’t, and, unable to come up with anything that felt even vaguely like a conversation starter, he was left to fill the long hours with empty thoughts, until, as he stood in line to use the restroom toward the end of the flight, a leather-faced man wearing a lapel pin with a fish motif about Harry’s age embroiled him in a conversation about golf and an exciting new golf ball that was being released that very month, onto the central stem of which conversation Harry, for his part, pasted one or two remarks about Restless Leg Syndrome, from which he had suffered, increasingly, for years, as well as a new method for rendering certain objects invisible that was being elaborated in some cutting-edge laboratory somewhere, which conversation seemed to Harry to form an interesting echo of his earlier interaction about surrealism and the Black Dahlia, not least because almost from the moment the man had begun speaking to him about the issue of Golf Digest he was holding in his hands, he, Harry, had half-imagined that he was speaking to the Dahlia’s presumptive murderer, George Hodel, which was why — hoping to draw him out and remembering something the young woman had said earlier about Hodel feeling “in his twitchiness,” either untouchable or unseeable or both — he had interjected the comments about Restless Leg Syndrome and invisibility, but the man had more or less ignored Harry and had gone on about golf and then had stepped into a free restroom and had vanished by the time Harry came back out of his own cramped cubicle.

Upon returning to his seat, Harry, whose intention had been to begin gathering his things — the unpromising copy of the New Yorker he had brought to read but hadn’t opened, the half a Snickers bar he had stuffed between its pages an hour into the flight, the packet of salt and pepper crackers he had saved from his meal — instead leaned his head back, pushed the aluminum seat recline button, shut his eyes and found himself thinking, with startling immediacy, of footage he had seen on television the week before of a brilliant green tree frog with prodigiously spatulate toes and huge, heavy-lidded eyes negotiating the undulating upper canopy of an unnamed rainforest that stretched, like the surface of some improbable off-world ocean, in all directions as far as the camera could reveal, which gave way to a succession of treetop close-ups, first of what had looked to Harry like a cross between a caterpillar and a piece of delicate, white coral, then an enormous lizard that put him in mind, even though he knew he was dealing in gross approximations, of a Komodo dragon, then of an unmoving insect, also frighteningly large, with frozen onyx eyes and legs locked into aggressive right angles, then another tree frog, this one deep brown, that lowered itself, as the camera covered it, into a cave of wet bark, and as Harry sat there, as the plane adjusted its attitude and, quite palpably, began its descent, which prompted the attendants to begin moving about the cabin to collect garbage, and scattered passengers to lift their arms up into the half-lit, under-oxygenated air to adjust the overhead lights, it seemed to him that the trespass committed by the camera — held aloft by a specially designed airship, which would now make this previously under-explored territory readily available to science, not to mention, as the expression went, “the thousands of eyes hidden in every camera,”—had all the dimensions of a ghastly crime, one that wouldn’t cease to expand in scope until it had ensured the destruction of this ocean of damp leaves and soft bark negotiated by the brilliant green tree frog, which, Harry suddenly imagined, turned its head, looked Harry in the eye, and smiled a bloody, Dahliaesque smile, he was sure had been as aware as its brown colleague that something unprecedented, if only dimly perceived, was nearby, and that this something must, at all costs, be hidden from, and while Harry might have continued to nourish this lugubrious line of thought, which he found strangely comforting, mired as he was and had been for so long in hopelessness, for the remainder of the flight, it wasn’t very long before an attendant came and tapped him on the shoulder and asked him and the woman with the crushed pomegranate hair to put their seats in an upright position and to otherwise prepare themselves for the plane’s impending return to earth.

After nearly ten hours in the rattling fuselage, Harry stepped off the plane into the smell of ocean, a salty thickness that became unpleasant, vaguely criminal, he thought, in its sweet, festering undertones, when, looking for the men’s room, he walked down a flight of stairs that adjoined the baggage claim area into a bulging envelope of air that seemed very little better for breathing than the water in an overcrowded or forgotten fish tank, and he might well have fled immediately had he not, on regaining baggage claim, where the luggage was at last coming around on the conveyor belt, found himself again stationed next to the man he had spoken with on the plane, only this time the man was talking about the new ball to someone next to him whom Harry, too nauseous to turn his head and look, imagined was the young woman with the pomegranate hair, and that as the man described the new ball, which was to come in three colors and three corresponding qualities, the young woman was nodding but not really listening — who really listens in such circumstances? — as she watched for her bag, but of course Harry was wrong, it wasn’t the young woman at all, as he discovered when, during a break in the delivery, a deep, accented voice said, “You could really lay siege to a course with a ball like that,” to which the first man responded, “It’ll be like assault and battery, I’m telling you, with this ball, life will be a siege,” which series of extraordinary assertions got parsed and twisted in Harry’s mind as he hefted his duffel bag and valise off the belt and onto a cart he had secured, then made his way past customs to the exit, into the phrase, “assault on life,” which he rather liked, it seeming to represent the inverse of what he had been conducting for quite some few years now, and when he stepped outside into the sunlight, there was a fresh wind that swept out his mouth and nostrils and pleasantly filled the taxi he climbed into then out of in front of the building where, 1,000 years ago it now seemed to him, he had groggily, via the internet, rented a small apartment on a long, curving street, whose stone edifices, none built more recently than the late Inquisition, seemed to Harry, who was very close to falling asleep as he stood absently handing money to the driver, to be about to burst out of their own windows and come crashing down on his head.

Deep slumber should immediately have ensued, but the most annoying part of Harry’s nocturnal disorder was that the greater his fatigue the more pronounced it grew, so that instead of immediately and gratifyingly giving himself over to oblivion after the long journey, he was obliged to spend the better part of an hour simultaneously resisting the urge to rip the affected flesh off his burning legs, which felt like an army of invisible termites was settling in for a long stay, or like someone had taken the content of an endless Tarkovsky movie and somehow shoved it under his skin, or like all the hair on his thighs and calves was growing inward at sickening speed, and doing vigorous knee bends and imprecise sun salutations and running through low-level logic puzzles — tedious things to do with knights and knaves — in an effort to trick his mind into thinking he was interested in being awake rather than asleep, which usually, eventually, gave him some relief, and as he went through this prolonged version of what, with certain variations, had over the years become his nightly routine, the low sloping ceiling he had already managed to smack his head against, the faded prints of deltas, root systems, and family trees that hung in worn-out frames from the walls, the dishes stacked precariously on shelves that were manifestly too small for them, the uneven tile that covered the floor of the kitchenette, seemed, as his mind mashed them together, like an extension of the interiors of the unpleasant air terminal and the rattling airplane and the house whose keys now hung in or lay under the forsythia bush, and it was hard not to think, with despair, about the remark a clerk at the local supermarket had made — when Harry, unprompted, had blurted out that he was planning to leave and probably forever — that it was “too bad we have to go with ourselves when we undertake such journeys,” although he was quite surprised that when a few minutes later he sank onto his new bed, and began to drift, his thoughts turned not in the direction of the clerk’s observation but toward a pair of wire service articles he had read just before leaving for the airport, the first of which had concerned a woman who had been stopped at a border somewhere in Gaza because of her unusual shape and was found to have wrapped three baby crocodiles around her stomach in an attempt to smuggle them into Israel, a discovery that had caused an apparently quite general pandemonium, comprised of screaming and running about, which image had actually been matched, if not exceeded, in its agreeable improbability, by the other article, which announced the recent marriage of the world’s tallest person, and showed a picture of him standing with his new bride, who had her arm wrapped around his hips, and which as a kind of afternote, related the key role played by this really very tall person in using his long arms to remove chunks of plastic that had become lodged in a dolphin’s stomach, and that would have killed it without his timely intervention, and as Harry made his way, panting slightly, into sleep, a wary but resolute Chinese giant with a trio of dolphins and a small Chinese woman strapped around his midsection led him there.

“Now,” said Harry, speaking to the mud-colored pigeon scrabbling away at the inhospitable roof’s edge below him, and to the bits and pieces of clouds that were forever threatening, at least since he had been there — how many days had it been? not so many really — to coalesce into something dim and wet, “Now,” he said again, “I will begin my assault on life,” but where to begin: with a bit of hard sausage and some rosemary goat cheese and certainly a pickle and a bit of bread then some sparkling water, followed by a slice of apple and some additional cheese — blue this time — all of which and more Harry had procured that morning at the city’s central market: a gigantic, cheery affair attended by red-faced, thick-fingered men and women who had seemed to him almost grotesquely happy to be hovering over their wares, which were no doubt fine enough, but still, surely not terribly profitable, not to mention constantly threatening to rot or tumble to the ground, plus there had been a chill in the air, something vaguely sinister, and already, even this early in the season, the smell of tour-bus diesel exhaust and brightly clad tourists following locals carrying clipboards and flags, a combination that Harry had found just irresistible enough to attach himself to a group of travelers from India, who after a time had looked at him with such collective fury that he had been obliged, or so it had seemed, to run away at top speed, his heavy bags bonking his knees, “Which means nothing,” Harry said to the one-legged pigeon, “What do you know of happiness, or remember of it, not, I imagine, very much,” and he brought one of the tiny pickles to his mouth then pulled it away again and turned from the window and the table and made for the near dark of the bedroom, where after staring at the crumpled heap of himself in a wall mirror for several minutes, he said, though without great conviction, “you must be mad.”

Possibly mad, he wandered the tree-lined streets of the city for weeks, shivering along with the slowly growing emerald leaves, and the animals in the modern but poorly maintained zoo he visited three afternoons in a row, where the wild boars bloodied their tusks on each other and small children climbed into the penguin exhibit and frightened themselves half to death and the owls flung themselves over and over again into the rusted bars of their cages, and with the old women everywhere on the streets, shivering in their hats and sunglasses, one of whom, he thought, said, “Poor man,” as she passed him, which, whether she had actually said it or not, made him laugh so hard he had to stop and lean against a lamppost, poor man, indeed: it was the acuity of this observation — whether or not it had been made by anyone or anything besides his bruised grapefruit of a head, let alone an old woman in a blue felt hat and long yellow coat dragging a handsome, though manifestly overfed Pekingese — its stunning incisiveness, which cut straight to the quick of his worn, unflattering outerwear, slumped shoulders, and rather saggy skin and vague, even sinister/vengeful puffery about assaulting life and so forth, with the result that as he continued his daily wanderings he realized 1) that given the level of sustained autoanalysis he was engaged in and no matter how much he might in his self-pitying, aspire to it, “mad” was probably inaccurate and that 2) well, there was no 2) but there might be, and that was something, maybe his sinister assault was underway after all, and how spectacularly interesting, and perhaps, well, perhaps it was time he took a little better care of himself.

Given that over the next few days Harry continued to agree with himself that better self-care was probably indicated, and convinced that both body and mind probably should, if something meaningful were to occur, be equally implicated by any eventual attentions, it struck him that he might well pay a visit to the acupuncturist whose more elaborate than average literature, which spoke of addressing just those things, had found its way into his mailbox, so he called and, almost before he had had a chance to finish his first explanatory sentence, was told to come over immediately, an injunctive that Harry was only too happy to comply with, and on the way over, sitting near the front of the bus, holding the acupuncturist’s literature in his hand, which featured a series of awkwardly rendered but nevertheless appealing body-mind slogans, e.g., in approximate translation, “Have a Happy Way!” not to mention, in each of the accompanying photographs of the doctor and his office, the presence of the sort of bell to be universally found on hotel front desks — at least filmic representations thereof — and which Harry had always found most compelling, he felt quite sure that he had taken a promising step indeed, one that couldn’t fail to help him, by dint of the renewed mental and physical vigor he would enjoy, to prosecute his assault,

“Come in,” he was told by the very Doctor Yang pictured holding one of the bells in the literature he had carefully folded and accidentally left sitting on the bus,

“Many thanks for seeing me at such short notice,” Harry said,

“Fill this out,” said Doctor Yang, handing over a clipboard and asking him to ring the bell that sat on a little teak table next to a chair in the corner, for which request, despite its absurdity in the face of the petit office and Doctor Yang’s continuing presence in the room, Harry was grateful, because it sufficiently mitigated the impulse the clipboard inspired — which was to immediately make for the door — for him to be able to make his way through the five or six pages of questions about his mental and physical health, which seemed so very poor on paper that, he thought, he might just as well go and lay himself down in the nearest meat locker, rather than on Doctor Yang’s table, which is where, nevertheless, after dinging the bell, he found himself gazing up at a mauve-colored drop ceiling as Doctor Yang — who had looked at his chart, checked his pulse, and rather cryptically asked him if he ate a lot of pizza, “maybe too much pizza?”—inserted authentic thick needles into twenty-six points in his upper and lower body, which at least every other time made Harry jump, though Doctor Yang told him that this was a sure sign that the width of the needles and their placement was correct, that amateur acupuncturists who had not undergone sufficient training, or who were naturally sloppy — like the employees in a nearby practice he had recently infiltrated by posing as a patient and subjecting himself to their woeful ministrations — tended to use thin needles and incorrectly insert them, which was completely pointless, unlike what he was doing, which was serious and ancient medicine, whereupon, having offered these contextualizing remarks, he set one of the bells next to Harry’s left hand and, giving it a cheery little whack, instructed him to ring it if he needed anything, and although Harry didn’t do any more than tap the side of the bell with his left ring finger during the long hour he lay twitching on the table in the half dark listening to what he thought was Gaelic chanting coming through a boombox somewhere on the floor, the bell continued to accord him a sense not just of comfort, but also of well-being, so that even though he was sure upon leaving that — although he had been happy enough to have had the experience — he would not make a return visit to Doctor Yang’s offices for the long-term course of follow-up needlework that was recommended to him — what the fuck, in short, had he been thinking? — he did that afternoon procure a bell at an office supply store near his apartment, which he placed on his bedside table and would ring or imagine ringing from time to time in the coming days and weeks, and he did go out to a charming restaurant near his house and order a large pizza, draped with asparagus and anchovies and drenched in extra cheese, which he ate with great appetite, while gazing out the window at the handsomely clad passersby and wondering if, rather than looking into alternative forms of treatment, he shouldn’t just go shopping.

Yes he should, he thought the next morning, and, giving his new bell a whack, decided to start by looking for something to replace the ill-fitting gray windbreaker he had dug out of the closet just before leaving, which, now that he was here in this city of smart sport coats, made him feel even older than he was, and which in collaboration with a bowling shirt, plaid trousers, and a park bench would have been all too perfect for pigeon feeding or coffin shopping, or so he put it to himself as he went up and down the mirror-lined escalators of a downtown department store, seeing himself over and over again from similar angles, none of them consoling, but before he could find men’s wear, he was called over to a glittering counter by an extraordinarily fragrant salesperson holding up a bottle of crimson skin toner and a cotton pad, who, after remarking on the “energetic” patches of eczema around Harry’s nose and mouth that were obscuring his finer attributes, worked his face over so vigorously with so many products that as Harry walked away with a bag of skincare items under his arm, he had the feeling that the salesperson had surreptitiously ripped off his face and replaced it with a lacquer mask, an impression that was not altered in the least by the sight of himself, again, in all the mirrors he was obliged to pass as he exited, suddenly too fatigued, despite the pleasure he had taken in being so assiduously scoured, after sitting there under the bright makeup lights and the salesperson’s cotton pads, to continue looking for a sport coat, in fact, too fatigued, he thought, especially in light of the previous days’ exertions, not to mention the nocturnal indigestion he had suffered after his overlarge meal, to do anything other than go back to his apartment and lie down, and he likely would have done just that had he not passed a small vintage clothing store, in the front window of which hung a worn, but nevertheless appealing brown velvet sport coat, which looked like it might fit him, a supposition that proved, happy event, to be accurate, and so pleased was Harry by this bit of luck, that he let the young woman helping him convince him that he should acquire a stack of green, blue, orange, and red T-shirts, each with a different image emblazoned on its chest, to wear under it, that this was the sort of thing that was fashionable in many cities, for men of all ages who cared about their appearance, as were thin-soled high-top sneakers with red stripes—“suitable, outside the urban context, for wrestling”—a gently used pair of which she slipped onto Harry’s feet and, a moment later, collected his money for, while simultaneously and courteously dropping his windbreaker and short-sleeved polyester button-up shirt in the garbage and handing him an indigo silk scarf, “on the house,” that a customer she didn’t like had left behind several days before, so that when after getting directions to a café where he might gently celebrate his purchases Harry took his leave, he found that his fatigue had left him, and that there was even a certain amount of spring to his step as he moved across the variegated grays of the sidewalk in his new shoes.

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.”

“I’m very glad too,” Harry said, hardly meaning it, and as he walked along beside Ireneo, he found himself thinking with longing of being caught for a few minutes in Señora Rubinski’s web, of listening to her and nodding and contributing the odd syllable here and there, of admiring the photograph of her husband she liked to take out of a purple silk wrapping she had put around it and show people, and then, at an appropriate moment, of stepping past her and into the entryway of his building and beginning to climb the creaking stairs in his new shoes, but instead, here he was: chilled, out of breath, and more than a little sick to his stomach, negotiating one markedly empty street after another with this Ireneo, who still hadn’t said where they were going and had nothing to recommend him besides his eyes, cheekbones, and pleasant way of drinking sparkling water, and yet he, Harry, kept walking and even blurted, as if to affirm how happy he was at this turn of events, that the bags he was carrying were the result of a shopping expedition he had undertaken that afternoon, a particularly inane remark that Ireneo countered with unadulterated silence, which did not prevent Harry from following up with the observation, in an instance of “over-sharing” if ever there was one, that he suffered from a profound sleep disorder to do with his legs, one that affected some five percent of the world’s population and made sustained mental and physical activity indispensable if he was to relax enough to sleep, although this time Ireneo turned and looked at him, unblinking, for several seconds, before saying, politely but noncommittally, “I see,”

“I’ve just tried acupuncture in an attempt to deal with it as well as other problems,”

“And did you find it effective?”

“I just went the once, yesterday,”

“Ah,”

“Then I bought a bell,”

“A bell,”

“The kind you ring at hotels and doctor’s offices if you need help,”

“I see,”

so that the upshot of Harry’s attempts at drawing out his companion was that he felt slightly worse than he had before he had spoken, but even when Ireneo at last held open a green carriage door that gave onto a cobblestone courtyard at the end of which Harry perceived a large, dimly lit window filled with unmoving people dressed in somber colors, standing with their backs to him, which Ireneo announced as their destination, so far was Harry from mounting any resistance that he momentarily took the lead as they crossed the courtyard and went in through a small door next to the large window and joined the crowd of, yes, very nearly unmoving people, who were dressed entirely in something akin to mourning, so that Harry, in looking at their backs and shoulders, felt his eyes falling into familiar chasms, black openings in the dim air, which felt to him chillingly consummated mere moments after Ireneo had shut the door behind them, when he heard a click and the room was plunged into a darkness that seemed to explode out of the black clothing and that remained unmitigated long after it seemed to Harry that his eyes should have adjusted to it.

Harry was no stranger to lightless chambers, in fact for whole months he had spent his free time, i.e, the hours not passed in his gray bedroom or in his slowly decomposing cubicle at work, in a chair placed dead-center in a windowless room in the basement of his former house, where he had unscrewed the lightbulb and would sit, hoping that in the miasma of black he had created the conditions would be right — though right for what he wasn’t certain: some shift, some alteration, perhaps some new dispensation that would allow him to walk out of this world and into some other — but after a time he had begun to find himself troubled by the blackness, the mockery it made of his eyes, the sounds it seemed to heighten, small scratching noises, bits of breathing he couldn’t trace, tufts of cold air on his ear or toe, and he had begun avoiding the windowless room, indeed had long ago left the chair sitting there and locked it up, like he had now done with his entire house, forever, which is what he began to wish he could do here, even though he had only just arrived, and while he was thinking this and other things, an old woman wearing what appeared to be an illuminated lampshade on her head appeared in the depths of the room and began walking toward him, and it struck Harry that the crowd that had been there must have dispersed, because her path toward him was unimpeded, and before he could take a precautionary step backwards she was standing in front of him with her eyes shut, permanently or not he could not have said, as the light cast by the lampshade or whatever was in it was imperfect at best, but this didn’t matter because then the woman began humming, something vaguely incantatory, and as she did so her lampshade went off and lampshades began to flicker around the edges of the room, where the people had apparently positioned themselves, causing their faces to float for a moment like ruined petals, Harry thought, amidst the blackness, with the effect that he began to feel as if he were floating just a little along with them, so that when the old woman stopped humming and said, “Now I will tell you what it is you have come to hear,” Harry heard it from on high, as it were, and answered more loudly than perhaps the situation merited, although he understood quickly enough that this was not what caused the old woman to throw open her eyes, quickly look him over, then yell, “Lights out!” whereupon she vanished leaving a globular afterimage that danced before Harry’s eyes long after Ireneo had hustled him back out of the doors they had come in through and out onto the street, where, as the pale yellow thing still bobbed before him, Ireneo gesticulated and rolled his turquoise eyes and said, “It was her, I knew it, I should have known it, they told me to bring the one with the broken face, it was her,” and for a moment they both, Harry thought, looked into the yellow globe before them and saw the handsome woman from the café sitting cross-legged inside it, flecks of silver sparkling like tinfoil on her face, which didn’t stop him from saying to Ireneo, “Who, who was her?” and Ireneo from bowing, apologizing, turning on his heel, and walking away.

Harry found so appealing the idea that his sparklingly clean but manifestly still-broken face had led Ireneo to mistakenly summon him instead of the silver woman to the ceremony of the lamps, as he called her and it as he lay in bed fighting his legs later that night and then the next morning over tea and miniature pastries, that, after trying and failing several times to find the mysterious house again, he began doubling up on his appearances at the café in hopes of encountering either her or Ireneo, but the world had swerved away from or swallowed that trajectory, and he saw neither of them, and no one he spoke to at the counter of the bar could call to mind the tall man with the turquoise eyes or the woman with the flecks of silver on her face, and by and by he again found himself beating hasty retreats to his bed, ringing his bell, dodging or not dodging Señora Rubinski, murmuring greetings to his neighbors and wandering the streets of the city or sitting on one of its wide beaches or stumbling around its often oddly shaped plazas, which were invariably constructed around statues and/or fountains: focal points for the eye that might otherwise have been pulled away into the shadows that held sway along the jagged periphery, thought Harry, one day when he was feeling particularly susceptible to what he called the loathsome generalities, abstractions like “everyone” and “everything,” that crushed whatever came in their way, whether it was the everyone associated with the office, the everyone who announced that the period for grieving had long since expired and that it was high time for one to get off one’s sorry ass and come back to the cubicle, as it were, or the everything associated with the stars and moon, the earth and oceans, the red sandstone yawing in monstrous slabs out of the calm green slopes, the snow that covered, froze, and quieted it all, the world, in short, that entered through your burning eyes and bludgeoned your sorry soul— So much that cuts our legs out from under us —“I couldn’t agree more,” said a man just after Harry had thought this, as he stood beneath a striped green awning that looked out through a bright drizzle over a fringe of evergreen bushes to a monument to some group or other of the once-honored dead, and although the man was speaking to the woman next to him and not to Harry, Harry looked in his direction and thought, You’re just saying that, and without missing the proverbial beat the man said, “Quite the contrary, I might have said the same thing myself and in just those words,”

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.

Cheeks burning as he hurried away, Harry reminded himself that, in his defense, he had stumbled upon the silver angel by accident, and that while it was true that this accident had occurred in the context of his attempts to locate her, it was still an accident, that could not be disputed, or could it? hmmm …: he had been looking for her and had found her, and hadn’t his method been more or less to stagger around the city until their paths crossed again? and hadn’t that been what had happened? it had, but, still, in what sense had he, actually, been looking for her? wasn’t he mistaking what had been reduced to rather a wan hope, one stripped of all but the most desultory agency, with active engagement? wouldn’t any outside, so-called impartial observer briefed on the situation exclaim, “but you weren’t looking for her, you were just flopping around, you may have been thinking about her in some abstract way as you went out, but that’s pretty far from constituting a search”? but what constitutes a search? Harry wondered, what is the cut-off point? the point beyond which the activity ceases to be what we have mistaken it for? once, over coffee, a well-meaning friend had put her hand on his shoulder and said, “what are you doing? that was years ago, years and years …” and he had taken a sip of his coffee and said, “I’m searching”—in much the same tone, he realized as he passed a pair of living tree statues, fairly nice ones, that he had used in making his comment to the pigeon about beginning his “assault on life” and his comment to the man under the awning about the number of hurdles life lines up before you — but what, exactly, had he meant by that? had he been describing an open-ended engagement, one that, perhaps, continued even now? this seemed plausible, and rather interesting, insofar as said search could be seen as an umbrella for the search he had or had not been conducting for the woman he had or had not found, but which was it? had he, in this subsidiary instance, been searching or hadn’t he? could he, in other words, fairly attribute a portion of his boorish behavior in front of the angel to his astonishment at having found — rather than stumbled across — her? and what (the fuck, he thought) was the difference? it was hard to say, which was the way so many of his arguments with himself ended: in depressing stalemates, he far and away preferred losing to himself, as at least in those instances he achieved some approximation of clarity, and clarity, even the false variety, was inarguably something, etc., Harry thought, and as he did so, moving all the way down the long avenue and toward the water, the handsome woman, the woman with paint on her face, the silver angel — whose name, it is time for her to have one, was Solange — stood on her box, and thought not about Harry, whom she had barely noticed and had quickly forgotten, but about a path lit by star- and moonlight, one she had heard the dead were obliged to travel before leaving this sphere, and that for some was very long and for others very short, and she wanted to know which, in the case of her lost one, it was, and not knowing was troubling her and preventing her, and her lost one, she suspected, from moving on, which was why when, a week ago, after she had found the little salmon-colored slip of paper on the subway platform that guaranteed answers to “insoluble questions,” she had telephoned the number given and had been told to wait at the café where we first encountered her and where Ireneo made his mistake.

For his part, Ireneo, who had quickly shrugged off any sense of guilt about having brought Harry along to the “answer session” at his employer’s apartment, due to the inherent, not to mention typical, vagaries of his brief—“Bring me the one with the broken face”—had in fact been tasked with finding the woman, but quickly realizing what to Harry would seem so problematic — that only serendipity would bring him back into contact with her, who in arranging to be present at the café at the given hour had communicated neither name nor number — he had done exactly nothing besides keep his turquoise eyes open as he went about his business, which in the vicinity of the moment we have lately been considering, had him lighting candles for the dead at a church no more than a quarter mile away from where Solange stood unhappy, unmoving, on her silver box, and less than that from the living tree statues that Harry passed on his way down the boulevard, a relative proximity that all three of them, had they known, would in the light of their later association have found bracing, Ireneo no less than Harry and Solange, still, what is most pertinent at the moment is that among the seventeen red candles Ireneo had been tasked with lighting by his employer Doña Eulalia — the old woman who had spoken to Harry while intending to speak to Solange — three related to the former and one to the latter, and as soon as they were lit, this very Doña Eulalia, who was sitting quite some distance away on a small red sofa by the window of her bedroom, felt a sharp urge to sit up straight and take a deep breath and insert a mint-lemon drop into her mouth, only the last of which she did, while thinking, “I should have spoken to him while he was here, and now where is he, and more importantly, who are they? for even though something had come across authoritatively enough to her in the days following Harry’s unexpected appearance for her to expand the list of souls she was actively tracking, she didn’t know who the candles that corresponded to Harry were, any more than she knew who the single candle was that corresponded to Solange, though there were things of course that she could say about them: saying things, however imprecise, about the souls corresponding to the candles she was forever sending Ireneo off to light was her business, though there were times — like now as she sat on the sofa sucking on her mint-lemon drop wishing she could tell Ireneo where, for example, to find both Harry and Solange, which would simplify things considerably — she wished she were better at it,

“I wish I were better at it,” she said aloud,

“But I’m not and to bloody hell with it,” she added,

a sentiment she softened by appending an “ah well,” which turned out to be one of those moments of synchronicity that, in the so-called grand scheme of things, are far more common than we suspect and than we may soon choose to believe, for at precisely the moment she emitted her “ah well,” Ireneo in front of his candles, Solange (though she said it silently) on her silver box and Harry who was just stepping onto the beach, said “ah well” along with her, and their reasons for saying it were not so terribly different.

That morning, on his way out to search or wander, whichever, Harry had stopped off in a bookstore, browsed a few minutes, then, without thinking much about it, had purchased a slender red volume in a language he no longer knew terribly well, had slipped it, still in its crisp paper bag, into the pocket of his brown velvet jacket, where he could feel it pressing lightly against his ribs, then pulled it out again and read some of it in a sprawling bed of daffodils outside one of the museums he would later visit — and where he would have such a strange time with the explanatory notice — the story, as best he could parse it, of a man who sometime in the middle ages, when Christianity has ostensibly swept Europe clean of its shadows, encounters the Greek god Pan, now much reduced and mud-covered, in the salty marshes of the South of France, but who appears to him, even “so long after he might most fully have mattered,” like some “dread avatar of forgotten impulses,” and now, just after joining Solange, Ireneo, and Doña Eulalia in half-murmuring, “ah well,” Harry sat down on the crowded — it was a lovely afternoon with just the lightest bit of breeze and a glorious warmth to the sand — beach, spent a few moments looking out through the fat palm trees over the gaily colored umbrellas to the ship-speckled horizon and the deep seam where sky and sea did their endless, distant dance, a place his father had long ago convinced him was full of wonders — ships made out of water, fish made out of air, only, of course, try as you might, you could never get there, and although his father might well have used this evocation as the basis for a paternal lesson in the unattainable aspects of life, he never had, for which Harry found himself suddenly quite grateful: what a load of crap such lessons were: life always had the upper hand, no matter how many little stories you told yourself about it — then pulled the book out of his pocket, opened it, found his visual aphasia had again returned, but, this time, along with it, a sense that some forgotten impulse he had been harboring, along with his heart, in the pit of his stomach, was staggering out into the light — perhaps set free, in the first instance, by the change of locale, and, in the second, by a combination of the acupuncture treatment, the purchase of the bell, the adventure with Ireneo, and the conversation with the man under the awning, not to mention the stunning particularities of the silver angel herself — and would emerge at any moment, after all these years, and that he should be prepared to step forward, for better or worse, along with it, which thought made him feel giddy and jaunty — like the character in the movie he had imagined — but also completely terrified — what tack to take? — so that after staring a moment longer into the deep seam of the horizon and imagining he was on the verge of reaching that impossible place where he could float alongside hybrid marvels of sky and sea, or at least dream up some way to inoffensively approach the silver angel, some way that wouldn’t result in his instant and definitive dismissal, he ran back home, closed the shutters, and jumped into bed.

Two days later, Harry opened them again with a plan, or rather the bright beginnings of one, and while, after so recently spending so much time on the inside of his head, one might expect that a good deal of slightly soggy thinking had gone into reaching it — a long-ago colleague, subjected to a lengthy dose of Harry’s thought process, once compared it to the higgledy-piggledy fretwork of boards laid down in pre-modern times across bogs and marshes, the remains of which could still be found, along with the victims of their treachery, in certain regions of Europe — on this occasion, Harry had simply woken, legs still twitching, with a bucket of golden paint floating before his eyes, so that after he had spent a bit of time with the local yellow pages, executed his ablutions, and made a lightning dash, back pressed against the side of the building, behind and past Señora Rubinski, who was standing outside the door tapping her foot, he paid a visit to Almundo’s Store for Living Statues, which he had selected as much for the size of its advertisement — twice that of Ernesto’s Living Statue Emporium — as for its proximity to his apartment, nor was he disappointed, as Almundo was able with great efficiency and appealing panache to kit Harry out with everything — including gilded armor, gilded box, gilded lance, golden body paint, body-paint remover, a large duffel bag — he would need to make a most convincing living statue, one that would, according to Almundo, attract the greatest sympathy of passersby and provide the foundation upon which he could transmit the full flourishing of his artistry,

“Speaking of which,” Harry said, “any suggestions?”

“Stand very still, my friend,” said Almundo, “stand very, very still,”

“And beyond that?” Harry asked,

“Look down, think happy thoughts, and bathe every evening to keep your skin from breaking out,” said Almundo,

“Thank you, I will,” said Harry, eager to get started, but already dusk was sweeping through the city, lights were flicking on, and as he alternated between hefting and dragging his duffel bag, it became clearer and clearer that he would have to wait until the next day to make his debut, which did not stop him, once he had done a medium-length tour of duty with Señora Rubinski, from spending a quiet hour on his box in front of the wall mirror in his bedroom, dressed and made up as what had been pitched to him by Almundo as the one and only “Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” but which, at least in the problematic light of his floor lamp, made him look dangerously like some kind of laminated hobgoblin or gigantic duck.

Still, he rose very early the next morning, ate some hard sausage and a tomato, drank half a bottle of sparkling water, applied his makeup, packed his duffel bag, and made his way to the slowly waking boulevard where he set himself up in what he recalled being a largish gap in the line of statues — of which there were none yet in sight, it being far too early — at a point he decided was more or less equidistant between the golden centaur and a large flower kiosk, and had the advantage of being situated directly beneath one of the largest plane trees on the boulevard, which, during the heat of the day, would provide him with some measure of shade, and then, with a steady stream of locals on their way to work and a few sleepy tourists heading for fresh juice, melons, packets of nuts, and glass cups of milky coffee at the market drifting past him, he planted his golden box, pulled on his golden costume, did a few preemptive deep knee bends and arm stretches, swiped at the air with his lance, then stepped up and struck an overly elaborate pose — a sort of supplicant’s arrangement he had puzzled out the previous evening in front of the mirror in lieu of his normal anti-RLS routine — which he held for what seemed like ages, but was really more like three minutes, and then tried another, and another, and so began a very long day, one that, by the by, involved assorted insults, copious sweating, a cornucopia of low-grade pains, far too much thinking about the folly of human endeavor generally and his own specifically, and a patent inability not to forget that he was meant to be a statue of sorts and crane his neck in order to catch a glimpse of the silver angel, who, when in the early afternoon she appeared one hundred meters up from him, he could just see shining off in the distance like a silver suffix to all that had gone wrong in his life and a silver prefix to all that might, if he could only — fat chance — hold his position long enough, and, over time, move his box far enough up the boulevard, still go right.

While Harry stood, woeful, let’s face it, indeed, on his box under the giant plane tree, already well aware — even with downcast eyes one could both see and of course hear the snickering — that the passersby, when they arrived at the silver angel, would now include him along with the other second and third raters in their commentary when they stood in wonder before her beautiful, broken face and extraordinary wings, Solange stood on her own box thinking about the little salmon-colored slip of paper with the number she now realized — having gotten over the sense of desperation that had set in after no one had arrived that evening in the café to collect her — she very much wished to redial, while being cognizant that upon returning home after having been, so to speak, stood up in what had felt like her hour of greatest need, instead of covering it in the Lucite she had on hand and that she used almost daily on certain objects in a largely unarticulated attempt to afford them some measure of permanence or protection, she had torn it to shreds and thrown it out the window and watched it float down through leaves and lights toward the street below her building, and that although for days she had combed the ground inside and out of the subway she had not found a replacement, only gum wrappers, beer bottle labels, shopping lists, burned photographs, bits of plastic and endless shards of shattered colored glass, the whole, it seemed to her, threatening to rise as if caught in fierce winds and blot out whatever dim light she was still able to shine on the calming songs she had always sung to herself: in short, still not so good and maybe even a little worse, the mental state of Solange, the silver angel, and it was certainly untainted by any awareness that a woeful knight/laminated hobgoblin/my God, what the fuck are you supposed to be, friend? had set up his shop down the boulevard in hopes of eventually edging his way into her peripheral and maybe, eventually, frontal vision: how strange the storms, some small, some large, that are forever sweeping over us before we’ve even had a chance to think “I must seek shelter,” and Ireneo, meanwhile, had taken up jogging.

Rediscovered jogging might be more accurate in this instance, as Ireneo had once done a very good deal of jogging indeed, so much so that at university, when he was still “on track” to take a degree in contemporary finance and assume a position in his mother’s accounting firm, which would have given him, even at the entry level, access to a company car and a company apartment and an expense account pointed skyward — in other words “the works”—he had been a member of the school running club, and had often finished near the head of the pack when informal races were organized, but that had been long ago, so long in fact that when, after Doña Eulalia had asked him to step up his efforts to find Harry and Solange, and he had thought of how much more distance he could cover at a run, he was no longer aware that he still owned a pair of beat-up but serviceable Asics running shoes, so that their apparent apparition — he had set them there, in the guise of bookends, so long ago that they had ceased, in any meaningful way, to exist — on either end of the mantel over the blocked-up fireplace in his modest studio, with their shoelaces intact but wildly akimbo, read to him as an extispicic instance whose meaning would only become clear after he had laced up the shoes and used them to put an end to his search, so after digging out a pair of cotton socks, he had pulled them on, taken a long pull on a bottle of sparkling water, and run out his front door, into the city, where although obviously he had done nothing in the way of training in years, he had found that, even in slacks and rather a tight linen shirt, he could run without pause for hour upon hour, as if his feet were enchanted, the thought of which prompted the slightest of smiles to infiltrate his otherwise impassive features, happy occurrence that lit his turquoise eyes and further lifted his cheekbones, so that it would have been hard to say whether all the men and women who looked at him as he ran past were doing so because he was loping along in his street clothes or because he was so striking, which of course is neither here nor there, except that eyes and faces flipped in his direction as if pulled sharply by a string and for a time Ireneo found this distracting and worried that all the attention he was receiving would negatively impact on his ability to search, but just as he was thinking this it seemed to him that his old shoes began whispering to him— turn left at the next corner, run as close as you can to the beautiful display of antique toy cars in that shop window, nod at the construction worker who is having trouble negotiating that alley with his untrustworthy backhoe, sprint across the chalk-colored museum courtyard where the skateboarders hold sway, cut through the market but don’t run or barely run and make sure to lift and sniff a melon or a papaya as you go, hum a little, jog above the sea and take in deep gulps of the fresh air, take a turn down the boulevard— and he liked the sound of this whispering, which kept him company even as, at stoplights, he was obliged to run in place, though he also found it moderately unsettling and decided to ask Doña Eulalia what she thought about it, when after he completed his search he saw her next, which, he had a feeling, now that he had rediscovered these marvelous shoes, wouldn’t — just as Doña Eulalia had predicted — be long.

That both Doña Eulalia and Ireneo proved to be wrong — in the short term because Ireneo’s old Asics, for reasons all their own, instructed him to keep his head pointed pavementward on the boulevard; in the slightly longer term because Ireneo’s mother, who now lived in elegant retirement up the coast, fell gravely ill and required his immediate attendance — was far from unfortunate in re the potential of an eventual dynamic unfolding between the silver angel and the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, not least because the information that Doña Eulalia was ever more eager to provide them most likely would have, had it been imparted too early, especially the portion concerning Harry and the candles, had a chilling effect, difficult to overcome, even on considerably more solid ground than that provided by a gold box moving (even only in potential — Harry didn’t yet think he was ready) toward a silver box (which had no idea said gold box was coming), on the crowded matrix of a pedestrian thoroughfare so bustling, so full, as they say, of life and its attendant distractions, and detractors/detractions, such as the three old men who, just as Harry, four days into his self-imposed calvary, was beginning, in great earnest, to consider packing it in for the afternoon, came and stood before him, folded their arms over their chests, and launched into a withering appraisal of Harry’s utter lack not just of artistry, but also of even the smallest degree of presence, to the point, as they put it, that he was almost invisible,

“Yes practically invisible,” one of them said,

“I can’t believe we noticed him,”

“But of course we did,”

“In the end,”

“Still, we did see him,”

“He’s not invisible enough,”

“This is not a promising debut,”

“Another sorry Don,”

“Just like last year’s,”

“Although last year’s was better,”

“Marginally, but it’s true that silver is better for the Don,”

“The Don must be skinny, this one isn’t skinny, I don’t say he’s fat, but he’s certainly not skinny,”

“That’s not the worst of it though,”

“No, it’s not the worst of it,”

I’m a statue, Harry thought, I can’t move, I can’t talk, the bastards, or can I? is this some kind of a test?

“He should reconsider,”

“I bet he got that getup at Almundo’s, the old swindler,”

“We ought to talk to Almundo sometime, pay a visit, it’s been a while,”

“His makeup is running,”

“He looks like a giant duck,”

“The Don looked ridiculous, but not like a duck,”

I don’t believe this, Harry thought,

“He’s hopeless,”

“Won’t last the week,”

“Shouldn’t last the week,”

“We know you can hear us, friend,”

“Unless he’s a foreigner, one who doesn’t speak the language,”

“Everyone speaks the language,”

“He looks familiar to me,”

“Everyone looks familiar,”

“That’s a long way from being true,”

“It’s clear he’s listening,”

“The Don wears an old barber bowl for a helmet, that piece of plastic on his head is a poor replica of a real Knight’s helmet,”

“And where is the beard and Rosinante for that matter?”

“You can’t expect him to have a horse, none of the Dons ever had a horse,”

“But one had a Sancho Panza,”

“That Sancho Panza was little more than a stuffed hippo,”

“Let’s go and have some bubbly,”

“With those lovely olives,”

“And a bit of salted cod,”

“He doesn’t have the touch,”

“Neither a buffoon nor an artist,”

“Neither here nor there,”

“There’s a word for that,”

“The word is ‘fucked,’”

Jesus Christ, Harry thought, and after the three old men had uncrossed their arms and gone off to have their goddamn drink and olives, he dropped his lance, shook off his shield, sat down on his box, and fumbled in his duffel bag for a bottle of sparkling water, which to top it all off had come uncapped and was now empty, then looked up the boulevard and saw that, no doubt during his dressing down, the silver angel had vanished, not the first time she had done this while he was not looking, in fact she had managed to do it each day he had come and stood on his box and sweated and been snickered at, I’m so out of here, Harry thought, which was when his neighbor, the golden centaur, now free of all but his golden body paint, came and tapped him on the shoulder, shook his hand, introduced himself as Alfonso, and invited him for a drink.

“They’re quite right,” said Alfonso once they were installed in an appealingly deep burgundy booth in the back of a nearby café and had tall, lime-garnished glasses of chilled sparkling water before them, “The connoisseurs are blunt, but they know what they’re talking about, as of course they should since they’ve been monitoring the statues on the boulevard for over fifty years,”

“That long,” said Harry,

“I know,” said Alfonso,

“But why?”

“It’s a pastime like any other, but the point is they always get it right,”

“Has anyone ever ignored them?”

“Of course, but with dire consequences, we’re all very loyal to them, as they are to us, once they’ve decided we merit their attentions,”

“What sort of attentions?”

“A coin or bill here and there to make sure our hats get filled, a bottle of water placed in the shade of our boxes on a hot day, a story to entertain us or make us think when traffic is low or we are or both, a wedge of cheese or sausage when they think we could use it, an antihistamine when a cold or allergy sinks its teeth into us,”

“All that,” said Harry,

“And more,” said Alfonso, “Once they sent a number of us on a cruise, covered all expenses, draped us, as we embarked, in spangles, pearls, pins, earrings, bracelets, rebates, furs, masks, laces, tiffanies, ruffs, and falls, sent us six hours out to sea where, on an island of verdant lawns and rippling brooks and long, splendid beaches, we were regaled at such great length and so splendidly, by hosts who seemed to intuit our every desire, no matter how sunken below the surface of our external commodities, that we didn’t dare sleep for fear of missing even a moment of the happiness that was everywhere to be had, and when we returned we hoisted the connoisseurs high on our shoulders and, cheering, carried them up and down the boulevard until it was time to get back to work,”

“Really?” said Harry,

“More or less,” said Alfonso,

“Then it’s hopeless,”

“I didn’t quite say that, but yes, it is, the boulevard is for serious statues and for serious clowns, again I don’t wish to give offense, but you’re just a man standing around in a costume, who sweats copiously and moves when he shouldn’t, in short you lack the calling,”

“I thought maybe with some practice …” said Harry,

“It would take years, it took me years, I went to school for it, basic stuff, juggling invisible apples and getting myself in and out of invisible glass boxes,” Alfonso said and made his hands climb backwards up an imaginary flight of steps that ran from the sugar bowl to the mirror above the burgundy seatback behind him, a feat that Harry tried and failed miserably to duplicate,

“No, I don’t think so,” said Alfonso, not at all unkindly,

“It’s just that,” said Harry,

“You’re hoping to impress someone,” said Alfonso,

“A woman, an angel,” said Harry,

“Ah, the angel,” said Alfonso,

“I just want to talk to her,”

“And perhaps get to know her a little and take a walk together and so on,”

“Exactly,”

“Of course, my friend, of course, it’s in the nature of things,”

“She and I have something in common,”

“I don’t doubt it, and I don’t want to make light of your feelings or make fun, but I will permit myself to say that in your admiration for the angel you are neither, as the old expression goes, the first nor will you be the last, though if your goal is to approach and be noticed by her, favorably noticed that is, I’m quite certain your woeful Don Quixote getup won’t help you,”

“You’re as blunt as the connoisseurs,” said Harry,

“Have you attempted to speak to her?”

“Not directly,”

“Wise decision, the last time she returned someone’s compliment the results were disastrous,”

“Disastrous?” Harry said, taking a deep sip of his sparkling water and pressing on the wedge of lime with his tongue, the resultant burst of tartness helping to check the momentary feeling of panic that had swept over him when Alfonso had used that word — which word, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps because he had seen and enjoyed the reaction it had caused in Harry, Alfonso used again, then he said,

“Do you have time for another water? if you do I’ll tell you a story, about the silver angel and how she came to have those tears on her face,”

“I have time,” Harry said,

“It was told to me — as I suspect, since it seems to be common knowledge on the boulevard, it was told to all the others — by the connoisseurs, and I will do my best to use their language and euphemisms in retelling it to you, although of course what you hear will by necessity differ in some hopefully small degree from what they told me,”

“Is what they told you true?” asked Harry,

“True enough, true enough, and if it isn’t then at least you will have heard a story, shall we order another round?”

“That will be fine,” Harry said.

“Once upon a time there was or there wasn’t a young woman named Solange who lived in a fine old city by the sea, and each day in that city she painted her face with gold and put on golden robes and wings and went and stood on the boulevard, which is famous the world round for its fine buildings and fine trees and crowds of people, but most of all for its extraordinary living statues, of which Solange, the golden angel, was the most beautiful and the most beloved, for when she smiled the sun slipped out of her mouth and danced in front of the crowds that would gather around her in such numbers that the boulevard was blocked and people seeking passage spilled out onto the surrounding streets, and while young men and young women alike fell hopelessly in love with Solange, and spoke to her and beseeched her to step down off her box, she never answered, never even seemed to look at them, until the day that the sun, having slipped out of her mouth to dance around in the crowd, stopped before a young man, who reached out a long, dusky finger and caressed it, as if it were a cheek, my cheek, thought Solange on her golden box, and when a moment later this young man came and stood before her and asked her to step down and join him for a drink, she shocked everyone (the murmur of it, which I remember well, rippled like electric wavelets all the way down the boulevard) by stepping down and removing her wings and walking off with him, and although Solange and the young man were often out and about in the days and weeks that followed it was as if they had pulled on magical cloaks that kept anyone from seeing them clearly, so that when they had been somewhere and then left it was like a dream had come, glowed for a moment, then gone, so love begins, and, in truth, ends, even when it ends so horribly, as Solange’s did, one night when her young man had gone out in search of milk and ended his search with a knife blade broken off so far down his throat it took the investigating officials several hours to discover the cause of death, though it did not take them so long to find the one who had broken his knife off in the young man’s mouth: after the deed he had drunk a bottle of sparkling water, swallowed a sprig of parsley and a fistful of Valium and went out to inform anyone who would listen that the golden angel, whom he had admired for far longer than the young man, would soon be his and his alone, without knowing that at the precise moment he had shoved his knife blade down the young man’s throat the golden angel had ceased to exist, for when, some weeks later, Solange reappeared on the boulevard, she was no longer golden — she had gone as pale as a piece of cloudy ice — and she never smiled, and there were tears on her face, and inside those tears, which she carefully affixed each morning and tore carefully from her face each night, were flecks of the broken blade, which the presiding coroner, who knew her from the boulevard, had given her out of pity, along with a piece of milk-stained cloth, when, after the young man’s family had swooped down and swept everything up, she had presented herself and asked in a clear, brittle voice if there was anything left from his final moments that she could have.”

When Alfonso had finished his story, harry excused himself, went to the restroom, locked himself in a booth, and threw up, and for a long time he stood there taking shallow breaths and wiping his mouth and forehead with squares of toilet paper until he realized that by doing so he was turning them gold, the color of the story, or at any rate one of its colors — blood red and death-metal silver being the others — and this thought reminded him that there were several follow-up questions he would like to ask Alfonso and that there would be more than enough time later to swim out into the icy depths of his own sea of sorrows, in which, midway through Alfonso’s account, he had found himself submerged, but when, after he had splashed water on the smeary makeup still covering parts of his face and straightened his hair, he got back to the table, Alfonso was gone and the booth had been occupied by a pair of teenage girls dressed like latter-day fans of the Bay City Rollers, one of whom, almost without looking up, handed him a napkin on which had been scrawled an address, a time later that evening, and the letter “A,” which made Harry think of the great tale by Hawthorne, though not, or only fleetingly, of the question of adultery, but rather of the novel’s deep forests filled with dense brush and gnarled trees and fallen leaves and drifts of snow and the bones of the animals and humans who had fallen there, not necessarily happily, perhaps even with their hands clasped and their heads cast heavenward, filling the empty sky with their useless piety and despair, much like, he thought with a dull shudder, his own gestures at a certain juncture, and here he still the fuck was, just like the knife-metal angel, who had once been a golden angel, whose name was Solange, who was still beautiful, even with her face broken and cast in shadow, Solange, he thought, whereupon two images floated like dead leaves down through his mind and landed one on top of the other, the first, of Solange, standing now farther away than ever from him on her box with the bits of metal on her face, and the other of the two of them somehow walking arm and arm along the shore, and, it seemed to him, if those thoughts could sit so close together, couldn’t he, somehow, find a way to step across the inconsequential divide: perhaps, perhaps not: though, yes, really what a fool he had been to put on his paint and plastic armor and stand out in the sun and hope to be noticed by her: even if the great Don might well have done just that, he, Harry, was no great Don, he was just a sad sack from a distant country attempting, halfway around the world, some ontological equivalent of the Humpty Dumpty story, which of course ended in emphatic confirmation of its own disaster, in spite of the neat rhyme, “Fuck Humpty Dumpty,” he said, and although he went to the trouble of extricating his duffel bag from under the table and the really quite absurdly dressed teenage girls, it was only to carry it out of the café and, with a sharp swing and hard kick, abandon it on the sidewalk outside.

The dead leaves that fell through Harry’s head in the café were of the same species as the ones that had been falling all that day through Doña Eulalia’s as she lay shivering under heavy quilts, attending to what she was convinced was a light fever but probably wasn’t — she had been a life-long hypochondriac — so that when, here and there, the letter “A” began appearing among the falling bits of gold and brown and red, followed by a series of, admittedly, barely visible L’s, F’s, S’s, N’s, and O’s, it took her quite some time to notice it, though when a golden horse holding a spear galloped through the downpour she sat straight up, threw off her quilts, reached for her phone and called Ireneo, who answered on the first ring, but in a hushed voice, so that she could barely hear him when he said,

“I am at my mother’s bedside, Madame,”

“Ah, and how is your mother?”

“She is gravely ill, Madame,”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear it, such a shame,”

“Yes, it is distressing, Madame,”

“What do you call those horses with human heads?”

“Madame?”

“Greek mythology, devilish things,”

“Centaurs, Madame, but you must forgive me, my mother …”

“Yes of course, I’m so sorry, go and see the centaur on the boulevard, the golden one, his name is Alfonso, he can tell you where to look,”

“It may be some days before I can return to the city to carry on my search, Madame,”

“Then you must go and look the moment you have returned,”

“I will, Madame, good-bye,”

“Just as soon as you have returned, make a note of it, Ireneo, and convey my best wishes to your mother, the poor woman, good-bye,” said Doña Eulalia, who emitted a loud “bollocks!” as soon as she had shut her phone, and for a moment she considered asking one of the others to run the errand, but they were all — these relatives of hers — useless, not much better than the mannequins on rollers she had them drag around on the nights she had her clients over, a scheme Ireneo, the only one not related to her, had helped her come up with in order to double the number of lamps and faces — those brief, bright pools of mystery — present at her consultations, without having to reach further beyond the unpaid ranks of her family, all of whom worked for her gratis, in expectation of an inheritance … no, it would have to be Ireneo, and she would have to wait, she thought there was still time, “but time for what?” she asked herself as she climbed back into bed, covered herself, reached for a thermometer, looked for the leaves to see if anything else was galloping around in them, found that her head was empty, said, “bollocks!” again, and promptly fell asleep.

Which was just what Ireneo, who had been more or less awake since he had arrived some days previously, wished he could do, but every time his head began to loll his mother, who had a platoon of servants at her command but wanted only him, would moan as if on cue, and Ireneo’s hand would go out and damp her forehead with a washcloth or squeeze a little water between her lips, and when, in a faltering, unenthusiastic voice she would ask him to sing, he would produce warbling, incomplete versions of songs she had taught him during his boyhood and made him perform, in a wig and short pants, along with a few poorly executed dance steps, in front of her employees at the factory during Christmas parties, while his father, who had drunk himself to death before Ireneo had turned ten, gazed on in poorly concealed disgust, a look which years later had found its echo on his mother’s face when he had told her he had no interest in taking up a position in her company, and that, instead, he had decided to go “into the occult,” a field in which if one sold one’s soul at least it was on one’s own terms, and which, if less remunerative, had significant and lasting rewards, a stance that Ireneo had continued to maintain, even though, thus far, his role remained a supporting one, after all even now as he sat by his mother’s bed the old running shoes, which he had gone so far as to sleep (if not bathe) in, continued to give off promising sparks of import that he very much looked forward to being able, again, to give his full attention to, in the way, as he saw it, Doña Eulalia paid attention to the bits and pieces of information that came to her, at all hours of the day and night, which focus allowed her, most of the time, to make something like sense out of not very much at all, a skill that Harry, a few hours later, would have been very happy to have had a little of, as against his better judgment, he negotiated the gray and violet streets of the pre-dawn city on his way to Alfonso’s, while at the same time continuing to think of the young woman on the plane with her book on the Black Dahlia, the man with his new golf balls, Señora Rubinski, Ireneo, Doña Eulalia with the lamp on her head, the connoisseurs, Alfonso, Solange, the young man with the knife blade in his throat, all of which had seemed to him, as he drank glass after glass of sparkling water at his kitchen table and watched the clock hands tick ever closer to this ridiculously awkward hour, like so many inexplicable blocks of ice bumping against each other on the black water that, since hearing the story of the silver angel, he had off and on been doing a dog-paddle in, any one of which he would have gladly clambered onto and taken his chances on, not least the one that corresponded to Señora Rubinski and Señora Rubinski’s dead husband, whom the excellent lady had, that very evening upon his return from the café, described as they stood a moment together on the sidewalk as a most marvelous and thoughtful individual, one with whom one “always had the very best chances of passing an agreeable moment,” an image that had touched Harry greatly, with the result that he had remained out on the sidewalk with Señora Rubinski for quite some time indeed, so long in fact that when Señora Rubinski announced with a sigh and a shake of her head that her husband, “a bit of a lazybones,” must have fallen asleep on the couch, and that she would have to go and wake him, even though it was now far too late for them to begin their customary walk, Harry was able to offer her his arm and escort her to the elevator and, as tears began to drip down her cheeks, hand her the stray makeup-removal cloth that was still neatly folded in his front pocket, which she very elegantly used to dab at the corners of her eyes then, with a slight bow, returned to him, and as he had climbed the stairs to begin waiting to go see Alfonso, it seemed very nearly certain to him that despite the leaning of his spirits of late, Señora Rubinski’s tears were about to have company, that they could not help but have company, and that this would be a good thing, for it had been a very long time, but the only tears in Harry’s apartment that night were Señora Rubinski’s, and of course in spite of the sparkling water that Harry found he could not stop drinking and the horrible black water it seemed to him he kept slipping below the surface of, before long the cloth that had contained them was completely dry.

Harry could not have said whether it was some trick of perception to do with the trend of his thoughts, or a pocket of unusual local phenomenon that he had stumbled into, but as he approached Alfonso’s coordinates, the streets of the city, described above as gray and violet, went black then blacker, and for a moment, even though he could see quite clearly, he felt himself compelled to hold his hands pressed against his thighs, flare his nostrils, and flick his eyes back and forth as if something — possibly the air itself and how the fuck could he fight the air — was about to spring and shove a blade down his throat, or otherwise finish the job on him, what a night, what a night, but presently a cheery row of lampposts cut a series of lovely cones in the darkness and, just beyond them, he began to hear bits and pieces of birdsong, which grew stronger as he moved forward, and before very long at all he had found the address he had been looking for, pressed the intercom buzzer, and been admitted into a kind of loft by Alfonso, who, scraped clean of his gold, looked small, distinctly plump and kind, so kind that Harry, a little discombobulated and, frankly, grateful to be suddenly bathed in light, warmly pressed Alfonso’s hand before accepting a large mug of coffee and a clap on the shoulder, and for a long moment he just stood there taking in the high ceiling, the crumbling paint, the wood stove in one distant corner, the black-and-white photographs of the city, interspersed with what looked like old maps of the continents and fanciful coastlines, hanging on the walls, the piles of scrap wood here and there and the large, clean-but-paint-spattered floor, drifting, as he did so, into the kind of stupor that abrupt changes in circumstance, especially those involving shifts in temperature or quality/quantity of light rarely fail to engender, and it was only when Alfonso, speaking over his own mug of coffee, said, “I have something to show you,” that Harry remembered what it was he had planned to say as soon as he arrived—“There are several things I’d like to ask you, Mr. Centaur,”—but instead he found himself murmuring, “It’s very dark out,” and following Alfonso to the far side of the room, and through a narrow blue door that gave onto what it took Harry a moment to realize was a garage of sorts, perhaps even — the stone seemed weathered enough — an old carriage house, in the center of which sat a large yellow submarine, more or less the one The Beatles had had their adventure in, the one that had been so useful in the struggle against the blue meanies, the one connected to the song, which he had never liked very much and which now raged very nearly out of control in his head before subsiding, slightly, then more fully, like someone had thrown a fade switch, “You can get inside it,” Alfonso said,

“It’s the Yellow Submarine,” Harry said,

“A model, made of chicken wire and papier mâché, but a good one,”

“The song …” Harry said,

“It goes away, I should know, I live with the thing,”

“Did you build it?”

“I inherited it, there’s a hatch, you can get inside, there’s more room in it than you might think,”

“It’s certainly nicely done,”

“I often climb inside it when I want a bit of quiet, after a hard day on the box, the bottom is padded, it’s very nice to lie down inside it and doze,”

“I see,” said Harry, taking a sip of his coffee and looking a little more carefully at Alfonso, who he suddenly understood was either drunk or medicated, but rather pleasantly so, indeed his comments about climbing into the yellow apparatus and lying down and dozing struck Harry in exactly the right way, as if he were drunk or medicated too — even though he had been neither in years — and he found himself drawing Alfonso out not on the subject of why he had invited him over at this insane hour and why, now that here he was, he was showing him this papier mâché model, but instead on the merits of lying inside the Yellow Submarine and having a snooze and feeling warm and cozy but also — that was the trick of it — vigilant, which was just as well because it turned out the answers to both sets of questions dovetailed nicely when, after a few minutes, Alfonso took his coffee mug, showed him how to open the side hatch, helped him to climb in, directed his attention to the viewing grill — hidden to the casual glance from the outside — and said, “You will be able to observe her through that, it’s a camouflaging technique, often used in the military, when you’ve had a chance to get a feel for the inside, climb back out and we will wheel it over to the boulevard — if we get out early enough you can have the spot opposite her, it’s nice isn’t it, when I was young I once pitched a tent in my grandfather’s attic and spent a week there, this reminds me of that,”

I’ve thrown away my Don Quixote costume and am in a yellow submarine, thought Harry,

“It has wheels,” said Alfonso, “It’s actually quite easy to push, the friend who left it here in payment of a debt pushed me around while I lay inside of it before he left, it’s very comfortable to ride in, and if we were closer to the boulevard, I would offer you this pleasant experience,”

“I don’t understand,” said Harry,

“Why I’m doing this,” said Alfonso,

“Yes,” said Harry, overcoming an urge to remain on his back in the warm yellow interior and opening the hatch,

“I would be lying if I told you it was because I was the bearer of bad tidings this afternoon,” said Alfonso, as the two of them began wheeling the submarine through what Harry observed with relief were the rapidly brightening streets of the city, “because I told you you weren’t welcome on the boulevard in your lousy Don Quixote costume, nor because I could see, even as I had barely crested the midpoint of the story of the silver angel, which I remind you I was retelling and did not invent, that you were being deeply, troublingly affected, no, I’m doing this because as you were striking your ridiculous, amateurish poses, as you stood gushing sweat and huffing and puffing on your box, I spent no small amount of time looking at you, and while I won’t go into the why of it, I thought to myself, there’s a story and a half there, a story that begins in the dark and ends in the even darker, and I would like to hear it,”

“Everyone has a story,” said Harry,

“There you trade in truisms, my friend,”

“Truisms are sort of a specialty with me,”

“I won’t dispute that, it may even be true, but I would still like to hear whatever it is that has you engaging in dress-up and meeting with off-duty centaurs in the wee hours,”

“You mean besides my interest in the silver angel,”

“I mean besides your interest in the silver angel, yes,”

“And you think lending me this thing, this submarine, is going to help you get it?”

They both paused and looked at the thing in question, which rolled between them with surprising delicacy, surprising to Harry, that is, of course,

“Don’t you?” said Alfonso,

“It’s a sad story,” said Harry, “so sad I don’t even tell it to myself anymore,”

“So it tells itself to you,” said Alfonso,

“Yes,” said Harry, after a long pause, “Even though I tried to bury it, it keeps clawing its way up through the dirt — all my efforts to erase it have failed,”

“It has its way with you,”

“Something like that, and then something like … but that’s a little silly …” said Harry, trailing off and wondering if, at any moment, whatever it was that was keeping him calm would be swept aside and he would howl,

“Like what?”

“I’ll spare you,”

“I appreciate silly, I dress up every day like a centaur, after all,” said Alfonso,

“You make a very fine centaur, I noticed you straight away,” said Harry,

“Flattery is good, it is very good,” said Alfonso,

“I was thinking of a syllogism, a very simple one, say, ‘All people are mortal, a man’s offspring were people, therefore the man’s offspring were mortal,’ and while, as I say, the syllogism is quite basic, more than just the middle element is missing from the conclusion, at the same time that said additional element remains not merely present, but also essential to the conclusion,”

“A haunted conclusion,”

“Yes, exactly, a haunted conclusion, the conclusion is haunted, and now I have to stop talking about it because if I don’t you will see a man tear his hair out in front of your eyes,”

“Climb inside the submarine,” said Alfonso, “I’ll push you the rest of the way.”

Harry got inside the submarine without a word, and Alfonso began to push, and in the time it took them to reach the tree-lined boulevard where Alfonso left Harry, as he had promised, directly across from the silver angel’s accustomed spot, the angel in question, who was still, at this early hour, just Solange, finished encasing a crumb of ginger cookie in Lucite and sat a moment staring at her work, admiring the fearful clarity of the medium, as always a little bit in love with the turgent liquidity of its hardening, the elegant curve she could still alter with fingertip, or slip her tweezers into, or some part of herself, although it would be as well, if she planned to do some Lucite diving, even just figuratively, to finish her coffee first and perhaps have another bite of her bread and rose petal jam, a jar of which Che Guevara had left outside her door in the weeks following the murder of her young man, and which had sat untouched, attracting flecks of dust and cinder, until one evening, upon returning home from a day on her box, she had scooped it up and deposited it on one of her many bare shelves, where it had continued its unopened existence until that morning, when she had looked down at her stale but salvageable bread and thought of the pale pink jam, which seemed to explode out of the jar as she opened it, then tilted the jar and let a pink glob slide down her tongue into her mouth, where after it had settled a moment it made her gasp and grab for the table to steady herself, before she tilted the jar again and gasped again, then spread some on her bread, which made her think of coffee, of how marvelous it would be to have a cup of fresh coffee to go with her bread and jam, and it wasn’t until she had the coffee before her and had taken another bite, that she remembered that she had set herself the task that morning of encasing part of one of her young man’s favorite cookies in Lucite, to accompany the bit of cloth from one of his purple shirts, the red plastic tine from his comb, the knob of rubber from his shoe, the button from his canvas bag, a long curled eyelash the color of burned butter, a tiny golden cog from the watch he had been in the process of taking apart, a hardened dab of bolonaise sauce from his last meal on earth, and the second word of the title, clipped from the frontispiece of his favorite book, Paradise Lost, and it was only when she had pulled on her latex gloves and set herself up by the open window that the sadness that for months had been circling her like a shark swept past her and looked at her with a blank, unblinking eye, but when it bit this morning, it seemed at first like it had barely broken the skin, and even when she realized that she had been mistaken, that it had indeed broken the skin and done its customary damage, she licked a drop of rose petal jam from her lips, raised one eyebrow, looked at the crumb of ginger cookie, decided it was close to finished, thought, hmmm, and when she got dressed for work a few minutes later, she affixed one less tear to her cheek and walked away from her building a little more quickly and with her eyes open a little more widely than usual, with the result that when she arrived at her accustomed spot — in front of a handsome old pharmacy with a medieval theme and a bustling fried fish establishment — and saw the Yellow Submarine sitting opposite her, she stood staring at it for upwards of a minute, the way, it occurred to her as she set up her box, one waking from a bad dream stares into the face of a loved one who has unexpectedly arrived at her bedside and places a calming hand on her head, and will sit there unmoving, for exactly as long as the situation warrants, which was what — though of course Solange didn’t know this — Harry, looking out of the submarine through its false front grill, intended to do.

With Harry in position and now far closer, in fact almost absurdly close, as we shall see, to achieving his goal, the silver angel feeling ever-so-slightly better and already looking over, with interest, in Harry’s direction, Alfonso climbing onto his own box and leaning into his hind legs to begin the long day, a warm breeze beginning to blow up from the sea, tourists streaming in and out of the market, shop doors opening and closing and old men and women taking up their stations in shadowy doorways and windows, it is time for the connoisseurs to take their morning walk, an undertaking they execute with a measure of determined intimacy: shoulder to shoulder, though not arm in arm, matching watery gray eyes flicking this way and that like small birds in their cages leaping from bar to bar, which is to say they take it all in, these connoisseurs, and not just the shining breeze-blessed surfaces, which drive the eyes of the tourists mad with desire, but also the peripheral zones, where bits of old candy conspire with crushed soda cans and melting cubes of ice to haunt the secondary and tertiary corners of the mind, zones that the connoisseurs, who have been taking daily walks up and down the boulevard for much longer than Alfonso and his colleagues suspect, long ago learned to attend to and make use of: the corners of the mind and what makes its way into them being dynamic crossroads full of wounding vapors and fierce reflections and, as one of them once put it to the other during their endless walkings up and walkings down the boulevard and surrounding streets to check on their charges, certainly, but also, as we shall see later, to accomplish other, darker tasks, but on this morning they merely walk and observe and, occasionally, talk, as they do briefly to the silver angel—“She looks gorgeous today, don’t you think? She’s not crying as much as yesterday”—and, even more briefly, to the inhabitant of the Yellow Submarine—“Much fucking better, friend,”—and in between times they whistle atonal airs that infect the thought processes of more than one person they pass, including, on the edge of the small crowd gathered to watch the living trees sway, as they do twice each fifteen minutes on calm days and even more frequently on breezy ones like today, a young woman with hair the color of crushed pomegranate, who will spend the rest of the day, without knowing why, humming a tune that she’s never heard before and that, outside of dream, she will never hear again, not least because her time in the city and its environs has come almost to its end, and after weeks of popping in and out of museums, where more often than she cared for her thoughts turned to the surrealists and the Black Dahlia killing, with the effect that in the contemporary art museum, as she stood in front of Man Ray’s portrait of Miró, she began to believe that the gray-faced man standing next to her in an orange trench coat and blue ball cap was a murderer, and then, a moment later, that she was in the museum gathering inspiration for her own next killing, which she would accomplish by means of injecting fuchsia dye into the veins of the first old granny she could get her hands on and hogtie in an empty courtyard as the clock struck thirteen and the walls began to sprout cornflowers, etc.: it has been a strange time in the city for the young woman, whose jet-black roots, it must be said, are starting to show, a detail that Harry in his Yellow Submarine can’t help noticing, because the young woman, after giving the submarine a casual glance, bends over in front of the concealed grill to tie her shoe, and lets her hair cascade down over her face, causing Harry, looking away while she pauses in front of his hiding place, to smile in recognition, and to almost blurt out, “Hi, it’s me from the plane,” but after opening himself up, if one can put it that way, to Alfonso as they made their way to the boulevard, his self-censor put a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “don’t say a word, don’t even breathe, don’t let anyone else know you’re here,” and by the time he says, “fuck you,” to his self — censor, which feels good, the young woman has turned on her heel and walked off as if she has just remembered something, which she has: a butcher shop she hopes to reach before they have sold out of a particular cut of beef she is fond of, and while soon she will have left these pages forever, her unexpected appearance before the Yellow Submarine, coming so soon after that of the connoisseurs, sets up an important association in Harry’s mind, which goes through several stages of transformation in the coming hours, involving on the one hand the Black Dahlia, golf balls, fuselages, his own sorry story, knife blades, and the silver angel — who Harry is sure keeps looking over at him, or rather at his submarine — and on the other, the three old guys who pass him twice more before they vanish off to wherever it is they go to refuel, so that, eventually, as Harry lies there looking out at the world, which has been so pleasantly reduced to a tissue-covered oval grate, the phrase “death and the connoisseurs” plays over and over again in his head, though with different intonations, and after a while the repetitions start to feel almost like he is struggling to remember something that has gotten stuck and is simultaneously thumbing its nose at him and teetering on the tip of his tongue, while the repetitions occurring in the head of the young woman with hair the color of crushed pomegranates, of the atonal air effectively implanted there by the three old men, which she considers later, as she polishes off her favored cut of beef and the remains of a few string beans sautéed in salted butter, and begins to think of getting her suitcases in order, make her remember a brightly lit swimming pool she once plunged painfully into over and over again one summer night long ago, as she attempted with no success to teach herself how to perform a backflip.