Ray of the Star

II

This move, the difficult, perhaps impossible perfor mance of which many of us can commiserate with, in which the body leaps up and back, while time, of course, continues to move forward, might be diverting enough to stop a moment and consider — picture for example the long gorgeous lift of the Olympic athlete in the midst of a perfect floor exercise, or the delicate, deadly grace of the Shaolin Temple Kung Fu master flipping backwards, through a snow shower, above waving bamboo, or a determined teenaged girl crashing backwards over and over again into bright blue water — as having teetered for a moment at the midpoint of this story, the days again began to slip by, and while it might be interesting to consider in greater detail, for example, how Ireneo came to the conclusion that his mother was, if not faking her illness, then certainly exaggerating its extent, and that in consequence his presence at her bedside was no longer required, and that he might just as well slip out in the middle of the night and run most of the way back to the city, where, after paying a brief visit to Doña Eulalia, who had recovered from her own dubious illness and informed him that, as she sensed the situation regarding the first individual with the broken face had been greatly ameliorated and that communicating with her was now merely a matter of professional courtesy, finding Harry, for whom the situation was worsening, should be his priority, he made haste for the boulevard and an interview with the centaur, who, at the end of his shift, told him that the individual he was searching for could be found in such and such a part of the city, or how it was that one balmy evening, and not for the first time, Solange — whose curiosity and progressive warming had led her to remove her silver tears one by one and take concomitant, exploratory steps across the boulevard in the direction of the improbable, appealing yellow apparition — came to be leaning, with a slight smile gracing her never-smiling silver lips, against the side of the Yellow Submarine, while Harry, heart smashing up and down inside him, lay just a papier mâché wall away from her, whistling a sort of Beatles medley, we could just say that while time has moved forward, some not insignificant backflipping has occurred, and consequently, we are no longer quite where we last were, a statement that, if we accept the notion that complexity is derived from the intricate and unexpected arrangement of banalities, we can be content with, though perhaps not in the stomach-fluttering way that Harry was content to be lying where he was lying, more like in the understatedly pleased way that Ireneo was content to be running in the city again, even following a piste he was absolutely certain was an incorrect one, that Harry wouldn’t be anywhere near the arcaded renaissance courtyard the tricky-looking centaur had directed him to, that all he would find there would be the usual motley assortment of northern European group-tour participants, some wearing ball caps and/or T-shirts proclaiming their affiliations, as with unadulterated pleasure — convinced they were at last, after a series of false starts, in the midst of an authentic moment — they gobbled second-rate tidbits thawed and deep fried in filthy kitchens hiding behind ornate exteriors, which is exactly what Ireneo did find and had plenty of time to consider, and from multiple angles, as for good measure he ran several slow laps waiting to see if Harry would make an appearance on the terrace of the grand café under the arches, where Bavarians ate fried potatoes and bruschetta with such infectious gusto that eventually Ireneo plopped down at an empty table and ordered a large bottle of sparkling water and a plateful of potatoes, while his running shoes, no worse for wear after his long run down the coast, and certainly no more silent, burbled on, as they had been doing all morning, about trust, about placing one’s fate in the hands of strangers, about clandestine meetings under facades carved from stone in the desert and trysts carried out in rooms lit by low-grade electricity derived from enormous water wheels, a theme that had switched around by the time Ireneo began attacking his fried potatoes — which he dipped in crab mayonnaise — in earnest, to a discussion first of modes of conveyance in general and then of underwater modes of conveyance in particular, and as Ireneo lifted his glass of water and held it aloft so that the backlit tables full of Bavarians looked like the bits of shifting color in a kaleidoscope, he said, “Ah, for fuck’s sake,” put his glass down, ate his last fried potato, and ran back to the boulevard, though by the time he had reached it night had fallen and all the statues and the submarine had gone.

It might be too much to request of the reader, already asked for a good deal of indulgence in the matter of the backflips, to imagine that while Ireneo was running his laps, eating his potatoes, and listening to his shoes, Harry stopped whistling, swallowed deeply, and started speaking, and that, after stressing that he was an acquaintance of the submarine’s owner, Alfonso, who of course was well known to Solange (a fact she confirmed), part of what Harry eventually said was, “There’s plenty of room, would you like to see what this is like on the inside,” and that Solange surprised no one more than herself by saying, “Yes,” and that, further, Alfonso, who each evening helped Harry return the submarine to its garage, appeared at a propitious moment, understood immediately, even though the interior of the submarine was dead silent, what had transpired and asked the two of them if they might be interested in a ride, the response to which was a muffled “All right,” from one voice, or the other, or both, Alfonso thought, as he disengaged the submarine and, with only slightly more trouble than he had had in pushing Harry by himself, rolled them first down the boulevard — the remnants of the day’s crowds parting before them with smiles and cameras cocked — and then along one gently curving street and quiet plaza after another, with here and there a splashing fountain, which transformed the sticky pavement beneath his feet, illuminated by shop windows and the occasional streetlamp, into the surface of an unnamed body of water, and that it crossed Harry’s mind, as he lay now just inches from Solange’s silver face, neither of them saying a word, their silence seeming like the first part of an understanding, that Alfonso was a kind of gondolier and the submarine a gondola and the streets watery thoroughfares, while Solange thought, we are in a submarine, protected from the terrible depths, and the lights we can see through the grill are the entrances to grottos, although of course they both thought many other things, especially when Alfonso paused for a moment before a pair of skeleton puppets, one playing a grand piano, the other a violin, the music being emitted from a gramophone standing between the two young women discretely working the marvelous puppets not anything either of them could have named, though we might as well note that it was Brahms, a jaunty piece that, being played as it was by the two little skeletons in their evening wear, seemed to color the air in the submarine an opalescent indigo that sent them both swimming off together into the depths Solange had imagined and Harry had intuited, and that, finally, Alfonso rolled the Yellow Submarine up to the gaily lit window of one of the grottos that both of them had looked upon with greatest interest and asked the two submariners if they might be interested in debarking, momentarily, in order to attend a small, convivial gathering of friends, with the understanding that he, Alfonso, would be prepared to set out again at a moment’s notice should a hasty departure seem indicated … but this is more or less what occurred, and Harry and Solange, who had begun their day on opposite sides of the boulevard, found themselves near the end of it in the company of Alfonso, enveloped in a cloud of growing familiarity that felt as freshly promising to both of them as a shower of melting snow falling against a backdrop of pure blue sky, stepping together through the doorway of a gallery opposite the city’s great cathedral — the very one where Ireneo, now on his way home to await Harry’s reappearance on the boulevard the following day, most frequently lit his candles — and into a small crowd of off-duty living statues that burst into spontaneous applause when they saw Solange, whom they hadn’t seen off the boulevard in ages, and for several minutes she was swept away into a collective embrace that gave Harry the opportunity to turn to Alfonso and thank him, and for Alfonso to bow and say, “You still owe me your story, and not just its outline,”

“It may have a new ending,”

“We can only hope,”

“Yes, yes we certainly can.”

Drinks at the event they were attending were procured by pushing one of two buttons set close together near the baseboard beneath the front window, which prompted a slender hand to appear out of a small hole cut into the floor, a hand that would, when given a modest amount of money, reemerge with an ice-cold bottle of sparkling water, or a glass of grenadine, or a chocolate malt, while donations to the gallery hosting the event could be made by holding a bill under a piece of nearby plastic tubing that snaked its way up to the ceiling where it curved around and around before plunging into a clear receptacle, already well supplied with bills that would dance madly when a button near the opening on the other side of the room was pushed and a fresh bill was sucked into it, a seductive spectacle that deprived both Harry, holding a chocolate malt, and Solange, a glass of grenadine, of several bills each, and if a line had not begun to form behind them they might well have allowed the contraption to suck up the entire collective contents of their wallets, which would have been a shame because, as they discovered, feeding additional bills into a slot in the floor caused a room that housed a griffon’s skeleton to light up under the oak planking, and furthermore there were tempting deep-fried items on offer at back tables that Alfonso convinced them to sample, and so it was that Harry drank a chocolate malt and ate a deep-fried clove cookie while silver-faced Solange interspersed bites of deep-fried almond butter squares with sips of grenadine and waves at Julius Caesar, Atlas, and Che Guevara, the latter who ran straight over, stuffed his unlit cigar in his mouth, and gave Solange a bear hug, lifting her straight off the floor and twirling her around, before turning to Harry, bowing, and suggesting that the two of them take the air, that it was a splendid night, there was a marvelous little garden attached to the store, etc.,

“Well,” Harry said,

“Go on, go on, Raimon is an old friend,” Solange said,

“And that’s really why I wanted to have a word,” said Raimon, once they had made their way through a back room and into what was indeed a thoroughly charming tree-filled garden, lit with strings of lights that were reflected in a handsome, merrily plashing pond surrounded by high walls, one of which, according to Raimon, who lit a red cigar and leaned against an ornamental quince, had been built by the Romans as part of the ancient city’s outer defenses, many relics of which Harry couldn’t have failed to notice were still standing amidst the modern edifices,

“Fascinating,” said Harry,

“Yes,” said Raimon, “Though of course every now and again some section of wall, uncared for by the municipal authorities, crumbles to the ground, leaving only its absence behind,”

“Its absence …”

“Its afterglow, in which some aspect of the former wall might be said to remain standing,”

“I like that,” Harry said,

“Are you familiar with negativity delirium?” Raimon asked,

“No,” Harry said,

“It’s the evil inverse of phantom limb syndrome, whereby, rather than missing limbs and organs maintaining their presence, present limbs and organs vanish,”

“That’s awful,”

“It’s diabolical,”

“I’ve often thought of chopping off my legs, because of the condition I suffer from, but now I can see that they might not be so easy to get rid of,”

“Not so easy at all, take for example, the case of my missing hands,” said Raimon, wedging his brightly burning cigar in the corner of his mouth and holding his hands up in the air,

“What are those things?” said Harry,

“You can see them too?”

“Your hands, yes,”

“Not everyone can see them,”

“How extraordinary,”

“It’s the greatest mystery and speaks to the core of this whole business, which is to say that they’ve come back, but not quite the same and not quite in the right place,”

“Yikes,” said Harry,

“I’ve never heard of such a case and I’ve done a great amount of research,” said Raimon,

“Nor have I,” said Harry, for lack of anything terribly apropos to offer, while trying and failing to see in what way the hands were wrongly placed,

“If it were an instance of phantom limb syndrome, we might not be surprised to know that the limb in question had returned, in fact it is quite common for them to return to the wrong place, my own uncle lost his left ring finger to a ripsaw and had it return some months later in between the middle and index finger of his right hand — it was most distressing for him and all of us, but this is an instance of negativity delirium in which what has vanished returns and is visible, at least to some,”

Harry wasn’t quite sure what to say to this either so contented himself to raise an eyebrow and nod in an enabling manner,

“Shall we go back inside?” Raimon said, looking at his hands and shrugging, as if there was nothing further that could or should be said,

“Yes,” said Harry,

“I’m glad we had a chance to chat,”

“I am too,”

“That’s really all I wanted, was to chat,”

“I’m glad we could,”

“She’s had a very rough time of it,”

“So I gather,”

“You could say that the universe has conspired against her,”

“I’m in a position to empathize,”

“I’m so very sorry,”

“Thank you,”

“It is all much more difficult than it ought to be, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed,” Harry said.

The statues present were either in partial or complete costume, which gave the wonder-filled room, through the front window of which the Yellow Submarine was fully visible, the air of a carnival, or, when Cleopatra and the Willow Tree began dancing next to the deep-fryers, of a masked ball, so that for a time after his return from the garden, and his only very slightly unnerving conversation with Raimon, whom he had rather liked, Harry’s happiness knew, as they say, no bounds, and when the Oak Tree pulled him up off his feet to dance next to the deep-fryers he did not decline, and for a few minutes he shimmied and whirled with a gusto that probably, at his age, did him no credit, but he would have continued and perhaps even pulled Solange up off her feet had he not, in looking over at her, realized that she was sagging, that the moment, such as it had been, was passing, and that it was time to get back in the submarine and sail off into the night, a course of action that, upon his suggestion, appealed to her, and that was agreeable to Alfonso, and so after finishing their food and saying good-bye, Harry and Solange climbed back into the submarine, though not before catching sight of the connoisseurs, who were just that moment arriving at the gallery, and while they were already in the submarine and rolling when the connoisseurs passed them and bade them each, by name, good-night, Harry felt Solange shiver for a moment beside him, and, although he knew it was indiscreet, could not refrain from asking her what it was,

“Nothing, fatigue,” she said,

“I understand,” Harry said, registering, as he did so, that by responding in this way, he had completed a problematic circuit, across the poles of which a bright blue band of falsehood was now crackling — she had not shivered, he was sure, because of a chill, and he had not, strictly speaking, understood anything, even if the unwelcome phrase “death and the connoisseurs” appeared for a moment before vanishing — but Harry also registered that every incipient relationship is at least partially lit by the light of dubious complicity so he simply smiled in the blue light and they continued on their way in silence, Harry thankfully not thinking about the connoisseurs, but about negativity delirium, which just about summed it all up, then about different qualities and kinds of illumination, and the structures that best masked or presented them, and Solange about the cold efficiency with which the connoisseurs had told and retold her story — which she suspected Harry had heard, probably from Alfonso, a story addict if ever there was one, because of the gentle way he, Harry, had remarked earlier, before she had actually laid eyes on him, that the last of her tears was gone — but also about the way Harry had probed for a moment, but not pushed, had allowed her her lie of convenience without forcing her to enlarge it, or to ask him to leave well enough alone, the sort of direct statement that, uttered too early, can have unfortunate results, often because of misinterpretation, which, the thought occurred to her, had too often marred her interactions with her young man who, likely because of his youth, which if not extreme had nevertheless been considerable, had gotten it wrong, so to speak, with some frequency, which in the short term had seemed endearing, but over the long term … well there hadn’t been any long term, and whereof, she thought, we cannot speak, thereof we ought to keep our mental mouths shut and reach for the Lucite, or rose petal jam, another jar of which she had purchased that morning and had told Raimon about that night, just after he had told her that if what he thought was occurring with Harry was actually occurring then he approved: she licked her lips, which still had a few flecks of almond butter on them and thought,

But why don’t I feel more sad?

It’s this submarine, plain and simple, thought Harry, whose mind had been moving along a roughly parallel track, as it had been, or as it seemed to Harry to have been, with the man under the awning,

It’s like spending time in a hollowed-out Twinkie, thought Solange, who as a foreign exchange student in Lawrence, Kansas had eaten plenty of them,

The thing even smells good, thought Harry,

“What a beautiful night,” they both said,

and the coincidence, though startling after so long a silence, didn’t seem as extraordinary as it might have given that what they could suddenly see out of the front grill, the half-lit trunks of palms along the beach and ship lights sparkling here and there across the moonlit bay, was indeed beautiful,

“This is a fine spot, I’m going to leave you here,” Alfonso said,

“We can roll it back together,” Solange said, and though both of them were sorry to see Alfonso, who came around and put his smiling, still-golden face in the grill, go, it seemed somehow appropriate that they would now have some time even more alone, even if as it turned out it was just to lie there very close to each other and look out over the glittering bay before debarking and making their slow way home through a night that seemed to rise and fall, enormous, like the sea they had left behind them — the sea, as Solange had called it, of commas, each wave a phrase in a sentence that was never quite finished, that would never quite be finished, until of a dreadful sudden it was — to bask separately in the mystery of what was occurring, this gently promising something that felt like it was happening to them.

As Harry and Solange were drifting off into a short sleep, Ireneo, who had spent more than half the night running down the city’s glowing avenues, rose and took off his shoes, then showered and put his shoes back on and went to see Doña Eulalia, who had asked him, when he had phoned her the previous evening to report, to come and see her at sunrise, a request that she had promptly forgotten, with the result that when Ireneo let himself in and knocked on her bedroom door, she was still, and not for the last time during this account, deep asleep, and was not pleased to be woken, and called Ireneo “Imbecile,” which he did not like, nor, apparently, did his shoes, for they barked out a retaliatory “Smelly old bag” and one or two other epithets that Ireneo, operating under the impression that the shoes spoke to him and him alone, was inclined to thank them for, except that as soon as the epithets had been uttered Doña Eulalia switched on the bedside light, reached for her glasses, peered down at the shoes, then up at Ireneo, at whom she smiled and said, “I once had a pair like that, they are great fun and even useful until they lead you astray, I threw mine into a furnace after they suggested I cut off my index finger and feed it to the cat, but not before, mind you, getting out a kitchen knife and sharpening it, thank God my late husband, who had never liked the look of them, came in and made me take them off, what have yours been saying besides ‘smelly old bag’?”

“After the centaur sent me off on a goose chase they told me where to look,”

“For which bit of information I’m inclined to forgive them their insults, though I’m not as inclined, my boy, to forgive you for finding them so agreeably apropos,”

“You had just called me ‘imbecile,’ Madame,”

“And so of course I had, for which I apologize, but at any rate, time is almost up and I must see Harry tonight, no more delays,”

“I’ll speak to him first thing this morning,”

“Good, and Ireneo,”

“Yes, Madame,”

“Do I smell?”

“You do not, Madame,”

“I’m relieved, you will watch out for those shoes, they will have you running out in front of cars before long,”

“I will,”

“Then that’s excellent, I’ll expect you tonight,”

“Good-bye, Madame,” Ireneo said and left the house and immediately started running, but when his shoes began to speak — small recriminations and half-hearted defenses — Ireneo stopped and said, “I’m on to you,” whereupon the shoes fell silent, and Ireneo headed off at a trot to a stand in the market, which opened early and served passable coffee and stuffed pastries, over which, while the curiously invigorating smell of the arriving fish, fruit, and freshly butchered meat wafted past, he could linger until it was time to go and see Harry and put an end to this errand, which had, after all, gone on much longer than should have been necessary, sentiments that overlapped in substantive ways with those being experienced, at that very moment at another market stand that served passable coffee but exceptional pastries, by Alfonso, who was perched, somewhat less comfortably than he cared to be between the connoisseurs, who were much less the worse for wear than he was for having spent the night eating deep fried foods and slurping down chocolate malts at the gallery, where Alfonso had returned after leaving Harry and Solange, not because he had wished to round out his evening with further celebratory activity, but because, at the precise moment that Solange shivered in the Yellow Submarine, one of the connoisseurs had slipped him a note that read, “Come back and see us when you are finished,” and for Alfonso, who had been a grateful recipient of the connoisseurs’ largesse for longer than any other current statue on the boulevard, a request from them was as good as a command, but that they were interested in anything more than his presence on the dance floor as the party trundled on into the wee hours was left unclear until, not terribly long before daybreak, they had danced a moment on either side of and in front of him then taken him by the arms and led him in the direction, as they put it, of a place they could all chat — this stand in the market where the connoisseurs were habitués — about, as it occurred, Harry and, by extension, Solange,

“So, it’s working,” one of them said,

“And part of why we asked you to join us for breakfast is just to express the sentiment …”

“The conviction,”

“Yeah, the conviction that it couldn’t have been done without your help,”

“My help?” said Alfonso, the connoisseurs laughed, one of them gave out a short whistle, then another one clapped him on the shoulder and said,

“No need to be disingenuous,”

“It’s unappealing,”

“Unappetizing,”

“It’s like all that fried food at the party,”

“Gets to you,”

“Only with this you don’t want to keep eating,”

“You don’t want to start eating,” the connoisseurs each picked up the cream-filled pastry they had ordered, wrinkled their noses, and tossed it back onto the counter, while Alfonso, who had a large bite of a similar pastry in his mouth, swallowed slowly, thought of telling Harry the story, of giving him the use of the submarine and putting him into position opposite Solange, of helping him push it each morning, of offering to roll him and Solange through the warm streets, and tried to decide if he had known he was helping, that he was acting, in a sense, as an instrument, but found he couldn’t quite remember, not that it mattered so much, he was happy to help and said as much and the connoisseurs picked up their pastries again and took bites and one of them said,

“Sending that guy off last night was the best thing you did,”

“Stroke of genius,”

“Maybe not genius but it bought us some time,”

“Come on, this is Alfonso, our friend, let’s call it genius, we can call it genius,”

“For fuck’s sake, fine, it was a stroke of genius,”

“Gave Harry his night,”

“And what a night,”

“All it takes is one,”

“For love to come knocking,”

“Now it doesn’t matter,”

“They’re both hooked,”

“Hooked enough, Solange’ll get over it,”

“Teach her a little lesson, she’ll be fine,”

“Why would Solange, of all people, need to be taught a lesson?” Alfonso asked, prompting two of the connoisseurs to smack the other and say,

“He misspoke, he was thinking about something else,”

“Criminy, you’re right, I misspoke, I was thinking about something else, apologies, Jesus, of course, poor Solange,”

“This is about him,”

“Harry,”

“Don Quixote,”

“Ha, ha, ha,”

“Now it can start,”

“What can?” said Alfonso,

“Ah, the poor schmuck,” said one of the connoisseurs,

“Yeah, the poor schmuck,” the other said.

The poor schmuck was feeling like anything but as he stood in front of the mirror in his apartment — first smoothing down the slightly wrinkled jeans he had left too long in the pile of clean laundry without folding, then smoothing the short sleeves of his yellow T-shirt with its blue sea bass logo, then pulling on his brown jacket, which did surprisingly well in warm weather, then running his hands through his still-wet hair, which, he had a feeling, would fall wrong all day, despite the solid quantity of hair paste he had applied after washing it — in fact he was feeling almost what one could call excellent, even better than he had felt when he had still been feeling good on the evening he had first met Ireneo and seen Solange, and the prospect of the day about to unfurl before him was so appealing that once or twice as he was going about his ablutions and eating his sausage and bread covered in the extraordinary rose petal jam that Solange had insisted on running inside to get for him when he had dropped her off at her apartment just a few hours previously, he had burst into song, the submarine thing, yes, but also bits and pieces of others that he had not come up with in years, and indeed he was in the explosive middle of one of these bits when he stepped through the doors of his building a few minutes after leaving his mirror behind and ran into Señora Rubinski, who, beaming, said, “Ah, Harry, how perfect, perhaps you would like to join us, my sleepyhead is finally up off the couch, we’re off for a morning walk, no need to wait for evening, here he is,” upon which she indicated, with rather a flourish, an elderly gentleman, the spitting image of the picture Señora Rubinski carried with her, who smiled a little sheepishly, shrugged, and seemed not at all nonplussed by Harry’s rather stunned silence at being presented to a man he could see through, even if only a little — at the right shoulder and the left shin — nor did Señora Rubinski, who had a reputation for moderate prickliness, take poorly Harry’s silence, which went on for the entire time the three of them were standing there, although when after an awkward interval Harry’s hand went slowly up and out, as if in spite of Harry’s reluctance it had decided a proper greeting was in order, a tiny cloud of worry came and rained on the edges of her huge smile, and she bade Harry a hasty farewell and, not quite touching the small of Señor Rubinski’s back, ushered him away, leaving Harry standing there staring after them, at Señor Rubinski in particular, though not, as one might imagine, with his hand still theatrically stretched out before him — he had immediately pulled that back in, placed it in his pocket, and made a nice tight fist of it — thinking, O.K. … and then, probably because he had thought it the night before as he and Solange had stood up straight after climbing out of the submarine and saw both Venus and the moon reflected on the disturbingly shiny waters of the bay, which looked both like and unlike the endless, gentle waters they had seemed to swim through together earlier, It harrows me with fear and wonder, the overly poetic incongruity of which remark, not to mention the terrors to do with numbness and icy water it adumbrated, had kept him from voicing it then but didn’t stop him from murmuring it now as the Rubinskis turned a corner and vanished, and he began making his way to Alfonso’s to collect the submarine and head for the boulevard, with the result that Harry arrived at his now customary spot in a very different frame of mind indeed and the silence that surrounded him inside the submarine, which found itself amplified by Solange’s absence from her box across the boulevard, even though it was past the hour they had spoken of the night before, was for the first time an uncomfortable, almost an untenable silence, a silence harrowed, in short, by fear and wonder, in that uncomfortable order, and so when Ireneo jogged up to the grill of the submarine and cleared his throat, Harry threw open the hatch and stepped out and, without hesitation, vigorously pumped the very real Ireneo’s proffered hand, an operation that was only mildly complicated by Ireneo’s apparent reluctance to stop jogging in place as he delivered his message.

“She wants to see me?” Harry said,

“Yes,” Ireneo said,

“You’re sure you’ve got the right person?”

“More than,”

“Because if it’s Solange you’re looking for she’ll be here any minute,”

“Solange …”

“The silver angel, the one with the broken face, the one you were looking for,”

“The two of you have struck up an acquaintance,”

“We have, after that night I looked for both of you and found her,”

“Well, my employer would be very happy to greet Solange too, but it’s really you, Harry, she is now eager to speak with,”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,”

“I met a ghost this morning,”

“A ghost?”

“My neighbor’s dead husband, an older gentleman, he has been dead for years,”

“But now he’s not,”

“Well, I suppose technically, of course, he still is,”

“I see, yes, not so terribly odd in and of itself, but I’ll let my employer know, it might be related,”

“To what?”

“I don’t know, in fact, I have no idea,” having said this, Ireneo swept a long finger across his forehead, simultaneously removing a fat bead of sweat that had been threatening to fall at any moment and adjusting the placement of an errant lock of damp black hair,

“Look, if you don’t mind my asking,” said Harry, “Why are you running in place?”

“That’s a long story too, but I can stop any time I want, in case you are wondering,”

“No, I wasn’t wondering that,”

“Well, I can, but that’s not important, what is important is that you accompany me tonight,”

“I’d be delighted to,”

“Excellent, I’ll come and collect you here,”

“What if we meet at the café again, that will give me a chance to get the submarine back where it belongs,”

“I’ll look for you there, just after sunset,”

“Fine,” Harry said, then watched as Ireneo not only jogged off at a brisk pace, but looked down at his feet as he did so and said, “Shut up,” only to come to a dead halt a few paces later, pull off his shoes, throw them against the side of a flower kiosk, start off down the boulevard, barefoot this time, then reappear a moment later, somewhat sheepishly grab up the shoes, and wave at Harry — who felt a little bad for having played witness to such a perplexing sequence of events, and pretended to be looking elsewhere — then put them on and ran off again, clearly muttering to himself, giving, in other words, every indication that he was undergoing some sort of psychotic episode, and while it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Harry’s attitude at watching Ireneo charge noisily off was identical to the one that had struck him earlier in the presence of the Rubinskis, the overlap was enough to make him wince a little at the thought of returning to the state he had been in before Ireneo had appeared and, a moment later, actually clap his hands and give a little jump when he realized that Solange was standing on the other side of the boulevard smiling at him.

It took Solange a moment to register that the inter twining of pleasure and concern that she felt dancing across her face as she watched Harry was actually dancing across her face, in a kind of variable speed tango, rather than remaining just below its painted surface, and then a moment longer to remember that as she had sat in her apartment applying her silver makeup earlier she had been overcome with an urge to twist and contort her face, to make it do, as she had said to herself, things it hadn’t done in a long time, which hadn’t meant very much to her then as she had made faces at herself in the mirror, but seemed to have more than a little resonance now, as Harry came quickly across the boulevard toward her and the tango stopped as concern bowed and stepped aside, abandoning the floor to pleasure, which did a pirouette and splits, and she felt her face breaking into an outrageous grin, the kind she had once been capable of achieving at a moment’s notice but that had vanished with her young man and gold face paint, and Harry, looking at the grin that had come out to greet him thought, if I ran fast enough and dove I could end up inside that smile and wouldn’t we both be surprised, but Harry didn’t speed up and dive, in fact he slowed down a little as he approached and the smile that lit his face grew softer as he approached, and for a fraction of a second Solange thought, without quite knowing why, We’re both climbing, but in opposite directions, and then Harry was standing before her, his eyes beaming, his graying hair catching the light surrounding them, and she was telling him about sitting in front of the mirror that morning making faces and that suddenly now, even though she hadn’t slept at all and was in desperate need of a cup of coffee and a bucket full of pastries, she couldn’t stop grinning and felt like a second-string circus clown, and Harry was saying, let’s go get coffee and a couple hundred pastries, which is more or less what they did — at a third stand at the edge of the market, one Solange had long frequented and which gave them a view both of the Yellow Submarine and the pile of Solange’s gear, which she had left in a heap on her box — and to say that both of them were delighted that the awkwardness they had been aware might be present when they met again in broad daylight did not materialize, would be an understatement of the first order, to borrow the phrase that ran through Harry’s mind as they sat there on their stools at a stand that marked the third point in a roughly isosceles triangle formed by the market’s three coffee stands, the two longer, equidistant lines of which converged on Harry and Solange and their plates full of pastries, which is pretty to think of but also satisfying to note given that, Ireneo having already impacted on Harry’s day, the connoisseurs and Alfonso slid off their own stools and a moment later passed within view of Solange, who had just enough trouble interpreting what struck her as a curiously painful disjunction between the placid faces of the connoisseurs on the one hand and the markedly unplacid face of Alfonso on the other, that she elbowed Harry, pointed at the foursome, which had stopped a moment at the edge of the market to wait for a dolly piled high with battered fish carcasses to trundle by, and quietly asked if she thought they looked “odd” to him, and Harry said they certainly did,

“They make me shiver, those three, as I’m sure you noticed last night, even if you were too discreet to discuss it,” said Solange, her frame vibrating with such force this time that Harry immediately rejected his first impulse, which was to tell her that the three of them made him think of death, then failed to abstain from placing his hand on hers for a moment, a move that filled him with just enough trepidation to make him take it away almost as soon as he had touched her, but Solange, who had been gazing off into space for a moment, with her grin, which had naturally been subsiding anyway, now completely collapsed, came back from wherever — for she couldn’t have quite said herself — her shivering had taken her, looked Harry in the eye and said,

“Put that paw back over here,” and after he had covered her hand again and they had sat there a few minutes without speaking in the center of a cliché that would have struck them both as smashing had they discussed it, Solange said,

“We barely know each other, Harry,”

and Harry said, “That’s true,”

and Solange said, “Let’s address that.”

As Solange and Harry deepened their acquaintance — at the coffee stand, against the Yellow Submarine, along the boulevard and the beach and then on Harry’s bed — Alfonso excused himself from the connoisseurs, donned his regalia, leaned back into his hind legs and became a golden centaur, and although he was every bit as magnificent and clearly impressive to the heavy crowds on that day as he was on all the others, behind the gold paint and the shining plastic armor he was filled with more misgiving than his sanguine outlook would generally have indicated, not because, he thought, the connoisseurs had asked him to implicate himself any further in whatever scheme it was they were cooking up, besides relieving Harry of his Yellow-Submarine privileges, which in any case — they had said and he had concurred — Harry didn’t need anymore now that he had “gotten the girl,” but rather because he was no longer sure if it would be fair, in the context of the deception he, Alfonso, was clearly helping to perpetrate, to press Harry to tell him his story, which he really did very much want to hear and which, he knew, and here was the source, or so he thought, of his misgiving, he would absolutely press him to tell, regardless of this question of fairness, and the truth was it remained to be seen whether or not what he had done for Harry — rather, obviously, than to Harry — which had paved the way for an interview with Solange, and, he thought, probably much more, would retrospectively be seen as a favor: there was some bad business in store for the “poor schmuck”—the connoisseurs never exaggerated and they never lied — but just how bad wasn’t clear …, and now that we’ve had a taste of Alfonso’s not-altogether-admirable line of thought, which continued untainted by any genuine feeling of remorse for most of the afternoon, though not, as we will see, throughout the evening, it might be as well, while we allow Harry and Solange another few hours to exchange stories and hint at others, to tell each other about the ghosts of dead husbands and knife blades and broken faces and black dahlias and shivering fits, but also about other things, a nearby cliff covered in flowers, a favorite novel, the surprising pleasures of working with Lucite, a beach that glowed pale violet in the moonlight, to attend a bit to Ireneo, who as you will recall we left in the midst of an apparent argument with his disgruntled running shoes, which even before Ireneo had left his stand in the market to come and speak to Harry, had set aside their silence and launched into a tirade against both Doña Eulalia and Ireneo himself to do with their stunning incompetence and the shoes’ manifest perspicacity, a tirade that only grew in volume during Ireneo’s conversation with Harry next to the Yellow Submarine and that culminated in a string of epithets so palpably vile that Ireneo tore the shoes off and threw them against the flower stand only to, a moment later, pick them up again and put them back on his feet, whereupon they started cooing and pointing out that not all sinister pairs of shoes were alike no matter what Doña Eulalia had said, and that there were many other factoids that they could share with Ireneo, should he care to keep running and continue listening: they could tell him, for example, a few more things about his mother and her supposed illness, or about where she kept her savings bonds, or about Harry and about that golden centaur, not a bad sort really, but easily manipulated, and about who was manipulating him,

“I couldn’t care less about any of that,” said Ireneo,

“Well, you should,”

“Go on talking if it makes you happy,”

“It does,” said the shoes, “You’ve put your finger right on it, it makes us extremely happy to talk, we almost can’t stand not to,”

“You never spoke in the old days,”

“We spoke all the time, you just weren’t ready to hear us,”

“That sounds like tawdry psychodrama talk,”

“Which doesn’t make it invalid,”

“No, just insufferable,”

“You wound us,”

“I doubt it,”

“You are right to doubt, after all it is doubt that leads straight to the heart of error and out the other side — where are we going?”

“There is no ‘we’ here, it’s just me and my shoes, out for a run, heading for the beach, la, la, la,” and it was certainly true that Ireneo was making for the beach, but at the last minute, almost in spite of himself, he turned and climbed up one of the high streets that led, by way of wildly interlacing cobblestone streets, to a series of vista points of the bay, including the very cliff mentioned a moment ago, which during the springtime was covered with innumerable white and yellow daffodils, and that now was an immense emerald lawn bordered by a white gravel path and low slate wall, which the shoes said they admired and which Ireneo, almost sprinting, bore down on, as if he meant to leap off it and soar into space, and put an early end, as it were, to the day, and as he got closer and closer the shoes kept talking about the wall and masonry and the masons that had worked on this one and what a bunch of crooks they had been even if they had done nice work, and so when Ireneo swerved at the last minute and deftly sent, instead of himself, the shoes sailing over the wall and out into space, they were still going on about crooks and the corrupt, ancient art of wall building, though one may suppose that as they stopped climbing and started falling, out of this story and into some other, they switched topics, which was what Ireneo, heaving a little after his exertion but satisfied that he had performed his civic duty by disposing of the shoes where no one else could easily pick them up and put them on and more importantly where, should he become tempted, he would have a very hard, not to say impossible time finding them again, now hoped it would be possible for him to do, although the first order of business would be to acquire some replacement footwear, as the sidewalk and street beyond the green lawn sparkled with glass and streaks of oil against which his thin running socks and even thinner soles would be no defense at all.

After spending time on the bed, Harry and Solange spent time at Harry’s kitchen table, where, over a few bites of this and that pulled out of Harry’s small refrigerator, Harry asked Solange to say a little more about the Lucite, he hadn’t quite grasped her interest in deploying it, that substance in particular, and she said that while she hardly understood it any longer herself, the initial impulse had come from a story she had partially overheard as she had leaned one morning against a palm tree and looked out to sea and considered walking into it and contriving not to return, whereupon two old women with thick ankles came and plunked themselves down near her and one told the other a story that she had read in a romantic novel of some sort, and had not approved of, about a boat builder who had lost his beloved wife after a protracted illness and who, in his grief, thinking of the amber pendant she had always worn in which an ant, dead millions of years, had been marvelously preserved, had given such serious consideration to plunging first her remains and then himself in the Lucite solution he used to coat the hulls of his boats that he had gone so far as to set her body on his workbench and to look for a proper receptacle, but as he did this, it seemed to him he felt a hand descend on his shoulder and a voice, her voice, whisper in his ear, that his grief was betraying him, and that he should stop and go and announce her death to the authorities and see to a proper burial, and that if he did this, she would come and visit him in his dreams, wearing his favorite dress, a promise Solange had not been able to hear if she had kept, and while all she had left of her young man were scraps, she had immediately gotten hold of some Lucite and begun encasing what she had, not in hopes of provoking an analogous response, she was too grief-stricken to hope for anything, but because — and it was this impulse that had driven her out to the beach in the first place — she had suddenly been overcome by an urge to devour the little pile of bits and pieces she had left of him — which had led her to wonder with horror what she would have done had his entire body been there — to pluck them up and drop them into her mouth, and while that unbidden impulse had remained as she set to work encasing the bits of knife metal in Lucite, it grew less acute over the coming weeks and before long seemed to have vanished altogether,

“Though of course nothing like that ever really vanishes,” Solange said,

“No it certainly doesn’t,” Harry said, and after they had sat silently gazing out over the sun-burnished rooftops around them, he added that while in this particular instance he was not in a position to empathize, he had heard of such cases, notably one involving a Buddhist monk, who had been unable to bear the thought of his dead lover’s body being given up to the flames or to the perceived ignominy of decomposition, and had consequently, presumably because no quieting hand had come down on his shoulder, eaten the body, an act that had, according to the story, cursed him, though Harry couldn’t say whether or not such an eventuality was merited,

“What happened to him?” Solange asked,

“He lived for many years as a madman in the ruins of his own monastery,”

“Then I’m glad that in the end I only nibbled on the end of one of my young man’s shoelaces.”

Solange and Harry emerged from the latter’s apart ment contentedly aware that their exchange of confidences, no matter how satisfyingly thorough, could reasonably be thought of as no more than an additional incipit in what — barring any unforeseen accelerant — would require a whole cascading series in order to move them toward that something they had not, during their discussion of the matter, been quite willing to articulate, though we might reasonably infer that the potential of an intense acquaintance bolstered by duration was under discussion, meaning that high spirits were the order of the evening as they set off for the boulevard to recuperate and stow away Solange’s silver costume and Harry’s Yellow Submarine before heading together, as they had agreed, to the café to have a light meal and a bottle or two of sparkling water ahead of the revelations to come, though when they passed the second floor door marked “Rubinski” their steps slowed and they exchanged glances, but a collective shrug seemed to take care of the matter for both of them and instead of further discussing ghosts as they walked they turned to the related but generally less noxious subject of dreams, for Solange had had a corker the previous night, a nacreous haze that had ended with a question, “What word do we use to indicate that tame lions are living among us?” while Harry had found himself in a landscape dotted with amalgamators on a walking tour led by a kind of magician whose face, the dream had proposed to him, was “shining like a wet sword,” and while neither Solange nor Harry was interested in digging around for submerged meaning in these dreams, they both found the inclusion of moments of language amidst the standard swarm of images strangely appealing, and no doubt would have found their way into an interesting conversation thereon as they gathered their things on the boulevard if Alfonso, still in full regalia, including his sword and hind legs, hadn’t been waiting, arms crossed over his armored chest, next to the submarine,

“Our gondoleer,” Harry said,

“He doesn’t look happy,” Solange said,

“You’re right, he’s not, he’s been standing here waiting for three quarters of an hour next to this abandoned, borrowed Yellow Submarine waiting to see if the person who borrowed it from him would turn up again,” Alfonso said sternly, while inwardly in fact he was quite pleased that Harry’s negligence in re the submarine had so conveniently handed him a straightforward justification for rescinding Harry’s occupational privileges, and he was preparing to broach this subject, and to extract an imminent date and time for Harry to fulfill his end of the bargain and tell him his story, which would no doubt intersect intriguingly with the connoisseurs planned attentions, when a curious thought, one that had not entered into his calculations about the source of his misgiving earlier, entered his mind — no doubt by some side door or other, the handle of which was Solange’s happily smudged silver face or Harry’s sweat-streaked wrists or the half-shredded sparkling water bottle splayed across the roots of the oak tree that rose and spread just behind them — and made him uncross his arms and recross them then look off to the side to study the thought again then once more before confirming that, yes, while of course as he well knew he had been the one who had told a certain handsome young man interested in taking up the living statue profession and who had come and stood in front of him, for the purpose of observation, for several days, that he might, since he was interested in golden things, just as well go and observe the technique of the angel near the top of the boulevard, and then of course a few days later the young man had become the golden angel’s young man and then, some weeks later, had died horribly and smashed her heart to smithereens, all this he knew, but it hadn’t occurred to him until just that very moment that it was the connoisseurs who had planted the suggestion in his mind, during one of their circuits, as they passed behind him, “Send that guy off to see Solange, that’s who he ought to see next, that would be good, don’t you think?” or had it been them? was he remembering something that had actually occurred or dropping depth charges from the present into the past? he didn’t think so, and because he didn’t, because there was doubt in his mind and maybe just a little more than doubt, especially given the expressions that had played over the connoisseurs’ faces when they had discussed Harry earlier, instead of telling Harry it was time for him and the submarine to part ways, he leaned over, opened the hatch, and said,

“Climb in,”

“We’re going somewhere,” Harry said,

“I’ll take you,” Alfonso said,

“You’re sure?” Solange said,

Alfonso patted the side of the submarine and said it would be good exercise,

“Are you going to take that stuff off or walk with it?” Harry said, pointing at Alfonso’s hind legs,

“They’re on rollers, they work even better than the submarine, every now and again I like to move around a little when I’m performing, it wouldn’t do to walk off without my legs,” Alfonso said, and before Harry could say something else, Solange took his arm and pulled him into the submarine and shut the hatch behind them, and after she had instructed Alfonso to grab her gear then told him where they were going, they were off, and as they moved off, Harry and Solange looked at each other and Solange said,

“I think he’s going to tell us something,”

“I think so too,” Harry said,

“The thing is I can’t,” Alfonso said, “Or at the very least I shouldn’t, it’s difficult, even tedious, extremely tedious, it’s just that a moment ago I had a thought and that thought, well, made me think,”

“I thought a thought but the thought I thought was not the thought that I thought I thought,” said Harry,

“If only,” said Alfonso,

“This is about the connoisseurs, something to do with them, isn’t it?” said Solange,

“It might and it might not be,” said Alfonso,

“We saw you at the market with them earlier,”

“We had breakfast,”

“After the long night,”

“It was a long night, wasn’t it, too long, maybe I’m just overtired,”

“Maybe we all are, I’m not finding this submarine as comfortable today as I used to, plus I saw a ghost,” said Harry,

“Actually, I don’t feel particularly tired,” said Solange, “And when I saw you four this morning I got the feeling you were cooking something up, though I wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with us,”

“Well, ha, ha,” said Alfonso,

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, I really don’t, look, just whatever it is you’re going to do, don’t do it,”

“You mean don’t have dinner?”

“He means don’t go with Ireneo, that is what you mean isn’t it?”

“Who’s Ireneo?”

“Some guy,”

“Some guy that was looking for you?”

“Why?”

“I forgot to mention it but he asked me about you,”

“What did you tell him?”

“I sent him goose chasing,”

“He got tired of chasing gooses and came to see me, but anyway, why shouldn’t we go with Ireneo?”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t go with anyone, I just said whatever it is you’re going to do, don’t do it,”

“The café is just over there,” said Harry,

“Fine,” said Alfonso, “I’ve warned you, which is a lot more than I should have done, though as a last thing I’ll just say that I really don’t have any idea if following my warning will help,”

“Fabulous,” said Harry, “Thanks a billion,”

“Yes, that’s not all that helpful, Alfonso,” said Solange,

“Apologies, but that’s all I can offer, I’m not sure if I knew more I would tell you, in fact I think I wouldn’t, there may already be consequences, though I hope not, and now I’ll have to go, and if you don’t mind, Harry, I’ll take the submarine along with me, you won’t be needing it anymore will you?”

“No,” said Harry,

“Good,” said Alfonso, then he opened the hatch and Solange and Harry stepped out and went straight into the café and sat down at a table and ordered dinner and when dinner arrived, Harry said,

“Do you still want to go?”

“Yes, how about you?”

“Yes,”

“You have to admit that was a little odd,”

“Yes,” Harry said, and shuddered, which made Solange shiver, about which they both laughed, then Ireneo arrived, bowed to Solange and apologized, in some detail, for the earlier misunderstanding that had kept her from her audience with Doña Eulalia, told Harry that he was feeling just fine and that he had taken care of the issue that had made it seem, when they had spoken, like there was a problem, to whit he had thrown his shoes off a cliff and purchased the relatively quiet espadrilles he was wearing and wouldn’t be doing any further running for the foreseeable future, then guided them off along what proved to be a fairly unproblematic set of twists and turns that ended in front of Doña Eulalia’s building, and although Harry couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t been able to find said building when he had gone looking, he had the feeling that if he mentioned this to Ireneo, Ireneo would come up with something as bizarre and unexplained/unexplainable as he had about his shoes, and Harry, feeling more than a little fatigued, thought he would leave any additional ellipses to Doña Eulalia and her lamps, though Solange, perhaps because she felt much less implicated than Harry in what was to come next, felt no need whatsoever to keep quiet, and, because she had had her interest piqued, as they approached the large green door, said, “I’m walking in between someone who saw a ghost this morning and someone else who felt he needed to throw his shoes off a cliff this afternoon — I know something about the ghost but nothing about the shoes, care to enlighten me?”

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

“It’s just a pair of shoes,”

and another of them said,

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve brought them.”

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

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

the individual in question, immense turquoise eyes seeming to float in front of him, came back out through the door he had disappeared through looking even more crazed than he had previously, no doubt in part because his head and upper torso were now sopping wet, but he shed no more light on this change in disposition than he had on the business of the shoes, nor did he say anything when Harry asked if they were now going to go into the room with the people and the lamps, and a moment later they found themselves sitting in a conventionally lit parlor of sorts in comfortable purple velvet armchairs with a beaming old woman dressed in a powder-blue pantsuit and improbably high heels, who offered them tea, which they accepted, then lemon-filled ginger cookies, which they declined, at which juncture Ireneo, who had been dripping away next to a sort of curio cabinet filled with odds and ends of all shape and variety, frowned and left the room — to spend the rest of what was to prove a very long, cold night fighting the urge to go back up to the cliff and kill himself — and Doña Eulalia said,

“Excellent, I am so glad you are both here,” a remark that was so far from being a mere nicety that she felt compelled to repeat it, this time laying the stress on the word “both,” for if she had been absolutely incapable of keeping this Harry and the unpleasantness that lay in store for him from her thoughts for more than a few seconds over the past several days, his companion, whose face Doña Eulalia could see had until recently been very broken indeed, had been more on her mind than she would have thought justified, given that, as best she could tell, anything that might until recently have required a candle and concomitant consideration had moved on, but as the specifics of the cases she was drawn to were, as we have seen, rarely her forte — so much so that it had dawned on her after she told Ireneo to go and ask the centaur where Harry was that she must have picked up the information from elsewhere, possibly Ireneo’s blasted shoes — she smiled at Solange, echoed Ireneo’s apology, and contented herself with saying that, as she, Solange, had clearly sensed herself, her loved one had moved on and was at peace, as she could now be, which, Doña Eulalia thought, was true, for now at any rate, and the limited parameters of “for now,” in Solange’s only mildly alarming case, struck her as sufficient, especially since contact had been reestablished in such a satisfactory way — in fact, she would have to ask them both to leave their cards or if they didn’t have cards, of course they probably didn’t, at least their phone numbers, so that any eventual follow-up protocols could be observed, which, who knew, might prove even more necessary in the case of Solange than Harry, though she doubted it, she highly doubted it — and with that in mind she reached for one of the ginger lemon cookies and put the whole thing into her mouth, crushing it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth in the way she was accustomed to and that always gave her great satisfaction, and she might have put another one in straight after the first if Harry, who until that moment had been sitting silently next to Solange, hadn’t looked around the room, made a sort of clicking sound then asked,

“Why don’t you have a lamp on your head and aren’t you supposed to hum or something?”

“Ah yes, well, different circumstances, different modes of transmission,” said Doña Eulalia, licking around in one of the gaps in her teeth for some remaining lemon crème and thinking, good god I must come off like a complete and utter charlatan,

“Oh,” said Harry, sounding a little deflated, as if by his question he had hoped to elicit an indication that even though they weren’t in the big room downstairs with her nincompoop relations at any moment the lights above them would go off and the lamps would come out and the furniture would start shaking or something like that, a speculation that diverged only in the matter of the shaking furniture from the actual thought that had run not just through Harry’s mind, but Solange’s as well, causing her, Solange, to raise an eyebrow and fix Doña Eulalia with a quizzical gaze this latter found so noteworthy that when a moment later she left off looking around in her mouth for more lemon crème, leaned forward, tapped Harry’s knee twice, cleared her throat, and said, “They’re coming,” she almost couldn’t refrain from turning to Solange and adding, “For both of you.”

After rather feebly, she thought, pointing her finger at the door and watching, through half-closed eyes, Harry and Solange make their way through it, Doña Eulalia took a deep breath, reached for the teapot, and, suddenly aware, in the way that these things came to her, that her night was not yet over, drank directly from its spout, then asked herself aloud what situation she would have the opportunity to mishandle next, and, still aloud, whether she ought not to go and get one of the lampshades from the reception hall downstairs, put it on her head, roll back her eyeballs and hum, though in the event she had so little time to wait that were she to have acted on this self-mocking impulse she would barely have made it halfway down the back stairs before the second round of visitors appeared, as it was, the chill that preceded them, as they stood waiting on the other side of the main door to her bedroom, after having gotten into the house she certainly didn’t know how, was such that she reached for one of her woolen throws and pulled it up to her chin before taking another deep voice and calling out that the door was open,

“Of course it is,” said one of the three old men she found standing in front of her a moment later,

“It’s always open, your door, isn’t it?” said another,

“It all just drifts right in, kind of like a walkie-talkie without an off switch, although maybe the reception isn’t so good,” said the third,

“Won’t you gentlemen sit down,” said Doña Eulalia, folding her arms around herself and crossing her ankles, “You will forgive me if I don’t stand,”

“Oh sure we’ll forgive you,”

“We just love to forgive,”

“But we won’t sit, standing seeming preferable,”

“Keeping the blood flowing,”

“Through our old bones,”

“Are you cold, Doña Eulalia, you look cold if you don’t mind my saying so …”

“You three brought a chill in with you,”

“Which we don’t always do,”

“Sometimes we bring in the opposite,”

“Light up the night, heat up the party,”

Doña Eulalia looked from one to the other of them and saw nothing except old men with watery eyes wearing sweaters and windbreakers,

“Your powers fail you,”

“You draw a blank,”

“Gaze upon the void,”

“It would not, gentlemen, be the first time,”

“Or the last, right?”

“How can I help the three of you?”

“Oh you’ve already helped us,”

“We’re grateful,”

“Here to express our gratitude,”

“We brought you a token,”

“Some chocolate,”

“Easily edible water fowl,”

“Custom made,”

“Just marvelous,”

“It’s about Harry,” said Doña Eulalia, looking, without moving, at the ribbon-wrapped box one of her visitors was holding, “Or perhaps it’s about his friend,”

“For someone so chilled you’re awfully warm,”

“Or it’s about my Ireneo, you’re the ones who gave him a fright, earlier today,”

“Your Ireneo, I like that, it has a nice ring,”

“We just told him it wasn’t worth going looking for those shoes,”

“That he had better things to do,”

“We helped him,”

“Who are you?”

“Who are we?”

“I love it,”

“You tell us,”

“I see,” said Doña Eulalia, still looking at the box, which was now sitting next to her teapot, its cargo of what looked like chocolate ducklings on clear display through its plastic top,

“It’s going to get colder tonight,”

“A turn in the weather,”

“Drink tea and eat chocolate, it will keep you toasty,”

“That’s what they do in the Amazon,”

“Something like that,”

“When they get a fever,”

“Or take fright,”

“Being as it never really gets cold there,”

“Anyway, we won’t keep you,”

“We just stopped by to deliver the token,”

“The mark of our gratitude,”

“Have one,”

“I should have warned them, poor dears,”

“Oh, you’ve warned them,”

“You’ve been marvelous,”

“Now you deserve a rest, a good sleep,”

“Have a chocolate, they’re excellent,”

“I don’t think so,” said Doña Eulalia,

“But we do,” said one of the old men,

“Yes, we certainly do,” said one of the others,

“We certainly fucking do.”