Ray of the Star

III

That night something like a wind left over from deepest winter made its way through the city, banging shutters, frosting balconies, flattening exposed strips of grass, crisping flowers, scattering wadded paper and ice cream wrappers and freshly discarded metal cans, and making the people who were still out, everywhere — their eyes scanning the heavily mitigated darkness for directional cues that would simultaneously lead them further into adventure and help them avoid disaster — wrap goose-pimpled arms around themselves and reach for coats they weren’t even sure they could have found if they were at home, and while it would be maudlin to propose a direct connection between that wind — which among many other things simultaneously rekindled then extinguished the end of the perambulating Raimon’s real cigar and froze the tips and knuckles of his strange hands, smashed the hat off the balding and unusually delicate head of Almundo, of Almundo’s Store for Living Statues, as he closed up for the night, and elicited an extraordinarily general and multilingual polyphony of “What the Fucks”—and Doña Eulalia’s message, it would be needlessly artificial not to pause for a moment in the insistent face of it and let it stretch its serpentine fingers through the groaning city, through its parks and plazas, its courtyards and late-night kiosks, before returning to Harry — an earlier incarnation thereof — reading the paper a lifetime ago on a stone terrace that looked out over an immense caldera whose rippling waters sparked and glittered in an afternoon light so ferocious it seemed to him, as he told Solange long after they had left Doña Eulalia’s, when his voice had finally returned, an exact inverse of the icy howling that had kept them up half the night under inadequate covers, one that would sear his flesh, char his bones, and leave nothing behind but a few black crumbs for the young waiter to sweep up, which was really neither here nor there, because, he said, what he had thought of in particular when Doña Eulalia had made her pronouncement then, politely but firmly, told them to leave without asking any questions because they would not, because they could not, be answered, was not of the temperature, but rather of the palm reader, festooned with purple and turquoise scarves, as well as some kind of Kung Fu jacket, who had been working her way from table to table across the terrace until, inevitably, she had appeared before him and none-too-politely demanded his hand, which he had surprised himself by removing from the top left corner of the paper and offering to her, though without quite looking away from the article he was perusing as he did this — which, he told Solange, had been meant to indicate a measure of disinterest in or even disdain for the proceedings — but before his disdain had had a chance to fully unfurl, the palm reader had given out a shriek, flung his hand away, and moved off so quickly that she was gone before he could take his eyes off the paper, and because his eyes were more or less there anyway, and the thought of someone looking at his hand and shrieking was unsettling, he had continued to pretend to read, until, after not too terribly long, he had been able to actually continue reading and enjoying the view of the caldera, if not the infernal heat, and then his time alone had ended and the others had joined him, and while in the ensuing avalanche of activity he had stopped thinking about the palm reader and her reaction to his palm, that night he had seen her billowing scarves and Kung Fu jacket and heard her shriek over and over again and then, less than a year later, well …

Yes, well, Harry thought, trying, without much luck, to swallow and realizing that he had been sleeping, that he had finally dreamed his way out of the misery of the cold, and that, of course, Solange was no longer there, that he would not see her, if at all — and given his behavior the if was not inconsiderable — until later in the day, that for the past few minutes he had been telling his sad little story to himself, a recitation he had punctuated by smacking the silver bell, then grabbing it and without quite knowing why shoving it into his pocket, and that, to carry matters to a head, as one might say, there was now a knocking at his door, like a reification of Doña Eulalia’s portentous words, and for several seconds he lay under his covers without moving, until it suddenly seemed imperative that he move, and quickly, before whoever it was stopped knocking and went away, just in case it was, well, them, so he leapt up, ran his fingers through his disastrous hair and, still trying to swallow, his heart smashing itself against his ribs, ripped opened the door, though not onto any unspecified “They,” but rather onto a clearly distraught Señora Rubinski, who told him he must come down to her apartment immediately because her husband, Señor Rubinski, was not well,

“Not well,” Harry repeated, trying and failing to catch his breath,

“He won’t come out of his bath,” Señora Rubinski said and, taking Harry by the wrist, led him downstairs, through her front door, over the recently polished wide-plank floorboards of a long hallway, through a living room glowing in the morning light coming in through gauzy drapes, and down another, longer hallway to a door covered in chipped blue paint that stood slightly ajar,

“In there,” Señora Rubinski said,

“But it’s not locked,” Harry said,

“I never said it was locked,”

“I assumed …”

“I don’t follow you,”

“But you haven’t gone in?”

“Into my husband’s bath, without his permission …” Señora Rubinski gave out a snort of indignation and Harry, rather hopeful that the wind was still howling and he was still dreaming, nodded gravely to show that he understood and endorsed the local protocol, knocked lightly on the door, said, “Excuse me, Señor Rubinski, it’s me, Harry Tichborne, your neighbor,” then stepped in.

There was so much steam and so little light in the Rubinski’s bathroom that it took Harry, who initially had a hard time pulling his eyes up off the black and white tiles covering the floor, a good while to get his bearings, and a good while longer to register that the source of all the steam, an enormous, claw-footed white bathtub, which sat a luxurious distance from the door, was to all appearances empty, but given the circumstances, i.e. the presumed condition of its presumed inhabitant, he thought it prudent to wait until he could be absolutely sure before making his report to Señora Rubinski, so that when this latter called in to ask if everything was all right, Harry said that it was as far as he could tell, an absurd response that nevertheless seemed to satisfy the Señora, who said nothing further as Harry crept over and, nervously fingering the bell in his pocket, peered into the bathtub and, through the steam and gray residue of what might have been bubbles, its considerable depths, then, after checking in the room’s closet, where he found only a moth-chewed raincoat, made out of the most extraordinary purple cloth, which made him think again of the palm reader and look rather mournfully down at his hand, he went and sat on a sturdy wooden box placed between the sink and the tub, whispered, “I’m just going to sit here for a few minutes in case you are here and I can be of any service, Señor Rubinski,” and while there was no answer, at least none that Harry recognized, he continued to sit there and, in the voluptuous warmth enveloping him, so pleasant after the long, cold night that had left him so tired and more than a little out of sorts, even let his eyes shut and his mind wander to the past, by the palm reader and the newspaper to the caldera, which dwarfed the great ocean liners that entered it and seemed never to stop glittering, even at night, when clouds covered the moon and stars and he and his family huddled together in the big bed, and his darlings demanded stories about the gods who had stolen children and the mortals who had longed for their return, which now, as he sat in the Rubinski’s bathroom with his eyes shut, seemed to have everything in the world to do with the way his heart had started smashing at the knock on his door, not to mention the totally inadequate farewell which had been all he had been capable of offering Solange when — after he had told her he really had no idea who the “They” in question might be, not once but, after she had very gently, very delicately, asked him again, twice — she had left him, saddened and perhaps even angry he thought, to return to her own apartment, ostensibly to make sure her windows were shut, but more likely because of the lie he had so shamelessly let out into the room, a nasty little cloud of razors and butterflies that had swirled between them for the rest of the time she had stayed, both of them well aware, Harry was sure, that unlike the small one Solange had told as they lay next to each other in the Yellow Submarine this was a significant lie, one that if not confessed to could end up shredding whatever it was that was occurring between them, but rather than make what would have been a straightforward, expedient correction, Harry had simply watched it swirl around the room and, even when Solange had offered him an opening, a “perhaps you’d rather not talk about it, I completely understand,” had said nothing and eventually Solange had left, and he had gone on watching it and sticking his hand into it whenever it passed, and sometime during the night it had tired of moving around the room and had leapt back into his throat, and when it did so Harry realized that by making no effort at all to chase it out of the room while Solange had still been there he had done something very foolish, potentially damaging, and to what purpose? he had wondered, before going into the long story, the story he had both dreamed and told himself, about the palm reader, before Señora Rubinski had started pounding on the door, and Harry, his heart smashing against his ribs, had ripped it open, very much hoping that They had arrived, had come back, had returned, had accomplished what he had spent years hoping they would, just like Señor Rubinski, exactly like Señor Rubinski who had returned to make himself available for morning and evening walks, or like the calming hand placed on the shoulder of the crazed boat builder who wanted to plunge his lost love into Lucite, but They hadn’t, and outside of his hopes he couldn’t even be sure who or what “They” referred to, or even if Doña Eulalia was anything other than a crank of the first order with her lemon cookies and lamps, but the fact remained that there was only one “They” worth mentioning, insofar as he was concerned, and what would it have hurt him to say it, what could it have hurt to tell Solange, what could anything, he thought, now hurt and yet here he was, hurting, waiting for the warm steam to convert itself into the cold, dark water that the presence of Solange, whom he had chased away with his lies, had been keeping at bay, and when he pressed his hands against his lips and opened his eyes, Señor Rubinski, his stringy hair plastered to the top of his dripping, greenish head, was smiling over the edge of the tub at him, “I died in an industrial accident, fell into the paper mill where I worked, was torn to pieces,” he said.

Harry once took and did poorly in a course in elementary logic, and while apart from the gross outline of a few riddles involving knights and knaves, which as we have seen had become one of the weapons in his fights against his legs, very little of the content of the course now remained with him, and as he sat in the steamy bathroom and stared into Señor Rubinski’s unblinking black eyes, he found himself thinking of Wittgenstein’s “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent,” which his professor had scrawled on the board at the end of the course as a kind of flourish, an assertion that seemed to buttress the decision that he, Harry, had taken, if decision it could be called, to suck in his lips and hold them pinched between his teeth as Señor Rubinski first cleared his throat, then coughed, then begged Harry’s pardon, then began again to speak, and since Harry, suddenly feeling completely unequal to the circumstance, jammed his hand against the bell in his pocket and more or less pinched his mind along with his lips between his teeth during the lengthy opening movement of Señor Rubinski’s speech, which, for the record, had evoked the multiple vectors the minor — that was to say lost or unaccounted for — bits of his flesh and cloth and bone had taken while pinwheeling their way across the shop as the machine “gleefully prosecuted his demise,” we might be excused for leaving him long enough to observe that unlike the scraps of Señor Rubinski that went sailing out higgledy-piggledy across his former place of work, a radical convergence, long flirted with, of the vectors being inscribed by the various major characters in Harry’s life is now definitively underway: witness Ireneo, finally starting to warm up after a night spent chilled both in body — in his damp clothes — and in spirit — despite Doña Eulalia’s efforts to clear his mind by pulling him into her bathroom and dumping a bucket of water over his head — eating octopus porridge at a stall near the beach while Solange, not nearly as negatively affected by Harry’s lie as Harry imagines her to be, but unsettled by it — and by a highly unexpected incident about which more, in her own words, a little later — nonetheless, and consequently out walking as much to restore her circulation after a short night spent shivering in her apartment as to think things through, moves along a near-perfect line of fat palms toward him, though she is still some distance away when the connoisseurs, whose tune Ireneo has been attempting to call to mind as he gazes into the comforting mass of rice-flecked tentacles in the bowl before him, come up on either side of Ireneo and without saying a word convince him that he should take a little walk with them, which is the moment that Solange spots the four of them, shivers deeply, and 1) because in addition to worrying about Harry and whatever it is that is supposed to be coming for him or that he now thinks is coming for him and isn’t ready to talk about, she has spent a good portion of the time since she last saw Ireneo wondering what became of him after he left Doña Eulalia’s and 2) because the newly formed quartet looks from a distance much like the one formed by the connoisseurs and Alfonso at the market, decides immediately to follow them, which she sets about with a degree of theatricality she finds almost comical, as if it were the silver angel moving with fluent stiffness from palm tree to palm tree and occasionally pressing itself against the sides of the red roofed villas then high stone buildings they pass as they move into the city, even though the moving tableau before her strikes her as anything but amusing: in fact, she very quickly becomes convinced that Ireneo’s confusion the night before must have involved the connoisseurs and, after shivering again, so hard this time that she thinks it might pass for one of Harry’s shudders and has to stop and shut her eyes and count to ten before she can continue, she finds herself swept by a series of fierce urges: to call out to Ireneo, to tell him to come with her, to run away and find Harry, to see what the connoisseurs would do — these old bastards, she thinks, whom she has never liked, even when, in the early days, they used to bring her boxes of fresh oranges and chocolate squares and fish-shaped marzipan and little bundles of wood to burn in her fireplace, until out of embarrassment and an inability to reciprocate she asked them to stop, which they did, though not graciously, a good deal of grumbling was involved, of muttering, perhaps even threats — but before she can do anything, the four of them, who have not once looked back, have entered the front door of a building, an unusual one as it occurs, one of several similar structural anomalies scattered throughout the city that were designed by the sort of visionary/crackpot who every generation or so arises in great metropolises and pulls fistfuls of the future out of his pockets and smears them all over the present, with varying results, as in the case of this building, which has always looked to Solange when she has passed it and wondered who was moving behind its oddly shaped windows not so much like it is melting, as the widely available literature suggests, as drooling, How curious that they went into that one, Solange thinks, and then it strikes her that of course she knows who is really coming for Harry, not, as he was not prepared to tell her, his lost ones, but rather the old bastards, just as they came for Alfonso, for Ireneo, for — and here she shivers again—her, which was exactly, “for her,” what Señor Rubinski said to Harry that at last made him release his mind and lips and sit up straight and listen, and so we will have to leave Solange’s revelation hanging in the air and close this parenthetical although before we do so, before we return to Harry, who after all and for better or worse is the major and ever more central shareholder in his story, and give Señor Rubinski the floor, we might just observe that as Solange, now lost in thought, begins to put distance between herself and the building, Ireneo, who has already been dismissed — and the verb is chosen with care — by the connoisseurs, steps silently out of it, squints his turquoise eyes, sees her, and begins to follow.

“For her, certainly, but also for myself,” Señor Rubinski said, “because let’s be quite clear, being dead is infinitely less entertaining than even the quietest existence, for example the variety enjoyed by a midlevel supervisor in a paper plant whose greatest joy is the near silent dinners and walks and inconsequential domestic interludes he enjoys with his wife, the smell of sautéed minnows, the swirl of multicolored hats on the boulevard, the delicious clink of cranberry crystal being set down on a pewter tray, there is nothing to smell with down there, nothing to see with, nothing to hear, we simply feel and what we feel is not always so marvelous, and thus when they came to me, I said, so to speak, ‘yes, I will do it,’ and they took me to a large room lined, as I saw afterwards, with row upon row of hangers upon which hung the repaired remains of all those who they told me were there with me, and the number was so great that when they had me back in what one of them referred to inelegantly but not inaccurately as ‘my drippings,’ which looked not much the worse for wear, incidentally, for what they had been put through when I leaned too close to the shredder, I swooned a little to think of us all being stored in this way, with all of our remains kept on hand, a practicality which they explained after kicking me back to attention that greatly facilitated the sort of furlough that from time to time they granted so many of us, and then they kicked me again and without ceremony shoved me through a door that had been burned through the rough concrete wall and I found myself in the front room lying on the marvelous red velvet couch you must have walked past when my wife brought you in to join me and which I spent endless miraculous hours on before my ravishment, if you will permit a moment’s fancy, by the shredder, not an instant of which I felt at the time, by the way, but all of which I have felt every — I underscore every moment since — regardless, there I was on the red velvet couch and then a moment later there was my poor wife, who after letting out a screech that, alas, quite neatly shattered the aforementioned cranberry glass pitcher and two out of four hourglasses from my old collection, came and knelt beside me and asked me if I had had a nice rest and then what would I like for the lunch she would begin preparing the minute we had returned from our walk, a walk I was none too eager to embark upon, being unsure of the viability, you see, of my drippings, but I had returned, as I said, in the main, for her, and so I allowed her to attempt to set a hat on my head, to whimper a little when it fell through me and onto the floor, to chatter a great deal at me about what seemed very little, and then to lead me downstairs and out onto the street, which is when I had the happy fortune of encountering you — happy not merely because of your kindness to my wife, during what she had described to me as her recent moments of doubt, but also because, and here we come to the crux of it, between the time that I had been stuffed, with very little ceremony I might add, back into my drippings and the moment I swooned, I noticed that on the short rack in the sort of dressing room they had me in there were a number of other drippings at the ready just next to the bloody hanger on which, I presumed, my own had been taken from, which would have meant very little at all except that after I swooned and before I came fully to, under the shower, so to speak, of their blows, I had the distinct impression that one of them said your name, Harry, and that the other laughed after he had said it, and while of course there are untold thousands of Harrys in the world, there have never, to my knowledge, been any others in my building, and so I said to myself when my wife mentioned you and then when we saw you, I must find a way to speak to this Harry, and to tell him what I have just told you,”

“Drippings,” Harry said,

“Yes, well it’s rather unfortunate isn’t it,” Señor Rubinski said, “but when one has been on the other side, as it were, well, then it makes more sense, much more sense, I can’t tell you, my dear Harry, just exactly how much good sense it makes, especially when you have seen the hangers, all of them, and what covers the floors, they must reconstitute themselves, the drippings, because there is so much of them on the floors, it was quite slippery, but I’m wandering, this was happening earlier with my wife, I’m afraid I gave her quite a turn talking about those floors, but it’s a different matter once you’ve seen them, once you’ve been there, and know you must go back, I was lying here in my bath, greatly enjoying it when I fell asleep and was there again, and it was not a dream, no I don’t think so, and when I woke there you were, I must have dozed for some time if my wife thought to get you, but you don’t look well,”

“Don’t I?” said Harry, who now wished very much indeed that he had managed to keep his lips and mind pinched shut, that he had put them in a vice and cranked it as tightly as it would go, and that he had shut his eyes and hadn’t stared at Señor Rubinski, sitting there in his drippings, with one arm lolling over the side of the tub, “Drippings,” Harry said again and found it quite curious that he didn’t feel sick, that, unlike his reaction to Alfonso’s story about Solange, he felt no need to excuse himself and lean over the sink and retch, or run out of the Rubinski’s apartment, up to his own apartment and retch, to run out onto the street and retch, to run down the streets screaming and retching, to smash his head with a piece of brick and retch,

“Whose drippings were hanging on those hangers?” Harry said quietly, not needing to retch,

“I don’t know, I thought you might,” Señor Rubinski said,

“Well, I don’t,” said Harry, adding, “And I’m afraid that now, since I can see that you are all right, I’ll have to go,”

“All right,” said Señor Rubinski, “Yes, I suppose I am all right, yes, I suppose I am,” whereupon Harry stood, and as he did it appeared to him that all there was to Señor Rubinski was what could be seen above the surface of the water, that there was nothing below — his lower drippings had deserted him,

“Good-bye,” Harry said,

“I hope I’ve been helpful,” Señor Rubinski said,

“Yes, quite, thank you, best of luck,” Harry said, then stepped out of the bathroom, shut the door behind him, walked back down the long hallway and into the living room where he saw Señora Rubinski, asleep in an enormous green armchair pushed up close to the red couch, holding a damp, mauve handkerchief between two curled fingers, looking unnervingly like certain representations of martyred and jaundiced saints painted on one altarpiece after another during a particularly grim decade of the Northern Renaissance into which, during the early days of his despair, Harry had done no small amount of research, then, having decided not to attempt to disturb the image before him to make his report, that the drippings in the bathroom would find their way out to see the image if they wanted to, he went out the Rubinski’s door, down the stairs, and into the warm sunlight, which gave a pleasant glow to the cobbled street, despite the presence, everywhere Harry looked, of so much wind-strewn debris.

Significant weather events have the effect of accelerating the natural redistribution of the contents of cities, and even more so aseasonal events that play themselves out in population centers already so thoroughly given over to casually disseminating natural and artificial ephemera, so it was that first Solange and then Ireneo found themselves negotiating swirls and crescents of heavy sand and crushed palm frond blown half a mile inland, a suite of antique iron sconce lamps snapped off their rusting hinges, clouds of green glass, pieces of pastel-colored Styrofoam escaped, along with a packing order that ended up far out to sea, from a box swept off an oversized window ledge jutting from one of the many decrepit buildings perched in a crooked line along the city’s eastern border, and seemingly endless sheets of brightly colored newspaper, including several aged blue sheets of a commemorative sports edition of one of the larger dailies, printed twenty-five years ago, lying in a puddle of glass, perhaps torn from the wall of a café that had left its doors open, Ireneo thought as he stepped past and wished for the 100th time since he had thrown them over the cliff that he had his running shoes back or at the very least something sturdier than these cheap espadrilles, which were comfortable enough for an afternoon at the beach, but not for the sort of mileage he had put on them as he wandered the frigid streets in his damp shirt, dealing with what Doña Eulalia had told him would feel and had felt much like a withdrawal — she had experienced it herself and for a period of some hours while it was occurring had had her husband strap her to the bed so that she wouldn’t be tempted to attempt to retrieve her own treacherous shoes from the furnace or try to throw herself in after them, it was awful, she had said, noting that on top of his experience with the shoes, he had had another fright, had seen something, a speculation that Ireneo had neither contradicted nor affirmed, though he had let out a bit of a whistle that had made Doña Eulalia raise an eyebrow and say, “Ah,” which is exactly what Ireneo had said when those three, as he had spent the night referring to the connoisseurs, had a few minutes before offered to employ him, had told him that a certain guy had let them down and that they had need of someone who knew the city and had experience in what they called stuff, and that if he was interested in what would be a strictly part-time gig, one that wouldn’t conflict with his other obligations, he could start right this second by following the angel, who was at this very moment standing outside the building on the street thinking about making a getaway that would sooner or later take her and consequently Ireneo to Harry, and when he, Ireneo, had found Harry, he could tell him to come and see them in this building, second floor, door on the right, and he would have fulfilled his first task,

“Interested?” one of them said,

“Ah,” Ireneo said, but standing there with them was like standing, so the image came to him, in the center of one of those medieval maidens whose spiked doors would at any moment snap shut around him, and when one of them lifted his arm to scratch something on his face, Ireneo did something he hadn’t done very much of during his life, which is to say that he cringed, and they said,

“Good,”

and Ireneo,

“All right,” and he left the courtyard where they had been standing and without great enthusiasm began to follow the angel, who by the by seemed to him rather small and pretty as she hurried along, looking in the sudden waves of sunlight extraordinarily unbroken, thoroughly, even from his vantage point, unlike she had when he had first seen her sitting in the wake of her own melancholy at the café—an observation that caused him to reflect, salubriously, on human resilience — and as he looked at her he sped up, at very nearly the same time that, the sense of urgency surrounding her rapid forward propagation having diminished, she slowed down, so that before very long — a few paces after Ireneo had stepped over the blue sports pages in fact — he cleared his throat and came up alongside Solange, who jumped a little, then shrugged, then smiled, and so they found themselves walking next to each other, with neither one, in the instance, too terribly surprised,

“I’m supposed to follow you,” said Ireneo,

“I thought you worked for Doña Eulalia,” said Solange,

“I do,” said Ireneo, and as he said this it struck him that perhaps the “Ah” Doña Eulalia had uttered and that he had repeated, there before those three, had had some kind of prophylactic effect, after all it hadn’t taken him very long to disobey them,

“Where are you going?” he said,

“Who’s coming for him?” Solange said,

“I don’t know,”

“Is it those three?”

“I don’t know, I never know, just like I didn’t know who you called us about,”

“She doesn’t tell you?”

“She doesn’t know either, she says it’s like those images on radar, they more or less all look alike, she just has a sense of how close they are and where they’re heading,”

“Radar?”

“Yes,”

“I see,”

“That’s right,”

“Who is she?”

“Doña Eulalia? an old woman who sees things, the city is crawling with them, all cities probably are,”

“Can she help him?”

“It depends on what you mean by help, she’s something of a generalist, she’s mostly pretty indirect, but she can surprise you,”

“Have you ever worked with Lucite?”

Ireneo looked at her,

“It’s used to encase things, enclose them, you have to wear gloves,”

“No, I haven’t,”

“I lost someone very dear to me,”

“Yes, so I understand,”

“When my grief started leaving me, which it did far more quickly than I can see now that I was aware of, I started taking little bits and pieces of that person, of what was left of him, and burying them in clear plastic, there’s a whole story that goes with it,”

“Indeed,” Ireneo said,

“One that found its ending last night after I left Harry’s and went home, would you like to hear that ending?”

“Yes,”

“One of my tears, which is to say a shard of metal caught in Lucite, spoke to me at some length as I was crossing the kitchen to go to bed, what do you think of that?”

“These are strange times,”

“They seem to grow stranger and stranger,”

“What did it say?”

“It said, in essence, that it no longer wished to be a tear,”

“Who could blame it,”

“That’s more or less what I thought and how I responded and then it went quiet and I threw it and its fellows into the trash,”

“Which is where we all end up,”

“I think I’m going to go over to the boulevard and just stand there for a while,”

“Do you mind if I join you, I think I won’t go and find Harry just now,”

“You could find him later, in fact, later, I’ll probably go and see him and you can follow me then, if you still want to,”

“I’m not sure I will,”

“I like that Harry,”

“Yes,”

“I like him quite a bit, although it’s probably hopeless, my liking him, what isn’t?”

“Doña Eulalia had me light more than one candle for him,”

“Multiple blips on the radar screen?”

“Something like that,”

“You know those old bastards used to bring me candy,”

“Candy?”

“Boxes and boxes, like they were after my teeth, wanted them to rot and fall out,”

“Doña Eulalia said he, Harry, was like a well that had sprung a leak, and that it would likely be hard to find a way to plug it,”

“I feel a little like a well that’s sprung a leak,”

“I could tell you about my shoes,”

“Yes, and the cliff,”

“I’ll think about Harry later,”

“Come stand with me for a while,”

“They told me stories, my shoes did, talked to me all the time,”

“You don’t look so fabulous, you look like you’ve got a leak too,”

“I’m sorry I was short with you last night, I’d just gotten rid of the shoes, and they were there when I did it,”

“The connoisseurs?”

“They kept me from jumping,”

“What do you mean?”

“After the shoes, they walked by just as I was about to do it,”

“I’m confused,”

“Maybe because they knew that they’d want me today, that their other guy had let them down,”

“Other guy?”

“They didn’t say who it was,”

“Alfonso? The centaur?”

“They didn’t say, just that they needed someone else, part time, for the odd job, I shouldn’t have gone with them, I was enjoying my breakfast,”

“We have to go back there, Alfonso’s a friend,”

“I don’t know if it was this Alfonso,”

“He’s a friend,”

“I’m not going back there,”

“It won’t take a second,”

“Oh, I think it will take longer than a second,”

Solange smiled, winningly, and grabbed Ireneo by his generously muscled forearm.

Not long after it happened, when the black wool he refused to take off even to sleep was still relatively fresh and the snow and ice covering the world was beginning to mix with mud and rain, Harry went for a walk that was remarkable only inasmuch as he was unable, even when he lost feeling in his extremities and every part of him began to ache and his lungs felt from one moment to the next as if they were being shot at with a nail puncher, either to reverse direction or stop until, thirteen hours after he had started, he staggered right, then left, then fell over into a large juniper bush, and although after his recovery he scoffed aloud when one of the counselors he had been assigned by his former company remarked that he had been “giving physical dimension to his grief,” since that time he had envisioned his so-called grief as a long, terrible line frayed a little at the ends, an image that might help us to understand not so much how but why it was, as we move toward our own ending, that just as Solange and Ireneo, after very little discussion, turned around to go and see about the golden centaur, Harry emerged from a small street on the other side of the boulevard and, after a moment’s pause brought on by his surprise at seeing them at all, let alone together, called out, but they had already turned and his voice was cut down by the poorly tuned chords of a sitar being struck with great vigor by a rather overdrawn bright-blue Hindu-swami sort of a statue, who had apparently rushed in to fill the void left by the Yellow Submarine, and in the seconds it took Harry to step through to the other side of the sound and the clearly skeptical fistful of people surrounding it, the two of them were disappearing around a thick, double-globed lamppost and striding off purposively, and although he had had it vaguely in mind to see if Alfonso (who was of course nowhere to be seen) would let him borrow back the submarine, or perhaps even give him one more ride in it for old time’s sake, catching up with Solange and Ireneo immediately swept any other considerations aside, and in hopes of quickly closing the gap between them, he pressed his still nifty (though otherwise unremarkable) shoes into a fairly satisfactory lope, one that on a day when his mind was less encumbered by thoughts of racks hung with drippings, memories of glittering calderas, and small, wet arms and calves in the moonlight, might have made him think of his time as a secondary school football player, when anything he couldn’t run past he could run through, unfortunately, immediately after successfully veering first past a chunky tourist sticking his fingers deep into a packet of candied oranges, then a bald man cradling the arm of a giant doll or mannequin no doubt shaken loose during the storm, then an ancient woman in dirty slippers slowly pushing a pram that held no less than five small, live, furred things, he was forced to stop by an enormous sparkling water truck that idled fully thirty seconds before pulling forward and clearing the way for Harry, who bolted forward so fast that he slipped on a pile of wet sand and twisted his knee and had to slow to a jog, which as it turned out was itself unsustainable, as, mere seconds after he had spotted Solange and Ireneo again, now off at a troubling remove, he began to feel faint, then remembered he had eaten and drunk nothing since the odd meal the evening before, and of course his sleep had been wretched, and he had just spent an hour in the company of Señor Rubinski’s drippings, and of course They were coming, and to make matters worse his voice was even less effective here in the face of a jackhammer that was smashing into the old stone ahead of him than it had been in proximity to the sitar, which is all to say that rather than closing the gap, as his initial burst had seemed to promise, said gap widened, with the result that the day’s third instance of tailing was an almost perfect inverse of the first two, and even if the chance intervention of the memory of himself, standing in his brown velvet jacket at the bar thinking of stealing church bells and lying not altogether chastely beside a glamorous co-star, momentarily kept his mind out of the Rubinski’s bathroom, Doña Eulalia’s parlour, and the long-ago motel room in that world covered with snow, the reprieve was short lived, and if he hadn’t chanced to look up just as the now-tiny figures he had almost forgotten he was following turned off the street into a building that seemed each time he looked at it as he drew nearer to have subtly changed not just its shape but its entire aspect, he might have taken one of the sharp turns his mind kept offering him and run into a wall or through a shop window or, as it had seemed to him the moment before he had fallen into the juniper bush, into a black lake ringed with snow, but in the event a few minutes later — having passed, without noticing him, Raimon in his Che Guevara costume emerging lost in thought from a side street — he stepped through the front door of the building into a courtyard lit even in the middle of the afternoon by globes of colored glass that rose along the undulating interior of the building, somehow deepening the smell of overripe citrus and damp stone wafting around him, not to mention the contrast between this enclosure and Doña Eulalia’s, which had smelled like nothing more than cinders and had been lit only by a single bare bulb hanging from a cornice that now put him in mind of a description he had once read in which a man, lost in a blackness of the sewers beneath a great city sees a single chink of light in the ceiling far above, then strode forward to the stairwell where, his eyes having inscribed an arc that took them all the way up one wavy bank of windows then slowly back down the other, he saw what his peripheral vision had initially told him were three more of the globes: the pale faces of the connoisseurs pressed against the glass of a second-floor window grinning down at him.

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

“Hello Harry,”

“Run, Harry,”

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

“They are coming,”

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

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

“Undoubtedly,” Solange said,

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

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

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

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

“Well then, fuck you, friend,” the connoisseur said and lifted out one of the chocolates and handed it to the one of the other connoisseurs who popped it into his mouth and said as he chewed,

“What my colleague means is, welcome Knight of the Woeful Countenance, welcome to our fucking abode,”

“Thank you, I was following Solange and Ireneo,” Harry said,

“Who aren’t here,” said one of the connoisseurs,

“Then perhaps they’re in another apartment,”

“They’re not in another apartment,”

“There are no other apartments, it’s all offices, this isn’t even an apartment,”

“This is our office,”

“Our orifice,”

“Nice, huh?”

“Connoisseur central,”

“Where we do our business, direct traffic, etc.,”

“Sorry about the mess,”

“It is messy,” Harry said,

“Yeah, well, it’s been a long week,”

“A long century,”

“I should go find Solange and Ireneo, I’m sorry to have troubled you,”

“They aren’t here, not in this building, you won’t find them,”

“Believe us,”

“Although if you want to step over to the window here in about five seconds, you’ll see one of them,”

“Yeah?” Harry said,

“Come on over, stand between us,”

Harry went to the window and, with connoisseurs on either side of him, watched a rather red-faced Solange burst through the street door, hurl herself halfway across the courtyard, then vanish,

“What are you thinking she’s good for?”

“Once more, twice?”

“Twice, at least, this guy’s got real charm,”

“And she knows he’s here,”

“She does indeed,”

“You sure you don’t want a chocolate?”

“I should be going,” Harry said,

“What’s the rush?”

“Yeah, what’s the hurry?”

“Alfonso’s here too, in the other room,”

“Care to see him?”

“I bet he’d like to see you, he’s not feeling too well,”

“Got something at the market, didn’t sit right,”

“Alfonso’s here?”

“That traitorous son of a bitch,”

Harry looked first at one connoisseur, then at the others, and then at his pale reflection in the window,

“What’s he doing here?”

“Alfonso? we were talking,”

“Deliberating on the subject of loyalty, or the evils of being a blabbermouth,”

“Now he’s resting,”

“I think I understand,” Harry said,

“Understand what?”

“This, you three, I mean not exactly, but sort of, this is bad, right?”

“What’s exactly? Who cares?”

“Not I, said the fat, fucking fly,”

“He’s getting it,”

“You think so?”

“It’s finally coming back to him,”

Harry looked at their reflections, took a deep breath then another then took a step backwards, and saw that the three of them formed a kind of tripod upon which, Harry thought, a terrible, almost invisible camera could sit and snap photographs of his misery,

“You didn’t change the tires, right, wasn’t that the story?”

“You had to take a little trip and you were a little busy and you didn’t get the tires changed and, well, you know, wintertime, fuck,”

“I think I’d like to sit down, I think that would be very nice,” Harry said,

“Well pull yourself up some fucking floor, make yourself at home, after all it was us you really wanted to see, wasn’t it, and now here you fucking are,”

Here I fucking am, Harry thought then went and leaned against a vaguely slimy wall and crossed his arms over his chest, but instead of sinking he held his position and it was as if he had entered into one of those more or less desirable moments when the powers of hindsight offer themselves in advance and nothing is surprising, nothing is ever surprising again, not at all,

“Drippings,” he said,

“Fuck yes,” one of the connoisseurs said,

“Waiting for you,”

“Say the word and we’ll get their drippings back on them, in fact, bammo, it’s already done,”

“The word?” Harry said,

“The words is what he means, and technically you already said them, back there,”

“At the motel,” Harry said,

“Cold night if I remember it correctly,”

“Which of course he does,”

“I remember everything, so do they,”

“You said ‘Take me instead,’ Do you remember saying that, Woeful Knight?”

“Yes,” Harry said,

“Well, say it again and now we’ll take you instead,”

“I meant to change the tires,” Harry said, and as he said it he thought he heard an invisible shutter click above them,

“Who gives a fuck, that was twenty years ago,”

“I even had an appointment to get it done,” Harry said,

“Of course you did, now say it again, and we’ll get them for you and you can have a nice little visit and then we’ll take you,”

“Why?” Harry said,

“You think walking up and down the boulevard is enough to float our boat, we want you, you’re a classic case, you appeal to us, we said so in that postcard we sent you,”

“That postcard?”

“The one with the picture of the city on it,”

“That came years ago,”

“You took your time getting here,”

“We’d practically forgotten the whole thing, the whole sorry business,”

“I thought you said you remember everything,” said Harry.

“Figure of speech,”

“Whatever,”

“Who cares?”

“The point is we had to walk by you in your Woeful Knight gear two or three times to get it, and then we thought, good, finally, let’s do it now,”

“Why now?”

“What’s wrong with now?”

“Is there something pleasant happening in your life that you wouldn’t like to leave? Something agreeable? Something nifty? Something neato?”

Harry didn’t answer and the connoisseurs, all of whom had been looking at Harry with satisfied grins on their faces, suddenly turned and looked back out the window,

“Here she comes again,”

“She’s slowing down,”

“Looks like she’s going to have a fucking heart attack,”

“Too much jam,”

“Not enough candy,”

“She should have accepted that gift,”

“Like the old lady did,”

“That old lady liked her chocolates,”

“Nice old lady,”

“Maybe that young guy of hers would have been spanking enough, for not accepting our largesse,”

“There’s never enough spanking,”

“Amen to that,”

Harry, standing on his tiptoes, could just see the street door opening,

“Well, now that’s interesting,” said one of the connoisseurs,

“Yes, it fucking is,”

Harry took a step forward and saw that both Raimon and Ireneo were now with the indubitably persuasive Solange as she charged across the courtyard, and not for the first time since his interview with Señor Rubinski he remembered the old story of the monkey’s paw and the story of the poor Black Dahlia and the word “DRIPPINGS” appeared in all caps in his mind, then he thought about Raimon and his hands and Doña Eulalia and her lemon crème cookies and the old women in black dresses and the bell that was still in his pocket and something came to him,

“He changed his mind, and now Raimon’s running with them,”

“How the fuck do you like that?”

“I’m not sure I do,”

“Listen,” Harry said, taking the bell out of his pocket, bending over, setting it on the floor beside him and giving it a whack, “I think I would like to see Alfonso, after all,”

The connoisseurs looked back at him,

“In a minute, back to business, say the words first,” one of them said,

“Yeah, excuse us, you have our full attention, especially since you brought that fucking bell, now say the words first, that’s how it works, we have to follow procedure,”

“They are coming,” said Harry, and hit the bell again,

“Yes, they fucking are, but only if you say the words first, say the fucking words, and stop with the bell,”

“Those are the words,” said Harry, hitting the bell once more,

“Listen, Knight of the Woeful Fucking Countenance, the fucking words are ‘take me instead’ and now for jerking us around with that bell you better add a fucking ‘please,’”

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry could see smoke beginning to seep from their mouths and bits of blood drip from their lips and an icy lake opened up behind them and a car skidded off the road and slid sideways into it, and it occurred to him that perhaps what he was seeing now was one of the pictures the almost invisible camera had taken and that, in fact, he wasn’t seeing anything, or not what he thought he was seeing, right this moment, at all,

“I’m going to go in and ask Alfonso if he’ll let me borrow the submarine again and then I’m going to go and apologize to Solange for lying to her and I’m going to tell her about my kids, and then I’m going to buy those two guys a drink,” Harry said, hitting the bell a final time, then walking toward the door,

“That’s beautiful, fuck face,”

“Yeah, that’s just gorgeous, now if you want to see those kids again, turn around, and say the words.”

Harry didn’t turn around and he didn’t say the words though a moment later he wished he had because as his hand closed around the doorknob one of the connoisseurs emitted something like a snicker, which Harry understood quite clearly when he had the door open and could see what was in the room waiting for him on a filthy black couch they were sharing with a bloodied and unmoving Alfonso, which couch looked directly onto a large backlit aquarium full of multi-colored houndfish and blood parrots that held his darlings’ attention the way the television once had when they had used to sit in front of it in the early morning in the flickering half-light, all those years ago, in fact they seemed utterly mesmerized by the fish, which were doing nothing so terribly striking as they moved slowly in and out of synthetic coral and plastic seaweed and a tower of bubbles that rose through the center of the aquarium like a column of air, and while it suddenly seemed imperative to Harry that he gobble them up with his eyes and take them into his arms, he was halted first by Alfonso’s voice — which seemed, by some trick of acoustics, to come out of the aquarium and not from Alfonso’s mouth—“You still owe me your story,” and then by his own answer, given as he stared into the roiling water, “I think it’s just getting started, here, right now,” so that when, as he began to lower himself onto the couch and to lift his arms and open his hands and found himself back out on the street just a short distance behind Solange, Ireneo, and Raimon, the image that played on his retinas as he started to run was not of his darlings but of a brightly lit box in which dark things moved, and though, when having reentered the courtyard, he yelled, “I’m sorry, take me instead,” he and these dark things were flung back out onto the street, where, as his friends came up and took his arms and breathed softly on either side of him, he stood for what felt like a very long while watching them.