Ray of the Star (12 page)

A
s 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.”

A
fter 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.”

In the places
only the dead dream, I will look for our reflections.

T
hat 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 …