Ray of the Star

by Laird Hunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

  At the café—which as it turned out was just around the corner from his apartment—Harry ordered a sparkling water and a packet of chips and stood at the counter and felt agreeably, in his deep blue scarf, red T-shirt, and brown velvet jacket, and with the evening paper he had picked up along the way, like the rather crisp echo of some supporting actor from a New Wave film that no one had ever seen because the studio had lost its funding and the film had been left to molder in a warehouse and the director had died and the producer had never liked the project, which had stolen too much from Godard and not enough from Truffaut, even as it thumbed its nose at Rohmer and embraced Varda, etc., and Harry kept going with this for quite some time, so long, in fact, that he had finished drink and chips both and was beginning to explore nuances of the general plot line—he had promoted himself to co-star status and had made himself the architect of a scheme to steal the bells of a provincial cathedral through machinations involving a secretary working in the mayor’s office who had a frog fetish and kept posters of endangered tree frogs around her workspace (in short, just the sort of somewhat moving, slightly somber, brilliantly stupid content out of which the New Wave engineered its complexities)—all the while looking from time to time at himself in the mirror behind the bar in a state of wonder at what he found himself calling “his inexplicable frivolity,” and while in the main he liked what he saw in the only very subtly warped glass, he had to admit that the overall impression, scarf and jacket and happy thoughts or not, was one of dilapidation, which he didn’t like to think of being set down on film for the consideration of anyone, especially when that anyone might mean viewers in the future, who would almost certainly find Harry and everyone around him horribly old-fashioned, unwashed, and half-diseased, in the way that one age naturally looks back in pity and horror, far more frequently than in admiration, at the paradigms of the other, particularly as preserved in celluloid and/or digital media, in other words, “putting myself down for the record would be a problematic venture at best,” Harry thought with a sigh, just as a tall, elegantly dressed man with extraordinary turquoise eyes and cheekbones that looked as if they could break razors came and stood beside him and ordered a sparkling water, then after a moment coughed and bowed and introduced himself as Ireneo.

  “My name is Harry,” Harry said, then called for another sparkling water and a second packet of chips, while registering that Ireneo’s face was so striking and his eyes so unusually colored that it was going to be mildly difficult to look at him as they conversed, which is what he sensed was going to occur at any moment—Ireneo’s arrival and rather formal introduction, not to mention how politely but firmly he made it clear that he was going to have no reciprocal trouble looking at Harry, seeming to presage this—but minutes were elapsing, and sips of sparkling water were being taken both by him and by Ireneo, who had a pleasant way of holding his glass with one hand and more or less cupping it with the other, all the while fixing Harry with his turquoise eyes, something Harry might ordinarily by now have found unsettling, but despite his misgivings he was still half-inhabiting his cinematic adventure and imagining he was someone else, and although he knew the shoe that had hung suspended since he had stepped into the vintage clothing store would drop at any moment and he would experience the crushing sense of fatigue and hopelessness that would drive him back to his bed to begin a horrible night, in which, nifty new bell or no nifty new bell, his sleeplessness and exhaustion would do their grim tango and jab at him with their sharpened heels, for the moment he felt almost jaunty, and the café and Ireneo and an unusually handsome woman with flecks of silver paint on her face and wrists sitting alone in the window, not to mention the moment of relative lightness he was experiencing, seemed an agreeable matrix of potential and mystery, so he sipped his water and ate his chips and waited for the conversation to begin, but when Ireneo did speak it was not to begin a conversation, it was to say, “Please come with me.”

  At that very moment, the ceiling opened up and the heavy shoe Harry had been waiting for fell, grazed his shoulder, and landed with a loud whamp beside him, and something all-too-familiar took up its station on his back and dipped its claws into his shoulders and the most tender parts of his kidneys, and his knees almost buckled, and he knew his bed and darkened room, and perhaps the new bell, were the only answer, but there he was standing in the bright light holding a packet of chips with Ireneo looking on, so he found his voice and said that he was indisposed and would have to offer his regrets—he actually used the word “regrets”—but perhaps another night, whereupon, with Ireneo still looking at him, he settled his bill, did his best to finish his water and, though he wasn’t sure why, gave the bright orange packet of chips a pat on its crinkly flank and walked out through the double glass doors into the dark, where the puddles of light leaking out of the half-lit shops made him think of a dream he had once had in which he was caught in a flooding aquarium, and as Harry wrapped himself in such thoughts and hurried home, Ireneo held his position, and slowly finished his water, although his eyes flicked across the room for a moment to the handsome, silver-flecked woman sitting alone at her table and as he did so his brow furrowed, and he took his hand off his glass, pressed his fingers into the bar and wondered whether he had gotten things right, and while the woman did not bring her eyes over quickly enough to meet his, she did feel his gaze and did look up at him, before returning to her newspaper and a story about a forensic entomologist who in her spare moments taught children to paint with maggots, which she was reading as the flimsiest of covers for her own melancholy.

  By this time, Harry was more than halfway home and, to his surprise, was beginning to feel somewhat better, the thing on his back had retracted its claws, and his breathing had deepened and he was looking with actual relish—rather than grim resignation—upon the prospect of once again locking his door behind him and lying down to begin the night with a cool towel over his eyes and listening to the small array of sounds haunting his walls and floor and ceiling, adding to them with his new bell, while he mulled over his odd, abrogated interaction with Ireneo, which he registered was an indication, this “willing contemplation of potential interaction,” as a counselor had put it more than once, that the crisis he was currently undergoing was a minor one, and not, after all, the kind that so often left him incapacitated, his breath reduced to a sort of peripatetic bubbling associated with heavy porridge and cold bogs, when from a distance he saw Señora Rubinski, his downstairs neighbor, standing outside the door to their apartment building, waiting for her husband to appear and collect her for their evening stroll, even though this husband was long-dead, something she did frequently, unpredictably, and with the greatest sociability—Harry had twice already found himself trapped in conversation—so that it was clear to our hero, in no mood to interact, that he had no choice but to turn on his heel and hurry back the way he had come, a maneuver he executed with just a touch of theatricality, vaguely hoping that if Señora Rubinski had caught sight of him turning around she would imagine that he had forgotten something and had to go back, which happened all the time, etc., Ha ha! what a fool he was, he thought, and went striding back the way he had come, moving even faster than he had previously, since he was meant to be rushing back to recuperate some lost item or relate some important information, and hurrying was a relative phenomenon, so that before very long he found himself passing the café and the very window the paint-speckled
woman was still sitting in, and although she did not notice him, he found himself struck by her again, in fact, more than struck: smacked, which was perhaps the most remarkable of the many fresh sensations he had experienced that evening, but he pressed on, did not break stride, even ducked his head, suddenly fearful that Ireneo might see him and become confused and perhaps offended, and he thought about this unfortunate possibility, of offending Ireneo, with such vigor that upon rounding the corner and beginning to put distance between himself and the violet glow of the café, and the light spilling out of the half-lit shops, he did not notice the elegant shadow languidly cutting the dark stretch of street before him, until he had come abreast of it, and Ireneo smiled and took his arm and said, “I’m glad you’ve changed your mind, Harry, yes, I’m very glad.”

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