by Laird Hunt
II
The past, since it does not exist, is
hard to erase. Tears and the gnashing
of teeth.
This move, the difficult, perhaps impossible perfor mance of which many of us can commiserate with, in which the body leaps up and back, while time, of course, continues to move forward, might be diverting enough to stop a moment and consider—picture for example the long gorgeous lift of the Olympic athlete in the midst of a perfect floor exercise, or the delicate, deadly grace of the Shaolin Temple Kung Fu master flipping backwards, through a snow shower, above waving bamboo, or a determined teenaged girl crashing backwards over and over again into bright blue water—as having teetered for a moment at the midpoint of this story, the days again began to slip by, and while it might be interesting to consider in greater detail, for example, how Ireneo came to the conclusion that his mother was, if not faking her illness, then certainly exaggerating its extent, and that in consequence his presence at her bedside was no longer required, and that he might just as well slip out in the middle of the night and run most of the way back to the city, where, after paying a brief visit to Doña Eulalia, who had recovered from her own dubious illness and informed him that, as she sensed the situation regarding the first individual with the broken face had been greatly ameliorated and that communicating with her was now merely a matter of professional courtesy, finding Harry, for whom the situation was worsening, should be his priority, he made haste for the boulevard and an interview with the centaur, who, at the end of his shift, told him that the individual he was searching for could be found in such and such a part of the city, or how it was that one balmy evening, and not for the first time, Solange—whose curiosity and progressive warming had led her to remove her silver tears one by one and take concomitant, exploratory steps across the boulevard in the direction of the improbable, appealing yellow apparition—came to be leaning, with a slight smile gracing her never-smiling silver lips, against the side of the Yellow Submarine, while Harry, heart smashing up and down inside him, lay just a papier mâché wall away from her, whistling a sort of Beatles medley, we could just say that while time has moved forward, some not insignificant backflipping has occurred, and consequently, we are no longer quite where we last were, a statement that, if we accept the notion that complexity is derived from the intricate and unexpected arrangement of banalities, we can be content with, though perhaps not in the stomach-fluttering way that Harry was content to be lying where he was lying, more like in the understatedly pleased way that Ireneo was content to be running in the city again, even following a piste he was absolutely certain was an incorrect one, that Harry wouldn’t be anywhere near the arcaded renaissance courtyard the tricky-looking centaur had directed him to, that all he would find there would be the usual motley assortment of northern European group-tour participants, some wearing ball caps and/or T-shirts proclaiming their affiliations, as with unadulterated pleasure—convinced they were at last, after a series of false starts, in the midst of an authentic moment—they gobbled second-rate tidbits thawed and deep fried in filthy kitchens hiding behind ornate exteriors, which is exactly what Ireneo did find and had plenty of time to consider, and from multiple angles, as for good measure he ran several slow laps waiting to see if Harry would make an appearance on the terrace of the grand café under the arches, where Bavarians ate fried potatoes and bruschetta with such infectious gusto that eventually Ireneo plopped down at an empty table and ordered a large bottle of sparkling water and a plateful of potatoes, while his running shoes, no worse for wear after his long run down the coast, and certainly no more silent, burbled on, as they had been doing all morning, about trust, about placing one’s fate in the hands of strangers, about clandestine meetings under facades carved from stone in the desert and trysts carried out in rooms lit by low-grade electricity derived from enormous water wheels, a theme that had switched around by the time Ireneo began attacking his fried potatoes—which he dipped in crab mayonnaise—in earnest, to a discussion first of modes of conveyance in general and then of underwater modes of conveyance in particular, and as Ireneo lifted his glass of water and held it aloft so that the backlit tables full of Bavarians looked like the bits of shifting color in a kaleidoscope, he said, “Ah, for fuck’s sake,” put his glass down, ate his last fried potato, and ran back to the boulevard, though by the time he had reached it night had fallen and all the statues and the submarine had gone.
It might be too much to request of the reader, already asked for a good deal of indulgence in the matter of the backflips, to imagine that while Ireneo was running his laps, eating his potatoes, and listening to his shoes, Harry stopped whistling, swallowed deeply, and started speaking, and that, after stressing that he was an acquaintance of the submarine’s owner, Alfonso, who of course was well known to Solange (a fact she confirmed), part of what Harry eventually said was, “There’s plenty of room, would you like to see what this is like on the inside,” and that Solange surprised no one more than herself by saying, “Yes,” and that, further, Alfonso, who each evening helped Harry return the submarine to its garage, appeared at a propitious moment, understood immediately, even though the interior of the submarine was dead silent, what had transpired and asked the two of them if they might be interested in a ride, the response to which was a muffled “All right,” from one voice, or the other, or both, Alfonso thought, as he disengaged the submarine and, with only slightly more trouble than he had had in pushing Harry by himself, rolled them first down the boulevard—the remnants of the day’s crowds parting before them with smiles and cameras cocked—and then along one gently curving street and quiet plaza after another, with here and there a splashing fountain, which transformed the sticky pavement beneath his feet, illuminated by shop windows and the occasional streetlamp, into the surface of an unnamed body of water, and that it crossed Harry’s mind, as he lay now just inches from Solange’s silver face, neither of them saying a word, their silence seeming like the first part of an understanding, that Alfonso was a kind of gondolier and the submarine a gondola and the streets watery thoroughfares, while Solange thought, we are in a submarine, protected from the terrible depths, and the lights we can see through the grill are the entrances to grottos, although of course they both thought many other things, especially when Alfonso paused for a moment before a pair of skeleton puppets, one playing a grand piano, the other a violin, the music being emitted from a gramophone standing between the two young women discretely working the marvelous puppets not anything either of them could have named, though we might as well note that it was Brahms, a jaunty piece that, being played as it was by the two little skeletons in their evening wear, seemed to color the air in the submarine an opalescent indigo that sent them both swimming off together into the depths Solange had imagined and Harry had intuited, and that, finally, Alfonso rolled the Yellow Submarine up to the gaily lit window of one of the grottos that both of them had looked upon with greatest interest and asked the two submariners if they might be interested in debarking, momentarily, in order to attend a small, convivial gathering of friends, with the understanding that he, Alfonso, would be prepared to set out again at a moment’s notice should a hasty departure seem indicated … but this is more or less what occurred, and Harry and Solange, who had begun their day on opposite sides of the boulevard, found themselves near the end of it in the company of Alfonso, enveloped in a cloud of growing familiarity that felt as freshly promising to both of them as a shower of melting snow falling against a backdrop of pure blue sky, stepping together through the doorway of a gallery opposite the city’s great cathedral—the very one where Ireneo, now on his way home to await Harry’s reappearance on the boulevard the following day, most frequently lit his candles—and into a small crowd of off-duty living statues that burst into spontaneous applause when they saw Solange, whom they hadn’t seen off the boulevard in ages, and for several minutes she was swept away into a collective embrace that gave Harry the opportunity to turn to Alfonso and t
hank him, and for Alfonso to bow and say, “You still owe me your story, and not just its outline,”
“It may have a new ending,”
“We can only hope,”
“Yes, yes we certainly can.”
Drinks at the event they were attending were procured by pushing one of two buttons set close together near the baseboard beneath the front window, which prompted a slender hand to appear out of a small hole cut into the floor, a hand that would, when given a modest amount of money, reemerge with an ice-cold bottle of sparkling water, or a glass of grenadine, or a chocolate malt, while donations to the gallery hosting the event could be made by holding a bill under a piece of nearby plastic tubing that snaked its way up to the ceiling where it curved around and around before plunging into a clear receptacle, already well supplied with bills that would dance madly when a button near the opening on the other side of the room was pushed and a fresh bill was sucked into it, a seductive spectacle that deprived both Harry, holding a chocolate malt, and Solange, a glass of grenadine, of several bills each, and if a line had not begun to form behind them they might well have allowed the contraption to suck up the entire collective contents of their wallets, which would have been a shame because, as they discovered, feeding additional bills into a slot in the floor caused a room that housed a griffon’s skeleton to light up under the oak planking, and furthermore there were tempting deep-fried items on offer at back tables that Alfonso convinced them to sample, and so it was that Harry drank a chocolate malt and ate a deep-fried clove cookie while silver-faced Solange interspersed bites of deep-fried almond butter squares with sips of grenadine and waves at Julius Caesar, Atlas, and Che Guevara, the latter who ran straight over, stuffed his unlit cigar in his mouth, and gave Solange a bear hug, lifting her straight off the floor and twirling her around, before turning to Harry, bowing, and suggesting that the two of them take the air, that it was a splendid night, there was a marvelous little garden attached to the store, etc.,
“Well,” Harry said,
“Go on, go on, Raimon is an old friend,” Solange said,
“And that’s really why I wanted to have a word,” said Raimon, once they had made their way through a back room and into what was indeed a thoroughly charming tree-filled garden, lit with strings of lights that were reflected in a handsome, merrily plashing pond surrounded by high walls, one of which, according to Raimon, who lit a red cigar and leaned against an ornamental quince, had been built by the Romans as part of the ancient city’s outer defenses, many relics of which Harry couldn’t have failed to notice were still standing amidst the modern edifices,
“Fascinating,” said Harry,
“Yes,” said Raimon, “Though of course every now and again some section of wall, uncared for by the municipal authorities, crumbles to the ground, leaving only its absence behind,”
“Its absence …”
“Its afterglow, in which some aspect of the former wall might be said to remain standing,”
“I like that,” Harry said,
“Are you familiar with negativity delirium?” Raimon asked,
“No,” Harry said,
“It’s the evil inverse of phantom limb syndrome, whereby, rather than missing limbs and organs maintaining their presence, present limbs and organs vanish,”
“That’s awful,”
“It’s diabolical,”
“I’ve often thought of chopping off my legs, because of the condition I suffer from, but now I can see that they might not be so easy to get rid of,”
“Not so easy at all, take for example, the case of my missing hands,” said Raimon, wedging his brightly burning cigar in the corner of his mouth and holding his hands up in the air,
“What are those things?” said Harry,
“You can see them too?”
“Your hands, yes,”
“Not everyone can see them,”
“How extraordinary,”
“It’s the greatest mystery and speaks to the core of this whole business, which is to say that they’ve come back, but not quite the same and not quite in the right place,”
“Yikes,” said Harry,
“I’ve never heard of such a case and I’ve done a great amount of research,” said Raimon,
“Nor have I,” said Harry, for lack of anything terribly apropos to offer, while trying and failing to see in what way the hands were wrongly placed,
“If it were an instance of phantom limb syndrome, we might not be surprised to know that the limb in question had returned, in fact it is quite common for them to return to the wrong place, my own uncle lost his left ring finger to a ripsaw and had it return some months later in between the middle and index finger of his right hand—it was most distressing for him and all of us, but this is an instance of negativity delirium in which what has vanished returns and is visible, at least to some,”
Harry wasn’t quite sure what to say to this either so contented himself to raise an eyebrow and nod in an enabling manner,
“Shall we go back inside?” Raimon said, looking at his hands and shrugging, as if there was nothing further that could or should be said,
“Yes,” said Harry,
“I’m glad we had a chance to chat,”
“I am too,”
“That’s really all I wanted, was to chat,”
“I’m glad we could,”
“She’s had a very rough time of it,”
“So I gather,”
“You could say that the universe has conspired against her,”
“I’m in a position to empathize,”
“I’m so very sorry,”
“Thank you,”
“It is all much more difficult than it ought to be, isn’t it?”
“It is indeed,” Harry said.
The statues present were either in partial or complete costume, which gave the wonder-filled room, through the front window of which the Yellow Submarine was fully visible, the air of a carnival, or, when Cleopatra and the Willow Tree began dancing next to the deep-fryers, of a masked ball, so that for a time after his return from the garden, and his only very slightly unnerving conversation with Raimon, whom he had rather liked, Harry’s happiness knew, as they say, no bounds, and when the Oak Tree pulled him up off his feet to dance next to the deep-fryers he did not decline, and for a few minutes he shimmied and whirled with a gusto that probably, at his age, did him no credit, but he would have continued and perhaps even pulled Solange up off her feet had he not, in looking over at her, realized that she was sagging, that the moment, such as it had been, was passing, and that it was time to get back in the submarine and sail off into the night, a course of action that, upon his suggestion, appealed to her, and that was agreeable to Alfonso, and so after finishing their food and saying good-bye, Harry and Solange climbed back into the submarine, though not before catching sight of the connoisseurs, who were just that moment arriving at the gallery, and while they were already in the submarine and rolling when the connoisseurs passed them and bade them each, by name, good-night, Harry felt Solange shiver for a moment beside him, and, although he knew it was indiscreet, could not refrain from asking her what it was,
“Nothing, fatigue,” she said,
“I understand,” Harry said, registering, as he did so, that by responding in this way, he had completed a problematic circuit, across the poles of which a bright blue band of falsehood was now crackling—she had not shivered, he was sure, because of a chill, and he had not, strictly speaking, understood anything, even if the unwelcome phrase “death and the connoisseurs” appeared for a moment before vanishing—but Harry also registered that every incipient relationship is at least partially lit by the light of dubious complicity so he simply smiled in the blue light and they continued on their way in silence, Harry thankfully not thinking about the connoisseurs, but about negativity delirium, which just about summed it all up, then about different qualities and kinds of illumination, and the structures that best masked or presented them, and Solange about
the cold efficiency with which the connoisseurs had told and retold her story—which she suspected Harry had heard, probably from Alfonso, a story addict if ever there was one, because of the gentle way he, Harry, had remarked earlier, before she had actually laid eyes on him, that the last of her tears was gone—but also about the way Harry had probed for a moment, but not pushed, had allowed her her lie of convenience without forcing her to enlarge it, or to ask him to leave well enough alone, the sort of direct statement that, uttered too early, can have unfortunate results, often because of misinterpretation, which, the thought occurred to her, had too often marred her interactions with her young man who, likely because of his youth, which if not extreme had nevertheless been considerable, had gotten it wrong, so to speak, with some frequency, which in the short term had seemed endearing, but over the long term … well there hadn’t been any long term, and whereof, she thought, we cannot speak, thereof we ought to keep our mental mouths shut and reach for the Lucite, or rose petal jam, another jar of which she had purchased that morning and had told Raimon about that night, just after he had told her that if what he thought was occurring with Harry was actually occurring then he approved: she licked her lips, which still had a few flecks of almond butter on them and thought,