Free Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt Page A

that she remembered that she had set herself the task that morning of encasing part of one of her young man’s favorite cookies in Lucite, to accompany the bit of cloth from one of his purple shirts, the red plastic tine from his comb, the knob of rubber from his shoe, the button from his canvas bag, a long curled eyelash the color of burned butter, a tiny golden cog from the watch he had been in the process of taking apart, a hardened dab of bolonaise sauce from his last meal on earth, and the second word of the title, clipped from the frontispiece of his favorite book,
Paradise Lost,
and it was only when she had pulled on her latex gloves and set herself up by the open window that the sadness that for months had been circling her like a shark swept past her and looked at her with a blank, unblinking eye, but when it bit this morning, it seemed at first like it had barely broken the skin, and even when she realized that she had been mistaken, that it had indeed broken the skin and done its customary damage, she licked a drop of rose petal jam from her lips, raised one eyebrow, looked at the crumb of ginger cookie, decided it was close to finished, thought,
hmmm,
and when she got dressed for work a few minutes later, she affixed one less tear to her cheek and walked away from her building a little more quickly and with her eyes open a little more widely than usual, with the result that when she arrived at her accustomed spot—in front of a handsome old pharmacy with a medieval theme and a bustling fried fish establishment—and saw the Yellow Submarine sitting opposite her, she stood staring at it for upwards of a minute, the way, it occurred to her as she set up her box, one waking from a bad dream stares into the face of a loved one who has unexpectedly arrived at her bedside and places a calming hand on her head, and will sit there unmoving, for exactly as long as the situation warrants, which was what —though of course Solange didn’t know this—Harry, looking out of the submarine through its false front grill, intended to do.

W ith Harry in position and now far closer, in fact almost absurdly close, as we shall see, to achieving his goal, the silver angel feeling ever-so-slightly better and already looking over, with interest, in Harry’s direction, Alfonso climbing onto his own box and leaning into his hind legs to begin the long day, a warm breeze beginning to blow up from the sea, tourists streaming in and out of the market, shop doors opening and closing and old men and women taking up their stations in shadowy doorways and windows, it is time for the connoisseurs to take their morning walk, an undertaking they execute with a measure of determined intimacy: shoulder to shoulder, though not arm in arm, matching watery gray eyes flicking this way and that like small birds in their cages leaping from bar to bar, which is to say they take it all in, these connoisseurs, and not just the shining breeze-blessed surfaces, which drive the eyes of the tourists mad with desire, but also the peripheral zones, where bits of old candy conspire with crushed soda cans and melting cubes of ice to haunt the secondary and tertiary corners of the mind, zones that the connoisseurs, who have been taking daily walks up and down the boulevard for much longer than Alfonso and his colleagues suspect, long ago learned to attend to and make use of: the corners of the mind and what makes its way into them being dynamic crossroads full of wounding vapors and fierce reflections and, as one of them once put it to the other during their endless walkings up and walkings down the boulevard and surrounding streets to check on their charges, certainly, but also, as we shall see later, to accomplish other, darker tasks, but on this morning they merely walk and observe and, occasionally, talk, as they do briefly to the silver angel—“She looks gorgeous today, don’t you think? She’s not crying as much as yesterday”—and, even more briefly,