Free Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt Page B

to the inhabitant of the Yellow Submarine—“Much fucking better, friend,”—and in between times they whistle atonal airs that infect the thought processes of more than one person they pass, including, on the edge of the small crowd gathered to watch the living trees sway, as they do twice each fifteen minutes on calm days and even more frequently on breezy ones like today, a young woman with hair the color of crushed pomegranate, who will spend the rest of the day, without knowing why, humming a tune that she’s never heard before and that, outside of dream, she will never hear again, not least because her time in the city and its environs has come almost to its end, and after weeks of popping in and out of museums, where more often than she cared for her thoughts turned to the surrealists and the Black Dahlia killing, with the effect that in the contemporary art museum, as she stood in front of Man Ray’s portrait of Miró, she began to believe that the gray-faced man standing next to her in an orange trench coat and blue ball cap was a murderer, and then, a moment later, that she was in the museum gathering inspiration for her own next killing, which she would accomplish by means of injecting fuchsia dye into the veins of the first old granny she could get her hands on and hogtie in an empty courtyard as the clock struck thirteen and the walls began to sprout cornflowers, etc.: it has been a strange time in the city for the young woman, whose jet-black roots, it must be said, are starting to show, a detail that Harry in his Yellow Submarine can’t help noticing, because the young woman, after giving the submarine a casual glance, bends over in front of the concealed grill to tie her shoe, and lets her hair cascade down over her face, causing Harry, looking away while she pauses in front of his hiding place, to smile in recognition, and to almost blurt out, “Hi, it’s me from the plane,” but after opening himself up, if one can put it that way, to Alfonso as they made their way to the boulevard, his self-censor put a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “don’t say a word, don’t even breathe, don’t let anyone else know you’re here,” and by the time he says, “fuck you,” to his self–censor, which feels good, the young woman has turned on her heel and walked off as if she has just remembered something, which she has: a butcher shop she hopes to reach before they have sold out of a particular cut of beef she is fond of, and while soon she will have left these pages forever, her unexpected appearance before the Yellow Submarine, coming so soon after that of the connoisseurs, sets up an important association in Harry’s mind, which goes through several stages of transformation in the coming hours, involving on the one hand the Black Dahlia, golf balls, fuselages, his own sorry story, knife blades, and the silver angel—who Harry is sure keeps looking over at him, or rather at his submarine—and on the other, the three old guys who pass him twice more before they vanish off to wherever it is they go to refuel, so that, eventually, as Harry lies there looking out at the world, which has been so pleasantly reduced to a tissue-covered oval grate, the phrase “death and the connoisseurs” plays over and over again in his head, though with different intonations, and after a while the repetitions start to feel almost like he is struggling to remember something that has gotten stuck and is simultaneously thumbing its nose at him and teetering on the tip of his tongue, while the repetitions occurring in the head of the young woman with hair the color of crushed pomegranates, of the atonal air effectively implanted there by the three old men, which she considers later, as she polishes off her favored cut of beef and the remains of a few string beans sautéed in salted butter, and begins to think of getting her suitcases in order, make her remember a brightly lit swimming pool she once plunged painfully into