Ray of the Star (2 page)

D
eep slumber should immediately have ensued, but the most annoying part of Harry’s nocturnal disorder was that the greater his fatigue the more pronounced it grew, so that instead of immediately and gratifyingly giving himself over to oblivion after the long journey, he was obliged to spend the better part of an hour simultaneously resisting the urge to rip the affected flesh off his burning legs, which felt like an army of invisible termites was settling in for a long stay, or like someone had taken the content of an endless Tarkovsky movie and somehow shoved it under his skin, or like all the hair on his thighs and calves was growing inward at sickening speed, and doing vigorous knee bends and imprecise sun salutations and running through low-level logic puzzles—tedious things to do with knights and knaves—in an effort to trick his mind into thinking he was interested in being awake rather than asleep, which usually, eventually, gave him some relief, and as he went through this prolonged version of what, with certain variations, had over the years become his nightly routine, the low sloping ceiling he had already managed to smack his head against, the faded prints of deltas, root systems, and family trees that hung in worn-out frames from the walls, the dishes stacked precariously on shelves that were manifestly too small for them, the uneven tile that covered the floor of the kitchenette, seemed, as his mind mashed them together, like an extension of the interiors of the unpleasant air terminal and the rattling airplane and the house whose keys now hung in or lay under the forsythia bush, and it was hard not to think, with despair, about the remark a clerk at the local supermarket had made—when Harry, unprompted, had blurted out that he was planning to leave and probably forever—that it was “too bad we have to go with ourselves when we undertake such journeys,” although he was quite surprised that when a few minutes later he sank onto his new bed, and began to drift, his thoughts turned not in the direction of the clerk’s observation but toward a pair of wire service articles he had read just before leaving for the airport, the first of which had concerned a woman who had been stopped at a border somewhere in Gaza because of her unusual shape and was found to have wrapped three baby crocodiles around her stomach in an attempt to smuggle them into Israel, a discovery that had caused an apparently quite general pandemonium, comprised of screaming and running about, which image had actually been matched, if not exceeded, in its agreeable improbability, by the other article, which announced the recent marriage of the world’s tallest person, and showed a picture of him standing with his new bride, who had her arm wrapped around his hips, and which as a kind of afternote, related the key role played by this really very tall person in using his long arms to remove chunks of plastic that had become lodged in a dolphin’s stomach, and that would have killed it without his timely intervention, and as Harry made his way, panting slightly, into sleep, a wary but resolute Chinese giant with a trio of dolphins and a small Chinese woman strapped around his midsection led him there.

“N
ow,” said Harry, speaking to the mud-colored pigeon scrabbling away at the inhospitable roof’s edge below him, and to the bits and pieces of clouds that were forever threatening, at least since he had been there—how many days had it been? not so many really—to coalesce into something dim and wet, “Now,” he said again, “I will begin my assault on life,” but
where
to begin: with a bit of hard sausage and some rosemary goat cheese and certainly a pickle and a bit of bread then some sparkling water, followed by a slice of apple and some additional cheese—blue this time—all of which and more Harry had procured that morning at the city’s central market: a gigantic, cheery affair attended by red-faced, thick-fingered men and women who had seemed to him almost grotesquely happy to be hovering over their wares, which were no doubt fine enough, but still, surely not terribly profitable, not to mention constantly threatening to rot or tumble to the ground, plus there had been a chill in the air, something vaguely sinister, and already, even this early in the season, the smell of tour-bus diesel exhaust and brightly clad tourists following locals carrying clipboards and flags, a combination that Harry had found just irresistible enough to attach himself to a group of travelers from India, who after a time had looked at him with such collective fury that he had been obliged, or so it had seemed, to run away at top speed, his heavy bags bonking his knees, “Which means nothing,” Harry said to the one-legged pigeon, “What do you know of happiness, or remember of it, not, I imagine, very much,” and he brought one of the tiny pickles to his mouth then pulled it away again and turned from the window and the table and made for the near dark of the bedroom, where after staring at the crumpled heap of himself in a wall mirror for several minutes, he said, though without great conviction, “you must be mad.”

P
ossibly 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.

G
iven 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.

Y
es 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.

A
t 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.