Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt Read Free Book Online

another, and so began a very long day, one that, by the by, involved assorted insults, copious sweating, a cornucopia of low-grade pains, far too much thinking about the folly of human endeavor generally and his own specifically, and a patent inability not to forget that he was meant to be a statue of sorts and crane his neck in order to catch a glimpse of the silver angel, who, when in the early afternoon she appeared one hundred meters up from him, he could just see shining off in the distance like a silver suffix to all that had gone wrong in his life and a silver prefix to all that might, if he could only—fat chance—hold his position long enough, and, over time, move his box far enough up the boulevard, still go right.

W hile Harry stood, woeful, let’s face it, indeed, on his box under the giant plane tree, already well aware—even with downcast eyes one could both see and of course hear the snickering—that the passersby, when they arrived at the silver angel, would now include him along with the other second and third raters in their commentary when they stood in wonder before her beautiful, broken face and extraordinary wings, Solange stood on her own box thinking about the little salmon-colored slip of paper with the number she now realized—having gotten over the sense of desperation that had set in after no one had arrived that evening in the café to collect her—she very much wished to redial, while being cognizant that upon returning home after having been, so to speak, stood up in what had felt like her hour of greatest need, instead of covering it in the Lucite she had on hand and that she used almost daily on certain objects in a largely unarticulated attempt to afford them some measure of permanence or protection, she had torn it to shreds and thrown it out the window and watched it float down through leaves and lights toward the street below her building, and that although for days she had combed the ground inside and out of the subway she had not found a replacement, only gum wrappers, beer bottle labels, shopping lists, burned photographs, bits of plastic and endless shards of shattered colored glass, the whole, it seemed to her, threatening to rise as if caught in fierce winds and blot out whatever dim light she was still able to shine on the calming songs she had always sung to herself: in short, still not so good and maybe even a little worse, the mental state of Solange, the silver angel, and it was certainly untainted by any awareness that a woeful knight/laminated hobgoblin/my God, what the fuck are you supposed to be, friend? had set up his shop down the boulevard in hopes of eventually edging his way into her peripheral and maybe, eventually, frontal vision: how strange the storms, some small, some large, that are forever sweeping over us before we’ve even had a chance to think “I must seek shelter,” and Ireneo, meanwhile, had taken up jogging.

R ediscovered jogging might be more accurate in this instance, as Ireneo had once done a very good deal of jogging indeed, so much so that at university, when he was still “on track” to take a degree in contemporary finance and assume a position in his mother’s accounting firm, which would have given him, even at the entry level, access to a company car and a company apartment and an expense account pointed skyward—in other words “the works”—he had been a member of the school running club, and had often finished near the head of the pack when informal races were organized, but that had been long ago, so long in fact that when, after Doña Eulalia had asked him to step up his efforts to find Harry and Solange, and he had thought of how much more distance he could cover at a run, he was no longer aware that he still owned a pair of beat-up but serviceable Asics running shoes, so that their apparent apparition—he had set them there, in the guise of bookends, so long ago that they had ceased, in any meaningful way, to exist—on