Ray of the Star (16 page)

H
arry didn’t turn around and he didn’t say the words though a moment later he wished he had because as his hand closed around the doorknob one of the connoisseurs emitted something like a snicker, which Harry understood quite clearly when he had the door open and could see what was in the room waiting for him on a filthy black couch they were sharing with a bloodied and unmoving Alfonso, which couch looked directly onto a large backlit aquarium full of multi-colored houndfish and blood parrots that held his darlings’ attention the way the television once had when they had used to sit in front of it in the early morning in the flickering half-light, all those years ago, in fact they seemed utterly mesmerized by the fish, which were doing nothing so terribly striking as they moved slowly in and out of synthetic coral and plastic seaweed and a tower of bubbles that rose through the center of the aquarium like a column of air, and while it suddenly seemed imperative to Harry that he gobble them up with his eyes and take them into his arms, he was halted first by Alfonso’s voice—which seemed, by some trick of acoustics, to come out of the aquarium and not from Alfonso’s mouth—“You still owe me your story,” and then by his own answer, given as he stared into the roiling water, “I think it’s just getting started, here, right now,” so that when, as he began to lower himself onto the couch and to lift his arms and open his hands and found himself back out on the street just a short distance behind Solange, Ireneo, and Raimon, the image that played on his retinas as he started to run was not of his darlings but of a brightly lit box in which dark things moved, and though, when having reentered the courtyard, he yelled, “I’m sorry, take me instead,” he and these dark things were flung back out onto the street, where, as his friends came up and took his arms and breathed softly on either side of him, he stood for what felt like a very long while watching them.

COLOPHON

Ray of the Star
was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain
Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis.
The text is set in Goudy Village

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