“After the long night,”
“It was a long night, wasn’t it, too long, maybe I’m just overtired,”
“Maybe we all are, I’m not finding this submarine as comfortable today as I used to, plus I saw a ghost,” said Harry,
“Actually, I don’t feel particularly tired,” said Solange, “And when I saw you four this morning I got the feeling you were cooking something up, though I wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with us,”
“Well, ha, ha,” said Alfonso,
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t, look, just whatever it is you’re going to do, don’t do it,”
“You mean don’t have dinner?”
“He means don’t go with Ireneo, that is what you mean isn’t it?”
“Who’s Ireneo?”
“Some guy,”
“Some guy that was looking for you?”
“Why?”
“I forgot to mention it but he asked me about you,”
“What did you tell him?”
“I sent him goose chasing,”
“He got tired of chasing gooses and came to see me, but anyway, why shouldn’t we go with Ireneo?”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t go with anyone, I just said whatever it is you’re going to do, don’t do it,”
“The café is just over there,” said Harry,
“Fine,” said Alfonso, “I’ve warned you, which is a lot more than I should have done, though as a last thing I’ll just say that I really don’t have any idea if following my warning will help,”
“Fabulous,” said Harry, “Thanks a billion,”
“Yes, that’s not all that helpful, Alfonso,” said Solange,
“Apologies, but that’s all I can offer, I’m not sure if I knew more I would tell you, in fact I think I wouldn’t, there may already be consequences, though I hope not, and now I’ll have to go, and if you don’t mind, Harry, I’ll take the submarine along with me, you won’t be needing it anymore will you?”
“No,” said Harry,
“Good,” said Alfonso, then he opened the hatch and Solange and Harry stepped out and went straight into the café and sat down at a table and ordered dinner and when dinner arrived, Harry said,
“Do you still want to go?”
“Yes, how about you?”
“Yes,”
“You have to admit that was a little odd,”
“Yes,” Harry said, and shuddered, which made Solange shiver, about which they both laughed, then Ireneo arrived, bowed to Solange and apologized, in some detail, for the earlier misunderstanding that had kept her from her audience with Doña Eulalia, told Harry that he was feeling just fine and that he had taken care of the issue that had made it seem, when they had spoken, like there was a problem, to whit he had thrown his shoes off a cliff and purchased the relatively quiet espadrilles he was wearing and wouldn’t be doing any further running for the foreseeable future, then guided them off along what proved to be a fairly unproblematic set of twists and turns that ended in front of Doña Eulalia’s building, and although Harry couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t been able to find said building when he had gone looking, he had the feeling that if he mentioned this to Ireneo, Ireneo would come up with something as bizarre and unexplained/unexplainable as he had about his shoes, and Harry, feeling more than a little fatigued, thought he would leave any additional ellipses to Doña Eulalia and her lamps, though Solange, perhaps because she felt much less implicated than Harry in what was to come next, felt no need whatsoever to keep quiet, and, because she had had her interest piqued, as they approached the large green door, said, “I’m walking in between someone who saw a ghost this morning and someone else who felt he needed to throw his shoes off a cliff this afternoon — I know something about the ghost but nothing about the shoes, care to enlighten me?”
“No,” Ireneo said, and if he spoke to solange a little sharply, all the better as far as he was concerned, for it had cost him enough just to bring it all up for the purpose of clarifying his earlier behavior — Harry must have thought he looked “completely crackers,” as his mother had liked to put it when he threw tantrums as a child — and even just the thought of the whole business was enough to make his throat go dry and the back of his neck tingle like someone had struck him sharply on one of the upper vertebrae with the sort of rubber mallets doctors used to test reflexes, or at least that was the way he had felt when, after leaving the little store wearing his new espadrilles, the feeling had presented itself and obliged him to turn around, climb the hill he had just made it back down, cross the emerald lawn once again and go and look out over the wall, first at the horror of gray clouds spreading across the far horizon, then at the disaster of blue below, then decide he’d better throw himself off it, whereupon he had placed both hands on the low wall and started to lift one of his feet and said to himself, “Good, it has all been tedious and baffling anyway,” lifted his other foot onto the wall, looked at his unkempt toes and thought, “Good god those need trimming,” and tensed to spring, only at that moment something stirred in his peripheral vision, something moving slowly toward him, something that was whistling an air so exasperating that it reminded him of stale coffee beans being put through a hand grinder, then of someone kicking in a glass display case, then of the taste of gasoline-soaked cardboard, then of where he was, teetering on the edge of a wall with a 500-foot drop, and then the something — three old men walking shoulder to shoulder along the gravel path — stopped whistling and one of these three old men said,
“It’s just a pair of shoes,”
and another of them said,
“You don’t need those things, don’t be an idiot,”
then the whistling had recommenced and the three old men passed behind him, and the other half of his peripheral vision was engaged and just as it clicked on he thought he heard, somewhere amid the whistling, one of them say,
“Go and pick up Harry and take him where he’s supposed to go,”
and then he had fallen over backwards off the wall and had lain on the path they had traversed and at first it seemed to him that the path was like a piece of ice and that it would be damaging to continue to lie there on it looking up at the clouds and the occasional bird slicing through the air, that his skin would stick to it and be torn off when he tried to stand, that he would find himself partially flayed, and as he thought this the whistling started up in his head as if he had put on earphones and hit play and this time it sounded to him like teeth breaking as they were directed by their owner to bite down on chunks of aggregate mineral, and in the meantime the feeling in the back of his neck returned and he wanted nothing more than to stand up and fling himself off the cliff, but he knew that if he did so he would tear off his skin and that as he fell through space he would fall in a great shower of blood, and he knew this long after he had realized that the ground was not cold in the slightest and that the whistling had stopped and that he was not going to throw himself off the cliff, and knowing it he stood and brushed the dust off of his back and smiled in what he was quite sure was not at all a reassuring manner at a woman who was standing on the green lawn petting an obese German shepherd and staring nervously at him, and then he had stopped knowing it in quite such a debilitating manner and had started off again down the hill and had not paused, except to buy a bottle of water and a large packet of paprika-spiced fried minnows from a vendor near the harbor, which he shoved by the handful into his mouth until the packet was empty and he had calmed down enough to find a public restroom and wash his face and run damp fingers through his hair, before proceeding to his rendezvous, where he had hoped to preempt any questions to do with the shoes, a strategy that had worked quite well with Harry, but not, alas, with Solange, who nevertheless, far from taking visible offense at his curt answer, reached out, put her hand on his forearm and held it there until it occurred to him not only that he had been shaking, but also that he had now stopped,