Harry found so appealing the idea that his sparklingly clean but manifestly still-broken face had led Ireneo to mistakenly summon him instead of the silver woman to the ceremony of the lamps, as he called her and it as he lay in bed fighting his legs later that night and then the next morning over tea and miniature pastries, that, after trying and failing several times to find the mysterious house again, he began doubling up on his appearances at the café in hopes of encountering either her or Ireneo, but the world had swerved away from or swallowed that trajectory, and he saw neither of them, and no one he spoke to at the counter of the bar could call to mind the tall man with the turquoise eyes or the woman with the flecks of silver on her face, and by and by he again found himself beating hasty retreats to his bed, ringing his bell, dodging or not dodging Señora Rubinski, murmuring greetings to his neighbors and wandering the streets of the city or sitting on one of its wide beaches or stumbling around its often oddly shaped plazas, which were invariably constructed around statues and/or fountains: focal points for the eye that might otherwise have been pulled away into the shadows that held sway along the jagged periphery, thought Harry, one day when he was feeling particularly susceptible to what he called the loathsome generalities, abstractions like “everyone” and “everything,” that crushed whatever came in their way, whether it was the everyone associated with the office, the everyone who announced that the period for grieving had long since expired and that it was high time for one to get off one’s sorry ass and come back to the cubicle, as it were, or the everything associated with the stars and moon, the earth and oceans, the red sandstone yawing in monstrous slabs out of the calm green slopes, the snow that covered, froze, and quieted it all, the world, in short, that entered through your burning eyes and bludgeoned your sorry soul— So much that cuts our legs out from under us —“I couldn’t agree more,” said a man just after Harry had thought this, as he stood beneath a striped green awning that looked out through a bright drizzle over a fringe of evergreen bushes to a monument to some group or other of the once-honored dead, and although the man was speaking to the woman next to him and not to Harry, Harry looked in his direction and thought, You’re just saying that, and without missing the proverbial beat the man said, “Quite the contrary, I might have said the same thing myself and in just those words,”
I have a recurring dream, thought Harry,
“Oh really?” said the man,
This awning is reminding me of it,
“Go on,”
A ship takes me to a distant city, we arrive at night, I am meant to disembark with a group for a tour of some sort, but I disembark alone and am quickly lost in winding streets,
“A labyrinth,”
Of sorts, only before long it resolves itself and I am in the very bazaar the group had been meant to visit: an agreeable affair next to a long canal, with stalls of blue and violet glassware mixed in with piles of bolts, bicycle chains, jewelry boxes, all backlit by lamps that set the glassware alight,
“That must have made for a beautiful reflection in the water,”
Yes, and in fact before long I am on the canal, shopping at the reflected stalls, which are tended by children,
“Children?”
Which is odd because there was no one tending the stalls above the surface,
“That is odd,”
I want to buy something, but can’t decide what to buy,
“Too many choices?”
Everything is too lovely, and all this loveliness, which emanates in equal part from the glowing wares and the children’s faces, short-circuits my ability to think, and I just stand there without being able to move,
“You’ve lost something,”
But in the dream I can’t think of what it is, all I can do is stand there, without moving, as the dark from the water slowly gains the upper hand on the light from the stalls, and all around me people are streaming back toward the harbor, where the ship is waiting to leave, but I don’t leave, I just stand there, which is what Harry did, for quite some time after the man and his companion had left, and the rain had stopped falling, and the pigeons and green parrots, which sometimes flew with them, had returned to preen and dry their feathers in the sun that was now coating the monument to the dead, dripping off all of its exposed surfaces, burning off the rainwater gathered there between the surrounding cobblestones.
When Harry finally collected himself and left, he felt that by telling someone about his dream he had gotten something essential off his chest, something that had had to be removed, like the mineral scale that, unaddressed, builds up in small, water-reliant appliances like espresso machines and warm-air humidifiers, eventually choking them, and as he continued his explorations it seemed like the sprawling city, which nevertheless remained wrapped in a veil of mystery that he was certain his multiple incursions would do little to mitigate, was in some way opening to him, and that his knotted mind was at last untying itself, with the happy result that when one afternoon, upon visiting one of the city’s many spectacular museums, where bits of the distant past had been hammered up on the wall alongside multilingual explanatory notices, he had great difficulty deciphering what was being proposed about the glistening armor hanging before him, a fact he found more curious than troubling, and he was even encouraged, rather than perturbed, to note that this moment of ocular aphasia before the explanatory notice reminded him that in the old days he had often woken not so much not knowing where he was, but not knowing who it was he was lying next to, which had more than once made him leap up and grab for his pants, afraid that his then-wife, upon waking, would be horrified to find a total stranger lying nearly naked beside her, and that when that dynamic had ceased being possible, i.e. when the bed beside him had become empty, he had more than once woken with the sensation that the emptiness beside him would at any moment awake and, seeing him lying on the bed partially clad, scream, and that scream would destroy him, so he had started sleeping on the couch and had not stopped sleeping on the couch until he had arrived in this new city, where he had a single bed, a sequence of thought that had continued to attend but not disturb him as he left the museum and drifted back down to the city from the heights where it was located, to which layers — upon layers — of mental fog he attributed his inability to recognize the handsome woman from the café when, less than an hour after he had stood gazing without comprehension at the three-by-three-inch sign, he stood gazing without comprehension at her.