“I wish I were better at it,” she said aloud,
“But I’m not and to bloody hell with it,” she added,
a sentiment she softened by appending an “ah well,” which turned out to be one of those moments of synchronicity that, in the so-called grand scheme of things, are far more common than we suspect and than we may soon choose to believe, for at precisely the moment she emitted her “ah well,” Ireneo in front of his candles, Solange (though she said it silently) on her silver box and Harry who was just stepping onto the beach, said “ah well” along with her, and their reasons for saying it were not so terribly different.
That morning, on his way out to search or wander, whichever, Harry had stopped off in a bookstore, browsed a few minutes, then, without thinking much about it, had purchased a slender red volume in a language he no longer knew terribly well, had slipped it, still in its crisp paper bag, into the pocket of his brown velvet jacket, where he could feel it pressing lightly against his ribs, then pulled it out again and read some of it in a sprawling bed of daffodils outside one of the museums he would later visit — and where he would have such a strange time with the explanatory notice — the story, as best he could parse it, of a man who sometime in the middle ages, when Christianity has ostensibly swept Europe clean of its shadows, encounters the Greek god Pan, now much reduced and mud-covered, in the salty marshes of the South of France, but who appears to him, even “so long after he might most fully have mattered,” like some “dread avatar of forgotten impulses,” and now, just after joining Solange, Ireneo, and Doña Eulalia in half-murmuring, “ah well,” Harry sat down on the crowded — it was a lovely afternoon with just the lightest bit of breeze and a glorious warmth to the sand — beach, spent a few moments looking out through the fat palm trees over the gaily colored umbrellas to the ship-speckled horizon and the deep seam where sky and sea did their endless, distant dance, a place his father had long ago convinced him was full of wonders — ships made out of water, fish made out of air, only, of course, try as you might, you could never get there, and although his father might well have used this evocation as the basis for a paternal lesson in the unattainable aspects of life, he never had, for which Harry found himself suddenly quite gratefuclass="underline" what a load of crap such lessons were: life always had the upper hand, no matter how many little stories you told yourself about it — then pulled the book out of his pocket, opened it, found his visual aphasia had again returned, but, this time, along with it, a sense that some forgotten impulse he had been harboring, along with his heart, in the pit of his stomach, was staggering out into the light — perhaps set free, in the first instance, by the change of locale, and, in the second, by a combination of the acupuncture treatment, the purchase of the bell, the adventure with Ireneo, and the conversation with the man under the awning, not to mention the stunning particularities of the silver angel herself — and would emerge at any moment, after all these years, and that he should be prepared to step forward, for better or worse, along with it, which thought made him feel giddy and jaunty — like the character in the movie he had imagined — but also completely terrified — what tack to take? — so that after staring a moment longer into the deep seam of the horizon and imagining he was on the verge of reaching that impossible place where he could float alongside hybrid marvels of sky and sea, or at least dream up some way to inoffensively approach the silver angel, some way that wouldn’t result in his instant and definitive dismissal, he ran back home, closed the shutters, and jumped into bed.
Two days later, Harry opened them again with a plan, or rather the bright beginnings of one, and while, after so recently spending so much time on the inside of his head, one might expect that a good deal of slightly soggy thinking had gone into reaching it — a long-ago colleague, subjected to a lengthy dose of Harry’s thought process, once compared it to the higgledy-piggledy fretwork of boards laid down in pre-modern times across bogs and marshes, the remains of which could still be found, along with the victims of their treachery, in certain regions of Europe — on this occasion, Harry had simply woken, legs still twitching, with a bucket of golden paint floating before his eyes, so that after he had spent a bit of time with the local yellow pages, executed his ablutions, and made a lightning dash, back pressed against the side of the building, behind and past Señora Rubinski, who was standing outside the door tapping her foot, he paid a visit to Almundo’s Store for Living Statues, which he had selected as much for the size of its advertisement — twice that of Ernesto’s Living Statue Emporium — as for its proximity to his apartment, nor was he disappointed, as Almundo was able with great efficiency and appealing panache to kit Harry out with everything — including gilded armor, gilded box, gilded lance, golden body paint, body-paint remover, a large duffel bag — he would need to make a most convincing living statue, one that would, according to Almundo, attract the greatest sympathy of passersby and provide the foundation upon which he could transmit the full flourishing of his artistry,
“Speaking of which,” Harry said, “any suggestions?”
“Stand very still, my friend,” said Almundo, “stand very, very still,”
“And beyond that?” Harry asked,
“Look down, think happy thoughts, and bathe every evening to keep your skin from breaking out,” said Almundo,
“Thank you, I will,” said Harry, eager to get started, but already dusk was sweeping through the city, lights were flicking on, and as he alternated between hefting and dragging his duffel bag, it became clearer and clearer that he would have to wait until the next day to make his debut, which did not stop him, once he had done a medium-length tour of duty with Señora Rubinski, from spending a quiet hour on his box in front of the wall mirror in his bedroom, dressed and made up as what had been pitched to him by Almundo as the one and only “Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” but which, at least in the problematic light of his floor lamp, made him look dangerously like some kind of laminated hobgoblin or gigantic duck.