Ray of the Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

W hen 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