Ray of the Star Read Online Free PDF

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.

A fterwards, Harry realized that he had more than once walked past her, that she had been hidden in plain sight, like the letter in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story, which mechanism had baffled all attempts to find it because it lay out in the open where everyone could see it and so, in the natural order of things, didn’t, a comparison he liked quite a good deal even though the two ends didn’t quite match up—she after all had neither been hidden nor was hiding—and which prompted him, some weeks later, when it was all over, to seek out the story in question and reread it over a plate of sliced quince and tuna wedges and a glass of sparkling water at a small specialty shop near the market, out of which he had emerged when he stepped onto the broad sloping central pedestrian boulevard that split the city and led down to the sea, and which he had walked along nearly every day, remarking, assuredly, upon the numerous “living statues” who had set up their more or less elaborate shop along the edges, to the general delight of tourists and to the more specific delight, as Harry was unfortunately to learn, of certain local connoisseurs, though never before having stopped in front of one, as he did shortly after starting down the street on this day, in front of this extraordinary silver angel, with her enormous silver wings and beautiful silver face, down one cheek of which coursed frozen, silver tears, upon which Harry gazed with wonder then sudden, spine-stiffening recognition that grabbed him up and shoved him through to the front of the small crowd surrounding her, whose members were snapping pictures and remarking on the elaborateness of her costume, really one of the best, so much more marvelous than the fairly predictable Che Guevara, or the chubby Julius Caesar, or the man with his own head on a plate, or the creaky, battling robots, or