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mint-lemon drop wishing she could tell Ireneo where, for example, to find both Harry and Solange, which would simplify things considerably—she wished she were better at it,
    “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.

T hat 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 grateful: 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