The Impossibly

by Laird Hunt

  Yes, he’s in there, and he’s feeling very lonely, my friend said.

  So maybe I’ll go in there and give him some company, the individual with the orange hat and the cracked tooth said. And when he stood—the door was slightly ajar—I could see he was holding a gun.

  It occurred to me, of course, that I was simply, as so often, drifting again. After all, I had witnessed this scene, or one much like it, several days or weeks previously. Something, though, told me it might be important to attempt to play it safe. So I did what it had lately struck me I could do—I became barely visible.

  Or thought I did.

  The individual, wearing his orange hat, entered quickly, gun drawn, a smile on his face, finger on the trigger, a burst capillary in his left eye. On registering that I was not at my desk, he performed a series of deftly executed advances and pivots, which, each motion, he repeated several times. When he was satisfied that I wasn’t standing out of the range of his peripheral vision, he took two quick steps over to my desk, simultaneously looking under it and pushing the curtains aside.

  Where are you? he said.

  He said it in a very casual, almost friendly way, which nearly caused me to become, if I wasn’t already, completely visible again, or at least to attempt to answer. For a moment though, I was drawn all but irresistibly away from this line of hypothetical inertia into a moment’s reverie in which I was hiding in a footlocker in a dark room and someone holding a large knife and a flashlight was looking for me.

  Where are you? she said, in a very casual, almost friendly way, so that, as she stood outside the locker, I nearly answered, or began to breathe again.

  Suddenly, he was standing right beside me. If I could have felt anything I would have felt his breath on the lobe of my left ear.

  This is where you are, he said. He spoke now in a hoarse, half-whisper, so that it was somewhat difficult to hear him.

  Yes, this is where you are, he said, tilting his head back and forth. I wonder what you’ve learned so far. I wonder if you have learned anything at all.

  Very little, I thought, though I have learned some things. I have learned, for example, that murder was done, most certainly. Great quantities of blood and tissue and several small pieces of bone were found.

  By whom? (I thought.)

  The authorities.

  What authorities?

  Those charged with attending to this variety of incident.

  And how did you come by this information?

  I was part of the clean-up crew.

  To clean up the blood and …

  Yes. This was following the assessment.

  After the scene had been analyzed?

  There was no analysis. There was just the assessment, then the cleanup. There were some 1.8 pints of blood, 3 ounces of tissue, and 3 slivers of cranium.

  I don’t believe you.

  Nevertheless.

  Who estimated the amounts of blood and tissue? Who determined that it was cranium?

  I did.

  You possess the expertise?

  I possess the expertise.

  This was done under whose orders?

  The authorities’.

  Whose authorities?

  The firm’s.

  What firm’s?

  I can’t tell you.

  What became of the body?

  It had been removed.

  By whom?

  (No answer.)

  Isn’t it possible that the body, not dead, removed itself?

  No.

  Why not?

  There were certain indications.

  Such as?

  The blood had spread around the body and congealed, leaving behind an almost perfect outline.

  Almost perfect?

  There were bootmarks, a single set, pointing inward. They interrupted several of the edges.

  Was this documented?

  There was a photograph of the crime scene—a damp alley, much rusted metal and garbage and crumbling brick, to one side of which stood a green door; an alley like the one I had recently visited, having left the dark woods and having, part of me that is, returned. A small man was in the photograph. He was standing off to the side, looking down at the almost perfect outline of a body.

  I am small. (I thought.)

  Who was the victim?

  We have not yet made a positive identification.

  I repeat, who was the victim?

  We aren’t sure yet.

  Who is we?

  We of the firm.

  What firm?

  I can’t tell you.

  I know what firm.

  Not from me.

  No, not from you.

  This I had probably learned earlier during those days I spent alone as a teenager in the large farmhouse or out in the surrounding fields. I would lie in bed in the dark and look at the rectangle of light the service lamp projected through the window onto the ceiling above my bed. It seemed to me, as I lay there each night and early morning looking at it, that the world had at last been reduced, that its substance, if substance it could be called, had been sucked away, that all that was left was this poorly formed rectangle, which, in its turn, would surely begin to fizz and fade. In the fields, in the early morning, I would walk and hum and throw stones and think, there where they have fallen, there, quite silent, is where I will lie.

  I stared at her astonishingly handsome face. I mean the body’s.

  What body?

  The body that had been there. The one I had put there. When I had been there earlier, having left the dark woods, having returned to my apartment, then crept down the back stairwell and out into the alley, earlier.

  How long have you been dead? I said after a time to the astonishingly handsome face.

  I’m not sure I am yet.

  You are.

  And where is my body?

  It has been removed.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I had been speaking aloud, that almost all of the preceding had, in fact, been said loudly enough for the individual with the orange hat and the cracked tooth to hear.

  Did you hear me? I said.

  Yes, he said.

  So you can see I know very little.

  Not as little as you should know—one should know very little about these matters, as little as possible.

  About what matters?

  He laughed. A judgment has been made.

  What judgment?

  You’ve been disaffirmed.

  I’ve already been disaffirmed.

  He lifted his gun and aimed it at me.

  Yes, knowing very little is best in these matters, he said.

  The gun, unless my eyes were deceiving me, probably they were deceiving me, was largely transparent and glowing slightly, and though I wasn’t entirely sure what a gun, or any weapon for that matter, could do to me, given my current condition, I did not feel well enough informed to make the correct decision. And in fact it was just as well that, right before he smiled and pulled the trigger, I allowed myself to fall backward through the wall, because the bullet, itself partially transparent, that issued from the gun and struck me in the neck instead of the heart, did considerable damage and hurt tremendously, as bullets, even beautiful ones, are wont to do.

  Shot through the neck and falling backward then, I watched him smiling, his cracked tooth caught in some stray line of light and my friend’s head peeping in through the door, until the wall I had fallen through obscured them.

  For a time then I fell—through the floor of the next room then through other floors then through the earth which glowed and seemed warm and then through a shaft and the edge of a platform and onto the rails of a subway line along which I skidded for a time then lay still. I don’t know how long I lay there, but many trains passed through me, causing me only a slight pain, nothing compared to the pain in my neck. It was likely this pain that held me immobile and caused me to focus my thoughts so effectively. I had often done some of my most interesting thinking when in pain and this
has remained the case, even all these years later. It was just a moment ago, in fact, when they reset my leg, that several details (of the events I am now relating) both resurfaced and were seen in a fresh alignment that might have helped shed light on what had followed, if only, once the pain lessened, the alignment had not begun to seem less assured. I am still, however, in a position to relate several of these details, and will now do so.

  I have killed someone.

  Who?

  There, on the ground.

  Who is it?

  My boss.

  Which boss?

  (No answer.)

  Why?

  Because of a stapler, because of a shovel and a dark woods, because she was about to have me killed, because …

  I was in love once. Or perhaps twice—in a park, and then again on a couch.

  The wind and scattered clouds and pigeons, soothing us.

  But to return …

  Yes?

  To what you did.

  They were waiting for me. Three of them in my apartment. My boss set me up. I escaped. Went down the back stairs into the alley. My boss was waiting there for them to finish.

  So you killed her?

  Yes.

  With the shovel?

  It was still in my hand. I’d been using it in the woods.

  Using it for what?

  To dig.

  To dig what?

  (No answer.)

  And then they shot you?

  A flesh wound, in the neck. Then when they found me again they broke my legs.

  Such were the thoughts I had, more or less, as I lay there on the tracks and afterward, and that I have just had again, though of course they must be somewhat different. In fact, given my condition at the time and my condition now, not to mention the considerable interval, it would be irresponsible not to admit the possibility that these memories were inaccurate, i.e., that they did not substantially adhere to the real, or at least to some satisfactory approximation thereof. I learned quite early on (in the bedroom, in the fields) to content myself with approximations and have long taken comfort in them.

  Taken comfort.

  One comes to whisper that.

  At any rate, to resume, it was the thought that I had been in love with someone, this perplexing and galvanizing premise, that caused me at last, as I remember it, the pain in my neck notwithstanding, to stir and, eventually, one or two more trains having passed through me, to stand.

  Then I walked along the tracks, through dark tunnels lit occasionally by train lights and yellow soot-covered lanterns. Every few hundred yards the tunnels opened onto platforms where people, collapsed into chairs, slumped against walls, leaning on painted girders, waited in a kind of daze. They were strangely attractive to me these people waiting for trains below the earth, and once or twice as I walked I stopped and considered them. Mostly though I walked, and walked and walked, and stopped walking and rested with my cold feet in a puddle that held some special appeal for the rats. The rats, intent upon their puddle, which probably had a little oil or meat or rotten lettuce in it, paid me very little attention, although one or two of them attempted, in desultory fashion, and with no luck at all, to bite my ankles.

  The city, I then discovered, was as intricately articulated below its surface as it was above, and it was not at all unpleasant to walk along, at best a pale blur, and think about love. Or about being in love. At first it troubled me greatly that I couldn’t recall any further details, and that, in fact, some of what I was sure I had just remembered, had already slipped my mind. But this feeling passed quickly enough.

  I love you, I said, and the words both warmed and chilled me, as if they were some strange food or drug, or the last faint traces of a dream. I walked and walked and the words “hand in hand” accompanied me, as did the words “I love” so that after a time, when I began to rise up off the tracks, through the damp ceiling and back onto the dark streets, I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised when, still walking, still wrapped in similar thoughts, my mouth making the shape of similar words, I floated up the sides of several buildings and, once, a water tower, where, as the cold wind blew both through and around me, I could just make out the gray-blue light of the approaching dawn.

  And as I went upon my way I was slightly glad that I had met him. A droll customer.

  —FLANN O’BRIEN

  The Third Policeman

  THIS OCCURRED QUITE SOME TIME AGO, LONG before the events I have set down elsewhere, long before, at any rate, most of them. During that period I was working, principally, in a firm of transaction specialists. I say “principally” because, at the suggestion of a colleague, I had taken on some outside work as an investigator of sorts, setting up shop, as I did so, in an office on the fourth floor of a building on the far side of town. It was not, at the beginning, particularly nice, this office. It was unsettlingly run-down, with cracked paint and exposed pipes and stacks of newspapers and a huge green sofa with a large stain on one of its arms, and it looked out onto a courtyard into which, clearly, several decades of garbage had been dumped. Still, even though at the beginning it wasn’t nice, it did have a sort of anteroom where illustrations could be hung and clients could wait and where a secretary, this was the best part of all, could sit, and it had two of those terrific semitransparent plateglass doors. Once I was settled, I would stand, in fact, for considerable periods of time beside those doors—one leading out into the corridor, the other mediating between my office and the waiting room—considering, as a part of my self-imposed and, admittedly, desultory training, any number of deductive intricacies.

  Often, as I stood there, my secretary would bring me small snacks.

  Yo, Boss, here’s another snack, he would say.

  In short, I had great hopes.

  The above-mentioned colleague from the transactions firm helped me rent the office.

  Sport, he said. This has got to be the place.

  It was. I sat down. I stood. I went over and looked at my secretary. He looked at me. I had not seen his teeth when I engaged him. I went back and sat down. Several days went by like this, exactly like this. Then one afternoon there was a knock on the door.

  Send him/her in, I said.

  Incidentally, when I speak of several days, I am not referring to consecutive days. Most of my time, of course, was still spent at the transactions firm or in the field, which should be taken to mean any place—dock or alley or social club—where business was conducted outside the firm’s premises. The night before the afternoon of the knock on the door—there is someone knocking, Boss, my secretary excitedly said—I had been in all of those places, variously in company and alone, and have to confess that, as the events I propose to relate began, I was feeling somewhat the worse for wear, somewhat tired, not quite right. I was thinking of just that when my secretary put his head through the door of my office and said, there is someone knocking, and I said, so answer it.

  The individual who came into my office and stood before me looked vaguely familiar. She had long blond hair that did a lot with the dim, yellow light dripping down from the ceiling, and she was wearing a brown trench coat that didn’t do much to hide her attributes, of which, let me tell you, there were plenty.

  Evening, she said.

  Evening? I thought. I looked at my watch. It was evening, well into it. I had been under the impression, as I indicated above, that we were still dealing with the afternoon.

  Come in, sit down, I said. But looking up, I saw that she had already come in, had already sat down. Clearly, something was off. I was off. I made a note to myself to get friendly with some food and take a break.

  I still have that note. It is written in that extraordinarily faint, barely determined hand, that was to characterize all of my attempts at note-taking over the coming days and weeks, and that was to contribute, increasingly, along with other factors, to my inability to make consistent sense of the evidence that was put before me.

  Eat burger then sleep, the note reads.
>
  So simple. If only.

  I smiled at her.

  She smiled back.

  Lovely teeth.

  Very different story from the one I got when my secretary flashed his choppers, which looked like they’d been soaked in caramel every night for many years.

  My own teeth, I don’t mind informing you, were in excellent condition in those days, as were many other aspects of my person. My male colleagues at the transactions firm liked me tremendously and even went so far as to call me Champ and Sport. It will come as no surprise then that I was far from being unpopular with certain female individuals, and that I even had one or two special friends.

  How can I help you? I said.

  Don’t you know who I am? she said.

  Why do you ask?

  Because that’s a very, very blank look on your face.

  Of course I know who you are.

  Good. What have you learned?

  Learned?

  Yes, learned.

  Her hair and the light were collaborating even more nicely now that she was sitting down, and I have to say I had a hard time keeping my eyes off it. Her eyes, too, were worth noting—they were a very pale gray ….

  Pale blue, she said. It must be the light—in a more robust light they are clearly blue. But thank you for noticing.

  Did you, ahem, just say something? I said.

  She frowned.

  I asked you if you had followed him, hello, as per our agreement.

  Of course I did, I said.

  When?

  Last night.

  And?

  And I learned some very interesting things.

  Elaborate.

  After a moment, I did so. I told her that at approximately 5 p.m. the previous evening I had followed him out of his office on the west side and had trailed him across town. Subject had walked briskly, one might even say, without overpresumption, purposefully.

  He is purposeful.

  Yes, I could see that.

  Go on.

  On the way across town, Subject had stopped four times. Once for a chocolate bar at a newsstand; once for a cake of heavy-duty soap at a hardware store; once outside the window of a gift shop; once in an alley where he knocked twice on a green metal door, after which I momentarily lost sight of him.