The Impossibly

by Laird Hunt

  I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, I said. Have you seen my secretary?

  I asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a walk down the hall, just for a few minutes, you understand.

  I told him I did.

  Then I asked him how long he had been sitting there.

  Quite a while.

  From where I stood, I could see that the intercom was still on.

  Did you …?

  Yes, everything.

  About the cataracts?

  It’s quite a nice story. Your relative lived a very handsome life.

  Yes, I said.

  Yes, he said. I liked the story about the war, and the military plane, sitting next to the prince and seeing the leaning tower from the air. Have you ever seen it?

  No, I said.

  I have, he said. It’s a nice tower, you stand on a green lawn and look at it, but it’s not as nice as it would be from the air—blue sky above and around, brown and yellow fields below. And then descending at dusk on the airfield lit by gas lamps to dine with the prince while bombs went off against a backdrop of thunder.

  Those were different days, he said.

  Yes.

  He wasn’t lying, was he, your relative?

  I don’t know.

  Because they do lie, not always but sometimes.

  He was looking at me. I could see his eyes now. They were a very pretty green.

  You don’t recognize me, do you? he said.

  No, I said.

  I don’t mean to imply that you should. I just find it curious—a curious result.

  Result of what?

  My name is Green.

  Mr. Green?

  No it’s not, never mind, a little joke, don’t call me that.

  We stood there a moment. That is to say that I stood there and he sat there.

  Can I help you with something? I said.

  Yes, you can.

  I told him that perhaps, as it was a business call, we should go into my office, that that would be more appropriate. I could sit behind my desk and he could sit in the client’s chair. I could take notes on what he had to say. I had a notepad and a very nice pen.

  All right, he said. He smiled as he said this and his smile, like his eyes, was very pretty, despite his lips, which were not pretty; I could not understand how they could participate in something as pretty as the smile they helped to compose.

  I didn’t recognize him at all.

  We began to walk into my office. I motioned for him to precede me.

  Please, I said. After you.

  You are very polite. I am happy to be in the hands of an investigator with some manners.

  He stepped ahead of me. We moved forward. And as we did so, strange to relate, it seemed to me that I passed through him, that he paused a moment and I continued and slipped straight through him, that, in fact, I continued to move, straight through what was to be his chair and through my desk and through my chair and the wall behind it and across the courtyard and out into the open air above the dark street where I stopped and floated for a time.

  When I turned, however, I found that I had misperceived my situation, and was sitting in my chair, pen in hand, notebook open in front of me. Beside the notebook, several pages of which were filled with writing, was a card that read, “Mr. Smith,” and gave an address—the address to which I had followed my previous client’s “husband.” As for my client, having presumably said all he wished to, he had seen fit to take his leave.

  I found, now that he had gone, that I was very tired, and even though it was late and I would soon be expected for my shift at the transactions firm, it seemed hard to move. It was pleasantly warm in my office and the yellow bulbs gave off the kind of soft, inadequate light that lends itself to lucubration and dozing. Aware, then, that I was in my element, I depressed the intercom switch and said, Are you there?

  Yes.

  You’re back from your little stroll.

  Yes.

  Don’t let anyone in.

  There is a woman here to see you.

  Make an excuse. Send her away.

  I switched off the intercom and, leaning back in my chair, let out a sigh, took up my notebook, and read the following:

  [Client]: I have a story too. It’s not coming to me right this second, but it will.

  We sit. I ask the client for details of the business matter he has come to share with me.

  [Client]: Ah, here it is, I knew it would come. It is of a slightly older vintage than the one you related, and while it does not involve princes and airfields, I think you will find it makes for agreeable listening.

  Client’s story summarized: A great-great-uncle or aunt or client, having fallen in with a certain group, burns rose at midnight and waits up until dawn for ghost of rose to appear.

  [Me]: And?

  [Client]: It didn’t. Or so it seemed to my relative, for a number of weeks, months, or even years—the account isn’t clear—and then one morning at breakfast, on a sun-flooded table, an iris, very pale, appeared and began slowly revolving, all through breakfast.

  [Me]: An iris?

  [Client]: Yes, strange isn’t it? The ghost of an iris for a burned rose. My relative took to burning all kinds of flowers after that. Whole bouquets. But it is not clear whether there were any more apparitions.

  [Me]: I see.

  Client falls silent. Starts to hum. Pretty green eyes. Somehow familiar. I offer him a drink. We drink. Toast relatives. I ask him if the story he has told me is true.

  [Client]: Yes.

  [Me]: I see.

  [Client]: But there were no witnesses. Or none have come forward yet.

  [Me]: The victim had been bludgeoned to death?

  [Client]: So our sources tell us, but we haven’t been able to confirm. None of our people have seen the body. It is, you understand, a very delicate matter.

  [Me]: Delicate in what sense?

  [Client]: In all senses.

  [Me]: Where is the body?

  [Client]: We aren’t sure.

  [Me]: But you are sure the victim was one of your firm’s employees?

  [Client]: No.

  [Me]: So you want me to find out if it was.

  Client doesn’t answer. I ask client if any employees are missing. Client says it would be impossible to say.

  [Me]: You mentioned sources. How about some names?

  Client gives names, places of business, phone numbers: Mr. Jones, Ms. Green, Ms. Krumpacher. Settle on fee. Reasonable. Client looks at watch. Says he has to leave. Leaves. Room is suddenly filled with flowers. Very pale. Slowly rotating. Whole bouquets.

  By this time (I had been rather slow in reading), it was quite late and high time I left my office and made my way over to the transactions firm to see what they had for me that evening. Before leaving, however, I carefully copied the above-mentioned names and phone numbers onto a fresh sheet of the notepad, tore the sheet out of the book, put the book in the desk drawer, closed the drawer, locked the drawer, pocketed the key (I thought), went out and had a short conversation with my secretary, who I found in high spirits (the new client had tipped him generously), left him the names and numbers with instructions to set up appointments, felt for my pulse, couldn’t find it, asked my secretary to take it, was told it was eighty, asked him if he was lying, watched him smile, shrugged, then smacked him, gently, then left.

  And while it had been my intention to mull over certain aspects of the new case, especially those aspects that (even if only hypothetically) impinged upon my own person, before I could begin, before, in fact, I could begin even to be aware of my passage, i.e., down the hall, down the stairs, out the front door, along the crowded streets, then streets plural, I found myself at home, sitting on my couch with a scotch and soda in my hand.

  I took a sip.

  This was scotch from a good bottle, not any bottle I owned. For a moment, then, I had the pleasant thought that the entire night had slipped by, that not only had I misplaced my passage home, but also my pass
age to the firm, some light banter in the copy room, a welcome dose of exegesis from my fleshy friend or one of the more senior transactionists, an assignment, perhaps on one of the rooftops this time, or near a furnace, or outside the city in the wetlands, or on one of the many dark plains; at any rate, a fine night’s work, it occurred to me, might have passed, been completed, been achieved, after which I might have purchased (or even been awarded) this fine scotch.

  I sighed. I took a sip. As I pulled the glass away from my lips, a woman came out of the kitchen with her own glass and sat down beside me.

  Now it came back to me. I had been on my way to work and, in light of the seriousness of the case I was now working on, had stopped off at home to retrieve my gun. Arriving at my door, I had met this woman, who, she had told me, had attempted to see me earlier that evening at my office and had been turned away.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  You’ve already apologized, it’s all right, she said, sipping at her drink.

  She, too, was quite an interesting aggregate. By that I mean that she was in possession of attributes both comely and less so, some of them simultaneously. Take for instance her legs. They were exquisitely shaped, but exceptionally short, as if she had on the legs of a much smaller person. Her hands, too, which looked as though they’d been chiseled out of brown granite, were tiny, so that she was obliged to hold her glass of scotch, rocks no water, with both of them. Her face, for its part, was gorgeous, and it was a little hard not to just stare at it, and stare at it and stare.

  I’m sorry, I said. I mean for staring.

  How do you like the whiskey? she said.

  Lovely, I said.

  She had poured it from a leather-wrapped stainless steel flask that she had taken from an inside pocket. When she had pulled it out, I had seen her shoulder holster and the small but deadly looking automatic it held.

  How do you do with that thing? I had asked.

  Marvelously, she had said.

  At that point, I had excused myself to the bedroom where I had retrieved my own gun, a revolver, not too accurate but persuasive, had slipped it into my pocket, then returned to the living room and sat down.

  I took another sip.

  The apartment seemed a little cool to me.

  I asked her if she would like me to turn up the heat.

  She told me that she was adequately heated.

  It seems cool to me, I said.

  It’s probably your bruise.

  Probably.

  Take another drink.

  I took one.

  Helps, doesn’t it?

  I told her it did.

  For a while we sat there drinking.

  Any particular reason you stopped by?

  Yes.

  We drank a while longer.

  I found that most of my thoughts, though dull, had to do with her face.

  The tiny hands, too, had their charm.

  Sitting there, I had a vision of them—very quickly, even too quickly, sewing small items of clothing for dolls. Then I saw her fingers, wearing bonnets, walking together one fine morning along a country road.

  One encounters curious physical attributes more often than one would imagine, I considered saying.

  I also considered proposing to discuss my own.

  For instance, I have a trick knee.

  I am holding it and having it do its unpleasant trick now.

  And considered doing so then.

  I’m sorry I didn’t see you earlier at the office, would you like to look at my knee? I said.

  I’ve seen it, she said.

  Oh.

  You probably don’t remember.

  Of course I do.

  It was some time ago.

  I remember it very clearly.

  That took care of me for a few minutes.

  During those few minutes I rolled back my eyes and ransacked my brain.

  I haven’t been feeling that well recently, I said, finally, having turned up nothing, absolutely nothing.

  I know.

  For instance, hah, hah, I don’t have a pulse. By that I mean I haven’t been able to find it recently.

  She looked at me.

  You don’t have a stethoscope do you? I said, laughing a little. A stethoscope would probably clear this up.

  No, she said.

  She continued to look at me. She lifted her glass and looked at it. Then she looked at my wrist then at my chest, I think, then somewhere over my shoulder, at a mirror, maybe, that hung there, then looked at her glass again, lifted it to her lips, drank, looked at me, at my eyes, my eyes are brown shot with green, like a mineral I forget the name of, I saw a sample once, in a dark hall in which only the mineral cases were lit, looked away, set down her glass, leaned back, crossed her small legs, and said, I don’t either, I mean have a pulse, or anyway not much of one.

  That night at work I asked for some time off. The Chief Dispatcher, an agreeable older gentleman always in shirtsleeves and a blue fez, told me that would be fine as long as I worked my current shift. This seemed fair, so I went out into the hall and took a look at the assignment board. I found my name next to that of my fleshy colleague—I’ll call him John—who I subsequently found in the copy room having drinks with another of our colleagues. This transactionist, John told me as we went out the door and onto the street, possessed a bosom he deeply admired.

  Yeah? I said.

  Very, very special, John said.

  That’s interesting, I said.

  Yes, it is, John said.

  I thought about this as we walked along the street toward our destination, a disused power station that was soon, our briefing note told us, to be converted into a live/work space. Which is not to say that I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about our colleague’s bosom, although I was happy enough, without having had the pleasure, to be supportive of John’s position on it. Rather, I thought of John’s choice of words, deeply admire, which made me think about my first client’s attributes and my recent visitor’s face and hands, then the lamentable state of my pulse, not to mention the revelations thereon my recent visitor had shared with me and the hallucinations of a sort that had both preceded and followed that interaction, all in the context of the case I was now working on, so that when for perhaps the tenth time since leaving my apartment I probed my wrist for some positive indication and found it, even if it was only very faint, very far off, very feathery ….

  There is one, or almost one, she had told me and had helped me to find and count it—eighty-five faint beats that would grow fainter, as I grew fainter, she had said.

  … I thought of deeply admired bosoms, and of, strangely, being bludgeoned to death, even if only, and I said this last aloud, hypothetically.

  You’re a weird fuck lately, Sport, said John.

  Then we arrived at the disused power station.

  This was quite an impressive facility, with enormous brick walls and high windows and the words, carved in capital letters above the orange door, ELECTRICITY IS LIFE. We knocked and after a moment were let in. Inside it was dark, and the curious agglomeration of derelict machinery, tools, ladders, and sawhorses, lit only, as they were, by the streetlights filtering in through a few high, small windows, put us in a philosophical frame of mind.

  John told me afterwards, as we walked toward the river carrying the heavy bag between us, that the spectacle had made him think of a book he had read recently on the phenomenon of decay, many of the illustrations for which had been taken from this city’s archives. Quite a number of the book’s pages were devoted to microscopic decay and the corruption of molecules. There is nothing that does not decay, said John, from the steel in the skyscrapers, to the flesh that wraps and hides us, to the light that bathes and burns our faces. Even ideas decompose, and the gods we once carried inside us have broken down into simpler products, many of which have, themselves, entirely wasted away.

  For my part, having left aside for a moment the bosoms and bludgeonings I had been preoccupie
d with, as soon as we began to walk through the rows of ancient transformers, I thought of travel in deep space, and of a newly described propulsion system in which a spacecraft would generate a plasma field that would effectively function as a sail to harness the cosmic winds. It seemed to me that the majestically derelict machinery surrounding us, including the gutted turbine where the body was, must once have had something in common with the proposed plasma generator, which might someday lead us to strange and distant parts. It was along these and tangential lines (and not of decay) that I thought as we lifted the body wrapped in black plastic and deposited it in the oversize bag we had brought with us.

  The individual who had let us in let us out through another door. This individual had been silent throughout our visit and seemed not at all predisposed to engage in the kind of banter that is often characteristic of these assignments. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he too had been struck by our surroundings and was engaged in musings of his own as he led us through the all but dark. (I asked him about this when some days later I had the opportunity to converse with him. He told me that he had thought of nothing, that when he was working he did not think, but that he liked the idea of decay, especially insofar as it applied to himself. How do you feel about plasma-based propulsion systems? I asked him. Why? Because that’s what I was thinking about while we were there. Sorry, but I don’t care too much about that.) Still, as we left, John, who at the opening of the door found, he later told me, a sense of levity returning, made a remark regarding the quality and prodigious size of our colleague’s external accoutrements, which elicited the beginnings of a smile from the individual. This beginning of a smile, in its turn, when we had stepped out through a green metal door and into the dark alley beyond it, reminded me of something (see above—my first case, a certain set of minutes unaccounted for).

  Are you missing part of one of your teeth, the right incisor? I asked him as he was preparing to shut the door.

  Yes, he said. And as he said it, perhaps in a moment of empathy for the body we had in the bag, I found myself drifting back through the dark equipment to lie for a moment in the open turbine. Before long though I found myself back with John, walking along one dark street after another as we made our way to the river. We were discussing our thoughts on the interior of the power station and also the desirability of live/work spaces. Neither one of us had ever lived in a loft and we agreed that the prospect of so much renovated space had its appeal. My apartment at that time was a renovated space. It had once been the office of a fairly successful tailor who had returned, the housing agent had told me, to another country to die. When I moved in there were some scraps of cloth and thread on the floor behind the radiators, and in one of the closets I found a needle and a pin. Later, when John moved in with me and we became roommates, we found a bolt of blue cloth beneath one of the floorboards, and John had shirts made for each of us. This was not long after the events I am currently attempting to give some account of, that is to say after the conclusion of the present case and my retirement from the investigation business. This was not a happy moment, as you might imagine, but it seemed a necessary one. Now, of course, all these years later, I see how things might have been different for me if my speculations had been more probing and if my conclusions had been more prescient and if certain events had not unfolded as they did.