The Impossibly

by Laird Hunt

  They did.

  We reached the river.

  John said, wait here, swung the bag up over his shoulder and walked off into the gloom.

  But instead of waiting for him, as our briefing note directed, by the crates of rotten carrots, beets, and yellow squash that lined the walls of the warehouses we were now behind, it occurred to me that without actually doing so, or at any rate seeming to, I might in fact follow him, or try. I took this decision in an attempt to consciously effect the phenomenon that had lately, and as recently as the turbine, afflicted me, in light of the considerable amount of advice my earlier visitor had imparted to me, and not just concerning my pulse.

  It worked. I walked beside John, I walked behind him, I walked in front.

  There are other things you can do, she had told me. And if, as you say, you are currently engaged in a potential homicide case, you will find some of the modalities of your condition quite useful.

  This seemed useful. John, instead of taking the bag to the river and dropping it over the side, simply, in walking, leaned his shoulder into one of the ubiquitous crates by the water’s edge, causing it to fall into the dark water (a sound I would later remember having heard as I stood waiting by the warehouse for John), while he continued on a little farther, at which point he was met by a certain individual, difficult to make out in the half dark, until he smiled and showed his cracked incisor. There followed both an exchange of words and of knowing expressions, and also of the bag, which the individual hefted onto his own shoulder and set off with. Pushing my luck a little further, I followed along with this individual as he made his way back through the crates and into an alley not far from where I stood waiting and where John would momentarily rejoin me.

  We walked through the same set of alleys John and I had negotiated in carrying the body to the docks and, before long (it was necessary to be impressed by this individual’s robustness) we were back at the green door, where, instead of following the individual into the machines and the dark, I began, light as one of the lesser elements, to float up the side of the building into the night sky.

  One will be sure to think it possible, even necessary, to draw certain conclusions from this episode, and I was subsequently both willing and almost eager to do so.

  1) Necessarily, for instance, something was afoot; 2) That something involved me; 3) As well as the case I was working on; 4) Possibly; 5) John had something to do with it; 6) The transactions firm had something to do with it; 7) I was a ghost.

  This possibility had been presented to me by my earlier visitor, herself, she alleged, a ghost.

  What do you mean you’re a ghost?

  I’m a ghost, I’m dead, I do things.

  And yet here you are.

  But then she wasn’t.

  Suddenly she was standing behind me.

  She put her hands over my eyes.

  It was possible to see through them a little.

  All this means, I said, gesturing with my drink, is that I’ve been feeling a little unusual lately. I see through your hands because I’m so sleepy. I’ve been working two jobs and keeping some pretty strange hours and talking to some pretty strange customers and doing some pretty ugly things. Likely, you’re not even here.

  I’m not, she said. Which is to say that I am and am not. I’m also elsewhere.

  Where?

  I don’t know.

  But you’ve floated over here to inform me that I’m a ghost.

  I didn’t float. I try not to. Voluntary use of such capacities tends to over determine them, makes it difficult to get back.

  What do you mean by “get back”?

  To my body.

  So you do know where it is.

  No, I don’t. All I know is it’s dark—or that my eyes don’t work. Which is a possibility. It happens in a pretty high percentage of cases.

  And how did you learn all this?

  There is literature available.

  Literature?

  Yes.

  Listen, I said, I appreciate the scotch and you and your weird small hands and legs, but I have to get to work. I’ve just been having some mediocre out-of-body experiences, which a couple of pounds of food and some sleep will remedy.

  You won’t sleep, she said.

  I have to go, I said.

  But we sat and drank and she said other things.

  8) She said it was akin, at times, to a dream state, that at times I would like it, that at times I would not.

  Can I walk through walls? I said.

  Haven’t you already?

  I thought about that.

  And also, she said, barely there, you are divisible—can be barely there in more than one place, send off slivers of yourself. Then there are mirrors.

  What about them?

  A ghost sees many things in a mirror, but never him/herself.

  So how come just after I got my bruise I could see myself in the mirror in my office?

  It takes time for the condition to fully assert itself. Try it now.

  I stood. In the mirror hanging behind the couch on the wall I saw a row of brightly colored computers, a mummified crocodile, a shotgun, a row of turnips, a display of ray guns.

  What do you see? I said.

  Two galaxies in the constellation Canis Major colliding, she said.

  9) She also said that the visions or hallucinations I had been having could be both useful and dangerous—useful because any accurate edge on upcoming particularities was helpful; dangerous because as often as not what felt like an accurate edge was apocryphal or too vague to do anything but fuel confusion.

  So how can I tell the difference?

  You can’t. At least not until afterwards. Maybe not even then.

  Well, that’s just great. Doesn’t the literature you mentioned have anything to say about it?

  She nodded. It says what I just said.

  Can you add anything—like maybe from your own experience?

  I’m an optimist, she said.

  Meaning what?

  She shrugged. Meaning I think it’s all going to work out. Some way or other.

  I took a sip of scotch and thought about it. I didn’t know what to think.

  At any rate, before I knew it I was no longer floating up above the buildings and warehouses, but walking back to the firm with John and discussing all manner of first-rate subjects.

  John was very interested, he told me as we walked along, in the subject of big cats in general, and of cheetahs specifically. He had been doing some research lately and had learned that cheetahs, while well deserving of the title “fastest land animal,” were at a considerable disadvantage when it came to weight and strength, and often lost prey. Lions, who were in many ways the scourge of the jungle, and also of the savannah, were always delighted to come across a cheetah working over a fresh kill, as there was nothing easier for a lion than to send a cheetah packing. John had never yet seen either a lion or a cheetah, but he had seen a jackal once. The little dog, as John described it, had snapped viciously at a stick John was carrying before running away.

  Jackals live in dens, John told me.

  Like badgers, I said.

  Yeah, just like badgers, Sport.

  Anyway, as you can imagine, I might well in the face of this benign but interesting conversation have come around to being convinced of the apocryphal nature of my surreptitious tailing, had not one subsequent remark struck a jarring note. After we had concluded our interaction regarding cats, jackals, and more or less related categories of animals, John said, that was some hat that guy was wearing.

  What hat? I said.

  Never mind, he said.

  That was all there was to it. But little by little, as I sat in my office later, after my leave of absence had started, I began to consider the events that had occurred while part of me had waited for John by the warehouse. One of the things I remembered was that, unlike earlier, the individual with the cracked tooth had been wearing an orange hat, a hat that John had remarked on
as they stood bantering a moment before exchanging the bag.

  My secretary buzzed. I buzzed back. The first of the appointments he had set up for me came in.

  This was Ms. Krumpacher—a very pleasant and intelligent individual who had, you will remember, information relevant to the case. When she had gone, Mr. Jones came. Then Ms. Green.

  Ms. Green, I was somewhat surprised to note, was more or less the woman I had shared scotch with the previous evening. We had a nice chat. Then she left. After I had seen her out, I returned to my desk, hit the intercom, told my secretary to hold all calls and to tell any visitors I wasn’t in.

  Sure, Boss, said my secretary.

  Good, I said. Incidentally, how have you been?

  Not so bad, Boss, he said. A little lonely, but not so bad.

  We all get lonely, I said.

  Sure, Boss. Will that be all?

  Yes. Although, frankly, I’d rather you didn’t call me Boss.

  What would you like me to call you?

  Sir.

  I won’t call you Sir.

  Then don’t call me anything.

  Having concluded that exchange, I leaned back in my chair and set my mind to the task of digesting the information I had just received from Ms. Krumpacher, Mr. Jones, and Ms. Green. Despite my best efforts at concentrating, however, I found that my thoughts kept returning to my secretary’s remark about loneliness. No doubt it was this remark that brought to my mind images of all 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 onto the ceiling above my bed. It seemed to me, as I lay there looking at it, that the world had at last been reduced, that its substance had been siphoned away, that all that was left was this pale rectangle, which, in its turn, would surely fade. In the fields, in the early morning, I would walk and hum and throw stones and think, there where they have fallen, that is where I will lie. And much else along these lines, so that after a certain interval I found myself moved to rise, to go into the front room and join my secretary, to sit, as it were, in company with him. This laudable ambition notwithstanding, I got no farther than the handle of the door to the front room. My secretary wasn’t alone. He was conversing, in a suspicious whisper, with the aforementioned individual with the cracked tooth.

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

  So maybe I’ll go in there and give him some company, the individual with 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, for a moment, that I was simply hallucinating again. After all, I had more or less witnessed this scene several days previously. Something, though, told me it might not be entirely illogical to attempt to play it safe. So I did what Ms. Green had lately, i.e., a few minutes before, told me I could—I became barely visible.

  Or thought I did.

  It worked for a time.

  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 did a curious dance, a kind of wheel and pivot movement, executed quite deftly, which he repeated three 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 almost caused me to become visible again, or at least to attempt to answer. For a moment though, and perhaps this saved me, 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 foot locker in an enormous dark room—a small dark set off from a larger dark and my own dark set off from the whole—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 I almost, as she stood outside the locker, answered, or began to breathe again.

  He was standing right beside me. If I could have felt anything (I could see, hear, smell, and taste but not feel) 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, with the receptive capacities of my remaining senses much reduced, it was difficult to hear him.

  Yes, this is where you are, he said. 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, I thought, from my interview with Ms. Krumpacher, that murder was in fact done, most certainly. Great quantities of blood and tissue and several small pieces of bone had been found.

  By who? (I thought)

  The authorities.

  Which authorities?

  Those charged with seeing to this variety of incident.

  And how did you come by this information?

  I was part of the cleanup 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 several pints of blood and three slivers of cranium.

  Who measured the blood? Who determined that it was cranium?

  I did.

  Under whose orders?

  The authorities.

  Whose authorities?

  The firm’s.

  What firm?

  I can’t tell you.

  What became of the body?

  (I was now addressing Mr. Brown.)

  It had been removed.

  By who?

  Difficult to say.

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

  No.

  Why not?

  There were certain indications.

  Such as?

  The blood, of which there was a great quantity, had spread around the body and congealed, leaving behind an almost perfect outline.

  Almost perfect?

  There were bootmarks in the blood, they interrupted several of the edges.

  At this point Mr. Jones showed me a photograph. The photograph was of the crime scene—a damp alley to one side of which stood a green metal door, an alley much like the one I had followed my first client’s husband to, much like the one I had recently visited, having left the disused power station and having, part of me that is, returned. John was in the photograph. He was standing off to the side, looking down at the almost perfect outline of a small body. I am small.

  Who was the victim?

  We don’t know.

  (This was Ms. Green.)

  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.

  We sat there. I stared at her astonishingly pretty face.

  How long have you been dead? I asked her.

  I’m not sure I am yet.

  And where is your body?

  I don’t know.

  Where is my body?

  Not, perhaps, where you think it is.

  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 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?

  But instead of answering, he took a gun from his pocket and aimed it at me.

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

  The gun, unless my eyes 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 I was adequately informed to make a safe decision. And in fact it was just as well that, right when he smiled and pulled the trigger, I allowed myself to fall backwards through the wall, because the bullet, itself partially transparent, that issued from the gun and struck me in the neck instead of, most likely, the heart, did do considerable damage and hurt tremendously, as bullets, even beautiful ones, are wont to do.

  Shot through the neck and falling backwards, I watched him smiling, his cracked tooth caught in some stray line of light, my secretary’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 on 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, and nothing compared to the pain in my neck. It was likely this rather severe pain, which held me immobile, that helped bring to mind promising bits of memory that emerged for a moment like pieces of some phantom jigsaw puzzle that came tantalizingly close to locking together, only to pull apart again before I could discern their pattern. Some of what I remembered as I lay there has completely vanished, but the substantive details included the following: