The Impossibly (4 page)

Incidentally, this conversation I was having was with someone wearing large, reflective sunglasses.

Someone, I note again, who was tall and thin.

These are all details.

I am made nervous by events.

Strange things happen at them.

I took up a position in the kitchen. Then by the window. Then by my bed, for a moment, then by the door.

Finally, they arrived.

Hello, said Deau, very roundly breezing past me.

Hello, she said.

I brought her a drink and a plate of pickles and meats.

You have to meet John, I said.

Kiss me, she said.

It was quite an event. To his credit, John had managed to dig up a huge number of participants. I brought up the subject of John’s excellent technique and pointed over toward him. John, cleaned up now, was spinning around in the center of a small group with one of my pillows on his head. We stood there by the door, each drinking what I had brought over and nibbling on the pickles and meats. Comfortable. In fact, wonderful. But she didn’t stay long.

Later the next week, she said to me, after a certain point, and it is a very clear point, I cannot tolerate events, and that is why I left, but it was very nice to see your apartment and to meet John.

That’s fine absolutely anything is fine, I said.

I did not actually see them meet, but at one point John came over to me and said, okay, wow, then he went over to the kitchen, and a little after that is when he spilled wine on Deau, or vice-versa, and they laughed, and the two of them made the plan that the four of us should go away somewhere, perhaps to the country.

Given the circumstances, it was a wonderful trip.

There is always this question of circumstances.

Just before she left the event, for example, we kissed, right next to the table where I had piled the food, which had, by this time, been thoroughly massacred. We kissed and kissed, and when we were finished she explained to me that part of the point of her initiating the kiss, at that moment, had been that she was about to leave, and that insofar as she had imagined the event before arriving, that imagining had involved a kiss, any kind of kiss at any moment involving me, and that the earlier kiss by the door when she arrived had been nice but insufficient, and that was the reason for it, if it needed a reason, and she was happy, even if she had not stayed long, that she had come.

Yes, I said.

Yes, I said again.

Yes.

John rented a car and the four of us drove off toward the country.

On the drive the two of us fell easily into the habit of discussing objects and words. John and Deau did not participate in our discussions and did not appear, at any point, to have any interest in doing so, but that didn’t bother us, and as we stopped along the way, we made several acquisitions, which would appear, later, on her shelves.

It was an excellent drive.

I did, however, of course, still harbor one or two creeping fears, but I was not cringing, and there was no rain, it was sunny, the event was over, and I was the better for it. Speaking, however, about rain—the rain that day of the event. At the end of our lame conversation the tall, thin individual I was talking to invited me, quite firmly, to enter a nearby building and go upstairs.

I do not know why I said yes to what they asked me to do when I got upstairs, I did not have to say yes, that had always been part of our agreement, but I did.

That I had said yes was why I said to John, a couple of days after the event when we were recovered and were discussing travel plans, let’s go here.

Why? said John.

I’ve heard it’s beautiful, I said.

John has never approved of my engagement with this world, a world for which he has always found me, rightly I suppose, ill-suited. Quite a number of years before, in fact, he had helped me to get started in another line, one that for various reasons I did not pursue.

But we did go where I proposed because my lie, this particular lie at any rate, was not, or so I then thought, detected.

Of course I knew you were lying, John later said.

That week, before our trip to the country, I slept beautifully.

And then we were driving up to the tops of the low round hills that occur on that drive and down them.

At one point, as we had stopped the car at the top of one of these hills and were looking out over a vista of undulations, in the direction of the ocean, Deau announced that her tour had now begun, and that she was ecstatic that we were all with her, so at our next stop in a little town we toasted the beginning of her tour with a glass of wine, then lightly burned our mouths on some delicious stewed apples. Deau and John had a certain level of unusual gourmandise in common. It was Deau, for example, who had insisted we order the stewed apples. And this had endlessly charmed John, who had insisted the meal before that we select only the most colorful dishes available—borscht, pomegranate, horned melon, and candied plums.

Stewed apples was, we agreed, an excellent word and concept, and before leaving the restaurant we acquired a handsome jar of it. So you can see that it was all going along very well.

At that business meeting on that rainy day it was like this. I had never before met the woman I met that day and she was persuasive, strangely. I had met many other women and not-women in the course of my career, but not this one. She was one of the ones I had heard about, or perhaps the only one, it’s difficult to say.

I think, probably, it was more than just her—that behind her, so to speak, were other women and not-women, with other cigars, in other rooms, who had other perhaps more important individuals than me doing projects for them. I do not of course mean to imply that if the woman with the cigar had superiors, or even just partners, that they were all smoking cigars and wearing gloves, etc.

This seems unlikely. Boss types, it has been my experience, all have their own special stamp. In my previous place of residence, for example, I had worked for a person who had in his office a very complex model train system that was always in operation, at every meeting and otherwise.

The organization that I was currently working for, by the way, was reputed to be immense and immensely effective, although largely staffed by part-timers like myself.

Probably not much like myself.

Or only maybe.

At any rate, the woman with the cigar who I was standing in front of was definitely a boss. Perhaps there were more-unnerving-to-look-at bosses, perhaps there were not. Once, I had been told, someone at a meeting had seen an eyeball set on top of the model smokestack on the model train in my former boss’s office, but there are many such stories, actually.

She sat there smoking the cigar, which is an endless thing in a meeting, never finished, and I was standing in front of her, and I could see myself reflected in miniature in her sunglasses, and it was a small room.

Yes I’ll do it, I said.

Also, however, she had a stutter, quite an intense one, and sometimes into the center of the stutter she would insert the cigar, and, the story of the eyeball on the model smokestack notwithstanding, I still have not seen or heard of anything quite as impressive as that.

This is all about why I said yes.

You’ll find I have precious little to say later about why I changed my mind.

What? I said.

She was speaking to me, not in the car anymore, we had left the car and were now, the four of us, installed in a hotel in a small city on the coast, and the two of us were in our room, and she had been speaking to me. Here is what she said:

It is not the objects, not the objects at all. It is not the words either, although often they are lovely and the contrasts are surprising when you have one in your head shaped like a rectangle and then you have another in your head shaped like a square, for example. That is lovely, as is the sound of your voice saying them, when you say them, but it is not the fact of the objects or the fact of the words, really, it is the fact of establishing the correct establishments on which to place them, that is all.

Each uncombined expression can mean one of these, she said, i.e., what, how large, what kind, related to what, where, when, how placed, in what state, acting, or suffering. See? For example, a woman may be five-foot six and a writer, a student of philosophy at her desk at midnight, sitting down and writing, and suffering from the cold.

Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection, she said.

I can’t do it, of course. I can’t say, again, what she said, not ever, not exactly. It is all there, inside me, is what I mean, but I can’t say it, not even for myself. It seems tragic that in matters of the heart one should have to suffer, even in discourse with one’s self, from this sort of aphasia.

Lately, for example, I have been thinking of an instance in which, to say it in general terms, she came across the room toward me, and even though it was considerably more than this, it is only in these general terms that I am ever able to say it.

She came across the room toward me.

It was too many shelves, at the end of it. It was a hell of shelves. From where I sat that day, I kept losing count of them. Over and over I would count and then lose count, and then begin again.

The next morning the four of us set out to visit the city. John and Deau were already walking with incredible synchronicity, and it was agreeable to follow them up the steps of that building and under the arches of this. She looks happy, she said. John’s happy too, I said. Old men limped along pulling carts and young women went by on scooters. We stopped at a flower shop where I bought her a daisy and a tulip and a rose and a carnation and a sunflower and a narcissus and a gladiolus and a lily and a tulip and a sunflower and a ranunculus and she said, they’re lovely, thank you. In one place, we drank tea poured from above the server’s head, and in another we ate fresh-made ice cream mashed green with pistachio nuts. Sometimes John would drop back and take my arm, and sometimes she would walk ahead and disappear with Deau. Once they disappeared for quite some time, and John and I sat down before steaming bowls at a table under a hideous bluish candelabra in a warm room that smelled of cinnamon and saffron, and, very powerfully, of what we were told was goat.

John, I said.

Tell all, he said.

Nothing.

We sat and sat and took care of another round of steaming bowls and talked. John talked about Deau and I talked about her and found I didn’t really have much to say. Then we paid and left and found them sometime later wearing completely different clothes.

Actually, they found us. Sitting on the terrace of another establishment sipping yellow drinks and watching old men play a game with shiny steel balls.

It was then that we walked down through the gently sloping streets of the warm city and saw the pair of monkeys, which made all of us, but especially her, and I do not know why especially her, laugh.

Then we slept.

I woke.

You were shaking, she said.

I was shouting? I said.

Shaking, you were shaking, you are shaking, stop.

I did stop, gradually, and then it was the second day in the small breeze-swept city on the coast.

I have changed my mind.

The personage sitting across the table from me, at a table with a view of the ocean and several rooftops belonging to the coastal city, did not blink, did not move, in fact never moved, not once, and after I had repeated myself twice more I left.

Nobody interfered with me as I walked out, which is unusual. Part of me, to tell the truth, had been hoping for a little immediate interference, which is quite standard and would likely have encouraged me to undertake a course of action that could have significantly minimized the interference that followed.

I thought of the woman with the cigar and of the cigar inserted into the center of her stutter all the way back to the hotel where they were sleeping in.

I thought, also, of an old man I once saw smoking a small homemade cigar through a hole in his throat and how that man had only had one eye and something very wrong with one arm.

That place was far away from anywhere anybody has ever known me.

And I think that soon, very soon, I will go away, to such a place, to stay. Even if once I arrive I find myself obliged to sit in close quarters with just such an old man, smoking, in just such fashion, etc.

Which is to say that, getting ahead of myself again, if you have never smelled it, then you should never have to smell it—the smell, I mean, of burning flesh.

She was not sleeping in. She was sitting up in bed and looking across the room to the window, which had a view much like the one I had seen from the room I had just left. Here, however, there was a certain amount of that fine winter light that comes into such rooms at such times in such parts of the world, and it was falling across her knees and her bare arms wrapped around her knees, which were pulled close to her chest, and a line of light was running along one of her forearms, and she was smiling.

It was stupid, really stupid, all things considered, to have agreed to it, and then to have changed my mind. It was even stupider not to have thought to smooth it out. While not necessarily encouraged, a certain amount of noncompliance is admitted by the organization, and it would have been straightforward enough both to have failed to carry out my assignment and to have mitigated the significant recrimination I could now look forward to. Of course I had thought about it. There was an easy way. Much about the business is actually quite easy once you’ve been at it a while. I could have, for example, picked up the phone, or at the very least double-checked the address of the package I had dropped in the mail on my way back from telling them that I had changed my mind. But there is in me a small speck of something hard, something stubborn, something immensely intractable, and I didn’t.

There, in the center of the cigar smoke, she had used the word “important,” and I was to think of that word a little later, as I sat there, thinking of preposterous causalities and staring at those shelves.