The Impossibly (21 page)

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:

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

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.

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

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 passage 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.