Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

I am no good at all, I believe I have already mentioned, at planning.

Nevertheless, I thought that I could somehow employ the paradigm of the dove-coming-out-of-the-hat trick, as described above. Yeah, I thought. I thought, somehow you understand, that I could reverse it, the idea of reversal having rather effectively just injected itself into my mind. It seemed to me that I could make the dove (myself) disappear into the hat (some receptacle) if I could only figure out some equivalent for the swishing of the hands. Dove, I said to myself. I swished my hands around a little, practicing. He was, without appearing to be, watching me. That was the problem. Even if I was a dove, the trick could never work if he was watching me. I mean if he was watching me while he was supposed to be watching my hands, or the putative equivalent thereof, swish around. I had been the proof of that — at the event, when I was sitting on the floor, before I had become a dove.

I’m a dove, I said.

The waiter shot me a look.

I kind of eased off on being a dove and got up.

He got up too.

It was a little like wearing a well-tailored, loose-fitting jacket.

Albeit one made of eyes.

For a second I thought about running. But then I remembered hearing about someone who had tried running on him. So I walked. Wearing the jacket. Quickly, but I walked.

In the end, I couldn’t think of anything except for a scheme which would have required as half the swishing part a few short seconds of time travel. I actually conferred with him on this and he said that he thought that yes that might just about do it, though he couldn’t be certain, after all it was difficult to be certain about these things. Incidentally, what do you think of this? I asked him, holding out my hand, slightly cupped.

Nice, he said. Where did you get it?

It was a present.

Nice present. Those are hard to come by. Interested in parting with it?

Nope.

I’ll give you 200.

Nope. Etc.

Or actually, more accurately, at the end what I thought of was calling her, which is what I did, you already know.

Hello.

Hello.

Suddenly he was standing right behind me.

I’m going to hit you now, he said.

And he did.

In one of my dreams I sprout wings, glorious wings. And I wait for them to fly. And they don’t.

They climb. Up tall buildings.

Dreadful heights.

Prehensile wings.

Always at some unexpected point in these dreams my head, which seems only ever capable of lolling, hits against a projecting cornice.

Whunk!

At this point in the dream a separation occurs and I watch myself being dragged by the wings up and up.

She had added animals in cages to her shelves. It took me a moment to realize that someone else must have done this while we were on our trip. There were birds and rodents and a monkey and some kind of a cat.

It looked like a cat.

Also she had added, although it could not, almost, have been possible, more shelves.

There were splotches of bright violet on a few of the shelves. I cannot, I don’t believe I’ve yet mentioned, tolerate bright violet. There was a bit of bright violet on the hole puncher. The monkey had a bright violet hand. I registered this part about the color, it now seems to me, but I have already spoken to you about overlay, at precisely the same time that I began to smell cigar smoke.

Hello, I said. Boss, I said.

The only response I got was stutter.

Then, however, began the Q & A, and I can tell you that in her part of this exercise my boss was quite fluent, and that it was I who seemed to stutter.

She asked, I answered. Actually, I also asked, but she did not answer.

This, in its way, was another kind of relationship, everything seemed to be about some kind of relationship. For example, one of the questions I was asking was, where is she?

The conflated smells of onions and of some kind of meat and of stewed apples and of the animals and of cigar smoke and of, after a few minutes, singed hair and singed flesh is not a good one.

I am, pardon me, I repeated, telling you the truth, I suggested, all truth etc., please please please, although I definitely did not suggest this in so many words.

The singed hair and the singed flesh part was about this: each time I answered I got burned on the back of the neck with the cigar. It was the tall, thin woman who would take the cigar, apparently, from my boss and place it against my neck.

I think that each time it was the tall, thin woman.

But it was impossible to be sure.

Those are just kisses, the boss would say, stuttering on the kisses part, so that it seemed to me, each time she never quite finished saying it, that I had received several kisses instead of just the one.

Once, I went to a circus, the clowns and animals kind.

Once I say, but this was not really all that long ago. It was a small circus just outside a city or, rather, outside the old borders of the city, when the city had ended, or had had an end, and then there had been some area, then more area and who knows what, the maps went blank, before you reached another city or the sea, but what we are talking about here was inside the city, as the city, is what I mean, had been extended into the area. I had stumbled upon the circus by accident as I was following someone, and when I had finished following that someone, I went back to it, bought a ticket, and went in. Inside the orange and ochre tent it was all bright lights and flashes and drums and choreographed roars and clowns and odd movements and frightening voices and a woman standing on top of a horse and an elephant, finally, the feature, sitting in a car. Put your hands together, said the announcer, a dwarf on stilts, for Kisses the Driving Elephant, who was, in fact, driving, so to speak, an appropriately enormous convertible, using her trunk to turn the wheel.

Eventually, Kisses drove her car into a small pyramid of very short clowns.

Which hadn’t been meant to happen and hadn’t been all that funny.

In various parts of the world, at various times, they have used elephants to execute people. One way was the elephant would rear back and you would be tied to something and then it would come down on your head. Brave people, it was said, wouldn’t close their eyes. Those elephants were painted with all kinds of patterns. I forget who told me about that. But at any rate I used to imagine it sometimes — lying there, eyes open, being brave, with the painted elephant rearing back.

I don’t think any of the very short clowns were badly hurt. Kisses, certainly, was not hurt, and she kept driving, around and around.

It was of this Kisses the Driving Elephant, at any rate, that I thought, and of elephants in general, and of those painted elephants, as they applied, for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, of great big elephants and of jeering onlookers, one of their kisses to the back of my neck.

Insofar as I was able to think.

Then they made me ingest the onions, the stewed apples, and the meat.

I wished they would not make me eat the stewed apples.

They had been our stewed apples — for the shelves, in our jar, etc.

Chew, I was reminded by someone close to my head.

I chewed.

It was very sweet. Sweeter than just the fact of the stewed apples.

Honey sweet.

I had seen all this process, from a small remove, on that previous occasion, the latter portion of which, involving the bag and the rocks, I have already mentioned. But that had all transpired in an almost empty room, empty except for a small blue appliance that sizzled and sucked away at an outlet in one corner. The process went on long enough for me to notice that the walls, which I had taken for white, were really a very pale green, another effective — I knew something about the subject — technique. The woman with the cigar, my boss, had not conducted that exercise. The tall, thin woman plus one or two others had. My job, at the first, had been to stand at the door, which I did until all of them had left and it became my job to sit in the room and watch him. Part of my stupidity, you will note, consisted in having been a party to this previous process, and having, nonetheless, taken the course it has been part of the purpose of this narrative to describe. But I had been in the condition I had been in when I had chosen my course of action. In picking me for the assignment, the boss hadn’t counted on what might become the ramifications of my having fallen in love.